Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks, welcome to The Roundup. We're a Cowboy State Daily podcast. We focus on interesting people in the Cowboy State. And one of the privileges that I get, being able to host The Roundup, is I get to talk to people who I admire and whose work is absolutely fascinating to me, and that is the case with today's guest.
Before we get to today's guest - who is just going to knock your socks off with his body of work - I want to make sure that people know about Cowboy State Daily and how we partner with other people in the cowboy state here - and the Wyoming Business Alliance is one of our wonderful partners here at Cowboy State Daily. And they are very proud to present a podcast called ‘Business From the Basement’.
If you're a news junkie, which we assume you are, if you like us here at Cowboy State Daily, news junkie, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business person, check out the ‘Business From the Basement’ podcast, full of great information to help you grow your business and be a better business person and a better partner for your community.
So ‘Business From the Basement’ podcast, don't miss it, but we also don't want you to tune out here, because there's so many things we're going to talk about today that just tickles me. I'm an avid True Crime reader. I love Dateline on television and in podcast form, but I also love thriller mysteries, and our guest today is Ron Franscell. Ron has written 19 books so far about true crime, about just those, those thriller mysteries that get under your skin.
And I am tickled to be able to highlight and profile today Ron Franscell, who has done his share of profiling people through his journalism background, through his his books that he's researched. Ron, hello and welcome to The Roundup. We're so glad to have you today.
Ron Franscell:
Thank you for having me. Because I'm from Wyoming, your introduction makes me a little, you know, humble. I think we grow up and we're told the moment your head starts to get a little bigger, at least in my case, my mom had smacked me up against the head and say, You're not all that. And coming from Wyoming it is easy to believe that we're somehow should be more humble.
The fact is, over the time, I've realized that we're lucky in Wyoming,
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely
Ron Franscell:
I've been around the world as a war correspondent, as a reporter, as just a tourist. I don't meet many people from Wyoming, so there aren't that many of us. We're unique.
Wendy Corr:
We are a special club here, being from Wyoming, and that's one of the things, though, that I think makes your career so interesting and so unique is that you have done all of these things, and you are from Wyoming.
You grew up in Casper, and that is that must be where you got bit by the storytelling bug, because there were some things that happened in your childhood, things that happened right down the road from you that that instilled a sense
Ron Franscell:
Right next door.
Wendy Corr:
That instilled a sense of, I need to tell this story. Tell us about the incident that happened right next door. We just talked about it, honestly, folks - in Cowboy State Daily just a few weeks ago, we did a story about an infamous bridge from which a terrible, terrible tragedy happened. And Ron, you chronicled this tragedy in one of your books. It's called The Darkest Night. Tell us about this incident and how it affected you and how it inspired you.
Ron Franscell:
Well, looking at my calendar here this week, 51 years ago, my two next door neighbors, friends, two young girls, 11 and 18. I was 16 at the time, they were part of our neighborhood family. You know, they were in every sandlot game, or every time you dig a fort or riding your bikes to the park or whatever. This week, 51 years ago, they were sent by their mother to a local grocery store for some provisions for dinner and there they were abducted by two local creeps.
Those guys took them out and terrorized them through the night. Eventually ended up at the Fremont Canyon Bridge, which is in that very deep, dark canyon between Alcova and Pathfinder. There, they terrorized them a little bit more, and very quickly, they took the youngest of them, Amy Burridge, out to the bridge, and threw her off 12 stories to the river below. She was killed.
They turned to the rape of her older sister. They did their business with her, and then they took her out to the bridge and threw her off. Luckily or unluckily, I'm not really sure. I haven't decided, and it's been 20 years, 20 years of me really giving this some thought, but for the moment, luckily, she hit the side of the wall of the canyon, and with it bounced her into deeper water. It broke nearly every major bone in her body.
But she survived, and she survived in a way that she was dragged herself out of that canyon, and anybody who's been there, it's, it's difficult to believe she's found by fishermen the next day, and she's able to identify these two guys. They ultimately are convicted and sentenced to die.
But it's the mid 1970s and the United States is wrestling with the idea of capital punishment. In fact, the Supreme Court has declared it unconstitutional, and it sent states back to rewrite their laws. Wyoming did that, and then these two guys, Ron Canady and Jerry Jenkins, were convicted, sentenced to die.
But in their appeal, the Wyoming Supreme Court decided that Wyoming had rewritten its death laws wrong, and so they were commuted to life in prison. There was no such thing as life without parole at that time, and so they were immediately available or eligible for parole, which the surviving sister, Becky Thompson, it literally scared the hell out of her.
There was a petition drive to keep them in prison, but she was still convinced that they were going to get out and come after her to finish the job. And so that's the crime that happens, and a very heartbreaking twist that comes as a result of that is described in the book.
But in a larger sense, I had decided to write the book literally on the airplane from the Middle East, where I was covering the beginnings of the Afghan War back to the United States, and I saw the Fremont Canyon crime as kind of a mini-91.
Because the town we went to sleep in the night before or the night of this crime was one thing. It was idyllic. We could run around. We could play nobody, nobody cared. The kids were out after dark. We woke up the next day in a town that was very different, and I would argue that Casper has never changed. So it changed the fabric of the community.
Small towns have long memories. This past couple weeks, the issue of whether there should be bungee jumping allowed from that bridge just scraped open some raw wounds, 51 years later. The purveyor of the bungee jumping, and I had a brief conversation, and he says, this is, you know, isn't 50 years long enough to get past it?
I think small towns have long memories. I think we can't really put a deadline on a memory. It dies when it dies. In this case, it isn't dead. And partly because that crime became a kind of a cautionary tale. People my age would have kids or grandkids, and they would say, you know, can you go to the store and give me something and then, then add, be careful, because when I was a kid, this thing happened.
And so it became part of the community’s, I won't say mythology, but a part of its fabric.
And I was, I don't know, unbelievably lucky that I grew up to become a journalist, and I grew up next door to these two girls, and was able to tell their story. The power is not in my beautiful prose or my outstanding research, the power is in the horror that they suffered - and to a degree, survived Becky, in Becky's case, and I'm just lucky that I got to tell the story.
Wendy Corr:
And that's what you do, though. That's the niche that you have found yourself in, is you tell these stories. I've been - I can't believe it's taken me this long to discover your books, because, like I say, I'm a thriller and mystery True Crime junkie.
So when I first, actually, when I first heard about your story, your books, Ron, it was the late Jim Angell who was our editor here at Cowboy State Daily, and he said, You've got to read this book called ‘Alice and Gerald,’ because it's about these, this crazy these people who killed probably five people and got away with it for a while, and these ever after, if you can live happily ever after, exactly when you've got that kind of background.
But that, again, is a crime that happened in Wyoming. And so I have to ask, Ron, when did you decide that you were going to tell these stories? Because obviously you went, you left Casper. You became a journalist. You worked for the Denver Post. It was the Denver Post that sent you over to the Middle East after 911 At what point did you say, ‘I have to be a storyteller? This is what I'm called to do.’
Ron Franscell:
Well, it was before that. I mean, I had as a journalist, as a newspaperman, that was a challenge I wanted. I had been a reader all my life, and I guess before I had written a book, I thought, Oh, this will be easy. I'm a storyteller. All I have to do is write a little bit longer, shift gears, a little bit.
I couldn't have been more wrong and more disappointed, but I wrote my very first book while I was the editor of the paper in Gillette and, and it was a literary novel. It was also set in Wyoming and nobody gave it a chance of anything. And frankly, neither did I.
I had a goal of writing a book, not publishing a book, but writing a book. And I figured this manuscript would go in my desk drawer and my kids would someday find it and say, ‘Oh, my dad wrote this.’ But once written, I decided, why not try to get it published - and that's a whole story. That's a whole other podcast all on itself.
But it was published, and it was named by the San Francisco Chronicle as among the 100 best novels of the 20th century West.
Wendy Corr:
Okay, so that's a big deal.
Ron Franscell:
It was a big deal. And nobody is more surprised than I am that, that it got there. But it's a beautiful little book. It forms the foundation of this. But I had done it, and I had written the book, so naturally I thought, well, can we do that again?
And I wrote another little book called ‘The Deadline,’ which was a mystery, followed by a sequel called ‘The Obituary,’ also set in a small town in Wyoming. And I to a certain degree, I might have left it there.
But then comes 9/11. I was working at the Denver Post, and I was sent overseas to cover what would become the beginning of the terror war. And it was on my way back that I saw photographs that I had never seen before.
We'd left so quickly after 9/11, literally four days, I think, the soonest they had commercial air traffic in the air again, we didn't see (we being the photographer, and I) didn't see a lot of American media. It was some time later, coming back in a French news magazine, that I saw pictures of people falling from the World Trade Center, and in one of them, two people were holding hands, going down.
Immediately, my mind snapped back to the story of Amy and Becky. Even though they didn't, they didn't hold hands. They went all over that bridge at different times - but in my mind, they went down together. And that at that moment, I decided maybe I want to write about this.
I didn't see it as a true crime per se. I saw it as kind of a reflection on my town, on my community, and how it was changed by this one terrible event. I can't deny that it ends up being a true story about a crime, so I'm not going to quibble about that, but it was a result of my experience overseas and coming home that caused me to then leap into that and write that book, and it has become really kind of the hallmark of my career so far as a New York Times bestseller and all of that.
So I'm proud of it, I've obviously moved on. That was book number four. So there have been 15 more in the interim, some of them set in Wyoming. Some of them are about Wyoming, crimes like Alice and Gerald. I keep coming back to Wyoming because it's such, first of all, to the rest of the world outside of the borders of Wyoming, Wyoming is kind of a foreign country.
Wendy Corr:
It is. It's a mystery to people.
Ron Franscell:
So, you're already working in something that's not terribly familiar to the people who are going to be reading about it, so that's part of it. Being from Wyoming, being a Western author, the landscape always plays a role. I don't care what you're writing, a mystery, a true crime, a romance. Doesn't matter. The landscape always plays a role in true crime.
In the true crimes I've been doing that are set in Wyoming, Wyoming sort of aids and abets the landscape, aids and abets the bad guys by hiding their behavior. You know there are people like Dale Eaton who can be out in the middle of nowhere and doing all the things he did, but also helping them hide their bodies.
Who hasn't driven across almost any long stretch of highway in Wyoming and looked out there and said, If I ever wanted to lose something, this is where I'd come. I'd walk for four hours out in that direction and drop it and come back and nobody would ever see it. There are places that, there are places in Wyoming where no human foot has ever set down.
Wendy Corr:
Which is, like you say, just part of it becomes a character in the books. I'm excited to get to read - I started on ‘The Deadline,’ which you mentioned, and then its sequel, ‘The Obituary.’ And I have to ask, where is - in your mind, where is Winchester, Wyoming in those books? Where do you see it as? What town is it based off of? Or towns?
Ron Franscell:
Those early books, Buffalo plays a very inspirational role for me, because to me, back then and now, it's this consummate small town, beautiful, quiet, with all the little quirks and peccadilloes that small towns have.
And I know so many of the newspaper people and have sat around and listened to former publisher Jim Hicks’ stories that they fit right in. But I would say northeastern Wyoming in general, and it's kind of amalgam of Buffalo, Sheridan, maybe Gillette.
On the cover of - I don't have one right here at hand, or I could show it, but on the cover of the first edition of Angel Fire has a water tower because the water tower plays a metaphoric role in the story. The water tower is actually Midwest’s water tower. An artist turned it into a different - I took the words off of it.
But there are mentions in the book of little landmarks all throughout Wyoming, but Northeastern Wyoming in general, for those few their first few books, I think Northeastern Wyoming plays the most inspirational role.
Wendy Corr:
I think that's great. Now, you obviously have gone far beyond the borders of Wyoming. I was reading the book that you co-authored with Dr Vincent DeMaio, which is ‘The Morgue.’ Again, as a true crime aficionado, I really appreciated that, especially since the very first story in it is breaking down a very high profile crime that happened not in Wyoming. It was the the killing of Trayvon Martin, and that just split the country in so many ways.
But the way that it was broken down, and it's, it's in Dr. DeMaio’s voice. But tell us how you collaborate with something like that, but how satisfying it is to bring truth to life and cut out all the rhetoric? Tell us about that.
Ron Franscell:
That book arose from the fact that I was just watching the Trayvon Martin trial, and I watched it from gavel to gavel. The turning point of that case was Dr Vincent DeMaio getting on the stand and explaining a critical fact.
The question was, at the moment a shot was fired, who was being the aggressor and who was being attacked? That was a critical question, using just the most brilliant scientific data and logic. He explained that in fact, George Zimmerman, who shot the young teenager, Trayvon Martin, was being attacked at the time, and he could show how we know that.
And it was mind bending, and the jury, the jury heard it and and on that question, the whole trial turned. It was just logic and science. Obviously George Zimmerman was acquitted. Caused a problem that had split the country. So there were legal issues, there were also social issues involved.
I reached out to Dr DeMaio and proposed the idea of doing a book with him, not just about Trayvon Martin, but about his career, because he was one of the lions of Forensic Medicine. He and Michael Baden, Henry Lee, people like that who occupied the top rung.
He though isn't, isn't as affectionate about TV coverage and that sort of thing. So there was a little bit of a sales job going on. In the end, we decided we were going to create this book that was going to look at a dozen of his most fascinating cases.
Trayvon Martin was one, partly because of the social issues involved, but as we went through and we discovered he had done a death investigation at the request of the biographers of Vincent van Gogh, who believed that there was reason, there was evidence he didn't commit suicide, that he was probably accidentally shot by somebody else.
And so they gave all their paperwork, everything they had, to Dr DeMaio, who came to the conclusion that indeed, Van Gogh had been shot by somebody else. He did not commit suicide.
Half the world, certainly the art community, had a stake in the romantic death of Vincent van Gogh. And they wanted to believe it. They wanted artists to believe it's okay. You might not be recognized during life, but you might be recognized as one of the greats in death. So they came unglued. They had their narrative that they wanted, and then, then there was the other side.
So to me, those were bookends, the Trayvon Martin case and the Vincent van Gogh case form chapter one and chapter 12, the last chapter of the book, because they showed the forensic examiner as the guy who's saying, Look, I'm just looking at the science. I'm just looking at what we know for a fact and I'm excluding the feelings. So I thought those two things were fascinating.
I will say this too, there is a Wyoming case in ‘The Morgue,’ and it was Dr DeMaio’s only visit ever to Wyoming. But it's a Wheatland case back in, I think, the 90s, so it was a murder case. A man was convicted. Dr DeMaio showed he didn't do it. It's fascinating, and spending time with him was really one of the high points.
He's passed now a couple years ago, but it was also maddening, because even after we were done, he didn't see - when I say fascinating case, he thinks about the forensics. He didn't think about examining JFK autopsies. He didn't think about actor Bob Crane. He did the examination of Princess Diana's driver. He had done all of these. Phil Spector, the music producer.
He had done all these fascinating high profile cases, but he didn't see them as fascinating - they were just something he did. The fascinating ones were the ones that had forensic puzzles. So after we were done with the book and it was taking off, and we would visit, and he would say, Oh, that reminds me of when I did, you know the Abraham Lincoln autopsy or something, you know, (not that, of course), but I would say, you never mentioned that. And he kind of shrugged, you know.
But he had, wow, what a career, 5000 autopsies in his life. His father was the chief medical examiner of New York City, the first, so he grew up with this, and he's a fascinating was a fascinating guy, and his story is fascinating.
Wendy Corr:
And you get to tell that story. But here's what I find really, really interesting, too, about your stories. It's not just the subjects, but it's your narrative. It's the fact that, like - there's a wonderful book that I read, which is called ‘Delivered From Evil,’ and it is the survivors of these crimes.
But you don't just tell the story of the survivors. You talk about what the perpetrator was doing that morning and the conversations they were having with their loved ones, and you talked about, you basically take us into the lives of these people, both the person who committed the crime and the victims of the crime.
You take us into their lives, and then you bring them together in that crucial spot, in that spot where their lives cross. And that's one of the things that I find fascinating, because again, you're filling in the blanks. You're telling the story. You're not just giving the facts. You're telling us the story about this.
Where do you get that style from? Where does it come from, in you that says, I need to do it this way, because this is, this is what feels good.
Ron Franscell:
It's all about the story. In wanting to be a writer, I want to tell stories. And stories have beginnings, middles and ends. They have characters that we are rooting for, we have characters that we're rooting against. They're very complicated things, but those elements are there.
Capote realized that with ‘In Cold Blood,’ the first narrative nonfiction that we can approach, like a newspaperman would approach us and say, ‘Here's fact, 123,’ and so on, and then we get to the end, and that's it.
Or we can breathe life into it without breathing fiction into it. We can tell a story and and and put, put the reader inside a real event, and let them believe that this is happening, or at least to experience it. It did happen. I think that my best at that really started with ‘The Darkest Night’ and ended here just a couple years ago, with ‘Shadow Man.’
Which is the story of a Montana case where somebody was killing people in Montana in the night, early 1970s. It frustrated the agent so much that he asked for the help of headquarters back in Quantico, and two guys who were noodling around with the idea of something they called criminal profiling, thought, maybe this is the first time we can use it. Maybe let's try. And so that case in Montana became the the reason that the FBI did this first ever criminal profile.
But I have to tell - I can tell that story, I just did, but I have to tell that story through the feelings of the mother who lost the seven year old daughter, or the young deputy who's on the scene the moment the morning she goes missing.
I have to do a lot of research to capture these people and their feelings and tell that story so that it reads like we expect a novel to read. And there are cliffhangers, there dialogue, there's, there these descriptive elements.
True Crime itself as a genre breaks down into two different sub genres. One is what I call the supermarket genre, where, where it's just the facts, ma'am and it's, it's just generally somebody belching out all the things from the trial and from the police reports and maybe a few interviews.
The more rare sub genre is the literary genre like Capote, like James L Roy, like…
Wendy Corr:
Like Ron Franscell.
Ron Franscell:
I want to be in that camp because I want to tell a more literary story with a little more poetic language. There's the reader who wants no poetry, they want none of that complexity. They just want the facts. What I'm doing is I'm giving you the facts, but I'm putting it in the form of a story and leading you through this, and bringing you up and down in the way that the real story did.
I think that's important, and I admire the writers who do that.
Wendy Corr:
Well, I think that it's phenomenal that you've brought us 19 books in your voice that have told these stories, whether they are fiction stories, whether they are the things that really happened and really affected communities in Wyoming and around the world and around the country.
And so we're so grateful that we can say, yeah, he started with us. He's our Wyoming guy, he's our Casper guy. And so we're grateful to that, even though, even though you're not here anymore. You're in New Mexico, right?
Ron Franscell:
Northern New Mexico.
Wendy Corr:
It sounds like the landscape’s, a little bit like home here, I would guess.
Ron Franscell:
Well, a little drier, actually a little hotter, but you still have room to spread out, and you have room to stretch, and we are not so far from people that we feel isolated, but we're far enough from people that we feel like we can stretch. And that was something we were looking for. We wanted to avoid what happens in Wyoming every you know, November, December, January, February, March.
Wendy Corr:
That's very wise. Yeah. So you're getting the best of all worlds there, yeah, understood. Well, I want to say, I just want to ask, because we're about out of time here, but I know that you are sought out as a television for television commentary, CNN, NPR, Fox - I mean, you have been on all of these, and a guest on all of these. At what point does somebody say, ‘This is a Ron Franscell kind of story. We want his input on that.’ When do you get called for those?
Ron Franscell:
Anytime we get the kind of complex story where somebody wants a peek inside the mind of the perpetrator, primarily, or maybe maybe a survivor. Because I think, just as you pointed out, I try to dive deep into those things.
Consequently, something will happen, and of course, ‘Delivered from Evil' is about 10 ordinary people who survive mass killers of some kind, mostly mass shootings. So that tends to be when CNN calls or Fox or somebody that called to ‘Hey, there's been a mass shooting, there's been a school shooting,’ or ‘talk to us about what was happening.’ What I have learned over time in those cases is that the media and the public in general are wanting answers before we have them, and so they look to people like me to make it at least an educated guess.
My message has always been, I don't know, and we won't know, probably for a long time. I use Columbine as an example, where the narrative grew up immediately that these were bullied guys who finally lashed out against their bullies. It was some time later that it was discovered that, no, these were the bullies, and they were taking the ultimate violence out on their victims.
So they're in ‘Delivered from Evil.’ There are a lot of those cases where the initial belief is one thing, but it's given a little time and a little chance to explore the mind of the killer, we find out as something else completely.
Wendy Corr:
Well, I think it's fascinating what you're doing, and we are grateful that you are offering this, these insights and these narratives to us. And so really quickly, what's next for you, Ron? I mean, you've, you've finished book number 19. When do we get book number 20?
Ron Franscell:
Well, book number 19 was a product of COVID. I have to go out and do the research that true crime requires. So I wrote a mystery called ‘Deaf Row,’ and right now the possibility of a sequel to that, so a fiction based on those same characters which everybody seems to love.
And we're also toying with a couple of screenplays that one of my books - a memoir called ‘Sour Toe Cocktail Club,’ which has nothing to do with crime, but is about the search for a cocktail that contains a mummified human toe - is is actually in development right now as an indie film, and so there are a lot of pots on the on the stove.
We'll see where any of them go. But as far as my writing, maybe a sequel to ‘Deaf Row.’
Wendy Corr:
I have ‘Deaf Row’ in my Kindle basket right next. That's happening next. I've read the narrative. I'm like, Oh my gosh, these characters look phenomenal, and I can't wait to see what they're going to come up with.
Ron, this has been just a fantastic conversation, and we are so glad to have you - like I say, as a Wyoming guy, and for us to be able to claim you and say thank you for your gifts. Thank you for telling your stories and for enriching all of us. We are grateful.
Ron Franscell:
Well, thank you, Wyoming, for making it possible. I credit Wyoming, its people, its culture, for a lot of what underpins how I approach my work.
Wendy Corr:
Well, it's great, and we're just glad you're keeping it coming. So this is great. We look forward to more Ron Franscell books.
Folks, thank you for tuning in to The Roundup today. This has been just a fascinating conversation for me. I've had a lot of fun, and I hope you have too.
If you have ideas for somebody that we need to talk to, that we need to have on The Roundup, a story that needs to be told, please let us know! We are so glad to reach out to those people and see if we can have them be the next conversation on The Roundup.
We also want to, once again, make sure that you know about the ‘Business from the Basement podcast.’ If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a business person, check out the Wyoming Business Alliance's really informative and educational and useful podcas,t and that information.
But thanks for tuning in, folks. Thank you, Ron, for being with us. Have a fantastic week.
