Vaughn couple doted on grandsons. Now one is charged with killing them.
Ted Ralston and Joanna Gormly, the couple found dead in their burned Vaughn home on May 17, doted on their grandchildren, friends said, and that may have been their undoing.
“They were very devoted to their two grandsons,” said John Kirry of Gig Harbor, a family friend. “They saw that as a mission. They sacrificed a lot for their grandkids.”
One of the grandsons, Ezra Fleming Ralston, a 26-year-old originally from near Austin, Texas, was charged on Wednesday, along with his girlfriend, with their murder.
Ralston, 71, was a retired computer security expert who had once worked for the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Clinton-Gore White House transition team.
Gormly, two years older, was fluent in Russian, had trained as a respiratory therapist and volunteered with a Key Peninsula health clinic.
Both were well-known and active in the Key Peninsula community, both in Democratic politics and community activities. They had just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
“Ted was often the smartest man in the room,” said Don Swensen, owner of the Blend Wine shop and president of the community council. “He was a political animal, and we connected a lot on that. We sat in here and had hour-long discussions about politics.”
“Joanna was one of the most gentle people I’ve met in my entire life,” he added. “She was quiet, reserved, elegant, intelligent, just a gentle soul.”
Both were found dead in the basement of their home on Bayview Road NW on Sunday night after firefighters extinguished an arson fire. They had suffered stab wounds.
Key Peninsula firefighters responding to a 911 call about 8:30 p.m. on May 17 found the home in the 18800 block completely engulfed in flames.
The couple’s grandson was missing, along with their car. Sheriff’s deputies located the car at a house in Lakewood on Monday and arrested the grandson there.
On Wednesday they arrested his fiance, Rebecca Neubauer, 22. Both were charged with homicide.
The deaths shocked the Key Peninsula, where both Ralston and Gormly were well known and longtime residents of the house on Bayview Road. They had been married there, in a 1969 ceremony on the lawn sloping down to Vaughn Bay.
“They were regular customers, friends,” said Swensen. “Ted was a guitar player and he would play in his house band Friday nights. Joanne was an aspiring singer, and they would sing some songs. Ted was a single malt whiskey connoisseur, and we shared that like between us.”
Both were active in the Key Peninsula Civic Center association, and Ted Ralston had served several terms as president, said Tim Kezele, the current president.
“They were just always there,” Kezele said. “If you needed a bartender or a setup person, or somebody to sell tickets, somebody to be on a committee, Ted was there.”
“Joanna was on the health board, the library board. She would help set up for events, then she’d whip up a great lemon meringue pie.”
Ted Ralston had such a command of political minutiae and world affairs that there were jokes about the CIA, Keleze said. In fact, Ralson did work in intelligence, and had some links to the agency. In the 1970s he worked on arms control issues for the Senate Intelligence committee, according to his resume.
Their deaths hit the community hard, Kezele said.
“I cried three times yesterday,” he said. “It’s just so hard to take. It’s not right.”
Met in the ‘Russian House’
Ted and Joanna met as students at the University of Washington, said Ken Gormly, Joanna’s brother.
“They were Russian majors, and they met at the ‘Russian house,’ where students lived and only spoke Russian, ate Russian food, and so forth,” Gormly said. “They were both pretty fluent.”
Kirry, a retired airline pilot who lives in Gig Harbor, went to high school with Ralston —Ingraham High, in the north end of Seattle — and was best man at his wedding.
“He was a very smart man with an unlimited, inquisitive mind who had many talents and many, many abilities,” Kirry said. He spoke three languages, was deeply versed in computer technology and was fascinated by history and politics.
Kirry said the couple doted on their two grandsons, even at one time moving briefly back to Austin as the younger boy, Quinn, completed his senior year in high school.
“They sacrificed a lot for their grandkids; they made room in their house for Ezra,” he said.
Grandson came summers
Ezra Ralston came from Texas to live with his grandparents every summer, said Cameron McMillan, a student at Olympic College who met him as a teenager some years ago.
McMillan said he met Ezra only a couple of times, and was repelled.
“He thought he was smarter than everyone else,” he said. “He wanted to be in charge. After a while, I wanted nothing to do with him.”
Ezra was interested in gaming, and wanted to be a game creator, McMillan said, but he remembers him saying he didn’t want to do the actual work, just provide the ideas.
Swensen, the wine-shop owner, said he’d met the young man only a few times.
“The grandson was a little odd, I’ll say,” Swensen said. “I hesitate to say that, because everyone is different. According to Ted and Joanna, he was diagnosed as quasi-autistic, and I think he played off that. He seemed very eccentric, in his own world a lot of the time.”
Ezra was present at his grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary at Blend.
“He was a little out there — long hair, a little color in it — nothing really too outrageous,” said Kezele.
‘Not mentally well’
Video from his arraignment Thursday showed a slender young man with blonde hair and a handlebar mustache, who nodded and answered, “Yes, your honor,” to questions from the judge.
According to prosecutors, Ralston’s mother told detectives after the fire that her son was “not mentally well” and asked them to help find him.
In a brief interview, Alex Ralston, Ezra’s father, said his son had come from Texas to go to college in Washington.
“He had gone up to attend college at Evergreen, and that didn’t work out,” said Alex Ralston. “He wanted to stay in the Northwest. He didn’t want to go back to Texas.”
Asked if his son had any problems, he said, “I don’t want to go into that.”
Alex Ralston is a chef in Fredericksburg, Texas, near Austin. His parents lived there for about eight years while Ted Ralston was working at a computer company.
Well-traveled life
Until settling down in Vaughn, Ted Ralston and Joanna Gormly lived a peripatetic life, residing at various times in Baltimore, Maryland; Oxford, England; Palo Alto, California, and Austin, Texas, as he pursued a career in technology.
Ralston graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Russian language, then went on to study Russian and Byzantine history at Oxford University. He didn’t complete a degree there because his father became ill and he had to return to the United States, Kirry said. He returned to UW in 1974 to study for a doctorate in history, but did not complete his dissertation.
In 1975, he went to work as a staff member for the Senate Intelligence committee, a job that earned him a cameo in Bob Woodward’s 1987 book, “Veil,” about the CIA.
Woodward portrayed him as an overeager intelligence nerd who developed a close relationship with Adm. Bobby Inman, then deputy head of the CIA, and kept Inman informed about the likes and dislikes of his boss, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. on the intelligence committee.
Ralston earned unwelcome attention in the early 1980s when he was fired from the committee staff for taking classified papers home with him. An investigation found no ill intent, but said he had been careless.
“It was all true, and he would admit it,” said Kirry, “But he wasn’t happy about the way he was treated in Woodward’s book.”
When Inman left the CIA to form a company in Austin, Texas called Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Ralston, who had been teaching at Stanford, went to work there. He and his family lived in Austin for eight years.
An expert in IT security
In 1995, Ralson formed a company with two colleagues, Blackwatch Technology, to advise other companies on computer security.
“This was before anybody was really interested in computer security,” Kirry said. “He was way ahead of the field. He was working mainly in network security.”
He took four months off after the November, 1992 election to work as a staff member for the science and technology group in the Clinton-Gore White House transition team.
He became chief operating officer of another company, The Software Revolution, in 1997. Two years later, he went to work for Tivoli, a subsidiary of IBM, as a senior IT security architect, according to his Linked-In profile. He retired in 2013 after 14 years at the company.
The couple returned to the Key Peninsula in the 1980s to help care for Joanne Gormley’s aging parents, Dick and Janet Gormly, who had owned the home on Vaughn Bay since the 1960s. Ted and Joanne bought a house uphill from them, and moved into her parents’ home when they died.
Besides the Civic Center Association, Ralston was active in the Lions Club, and served as president of the Gig Harbor Lions in 2014-16. He was an active volunteer for the club’s eyeglass recycling program and the beautification of the Finholm Hill Climb.
About 50 friends bent social-distancing rules Monday night to meet for an impromptu remembrance in the Civic Center Parking lot, said Tim Kezele.
“There just had to be a gathering,” he said.. “We tried to stick to the rules, but, yeah, there were some hugs. It was an hour of stories about them. It was pretty emotional.”
Stacia Glenn of The News Tribune contributed to this story.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Joanna Gormly.
This story was originally published May 21, 2020 at 4:34 PM.