Ep 55 | RONALD WRIGHT Transcript
Ep 55 | Ronald Wright Transcript
Before we begin this podcast, please be advised that the following episode contains language that some listeners may find offensive and inappropriate. The opinions expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not reflect the views of the podcast producers. Listener discretion is advised.
When you do m***, you actually hear voices, voices that tell you to commit heinous crimes. I do remember not long after I got on the highway thinking, "I killed somebody. I'm going to hell." Would it be safe to say that m*** has kind of like ruled your life? Yeah, from the time I got on it. Yeah. Everything you told me so far is literally 100 percent just made up in your own head from the drug induced psychosis.
People are still going to say, "Man, you killed an innocent man. Who cares if you're on drugs? You shouldn't have done the f***ing drugs." Well, after this, I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't do it. You are now listening to the podcast Voices of a Killer. I'm bringing you the stories from the perspective of the people that have taken the life of another human and their current situation thereafter in prison.
You will see that, although these are the folks that we have been programmed to hate, they all have something in common. They are all humans like us that admit that they made a mistake. Will you forgive them or will you condemn them? They're currently serving time for their murders. And they give us an inside glimpse of what took place when they killed and their feelings on the matter now. Here are the voices of those who have killed.
In this episode, we bring you a story of one man's 10-year struggle with m***amphetamine. In 2008, Ronald Wright murdered a 70-year old war veteran while experiencing the psychotic effects of m***. Although Ronald, now sober, is horrified by his past actions, his defense that he was not in his right state of mind fell on deaf ears.
As we're about to hear, all information about drug-induced psychosis was excluded from Ronald's trial, and news articles at the time painted him as a vicious monster and a danger to society who deserved to be locked away for a long time. Today, we'll hear the full story of Ronald's crime, a version that the jury members were not allowed to hear in 2008.
What was running through Ronald's mind as he started up his truck that day? Why did Ronald knock on a stranger's door in a Missouri suburb? Sit back and listen closely as we hear Ronald's recollections of his life and crime on this episode of Voices of a Killer.
So Ronald, did you grow up in Missouri? Yeah. All your life? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I moved around a little bit when I was older, but yeah, I was born and raised in Farmington. Now, I was still young when I moved to Utah for a while. Well, my mom moved out there, but didn't move back. How would you describe your childhood growing up?
Was it, you know, rough? Did you have a lot of turbulence or what? Nah, no. I actually, I got a wonderful family, and I'm the only one that's ever been in any trouble. You have siblings? I've got five... Yeah, I got three sisters and two brothers. None of them have ever been in any trouble.
So, are your parents still together? Well, my mom's still alive. She's 96, but my dad passed away 2011, I guess. Do you have a relationship with your mother? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Real good relationship. What about your siblings? Do you have a relationship with them? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they come and see me sometimes. How is that like with, you know, siblings, and you're in there for, you know, the murder of an innocent person, do they... how is that?
I mean, explain that to me. Well, they seen me out there, you know, on the m***. I was acting crazy for years, and in fact, one of my brothers put me in the mental hospital a couple times. And then my mom and dad went out and had me put in. So they knew that it was the drugs. Would it be safe to say that m*** has kind of like, ruled your life?
Yeah, from the time I got on it, yeah. I was very successful building houses until I got on that, and it wasn't too long after that that everything went downhill. When would you say the first time, not getting into it heavily, but just the first time you actually tried m***amphetamine, what age? That's probably maybe around 35. Maybe 34, 35.
I did other drugs when I was young. I first smoked weed when I was 13, but... And it seems like a lot of people that do drugs, and you can correct me if I'm wrong for your, you know, situation, but when they do something for the first time in all their life, they've heard nothing but bad stuff, like, "Oh, don't do that. It's, you know, you'll be m***ed out. You'll this and that."
And then they do it, they try it, and they're like, "What is everybody talking about? I don't see how I could lose control." Did that kind of make you feel like that? "I don't understand why people are talking so bad about this." I was just a workaholic and a family man, you know, at that period of time, like I said, I had done other drugs earlier, but I was totally straight and I just wasn't around people that was doing it, so I didn't really know nothing about it.
The painter, this is a guy that subcontracted the painting on a house from me, he had some. I tried it. That's the first time I ever tried it. And it made me feel good. Sure. You got quite a ways into your life before you actually tried m***. I mean, your thirties you're saying, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Life was great for the first 30 years of Ronald Wright's life. He ran a successful construction business that built houses in the Farmington area. The work was hard and physically demanding, but Ronald was a scrappy worker. And once the business kicked off, it boomed. At the time, Ronald was also a self-described family man with four young daughters from two separate marriages. Apart from a minor charge he'd incurred for possession of weed as a youngster, Ronald had a clean criminal record and showed no sign of straying from the straight and narrow path he was on. All that changed when Ronald first experienced m***. There are plenty of horror story about m*** destroying people's lives, and the drug has earned that reputation for a reason.
M***amphetamine is insidious. It's fiercely addictive. It floods your brain with dopamine and takes over your life before you notice your dependency on it. For a while, recreational m*** users can be high functioning and lead outwardly normal lives, but the drug takes hold eventually. Over extended use it corrodes your body causing rotten teeth and skin lesions, paranoia and hallucinations, and a painful debilitating period of withdrawl.
Former m*** users report how they lost control of their lives as the drug consumes them, and stole away the things they used to love. Unfortunately, Ronald found himself down a similar route. His first introduction to m*** that day at the construction site seemed harmless enough. Gradually, however, as the drug weaseled its way into his life, Ronald began a slow road downhill, putting in jeopardy everything he had built in his life.
So how long after your first time you did m*** to where you were like buying it and having it on you and like it was kind of part of you? Within a year or two. I didn't really know anybody that had it all the time until I got around a plumber when I was subbing up the apartment buildings. And he had it all the time and I had money so that's when it went downhill.
Yeah. What was your method of doing it? Smoke it, shoot it, snort it? Smoke it. I never shot up anything. And after you started doing this, what was the first sign that you had a problem? Whether it was family or the law or yourself reflecting? What was it? Yeah, I started getting in trouble. I wasn't really thinking about all that at the time, whether I really got a problem, but I started getting in trouble.
How'd you get in trouble? Well, just stupid stuff. You know, like, I had a new truck and then I messed it up. And then I was driving beat different vehicles that wasn't registered right, and this and that. I had custody of my kids, and my ex-wife got my kids from school, and I went into her apartment to get my kids.
I guess that was the first time... Now I did do some time back in the 80s for sale of marijuana, which I got that expunged recently with that new amendment. And I wasn't working like I did before, you know. And then, when it got real bad, I had some framing job subbed out. I My crew would come to my house and I'd just tell them, "Well, go ahead and take my truck."
I'd been up all night. Go ahead. And then the business started going downhill too. So it really kind of got a hold of your life. You have kids? Yeah, yeah. I have four daughters. How old were they at the time this was happening? Yeah, they were young. I ended up, I had custody of my two girls from my first marriage.
And then I had an anhydrous tank at my house and the task force come in. So they ended up taking my kids from me. And then my two younger girls, I had visiting rights with them from a different woman, second wife. And then she stopped letting me see them when I was on the stuff. But I have relationships with them all now.
You know, my kids was my life. Yeah. Understood. At what point did you start recognizing that it was getting a hold of you mentally also? Because you also had been admitted several times to the hospital mentally, right? Yeah, four times. My family put me in there. Yeah, and I... What would cause them to do that?
Well, because I just kept imagining stuff. I didn't realize it at the time, but, you know, I was always thinking people had my kids, or, you know, worried about my family, and I'd go to their house and search around thinking somebody's in there, in their house, and just various stuff like that. You know, m*** is notorious for, you know, when people really do it hard, they start to have, you know, like, a psychosis and things like that.
Besides the crime that you're in there for, what's one of the biggest things that you did where it just, once you reflected, you were like, "Wow, that was nuts. I completely, the drugs made that up." What was it? Really, I didn't even know anything about drug psychosis until I got this case. And then started, you know, learning about it.
But, yeah. Back then I was like, well, maybe that was the drugs, but then some things just seemed so real. But I've realized now it wasn't. Yeah, I mean, I'd just like be out in the yard or around the neighborhood, you know, thinking people's out there trying to follow me.
One of the most dangerous side effects of chronic m*** use is psychosis.
Over time, m*** users start to build up a tolerance to the drug, and they have to increase their dosage to achieve the same high as before. That's where people run into serious trouble. Using m*** excessively, or in very high doses, can damage somebody's brain to the extent that they lose touch with reality.
A user with no prior history of mental illness can suddenly show schizophrenic like symptoms. They can be unable to determine what is real or not be paranoid that somebody is out to get them or have vivid visual or auditory hallucinations that aren't really there. Often these psychotic symptoms are delayed and can take place days or even weeks after somebody takes the drug.
There's a medical term for this phenomenon. It's called drug-induced psychosis. Not all m*** users will experience psychosis. Ronald was just one of the unlucky few. As his dependence on m*** grew, he started to develop alarming psychotic symptoms. He heard strange voices and felt paranoid that the people around him were plotting to hurt his family.
On four separate occasions, Ronald was admitted to a mental institution at the Southeast Missouri Medical Center by his family. Thanks to these visits, there's a clear documented history of Ronald's troubling psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, delusional beliefs, and confused behavior, always with m*** as the precursor.
Under the influence of the m***, Ronald's life collapsed. His construction business collapsed.
He lost custody of his daughters and he began getting into trouble with the law. Here's a list of just a few of Ronald's charges from this period in his life. Possession of a firearm, possession of a controlled substance, failure to pay child support, and driving while intoxicated. It's worth noting that while these felony convictions were mostly drug-related, they were never violent.
By 2008, after frequent brushes with the law, Ronald found himself on probation. He was given the green light to enter society, but he was skating on thin ice. So, around the time that this started to happen, what kind of state were you in? You mean like around the day or so before that happened? Yeah, like that week or month or whatever, how was the condition of you?
Well, I got in some kind of trouble, like a traffic... oh yeah, the St. Genevieve police seen me like a month or two before that. I was out on a gravel road, all freaked out, and I said, "Yeah, I took a shower there in that hose. The people there said I could do it." And they said, "Where?" Said, "The people right there." And they shine lights, this is in their report, said there wasn't nobody there.
Of course, that couldn't be used. So then I was on parole, so they put me in this place where you can get out and work, but you gotta go back at night, so I didn't do anything, any drugs while I was there for a couple months, but I was saving up stuff to make it when I got out, so I made some when I got out, and it wasn't but a week or two after that that this happened, I think.
Wow, let me stop you real quick. So you actually went from drawing m*** for the first time in your 30s to actually making it? Yeah, yeah, I got arrested there. I had the first major arrest since I was young was with an anhydrous tank I had in my house. I had a new house. I was building houses, a brand new house, and I had an anhydrous tank in there.
Yeah. Yeah. So then, I get out of this place, make some. So, I'm working for somebody else, you know, I've been to prison and out, so I wasn't doing everything on my own anymore. I was working for other people. And these were, what do you call them, not Pentecost, but the ones that wear the long skirts and all that, them type of people? Jehovah's Witnesses, what these people, my boss and his brother. We were putting trusses on the house. And for some reason I was getting these different signs, you know, that these people had my kids.
Yeah, and I had some m*** on me and I was like, well, I know there's going to be trouble. So I went into their trailer and I had some there, so I just ate some. Thought, "Well, I need some energy. And I just got this feeling that they was doing this. And so, my boss's brother was on a ladder pushing up a truss with a two by four, and I knocked him off the ladder just out of the blue, you know?
So I say he was a Jehovah's Witness, but he started swinging at me, and then I swung at him, and... Let me stop you real quick. Were they able to tell you were that high at work before you pushed him off the ladder? "Man, you gotta go home. You're too out of it." Well, I don't know about that day. I think it was like a day or two before that my boss said that they think maybe I was using drugs.
I said, "No, I wasn't", which I was. Sure. I lied. So you pushed him off the ladder and he gets up swinging and do y'all actually start getting into to where you're actually making contact, punching each other? Yeah, he grabbed a two by four, and then I couldn't find a big enough, or a small two by four. But there was a stack of 16 footers, so I just grabbed the end of it, and knocked his two by four away, and we started fighting. And then this excavator guy, he's like a 350 pounds, 6 foot 5, come from out of nowhere and just grabbed me around my arms and my body and said, "Okay, that's enough."
And then my boss, he says, "You're fired. I'm calling the police." And so I leave. What was your reaction to them firing you? Were you like, "For what?" Or did you, you know, "I don't understand", did you make an excuse? No, no, no, no, I pretty well knew. I just got into it with his brother there. So I leave.
Ronald recounts the day he pushed a construction site foreman off a ladder at work. As you'd expect, this incident led to him being fired from his construction job. The loss of employment wasn't just inconvenient for Ronald. It had serious legal implications for him at the time. Ronald was on parole and to maintain that parole, he had to abide by two conditions. Firstly, he could not do anything unlawful, and secondly, he had to stay employed. By assaulting his company worker, ronald had violated both at once. This spelled trouble. Around 11:00 AM the next day, Ronald's parole officer called about the violations and told Ronald to report to his office later that day.
That meeting, however, never happened. Ronald never pitched up, effectively absconding from his parole officer and putting himself in deeper trouble with the law. So what was Ronald doing that day instead? Ronald tells me that he woke up on October 16th in his girlfriend's bed and heard a voice, a familiar voice calling his name. What happened next is a surreal and unnerving story that culminated in the brutal murder of an innocent man. I know by now, however, that the news sources from which we get our information about these crimes are often unreliable and sensationalize the truth.
So how much of Ronald's story is true and what is fiction? There's only one way to find out, after the break.
Well, here's what I wanna do. I wanna ask you, because you know, the news is not always accurate. As a matter of fact, I think that a hundred percent of the time there's usually something that's a little bit skewed or, anyway, yeah. So. You were actually, in the report, it says something about you looking for somebody?
Yeah. Who's a Mark, Mark Sitzers? Mark Sykes. Yeah. Who is that? Yeah. Well, that was a guy when I first woke up, that's the voice I heard. That was a guy that I used to do m*** with and I made m*** with and stuff. That's where I went to make the m*** when I got out of that place. Did you ever tell somebody that you, you quote unquote, "had a really bad feeling that there was going to be something bad that happened?"
Yeah, like I say, I was always worried about my family, so, and I just had a feeling like there was just bad things happening that day. And so I went down to my sister's house to check on her. And I went to my brother's house, knocked there one time on his door, and he wasn't home. Yeah. And then you also said that there was an American flag, like in a neighborhood
that supposedly pointed you in the direction that you needed to go. Yeah. Yeah. Was that American flag in front of the victim Mr. Shaw's house? No, that was like behind their house, the flag. I was getting different signs even before that. And had you ever met the Shaws? No, no, never. I'm sure you know a lot about them now that you've done this, you probably heard that he was a Korean War veteran.
Yeah, I had no idea. Yeah, which, you know, the victim being elderly and a war veteran, you know, it puts even more pressure on you. What made you decide to pick Mr. Shaw's house? What was that like? Well, like I say, I was hearing Mark Sykes voice and he wanted me to come out to his house. So I start heading down there and I'm going real fast down a two lane highway.
It says that Mark's voice told you to go to the victim's subdivision. Is that true? I don't know if it's his voice or somebody else's but it said, "Turn." They said, "Turn" is what. They said, "Turn", going down the highway. So I'm going real fast, I pass up, which is this subdivision where the Shaws lived. And so I slow down and turn around and go back in there, but this is just like a, I don't know, people got like a few acres, you know, all open fields. Maybe 15 houses.
And you can see everything from all the way around. What time of day is this? It was in the middle of the day, like early afternoon, two o'clock or so, maybe. And then I didn't know where to go then. So I go to the... I forget now, it's been so long. I know I went to three or four different houses and there's this lady watching me in the neighborhood.
Was there a lot of houses in the neighborhood? Yeah, I was driving through the fields and driving around for a long time and this lady was watching me. So, I mean, they tried to say that I was trying to case the neighborhood. Well, who's gonna drive through fields and up to different houses when you're casing a neighborhood to steal something?
And I went to this one house and knocked on the door. And I get different signs, you know, different meanings, and then I went to this construction site because I saw it was kind of up over the hill. They just had a subfloor. And I could just see a backhoe arm sticking up back there. So I thought, "Well, they're burying somebody."
So that's the reason I went there. And everything you told me so far is literally 100 percent just made up in your own head from the drug-induced psychosis. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's crazy as we, from time to time, anybody, especially in a city, you can see people walking around and they look like they are on drugs. And they, you know, it makes you wonder if these people that I see that are kind of out of it, they look like you can't hold a conversation with them and if they're also in the same situation you're in, drug-induced homicide, they've been up for three days, you know, doing m***, you know.
Yeah. Ronald's activity on the day of the crime was erratic. The effects of the m*** he had taken the day before hadn't worn off. He was severely paranoid and was hearing voices that directed him around that day. Following the instructions of a disembodied voice, Ronald turned off Highway D into a quiet neighborhood in Genevieve County.
He drove aimlessly around, looking for signs pointing out where he needed to go. Letters on car license plates, for example, or the tilt of an American flagpole. Around 1pm, Joyce Hayes, a resident of the neighborhood, caught sight of a strange man sitting in his truck. Joyce knew this man was not a local of the area, and wary, she watched his movements closely.
The subdivision consisted of just a few houses and big stretches of open land, and, from her house, Joyce watched the man drive slowly around the neighborhood. He paused here and there, stopping outside random houses and an active construction site. Then, he drove through one of the fields and backed his truck into the driveway of an elderly couple who lived in the subdivision. John and Jean Shaw were a married couple in their 70s.
Later, Jean would describe John as a good husband, father, and citizen. He was also a war veteran who had served in the Korean War. For over two years of that service, John had been held captive as a prisoner of war in Korea, only released after the armistice. And for this, he'd been decorated with a medal.
That was very long ago, however, and by now John was a frail man who relied on a cane to get around. This was no longer the kind of man who had the strength to put up a fight if his life was in danger. Now you've knocked on several houses, you eventually pull up to Mr. and Mrs. Shaw's house? Yeah, parked in their driveway. Yeah. So you pull up in their driveway. Do you actually go and knock on the front door? Yes. Yep. How long did it take for them to answer the door? I don't think it was very long. Who was it? I don't remember if it was just him or her or both or what. I can hardly remember now. Do you remember what the discussion was like when they first answered the door, what you asked for?
Yeah, I said, "Is Jake there?" Because for some reason I was thinking that this other guy I worked with from the construction side the day before, that he was in some kind of trouble. And maybe he was there. I said, "Jake." And then I said, I thought, well no, I better not ask for him. That might be worse for him or something.
I said, "Jake", I said, "I mean, I mean Jack." Yeah, were they able to tell that you were f***ed up? I don't know. They said, "There's nobody here by that name." So I went out. Back out to my truck and turned it on and started to leave. And then this voice said, "Where are you going?" Like I'm not supposed to leave.
So I always felt like some people was trying to help me and some people was against me. Right. At this point, did you feel like the Shaws were somebody that was against you or to help you? Not at that point. No, I didn't know. I just thought maybe there's something to do with Jake. Yeah, you shut off the truck.
Is Mr. Shaw right there saying this? No, no, I sat out there for quite a while. It might have been 10 or 15 minutes. Oh, so the voice saying stop, was that not actually somebody? It was just your, your made up voice? I think so. I mean, yeah, I guess I realize that now. Yeah. So now you stop the vehicle and you just stay there waiting in the vehicle?
I'm just sitting there, don't know what to do. What was the next step? Did he come out and approach you? Yeah, yeah. He said something about, "You can't sit here. You can't", something like that. Right, basically telling you you're not welcome here. What was your reaction? Did that irritate you? No, I don't remember feeling mad, but that's when this voice, actually Mark Syke's daughter says, "I'd hit him."
Wait, the voice told you that you should hit him, or that you already did? No. It just said. "I'd hit him." Oh, I, I would, I would hit him, basically? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And whenever you heard this voice, were you sitting in the vehicle? Yeah. And whenever you heard this voice, where was Mr. Shaw at? Was he still talking to you?
I think he was right there, right there close, yeah. And whenever you heard the voice, did you jump out of the vehicle pretty fast, or did you kind of contemplate for a minute? I don't even remember that. All I remember is I was hitting him. But I grabbed my hammer and I was hitting him with my hammer. So this guy's daughter's voice,
you heard her say, "I'd hit him." And where was the first place that you hit him? Was it on the outside, in the front yard or in the house? Yeah, outside. So whenever you struck him, did he run inside the house? Yeah. So you obviously didn't do enough damage to get him on the first hit. Did you run in after him?
Yeah, I went in their house. What was the scene like inside the house? Was there other people? Yeah, the man's wife, I just remember seeing a scared look on her face. Yeah, she left, went outside, out the back, I think. Poor lady. Yeah. I bet now that looking back on that, that was just, I mean, it doesn't get any more traumatic than that.
No. A strange experience. Wow. Yeah. I feel horrible about it. I mean, it's not, I mean, I couldn't kill anybody anyway, but somebody who hadn't even done me no wrong. If somebody had done you wrong, it'd be, you know, a little bit, maybe not quite so bad, I don't know, but innocent people. I think it's pretty easy to say that everything that happened was because of the f***ing m***.
You know, that's why it's such a horrible drug and I wish that nobody would ever do it. It's, it's, it's terrible, man. I think it creates so much negative energy in the world. It's just a bad, bad drug. Horrible. Ruins a lot of lives. Yeah. So, you scared this poor lady out of the house. Yeah. And supposedly, you struck Mr. Shaw several times in the head, killing him. Yeah. Do you ever remember any conversations with Mr. Shaw, of him pleading for his life or anything like that, or telling you, you know, "Stop" or anything? I don't remember that. No. No. I don't remember that. Some of it's kind of blurry.
On the afternoon of the murder, John and Jean Shaw were watching TV together when a stranger pulled up outside their driveway. The man who stood at their front door asked to see somebody call Jack, and when told he'd come to the wrong house, he returned to his truck in their driveway. This unsettled Jean Shaw. She gathered a few tools inside the house as a precautionary measure, one of them a shorthand sledgehammer. Unfortunately. Jean's fears were realized when the stranger broke back into their home. She watched in horror as he threw John to the floor and began punching him repeatedly. Jean ran out back with a cordless phone and hid in some brush, where she called the police.
When the noise died down and Jean ventured back inside, John was lying dead, his face smashed in. The sledgehammer Jean had set out to use in self defense had been used by Ronald to bludgeon her husband to death. For his part, Ronald can't remember the crime clearly. It's a pastiche of images and sounds mixed in with the hallucinations he was experiencing and he couldn't discern what was real and what was not. All he knows is that a voice told him to kill John Shaw. And in the confused mental state he was in, ronald unfortunately obeyed that instruction. Senselessly and without full possession of his mind, Ronald beat to death an innocent 77-year-old man who did not have the strength to fight back.
How long did you stay around the house after you finished him off? I was just like, I didn't know what to do, and then I heard another voice say something about the cops are coming or something like that. So I left. And then I couldn't figure it out because it was like I was backed in before, but then I backed out, so I don't know, and I left.
Yeah, what was the first place you went after you did that? Well, I just drove around. I drove down the two lane highway up towards, like I said, to Mark Sykes's house. 18 miles out of Farmington down the two lane highway, but I just went on past there. So, you know, 5, 10, 15 minutes after you've done this act, what are you thinking about that act now as the time goes on? Were you thinking, "Wait a second, did I do the right thing?" Or did you think that you're still on task with everything that your head's telling you to do? No. In fact, I disobeyed him, I guess you'd say, cause I think I was heading north and they said, "The wrong way" or something but I just kept going. But I do remember, not long after I got on the highway, thinking, "I killed somebody. I'm going to hell." It kind of hit me.
So you realized that you killed somebody and it was bad, but did you realize you did it unwarranted and that there was no grounds for it? I wasn't sure on that because I was still thinking there's people out to get me and stuff at that point. Wow, okay. So, where did you go next or did you finally get pulled over or what?
Well, I drove around, just up and down different roads out in the country and this and that. Then I ended up driving to De Soto. And I knew I was getting low on gas. And so I pulled up to a gas station, and then I was afraid to get out because I was afraid that somebody was going to get my truck or do something if I got out of my truck.
So I ended up not getting gas. Then I went back down to St. Francis County and drove around back on some of them roads again, trying to, you know, be guided where to go. This or that, you know. And so then I ended up, I was going along, and there was this garage door open. And I thought, well, that's where I'm supposed to go.
And so I pulled into this garage and closed the door, cause I still thought people was following me and out to get me and stuff. Anybody at this place with a garage? Yeah, yeah. So this man came out into the garage. He said, "What the hell are you doing" or something like that. And I said, "Oh, I thought this was my girlfriend's house." But I just made that up cause I didn't know what else to say.
Did he buy it? Didn't want to tell him. Did he? No, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. He said, "Get out of here." So anyway, so I start driving, and then I run out of gas in his driveway. In his driveway? In his driveway. And it would not start, and it was cutting out even before I pulled into this place, and they tried to tell me at the trial that they, after my truck sat for a couple years, before I went to trial, that they started my truck right up, and that they showed me a picture of a gas gauge. Showed it had gas in it, and said it had gas in it, which I know it didn't. I mean, I was going through a lot of things that day, but I know it was out of gas.
But anyway, I kept grinding on it and grinding on it. Even that guy said that I was grinding on it. So, anyway, this guy's mad and he's saying, "Get out of here. Blah, blah, blah." So then I go down this two lane highway, just, oh I don't know. No no I walked. Okay, so you started walking, okay. Yeah so I go just a little ways, maybe 50 or 100 foot.
And there's this little S 10, right out by the road, pointed towards the highway. And so, I think, well, somebody put that there for me. So I get in, keys are there, and I start it up, and I go maybe just a couple hundred more feet. And I'm thinking, well, I need to pull in here. So I pull in this driveway, that's just got two or three trailers there.
Still just, like, less than a quarter mile from this guy's house where I left my truck. And I go down to the end trailer, and I knock on the door, and I ask the lady if I could get a drink. So she came out with a glass and got some water for me and a hose. I got back in the S 10 and started to leave, and that's when the police come, and this guy has told that I went into his garage. So they arrested me.
So during that time, you having interactions with the lady giving you water, the parking in the guy's driveway. Did you ever think about killing any of those people? No. No. So whenever the cops arrested you, did you put up a fight? Well, no, I didn't put up a fight. I was in the truck and they pulled out their weapons. I guess maybe I thought about just trying to go through them and get away. They had their weapons pulled and I kind of revved up the motor, I think, one time, start creeping just a little bit. And then I... They definitely would have shot you if you would have tried to go through. Yeah. Yeah. I thought about just trying to, but I didn't.
So then they arrested me for stealing this truck. After you got arrested, how long a time was it until you realized that you murdered somebody for no f***ing reason? Well, I ain't sure really. I'm not sure when I really realized that, that, you know. I mean, do you realize that now?
Well, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, was it a couple days, a week, a year? Probably. Probably a few days or something, yeah that I realized these people didn't have anything to do with anything. So what was that like at that turning point of you crawling out of the psychosis to realizing that you had literally just meaninglessly killed some innocent guy, and that wasn't really, you know, it was the drugs, it wasn't you, but what was that like, realizing that?
It's horrible, man. I mean, I still get emotional talking about it or thinking about it now, really. Yeah. I feel horrible about it. Ronald was taken into police custody shortly after the murder, thanks in part to his psychotic state of mind. He tells me about his erratic behavior after the crime, walking down highways and stealing a truck in broad daylight, which naturally attracted the attention of the public.
By late afternoon, Ronald's truck had been blocked off in a dead end street, and the police swooped in to get their man. In his drugged out condition, Ronald had also made no attempt to hide any evidence of John Shaw's murder. The pants and shoes he was wearing at the time of his arrest were splattered with the victim's blood.
Other items in the Shaw home tested positive for Ronald's fingerprints. Compiling this evidence together, police easily tied Ronald to the crime and he was officially charged with the murder of the elderly war veteran. A lingering question remains, however: was it the man or the m*** who killed John Shaw?
When sober, Ronald was not a violent man with no history of aggressive behavior. It was only when he acted on the paranoid thoughts that were induced by the m*** that Ronald became violent. That makes for an interesting moral and legal question. Can we hold Ronald fully accountable for the actions he made while not in his right state of mind?
That question became a focal point in Ronald's trial, something we'll hear about next, after the break.
Your case is literally surrounded by m*** and being like the drug-induced psychosis. Yeah. Was that allowed to be used in court, the drug-induced psychosis? No, no. I couldn't mention drugs or anything or my past history. Or a doctor that did an interview once I caught the case said, "Yeah. His hospital records go right along with what he's saying what's happening to him that day", couldn't testify. Yeah, and Ronald, you know, whether the courts or whoever hears this or me or whoever, regardless of that, people are still going to say, man, you killed some, an innocent man, who cares if you're on drugs? You shouldn't have done the f***ing drugs. How does that make you feel? Well, I mean, I feel I'm responsible, but it might be a biased opinion, but I think it makes me a little less bad. You know, hopefully God sees it that way, which is the most important thing.
But yeah, I mean, I think that I deserve to be in prison. But I think that they should have took that into consideration and, you know, maybe got a lesser time or something, a parolable sentence with all that. How were they allowed to not admit any of your past history with drugs and being admitted to the hospital and seeing things and hearing voices and all that?
Yeah. Well, there's two statutes. I don't have them right here. Missouri statute one says something about you can't use drug addiction or something without psychosis. So that would mean that I could use it. But then the other one, forget how it's worded. It basically, you know, you're still responsible even if you're on drugs. Something like that. There's court cases to back it up. Sure. Sure. And the thing is, is now that when you go to trial for this and you remove the fact that everything was because of you being on drugs and the history of it, it really makes you, in the eyes of the courts, like if we just read the court documents, you're like a monster.
You know, you just, you know, premeditatedly thought about killing this innocent elderly person. So it's kind of crazy. So they charged you with first-degree murder, and once you started to really get to thinking about this, you had the argument of, this isn't first-degree murder, I didn't plan it out. Is that basically kind of how that went?
Yeah, I was trying to get diminished capacity, or something like that. You know, like I say, I had a history of it. And then all the, even police reports, talking about the crazy things I was doing, that same county, two months before, couldn't use none of that. And I wanted to testify and tell what happened.
I did end up telling the police too, at the second interview, they interviewed me once, and I was still psychotic then, but. And you know, I don't think that, honestly, in my opinion, I don't think that people should be able to use drugs to be able to get off. However, I think we should know about everything in the courtroom.
Yeah. Bring all evidence out. Yeah. So you're still going to go to prison, but I think it's a shame that, you know, the jury has to make a decision on things that are purposefully left out that really are the, everything in this case was m***, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And then, like I say, they wouldn't let me say that, wouldn't allow the doctor, my history, all these other witnesses, family members were gonna testify. And then in closing arguments, he says that I got up there and told the story, you know, I'm hearing voices at this time for this and that. So he said, "This is a bunch of malarkey. This is the big lie. We don't have any evidence that Mr. Wright has any mental problems or blah, blah, blah." So I didn't think that was right and the appeals court said it wasn't right, but basically it didn't matter. Yeah. It's really hard for the appeals court to go against the judge's or a jury's decision. Ronald takes issue with the jury trial that followed.
All evidence about his drug-induced mental state was excluded from the courtroom, which, to Ronald, made his trial deeply unfair. Prior to the trial, the prosecutor had filed a motion to prevent the jury from hearing anything about Ronald's diminished capacity on that day. Testimony about Ronald's mental health history and his drug use was barred from the courtroom.
In essence, the jury was only to be given half of the picture, and it was the half in which Ronald looked like a monster who had senselessly killed a feeble old man. Maybe the biggest blow to Ronald's defense was the fact that his expert witness was prohibited from testifying on his behalf. Dr. Scott was a psychologist from the Missouri area who had evaluated Ronald and concluded that he was suffering from drug-induced psychosis at the time of the murder.
Ahead of the trial, Dr. Scott planned to advise the jury that Ronald Wright was not capable of cool reflection when he was under the psychotic effects of the drug. Because of his diminished mental capacity, he said, Ronald did not know what he was doing and therefore did not have the intent to commit murder when he entered John Shaw's home.
Dr. Scott's testimony would be a major win for Ronald's defense, as it proved that he did not have an intent to kill, the precursor to first-degree murder. So, why couldn't the jury hear about Ronald's psychotic state of mind? The law on all this is complex, but we can try to wrap it our heads around some of the key principles.
Usually somebody can claim a mental illness like schizophrenia as a valid defense for their crime. Many states in the U.S., however, have eliminated what's called voluntary intoxication as a valid defense. The law specifies that you cannot claim you are incapacitated if you are high on drugs. If you willingly took an intoxicating substance, you are responsible for your actions while on that substance.
In Ronald's case, his psychosis was not an underlying condition, but caused by voluntarily taking m***. Therefore, it could not be admitted as a legal defense in court. Was this a fair call or not? Ronald doesn't seem to think so. Although he repeatedly showed remorse in court, even apologizing outright, the sentencing phase was severe.
Judge Pratt called the crime "a savage destruction of life". The prosecutor appealed for a long sentence to match the outrageous crime. And Jean Shaw herself wrote an emotional letter in which she called for Ronald to never be released. Subsequently,
Ronald was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, meaning he will never be released from prison. You know, I don't understand why the prosecutors have such a hard on for getting the worst case scenario they can, you know, charge you with. Because I think if you would have gotten second-degree murder, you probably could have got a s***load of charges to make you stay in there for a really long time anyway, but you actually got found guilty and you got life without.
Yeah. Yeah. So now you've sobered up, I'm assuming, are you doing drugs in there? Yeah. No, I don't use drugs. There's actually a lot of it here, especially the last few years. It's pretty bad. Sure. So no, I'm totally against it. So now you're in prison for years and years and years. You're completely sober, and now you get to really analyze everything that you did, your current situation, and one of those things you analyze is the fact that you are going to pass away in that prison, and what does that feel like?
Well, I mean, that's just the way it is, so, I mean, what are you gonna do? You know, you can... Do you think you should have a chance to be out on the streets? Yeah, yeah, cause I mean, there's a lot of people in here that have parolable sentences that have committed murders. And with the mitigating factors, yeah. I mean maybe, might have been a lot of life lessons you can get out in 27 years.
So, I mean I think that would have been alright. But I don't know. So here's the deal Ronald. If someone were to argue the fact that you should stay in there to never get out, I can almost hear the argument now and it's a really good one. And here's how it would go. You have a drug addiction. Whether you do it anymore or not, you've had a drug addiction to where m*** was your drug of choice.
When you do m***, you actually hear voices, voices that tell you to commit heinous crimes. Since drug addicts, it's sometimes, well, a lot of times, uncontrollable, they just end up doing it because they just want to get high. You get out on the streets, and you just slip up that one f***ing time, and you do a little bit of m***, and all of a sudden, you're driving around looking for somebody hearing voices again, like it's that f***ing easy. So that's a really good argument, you know what I mean, and what is your response to that?
Well, after this, I wouldn't do it. I just wouldn't do it. Everybody says that, you know. Yeah, I mean, I can see why people maybe wouldn't trust that. But, I mean, the recidivism rate that I hear for people who've done a long period of time is below 1%. Right. You know, I've always, obviously there's people that should never get out of prison again, however, I do kind of think that, you know, life without is definitely a death sentence in its own. So we should take careful consideration. And the prosecutors, you know, you know, they're just doing their job, they want to go for the worst. I don't understand that culture, but that's what it is.
They go for the worst they can and they'll do anything they can to get that. And that one thing they did was not let you admit anything that's about your prior drug history, which is crazy to me. But I got a question for you. I've interviewed a guy in your facility, actually, he may be in JCC, but regardless, he's in there for murder and it was life without.
And he tried to pass a bill and it was called the Killing Time Bill. Are you familiar? No, I've never heard of that one. So it's basically, it's a farfetched bill that will never make it, however, it's probably also making a point. But these guys in JCC tried to pass the Killing Time Bill to where it allows criminals that are convicted of murder that are doing life without to opt for the death sentence. If that was a bill that was real, would you opt for the death sentence and just kill yourself in there?
Let the state do it? I don't know. I know that they threatened me with a death sentence. If I didn't plead guilty to take life without, they would seek the death penalty. I said, "No, I'm not going to do that." I'm not sure what's worse. But now you spent decades in prison. If that bill were to come about, would you take advantage of it?
I wouldn't want to do that to my family. I mean, it's no really kind of life, but. Do you think there's people that would line up to do that in there? There might be. Might be. I don't know. Do you think prison's that bad to where people would want to just go ahead and kill themselves? I mean, I don't know.
Some of these people who are OD'ing might have wanted to do it. I don't know. The main way people in here die. I'm sure there's probably some. Life without parole is a tough pill for somebody to swallow. By this point, I've interviewed many inmates who know they are going to die in prison. Through these conversations, I've heard firsthand how devastating it can be to spend the rest of your life behind bars.
That's a reality that Ronald has had to come to terms with. Although he has expressed that he's horrified by his past actions, Ronald maintains that he should have received a lighter sentence because his mental capacity was diminished at the time of the murder. He assures me that this terrible incident gave him the shock he needed to get sober and to stay that way, and if he had the opportunity to be released back into society, he would no longer pose a threat to the public.
Should Ronald be given a second chance? All chances at appealing his case have been rejected meaning he will never be allowed to re-enter society. Instead, like many others, Ronald must try to find peace and meaning in his life, even if it's from behind prison walls. So when was the last time you heard voices?
Was it the day of the murder? Do you continue to hear them in prison? No, no, not in prison, but I was on anti psychotics for a while, still, because I still felt a little paranoid for years after that. No voices or nothing, but just had some paranoia, you know, people watching me or this or that. But they say there was no underlying condition, but I was actually on anti-psychotics when I went to trial, but they didn't bring that up either.
Do you find yourself getting in fights in prison? No, I got, well, I got one. I got in one, actually, not too long ago. I was at the honor dorm for 15, 14 years. I had 14 and a half years of doing write ups, and I just here a few months ago got into it with my celly. He wasn't showering. I said something to him about it. He swung at me.
So that's why I'm not in Honor House anymore. So that was my first violation since 2009. So after he swung at you, y'all got it in? Did y'all, did they find y'all fighting? No. So we got told on. It was in our cell. We stayed in the cell because we both had black eyes. We stayed in the cell for four days.
Somebody didn't like us or whatever. You know, that's, that's gotta be rough living with somebody for years and it's such a tight quarters and you can get into these heated things where you actually fight or even kill each other, you know, and then you try to. Yeah. Try to get past it and hide and live your life, probably really pissed off at each other but trying to get over it because you do have to live together, that's a stress in itself I'm sure.
Yeah. Well, I mean, we got along good after that, really, for the four days he was in there, I didn't really have nothing against him. I just wanted him to take a shower. I didn't want him to fight. It's been like four or five days. Yeah. And I should have went around it a little better, you know. Shoulda, coulda been nicer. Other than, "Yeah, you know, you need a shower. You're stank" or, you know.
You said you had four daughters. How do you raise them being in prison? Well, I don't. I mean, they're grown now, but they weren't then. So, you know, I call them pretty often and, and I see them every once in a while. Yeah. I've got 10 grandkids, some of them I haven't seen. I know a father daughter bond is pretty important.
I've got a daughter that, you know, she's extremely important to me. I'm important to her as well, so do you feel like this negatively affects your daughters, their father? Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. I had custody of my daughter, my two daughters, from my first marriage, when I got off of m***.
So, yeah, they, they went through a lot with that. Ronald, I appreciate you letting me ask you these tough questions today. I know that I don't think you're a hardcore, cold blooded killer. I think you were whenever you were on drugs, but not, I don't think that's Ronald Wright, which is a shame, but. You know, it's really tough for society to try to figure these things out.
We take the easier route and just, you know, "Get rid of him", you know, "Put him in prison forever." But these are complex questions and they take complex answers. So, but regardless, I appreciate you allowing me to talk to you today. I appreciate you. And I hope that you could find peace in there as much as possible. Yeah, no problem, man. And if you need something, give me a holler, okay? Bye bye. Okay, you too. Bye bye.
On the next episode of Voices of a Killer. I didn't want to kill him. I wasn't going to kill him. That wasn't my intention. It seems like the sum of everything here is just you being feeling like you're really put in a position where somebody kind of had their foot on your throat. I got arrested for being an adult riding a car that that kid took on a joyride and I got charged with stealing it.
He co-signed a bond to get me out of jail. And he later used that bond to force me to have sex with him. So whenever he blackmailed you, obviously nobody likes to be blackmailed, but did you gave in and just like, you know, wanted to go ahead and squash this deal? And he asked me, he said, "Is this where you're gonna kill me?"
The dude asked me this two days, three days before this happened. I had no intentions of killing him.
That's a wrap on this episode of Voices of a Killer. I want to thank Ronald for sharing his story with us today. His ability to be open and honest is what makes this podcast so special. If you want to listen to these episodes weeks in advance, you can now do so by joining our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/VoicesofaKiller.
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Your feedback helps us improve and reach new listeners. Thank you for your support, and we can't wait to share more stories with you in the future. Thank you for tuning in. I'm your host, Toby, and we'll see you next time on Voices of a Killer.