CHEHALIS, Wash. -- Since Ronda Reynolds died here nearly 11 years ago, no one in this community has been able to rest easy. Was Ronda killed and her murderer still running free? Or has the community simply been held hostage by a tragic suicide?

For the first time, those questions -- and the evidence surrounding the case -- are being heard by a jury. But this is not a criminal case; instead what's on trial is coroner Terry Wilson's decision all those years ago to call Ronda's death a suicide.

In this civil case, Ronda's mother Barb Thompson wants the judge and jury to overrule that decision.

"I guess maybe it just comes down to the truth," Thompson said. "That's, that's all I wanted the whole time is just the truth."

Nearly 11 years ago, Barb Thompson got the call at her Spokane horse farm that would turn her life upside down. Investigators had found her daughter Ronda dead of a gunshot in her Lewis County home. Investigators told her mother and closest friends it looked like suicide.

Like any family, they agonized: Could the former state trooper, so full of life, really have shot herself?

"You know, it started out trying to understand what happened," Thompson said.

But unanswered questions nagged at Ronda's mother.

Ronda had booked a flight to Spokane and packed her bags just hours before she died. She scrawled a message on a bathroom mirror telling her husband to call her in Spokane.

And even though Ronda was right-handed, police reports put the gun in her left hand.

Thompson started asking questions.

"And then the more questions you ask, the more it doesn't make sense," she said.

She enlisted the help of the original Lewis County detective on the case, Jerry Berry.

"The totality of circumstances indicate that it's a murder," Berry said. "No doubt in my mind. Never has been. It was a murder in 1998; it's a murder today."

But Ronda's marriage was breaking up and her husband said she'd threatened suicide. Over Berry's objections, the Sheriff's Office closed the case and coroner Terry Wilson called it suicide.

But Thompson didn't give up. She collected evidence from the original investigation, tracked down new experts, and contacted the Problem Solvers.

We recreated decibel tests with a firearms expert to see how realistic it was that others in Ronda's house never heard the gunshot.

We visited the crime scene, testing if the closet door could have been closed. And we asked a new forensic pathologist with more than 2,000 autopsies to his credit how he interpreted Ronda's autopsy.

"This is not a self-inflicted wound," said Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds.

All Thompson's efforts have paid off and now a jury is hearing this evidence. But her search for answers has taken a toll. It's cost nearly everything she makes breeding horses.

Emotionally, the cost is even higher. And as Barb fights this battle, she just wishes she could feel Ronda by her side.

"For all the people I can read, for all the things I can sense... I don't, I don't sense her, and that's sad," she said.

No matter what the judge and jury ultimately decide in this case, Thompson knows she has done everything she can. And her plan once this is over is to finally scatter her daughter's ashes and let her rest.