Rhonda Campbell Was Awake at Five Forty-Five. She Was Under Cut Branches.

Rhonda Campbell could take an order from a regular at the Timberline Diner and never write it down. She also noticed when someone who normally came in had missed a few days, and she would ask after them. On a Thursday in June of two thousand fourteen she did not show up for the six o'clock shift. Two days later a boy on a paper route found her truck on a mountain road, with one set of boot prints crossing the frost toward it and none leading away.

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Rhonda Campbell was twenty-three and lived at Ridgeback Loop fourteen, outside Vester, in Cascades County. She was last heard from at five forty-five on the morning of Tuesday, June tenth, two thousand fourteen. Her truck was found on Saturday, June fourteenth, and searchers found her four hundred and twenty yards into the timber behind it, beneath cut branches and logging slash. The medical examiner determined she had been strangled and could not fix a precise hour of death. Dennis Rice, thirty-eight, a timber and handyman contractor who two years earlier had spent three days working at her address for the previous tenant, was arrested on July ninth after a search of his home recovered her registration, her insurance card and her key ring. He admitted killing her and pleaded guilty. In October two thousand fourteen he received a life sentence with parole eligibility after twenty-five years. He explained why he took her documents. He never gave a reason for the killing. A separate homicide near Culver, that of twenty-six-year-old Tessa Garland fourteen months earlier, remained an open inquiry with no charge against Rice.

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This is an original fictional case written for True Crime 24 Hours. The people, communities, agencies and investigation are invented, and any resemblance to a real case is unintended. The account follows the invented case file: the scene photographs taken before the frost melted, the recorded interviews, the property inventory and the statements read at the hearing.

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A thirteen-year-old witness is central to this account. He is not named.