By Emily Fitzgerald / [email protected]

A man sentenced to life in prison in 1977 for the killing and dismemberment of a 13-year-old boy is now back in the Lewis County Jail awaiting a hearing on a motion to overturn his conviction.

Tommy L. Ragan, a former Lewis County resident who was 33 at the time of the incident, was initially charged with first-degree murder in January 1977, according to records filed in Lewis County Superior Court. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on April 17, 1977.

“The court has accepted my guilty plea, as well as the fact that I stated that I had no intention of killing the victim,” Ragan, now 81, said in a motion filed in Lewis County Superior Court on April 26, 2024.

The Chronicle’s reporting from this time refers to the investigation that Ragan and the

The victim, identified as Bruce Allen Kim, attended a party with several others at the LeMae Apartments in Centralia on January 2, 1977.

After an argument with Kim in the parking lot behind the apartment complex, “Ragan, who said he was drunk, became angry and punched and choked Kim,” according to an April 18, 1977, Chronicle article.

Then-prosecutor Jeremy Randolph stated that strangulation was Kim’s cause of death.

“Authorities speculate that Ragan placed Kim’s body in his car, drove it to Seattle and later buried it in a shallow grave near Yelm,” the Chronicle said.

Four days after Ragan’s arrest on a suspended sentence unrelated to the crime, investigators found Kim’s body in Seattle on January 14, 1977, missing his head and “mutilated.”

Ragan was also initially charged with sexual abuse and kidnapping Kim, but Randoph reportedly admitted “that he had no solid evidence to support the kidnapping and sexual assault charges,” according to Chronicle reporting at the time.

On April 18, 1977, Ragan was charged with being a “habitual offender,” which in Washington state law is a person who has committed multiple serious crimes. Ragan’s criminal record at the time included a conviction for second-degree kidnapping in 1964, a conviction for second-degree burglary in 1969, and a conviction for unlawful taking of a motor vehicle in 1969.

“A jury found me a habitual offender on May 11, 1977, and sentenced me to life imprisonment on May 16, 1977,” Ragan said in his April 2024 motion to vacate his conviction.

Ragan would have faced a lesser sentence if he had not been classified as a habitual offender, according to Chronicle reporting and court records.

In his motion, Ragan argues that he was “convicted of a nonexistent crime” because of a 2002 Washington State Supreme Court ruling that held that “a conviction for second-degree murder cannot be based on assault as a primary crime.”

Ragan essentially argues that he cannot be convicted of murder because he had no intention of killing Kim.

“At the time the (plaintiff) committed the acts for which he was convicted, there was no law recognizing second-degree murder based on assault as a felony,” Ragan explains in the motion, adding, “A conviction (of second-degree murder) based on assault as the underlying crime is not a conviction of a felony at all.”

Ragan argues, “Because the applicant was convicted of a nonexistent crime, he has been proven to have suffered a fundamental constitutional error that has actually and substantially disadvantaged him.”

Ragan argues that his conviction is “invalid” and that he is entitled to compensation, specifically that both his second-degree murder and habitual crime convictions be overturned.

The Lewis County Superior Court appointed an attorney for Ragan on June 6, 2024, and on June 20, a motion was filed to transfer Ragan from the Stafford Creek Corrections Center to the Lewis County Jail.

According to court records, Ragan was booked into the Lewis County Jail at 9:40 a.m. on July 12.

A hearing on the motion was originally scheduled for July 18, but was postponed.

On August 22, a hearing on the motion was scheduled for December 18 at 1:00 p.m.