The Roanoke Times

Printed Oct. 2, 2000

June 15, 1967. Quang Ngai, South Vietnam.

Cpl. Ronald Edward Gay is preparing for a milk run, usually an easy run of supplies to faraway troops. Gay mans the 50 mm cannon on the first truck, ready for enemy fire.

He is not tall, but strong. Top physical shape. He loves being a Marine.

That day, Cpl. John Anthony Penna asks Gay if he can switch places with him in the first truck. Gay says no, but Penna pleads. Gay relents and switches places.

The convoy heads out.

Penna's truck rolls over a land mine. He and the seven men on board are blown up.

Gay watches it happen. He picks up charred pieces of the soldier he thinks should have been him. He zips up the body bags of the eight men and moves on.

That's the story Gay told for the next 30 years. It's the story that many think was the first in a long line of twisted events that led to his undoing.

An undoing that includes Bibles with cryptic messages to the president, stints at veterans hospitals, a land dispute with the Canadian government, three sons who changed their last name and six troubled marriages, including one to a woman with a lesbian past.

An undoing that some say led him to walk into Backstreet Cafe last week and fire a Ruger 9 mm, killing one and injuring six. Police have charged Gay with first-degree murder.

‘Who's Gay?’ ‘I am, sir!’

Gay was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Dec. 22, 1945. He was the second oldest of two brothers and a sister. In school he played football and paddled canoes.

Sometime during middle school, his brother, Bill Gay, says Gay heard the taunts for the first time.

"Faggot," kids yelled at him, although nobody really knew what the word meant.

After graduation, Gay filled out a job application at the Canadian Labor Department. The clerk told him he'd make an excellent ditch digger, says his sister, Marilyn Gay.

Hurt and frustrated, Gay headed toward the Boston area to work in his uncle's garage.

It was 1966; the war in Vietnam was building. His uncle suggested he do something with his life and join the armed forces. He chose the Marines.

The name game continued, he later told one of his wives.

"Who's Gay?" the drill sergeant shouted.

"I am, sir!" he'd shout back. Still, he loved the service.

"He was 100 percent Marine," his brother says.

Soon, he would be shipped off to Vietnam. His father, Cecil Gay, wept for his son.

While Ronald Gay was in boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., in January 1967, his father died. Cecil Gay and family were in the midst of a land dispute with the Canadian government. They said the government never compensated them for land the government took in the 1940s. Gay was crushed by the death of the man he so admired.

Soon after the funeral, Gay went to war.

‘Kind of the beginning’

Summer 1967.

Casualties in Vietnam climb; the depth of the American involvement deepens. Gay watched eight men die. He saw other atrocities during his 13-month tour of duty, he told other vets and complete strangers. Missiles dive-bombing foxholes in the crease of darkness. More bodies. But Penna's death lingered.

"I think it shook him up for the rest of his life," his brother says. "I always said Ronnie's body came back, but his mind never did."

He left the war in 1968, but it followed him.

He seemed fine at first, settling down in Springfield, Va., marrying a woman named Dusty and having a son in 1969 who bore his name. He worked in a post office.

At some point in the early 1970s, Gay left his wife and went back to Halifax, in part to fight the battle his family was waging against the government. Gay wanted to carry out the legacy his father started and win what he believed was theirs.

With a German shepherd and pop-up camper, Gay set up camp on the land to claim it.

His brother remembered Gay wanted to build a bunker on the land.

He drove a truck full of sand to the property to make sandbags, but the truck axle broke on the way.

"I was sort of glad it broke," his brother says. He thought it was a strange move. "It was kind of the beginning" of Gay's troubles.

He moved to Rocky Mount, Va., to be closer to his son, but returned to Nova Scotia in a few years. Now that Gay wasn't around, his first son, Ronald Edward Gay II, changed his last name.

In 1978, Gay and girlfriend Jeannie Rogers had a son, Joshua. He managed a muffler shop, spent time with his son, cheered at ball games.

In 1980, the year they married, Jeannie Gay first saw the demons come.

‘A very sick person’

Late one night, Gay was sitting up in bed, staring down the hallway.

"Be quiet, be quiet, they're out there with guns," he whispered to Jeannie Gay. There was nothing going on outside, she later found out, but plenty going on in his head.

He'd kick and scream in the night, choke his pillow and sometimes her. She'd wake to find him on his hands and knees, sobbing. He told her they were being watched.

Over the next six years, he was gone as much as he was home. He'd take off for months on end, leaving no clue where he went, then show up at the dinner table like nothing had happened.

He started to think he was a prophet of God, Jeannie Gay says. She remembers his sending Bibles and cryptic messages to the Canadian prime minister and U.S. president. The U.S. Secret Service has a file on him that the Roanoke Police now have.

"I always thought I'd be the one he'd kill," Jeannie Gay says. "I always believed he was a very sick person." She didn't see him for almost two years.

His brother saw the changes, too.

Gay "knew something was happening to him," his brother says.

His love of the mountains brought him to Roanoke.

In early 1986, Gay checked into the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem. Jeannie Gay says doctors diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he was given 10 percent disability.

Doctors say PTSD is caused when a person experiences a traumatic or life-threatening event. That can range from being threatened at gunpoint to being sexually abused as a young child. People will experience the trauma over and over in their minds, resulting in angry outbursts, trouble sleeping and a tense, jumpy demeanor. This may begin two weeks after the trauma, or take years.

In March, Jeannie Gay moved to Roanoke to help out. Gay checked out of the VA and the two rented a place at Bent Tree Apartments in Roanoke County. He was taking medication -- Prozac and Klonopin -- to tame the depression and worries. He took a job selling windows.

"He seemed to be doing OK," she says.

One day she came home and he was standing over the toilet, flushing his medication. He became paranoid and sometimes violent, she says. He was off his rocker when he was off his medicine, she says.

"The look in his eyes would scare you half to death," she said.

Jeannie Gay left him in November of that year, moving back to Nova Scotia to get away from him. She feared for her life. She didn't think he could control his.

The next few years of Gay's story are foggy.

Jeannie Gay divorced him, his son changed his name, he was homeless for a time and he married a third wife in Tennessee. He spent some time at the Johnson City, Tenn., VA hospital, officials confirmed. He was last there in 1992. His brother visited him there briefly.

"He was pretty fried," William Gay says.

He later told Jeannie Gay that VA officials gave him 100 percent disability in 1992. By the time of the Backstreet Cafe shootings, he told authorities, he was getting $2,700 a month from the Canadian and U.S. governments combined.

He lived in Florida, where he married his fourth wife. They divorced. She introduced him to Laura Ramsey. Gay married Ramsey in 1994 and had a son, Kyle, in 1995.

Ramsey said when she met Gay she was living with a lesbian in a sexual relationship, but she says Gay knew about it and he never took issue with it. She heard him complain about homosexuals taking his last name, but never heard him say he hated gays.

"He wasn't homophobic," she said. They'd go to parties with gays sometimes.

He was drinking and taking his medication sporadically, Ramsey says.

In 1997, he left Ramsey and their son. He gave up custody rights to Kyle. In time, Kyle would change his last name, too. William Gay says Gay was a great father when he was present, and the fact that his sons changed their names tore him up. He and Ramsey divorced later that year and he moved back to the Roanoke area.

On Dec. 26, 1997, Gay called Jeannie Gay and said he wanted to see her. She knew his past, his demons, but she said she couldn't deny him. In July 1999, she moved in with Gay at the home he rented on Smith Mountain Lake in Huddleston.

"He seemed like his old self," Jeannie Gay said. "He laughed easily, there was a light in his eyes."

In August, he made his first trip to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. He told friends it was a difficult trek, filled with flashbacks and memories, but a journey he had to make.

At one point, he took Jeannie Gay to the woods on the side of Mill Mountain, where he said he had camped out for a year. He said he'd walk into town sporadically, pick up some noodles and bread, then head back to the hills.

Things were good for the two at the lake. They reconnected and he seemed at peace. They remarried Sept. 30, 1999, in Bedford County.

Jeannie Gay remembers his spending a lot of time alone, listening to country music on his portable radio. He gave that radio to a little girl about eight hours before police say he confessed to shooting seven people.

Burning his past?

Late in 1999, things began to come undone.

He bought a 9 mm pistol at a Roanoke gun store that fall. From then on, Jeannie Gay said, it was never far from its holster on his hip. He didn't sleep, didn't eat, didn't talk.

She took him to the Salem VA to get his medication organized. He was drinking a lot of Canadian whiskey.

The doctors told him he couldn't mix the medication and booze. Jeannie Gay says they told him they wouldn't give him the pills if he was drunk.

But doctors told Jeannie Gay that taking Gay off his medications would be like taking the fix away from a heroin junkie. Jeannie Gay knew he would be dangerous if he was off his pills.

He told Jeannie Gay that God started talking to him again in March of this year. She had to go, Gay said God told him.

Two weeks after she left for Florida, he called her and said God said she could come back. She didn't want to start the cycle again. She stayed in Florida.

In April, he was burned when he poured gasoline on a Christmas tree. Jeannie Gay thinks he was burning his military records, too.

In May, fire trucks pulled up to Gay's house, engulfed in flames. He was sitting on a neighbor's steps, a suitcase in one hand, a bottle in the other. Fire officials said a faulty dryer started the fire.

‘Wasn't the brother I know’

Salem VA officials say April 26 was the last time they saw Gay.

That month, he moved to Dunnellon, Fla., where he lived with his sister, Marilyn Gay, at a hotel where she worked. She said her brother was relatively happy when he was there. He'd collect his spare change and toss it under a tree. When children checked into the hotel, he told them the hotel had a money tree, she said.

On Father's Day, another side showed. He burst into Laura Ramsey's house and demanded to see his son whom he hadn't seen in three years. He said he would shoot Ramsey and her new husband, court records show. He left before police arrived.

Later that month, a Florida judge ordered Gay to surrender his guns and undergo a mental health evaluation. There is no evidence that either happened.

In July, he contacted the Salem VA hospital and said he wouldn't be back for some time. His sister says he visited the VA hospital in Gainesville, Fla.

He continued to live in Florida for a few months, where his sister said he was doing fine except for the fact he was trying to wean himself from his medications. He went three days without them, got depressed and slept a lot.

"It wasn't the brother that I know," she said.

He started taking the medication again and returned to normal, she says.

He left her in August and came back to Roanoke.

‘Something in my head’

Cabbie James Nichols first met Gay when he picked him up at a Roanoke hotel in mid-August. He drove him from hotel to hotel at different times over the next few weeks, often stopping at banks. He finally took Gay to Roanoke Mountain Campground, where he found the sunniest campsite.

Nichols took Gay to Wal-Mart to get supplies once. Halfway through the shopping trip, Nichols says Gay gave him some money and walked out of the store.

"He said he felt like the walls were caving in on him with all these people," Nichols says.

Nichols said he often saw Gay give money to homeless people.

"There was this guy who was filthy dirty, and Ron went up to him and said 'Here's $10, go get yourself something to eat and get cleaned up,' " Nichols says. Later, he said, Gay told him, "that could be me out there."

Nichols said Gay wasn't all there.

"He told me he was just here," Nichols says. "No emotions. No ups or downs. He was just existing."

The last time Nichols saw Gay was about 11 a.m. the day of the shooting, when he gave him a ride to the Jefferson Lodge in downtown Roanoke so he could take a shower. Gay told him to pick him up at the motel the next morning.

But by then, Gay was in jail.

His sister called him there the next night.

"I guess I'm in the s---," he told Marilyn Gay.

"Yeah, Ron."

"Something in my head."

Staff writers Laurence Hammack, Tad Dickens, Ron Nixon, Lisa Applegate and news researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this story.

Zeke Barlow can be reached at 981-3349 or zekeb@roanoke.com

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