Jacqueline Faye “Jackie” Travis, a 49-year-old white female, was found dead on December 8, 2000, in her apartment in east Merced, California. She had been living with a roommate, who discovered her body lying on a mattress on the bedroom floor, covered with a quilt. Travis, whose right leg had been amputated below the knee, had suffered a brutal assault. An autopsy revealed she had been beaten, stabbed, and ultimately strangled.
Blood was found throughout the apartment, and authorities believed she had been sexually assaulted.
The investigation into Jackie Travis’s murder eventually led to a breakthrough through DNA evidence. In 2005, California Department of Justice criminalists entered DNA from the crime scene into a database, which matched genetic material from another high-profile murder case in Arkansas. The DNA linked both cases to Ronald James Ward Jr., a 42-year-old transient drifter already serving a life sentence in Montana for the murder of Craig Petrich. Ward had also been convicted in Arkansas for the murder of 25-year-old Kristin Laurite, a white female whose body was found near a rest stop in Morrilton in August 2000.
In September 2008, Ward pled guilty in Merced County Superior Court to the murder of Jackie Travis and another victim, 33-year-old Shela Polly, a white female from Modesto, California. Polly had been found strangled and stabbed on December 30, 2000. Ward’s plea resulted in two life sentences without the possibility of parole, to be served concurrently with each other but consecutively to his existing sentences in Montana and Arkansas.
Authorities described Ward as a deeply disturbed individual with a history of violent crimes across multiple states. Prosecutors from Merced and Stanislaus counties traveled to Montana to meet with Ward in hopes of securing a plea deal that would spare the victims’ families the trauma of lengthy trials. Ward agreed to cooperate, and his guilty pleas brought a measure of closure to the families of Jackie Travis and Shela Polly. Law enforcement officials have expressed concern that Ward may be responsible for additional unsolved homicides and have encouraged agencies nationwide to review cold cases for potential connections.
