"My name is Lorraine Netherton,” said the voice on the phone to a King County Sheriff’s Office 911 operator. “One of the women I’m with, her ex showed up at her child’s school and took her.”
Steven Miller
If he’s successful in getting his ex-wife’s conviction overturned, Laxton says he’d consider getting back together with Netherton.
Courtesy of Rich Laxton
Lorraine Netherton.
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At around 3:35 p.m. on Nov. 23, 2002, Netherton said she was in a car in Ravensdale, located in rural east King County, and identified herself as the former director of the Federal Way Domestic Violence Task Force. She and the child's mother were parked outside a home where they suspected the father was with the 7-year-old. He was in violation of a court order giving the mother custody, Netherton explained. A trailer was in the driveway.
"We think they're going to leave with the child in this trailer," said Netherton.
The operator took detailed information and said an officer would be dispatched.
"Thank you," Netherton said. "I love you."
After five minutes, according to 911 recordings from that day, the operator called back to say an officer was on the way. Another few minutes passed before Netherton called 911 again and spoke with a different operator. Netherton reiterated the situation, adding, "It looks like they're trying to leave."
The operator couldn't say when an officer would arrive. Within five minutes came another 911 call."This is Lorraine Netherton! I'm going north on Southeast 268th. The subject just left..." The operator had trouble hearing the call as Netherton's cell phone cut out. "This man kidnapped his daughter...he took the child from school yesterday... God...they're trying to lose us!"
Netherton's voice rises. "They're out of the car!" she shouts. There's a commotion, and the sound of feet on the ground. "He kidnapped that kid!" she says to someone. And, seemingly to someone else, she commands: "Don't you fucking leave!"
"Hello?" says the operator. "Hello?" No answer.
Minutes later, at 3:54 p.m., a caller is back on the line. "Shots fired! Woman down, 26723 Southeast Ravensdale Road!"
The excited caller gulps deep breaths between words, and is partially inaudible. "She...opened the car door and attacked me and [inaudible] pounding the hell out of me and I [inaudible] in the blackberry bushes, and I fired."
"You fired?" asked the operator.
"Yes!"
"What's your last name?"
"Netherton!"
This time, units were on the way. When they arrived, officers found 22-year-old Desiere Rose Rants dead in an alley, and Lorraine Netherton standing nearby with a silver gun. She had tried to get police help, she told officers. But it all went sideways—she was attacked and had to shoot in self-defense.
Today, seven years later, Lorraine Netherton is still trying to prove that's true.
Now 47, Netherton is a quarter of the way through a 23-year term at the state women's prison in Purdy for murdering Rants, who'd been helping her brother and his child. She and Netherton met for the first time that November day in the valley, and Rants fell dead with two bullets in her stomach and chest.
Netherton insists she was wrongly convicted, something that leaves prosecutors arching their eyebrows and pointing to the court record. Evidence and testimony at a three-week trial persuaded a jury, after two days of deliberation, to find her guilty of murder. The verdict is now on its second appeal, according to her Seattle attorney, Tim Ford. In one of his recently filed briefs, Netherton says, "When I fired the shots that killed Desiere Rants, it was not my intention to kill her. My only intent was to stop a violent assault by her." The latest appeal is now before the state Supreme Court in Olympia, after a lower court twice confirmed that she'd gotten a fair trial.
Netherton has at least one true believer, however: one of her three former husbands. Rich Laxton of Seattle has spent much of his time and a lot of his money to help the combative woman he divorced two decades ago. Despite their breakup, says Laxton, "I decided I was not going to let Lorraine rot in prison for 23 years. If I believed she was guilty, I would have walked away. She's not."
Even after paying more than $100,000 in legal fees, the West Seattle machine-shop programmer is undaunted by the case's unblemished losing streak. He undertook his own investigation to disprove compelling testimony and evidence. Netherton was, after all, the woman he once shared his life with—and would do so again.
"I still care for Lorraine, and if her case is overturned, I would consider getting back together if she wanted to," Laxton says. "Even after we were divorced, we went on occasional river-fishing trips, travels to Ocean Shores, and other outback adventures. People change with time."
But it was mostly, he says, a sense of justice that trumped a bad breakup and his ex's reputation as someone who wouldn't win anyone's popularity contest.
"She's got a temper," he says, leaving it at that.
She's also got a penchant for bringing a gun to a fistfight, starting with the other time she shot someone.
Laxton is scrolling down a catalog of folders and files on the computer screen at his West Seattle home. "Here it is," he says, opening a cache of court documents and crime photos from the Rants murder scene.
