By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – The wife of Ricky Riffe’s high school friend Les George took the witness stand yesterday where she was asked about a long distance email relationship that took place over about a year and a half between herself and the murder defendant.
Debra George tearfully and seemingly reluctantly spoke of sometimes daily conversations over Facebook, Skype and through Gmail.
[1]Ricky Allen Riffe
“Did Rick ask you if people were talking about the homicides?” Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer asked.
Yes, she said, but they never mentioned the Maurins by name.
Prosecutors have indicated they believe Riffe was keeping tabs on the Lewis County investigation even as he was thousands of miles away in Alaska.
“Did you save those emails?” she was asked.
“No, he told me not to,” Deb George testified.
She said she thought Riffe didn’t want her husband or anyone else to see them.
Jurors in Lewis County Superior Court yesterday heard that her computer, as well as two computers from the Riffe household in King Salmon were seized and forensically examined a few weeks after a detective last year learned of the exchanges.
As the trial comes to the end of its fifth week, prosecutors continue in their attempts to prove Riffe is responsible for the December 1985 shotgun deaths of Ed and Minnie Maurin, the elderly Ethel couple whose bodies were found dumped off a logging road near Adna.
The now-55-year-old former Mossyrock man was arrested at his home in King Salmon, Alaska last year not long after the other prime suspect – his younger brother – passed away.
Lewis County Sheriff’s Office detective Bruce Kimsey spent his second day on the witness stand yesterday, sharing more of what he learned about the defendant when he flew to Alaska to confront him and subsequently to bring him back to Lewis County.
Riffe told him’d quit drugs cold turkey when he took a job in Alaska and put that part of his life behind him, according to Kimsey.
Kimsey has suggested the suspect’s attitude changed once he knew “the gig was up”, in contrast to the aloof manner he presented during the interrogation.
“It’s totally different,” Kimsey testified. “He’s more open, willing to talk to me. Willing to joke around and show he had a personality.”
After the July 8, 2012 arrest, he found the suspect not only more relaxed but quite witty, he said.
Kimsey spoke of observing Riffe during his court hearing in Anchorage laughing with other inmates, of conversing over lunch at Chili’s and then a fast food stop on their way to the Lewis County Jail.
When they hit Federal Way, they drove through and ordered burgers, according to Kimsey.
Kimsey walked over to a mini mart and brought back Pall Mall filtered cigarettes, apologizing he couldn’t get exactly what Riffe smoked, he said.
“So, he takes the cigarette out, bites off the filter, spits it on the ground and makes a joke to me,” Kimsey said. “Yes, he laughed.”
Kimsey said during the four-plus hour plane ride, he had continued to go through what all the witnesses have said.
“I’m sitting on his left side, detective Riordan on his right,” Kimsey says.
Riffe still had little to say about the case itself.
“He said, I don’t know. I hope justice prevails.”
“I told him, you can save that for your family and friends,” Kimsey recounted.
“He said, ‘well, it doesn’t look good’,” Kimsey said. “I said, ‘it’s bad.’ And he said, ‘yeah, it’s bad’.”
“Did you ask him if he’d worried?” Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Will Halstead asked.
“I’m talking in his left ear,” Kimsey said. “Did you ever think the day would come when police would come knock on your door and arrest you?”
His answer, “Well yeah.”