How Many
More Women ...?
What Really
Happened to Kimberly Ramming?
On Friday
July 5th, Kimberly Ramming, 35, came home to her Rohnert Park
apartment after a few hours of running errands.
According
to police, when she arrived Dale Lee Herring, Kimberly's 44 year-old
"boyfriend," was waiting, angry and suspicious about
her absence. According to Kimberly's statement to police, Herring
then imprisoned her in the apartment, choked and tried to smother
her, and brutally sexually assaulted her for some 26 hours before
she escaped through a window. Neighbors called 911.
Herring, a
pharmacist at Rite Aid drugstore in Rohnert Park, was arrested
and charged with domestic violence, assault with a deadly weapon,
sodomy, rape, two counts of penetration with a foreign object,
forced oral copulation, and terrorist threats.
Less than
24 hours later, Kimberly Ramming was dead. The coroner ruled she
drowned in a bathtub full of water; on her body was a prescription
skin patch for duragesic/fentanyl, a powerful narcotic. The autopsy
showed the hyatal bone in her throat was broken, indicating that
in the earlier choking incident she likely had been strangled
almost to death.
The Sonoma
County D.A. later added attempted murder charges against Herring,
who was has been in custody since the day before Ramming's death.
Police also confiscated photographs, videotapes and a computer,
reportedly under suspicion of child pornography, as well as illegal
drugs and prescriptions from Herring's San Rafael home.
The Purple
Berets Investigate
In just a couple
of days, here's what the Purple Berets' cursory investigation
into Kimberly Ramming's death turned up:
- According
to the state attorney general's office, Ramming was terminally
ill with cancer and met Herring at the Rite Aid pharmacy where
she filled her prescriptions. She was a tiny woman (about 4'8"
weighing less than 100 pounds) and was so ill and weak she hardly
left her apartment, where she had lived for just 3-4 months.
- Neighbors
say Herring was a frequent visitor at the apartment and called
Kimberly "obsessively" sometimes 8-10 times
a day.
- Kimberly
told a neighbor she wanted to get away from Herring and that
she often had trouble getting him to leave. In one overheard
argument, the neighbor said Kimberly shouted, "The relationship
is over. I want you to get out." Herring reportedly left,
but sat in his truck watching her apartment until 2 a.m.
- Neighbors
heard a number of heated arguments between the couple, once
including "what sounded like someone being pushed or thrown
against a wall." Though none of the neighbors we spoke
with called police, one reports that at least twice after such
arguments Rohnert Park police cruised by the apartment but never
got out of their cars.
- Police
confirm a June 5th call from Kimberly Ramming asking that they
eject her boyfriend who was refusing to leave. Police responded
to the call and dubbed it a "civil matter" in the
dispatch log. No police report was written; apparently no action
taken against Herring.
- Kimberly
told a neighbor she had been hospitalized some months before
and doctors had found drugs in the food she was eating
drugs she said had been put there by Dale Herring. Others report
Kimberly had at least once called Rite Aid pharmacy saying that
she didn't want to take the drugs Herring was sending her and
not to deliver them.
Herring's
History of Drugs & Violence
A look into
Dale Herring's history raises even more suspicions. A pharmacist
since 1981, he was twice put on probation by the state licensing
board, once for diverting cocaine and demerol for his personal
use. His license was revoked in 1988 but later reinstated; he
worked without a valid license at a Marin County Rite Aid in 1999-2001,
and was on probation with the state board at the time of Kimberly's
death. Rumor has it that narcotic drugs turned up missing from
at least one of the pharmacies where he worked.
But the clincher
is this: in October 1996, Dale Herring was arrested in San Francisco
for an assault with a stun gun on a female prostitute, who gave
police the license number of her assailant. When police stopped
the car, they found Herring, a stun gun, eight hypodermic needles,
six Floxin tablets (used for sexually transmitted diseases), sexual
restraints, sex toys and a knife. We're still waiting on records
from San Francisco, but it appears Herring was never prosecuted
in that attack.
Court records
in the Kimberly Ramming case show what appear to be other crimes
by Herring. The Sonoma County district attorney's office has requested
a number of other court and police records involving Dale Herring,
including a Rohnert Park police report involving sexual battery
of a former spouse, an Alameda County restrain-ing order, and
a San Rafael terrorist threats report.
Questions
That Beg for Answers
- Did
Herring provide the drugs
Kimberly Ramming used to end her life? If so, murder or accessory
to murder charges might be warranted.
- Is
Dale Herring a sexual predator who
targets terminally ill women he contacts through the pharmacies
where he works? Herring's attorney, Robert Stewart says that
prior to being hired by Rite Aid, Herring worked at a "hospice
pharmacy." In the course of his work there, he delivered
narcotics to the homes of terminally ill patients. Has any follow-up
been done on those hospice patients to see if there were similar
attacks?
- The
scenario described by San Francisco Police in the assault
on a prostitute reeks of a man who's done this before. Why wasn't
he prosecuted? Are there other unsolved rapes or attempted rapes
of prostitute women by a man using a stun gun and driving a
brown Ford Bronco in San Francisco? In Sonoma or Marin?
- What's
going on with Rite Aid?
Is it their regular practice to hire pharmacists whose licenses
are on probationary status due to drug use? Or with no valid
license at all? And did they not know of the violent felony
arrest in San Francisco? If they didn't, they should have.
- Same
question for the California Board of Pharmacy
how many chances does a drug addicted, sexually violent
pharmacist get before they revoke his license once and for all?
- And
finally, what's up with the child porn
and videotapes confiscated by police? Do any of them show Herring
committing other sex crimes?
January 2003
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