When a 90-year-old woman is found dead on her bed at home, foul play is rarely a consideration. When Wesley Ryals walked into his mother’s home to pick her up for the Thanksgiving holiday, he found her frail body motionless on the bed, the house exactly as he had remembered it. He called his cousin Billy, certain that Ruby Ryals had suffered a stroke and passed away in the comfort of her own bedroom.
But it wasn’t a stroke that killed her. She died from asphyxiation due to suffocation. Someone had smothered her with a pillow before stealing her pocketbook and the diamond wedding ring from her left hand.
Ruby Ryals lived in Dunn all her life. She grew up in a close-knit family, worked as a secretary for a local cotton company, and was an active member of her church, but she had also faced her share of hardship.
In 1969, her husband died of emphysema.
“[She] was by herself from that point on,” Wesley recalled.
In 1996, about a month before Ruby was murdered, her sister Peggy, her best friend, died from a slow, painful battle with lung cancer. Ruby took care of Peggy up until the day she died.
By the time she reached 90, Ruby was a fixture in the community. She was the kind of woman who insisted on keeping up the independent lifestyle she had cultivated since her husband’s death. She worked in the yard, gardening and raking leaves, defying her aging body.
“She was very independent and it was good to see that she was able to do the things that she wanted to do at that stage of her life,” Wesley remembered. “We had talked several times about her selling her house and moving into an apartment… and she didn’t want to do that. She was adamantly against doing that.”
Wesley can’t imagine who would have wanted to kill his mother. Investigators believe the murder was a robbery gone wrong.
“Perhaps while they were inside the residence that Ms. Ryals woke up, or she was in process of getting out of bed and startled them,” said retired Lieutenant A.J. Hawley, former lead investigator for the Dunn Police Department. “… It’s unsure if the original intent was to go in there and cause harm or if it was more one of those scenarios where Ms. Ryals may have known her attacker.”
Police and family members had been walking freely around the house before anyone realized that Ruby had been murdered. Someone at the crime scene eventually noticed that Ruby had a small gash on the back of her head and that some of her fingers had been broken where her wedding ring had been.
Suddenly, Ruby’s bedroom became a crime scene. Her pocketbook was missing, her phone was off the hook, her back door had been slightly ajar when Wesley arrived that afternoon. Special Agent Mike East, lead investigator for the State Bureau of Investigation, recalled that because the crime scene hadn’t been secured from the beginning, crucial physical evidence may have been lost.
They began their investigation by interviewing neighbors and friends. A local student had been renting an apartment on the second floor of Ruby’s house. He was home the night Ruby was murdered, but he didn’t hear or see anything out of the ordinary. He was eliminated as a suspect.
Conversations with neighbors revealed that there may have been a habitual intruder in the area, who entered people’s homes while they were gone. None of these suspicions were ever reported to police because nothing was ever stolen.
“Perhaps there wasn’t a glass out on the counter. When they returned, there was. Or they specifically remember closing a bedroom door, and when they return it was open,” Hawley explained.
A woman who had rented the apartment above Ruby’s home two years earlier came forward with information that keyed police in on a potential suspect. She came home one day to find Christopher Capps, a teenager who lived down the street with his grandparents, in her apartment digging through her things. He said he was looking for Ruby. She told him to leave and he did. The woman explained that she never reported the incident because, again, nothing had been stolen.
Capps, 17, performed odd jobs for Ruby as a young boy, but he denied any involvement in her murder.
“It was a friendly, neighborly relationship between her and my grandparents. I used to help her in the yard, help her rake leaves and stuff when I was growing up,” Capps said. “I’ve lived here since I was about 12 years old. We’ve grown fond of one another while I was staying here.”
During the investigation, Capps agreed to take a polygraph test. He failed. He also submitted to a voice stress analysis, which revealed that he showed signs of deception when asked about Ruby’s murder.
Capps said he failed the polygraph because he was “young and nervous.”
The SBI then collected hair, saliva and blood samples from Capps. He told police he stayed overnight with a friend, Richard Davis, the night of the murder. According to the search warrant, when Davis was interviewed by police, he denied that Capps had spent the night with him. Several people also told police that Capps was trying to sell a large diamond ring.
“I couldn’t harm an ant,” Capps said. “I mean I’ve been in scuffles before but I couldn’t kill nobody, especially a 90-some old lady. I mean, what would I get out of that?”
He has never been formally named as a suspect.
This Thanksgiving marked the 11th anniversary of Ruby’s murder. For her family, friends and investigators, the holiday is a frustrating reminder that her killer is still walking the streets.
“When it was first started, [the police] were optimistic that they were going to settle it fairly soon,” Wesley said. “Then as time wore on it’s just been more and more frustrating… It just goes on and on.”
But investigators believe they will eventually close this case.
“I think [the killer is] wondering, ‘Is this going to be the year? Is this going to be the year that my luck runs out?’ That’s what I hope he’s wondering because that’s what he should be wondering,” Hawley said.
