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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening, This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, The most shocking Killers in true crime History and the authors that have written about them. Casper, Wyoming, nineteen seventy three. Eleven year old Amy Bridge rides with her eighteen year old sister Becky to the grocery store. When they finished their shopping, Becky's car gets a flat tire. Two men politely offer them a hand, but there were
anything but good Samaritans. The girls would suffer unspeakable crimes at the hands of these men before being thrown from a bridge into the North Platte River. One miraculously survived, the other did not. Author and journalist Ron Francell, who lived in Casper at the time of the crime and was a friend to Amy and Becky, cannot forget Wyoming's
most shocking story of abduction, rape, and murder. The two men who violated her and Amy were sentenced to life in prison, but the demons of her past kept haunting beck Becky until she met her fate years later at the same bridge where she had lost her sister. The book we're featuring this evening is The Darkest Night with my special guest, journalist and author, Ron Francell. Welcome back to the program, Ron Francell, and thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Oh Dan, you know I always loved being on your show.
Well, the feeling is mutual, Ron, and I'm sure the audience bearing out by the amount of people who listen to the programs, you're one of the show's favorites. Bar Nunn. Now let's start. This is a personal story for you, obviously we've alluded to that. Tell us a little bit about Casper, Wyoming set the stage for us. What was it like growing up in Casper, Wyoming for you? And in that you can tell us what your relationship specifically
was to Amy. And Becky and tell us a little bit about what Casper, Wyoming was like in nineteen seventy three when this story began.
Well, Casper was like many small high planes towns. It was sometimes barely clinging to the landscape in swept town, largely built on hard work in the oil fields and surrounding mines and cattle. It was just a hard working town and the people who lived there were hardworking people. But it was a small town and so we enjoyed this sort of idyllic existence. Well, you know, so many of your listeners will, you know, envision those places maybe like they've grown up, where you could ride your bike
into the evening. You know, all the neighborhood kids would be out at night in the summers, and parents weren't much worried about what they were doing and what might happen to them. It was a fairly it felt innocent. No place is truly innocent, but for those of us who were growing up at that time, there there was there was no evil, there was there was no threat, There was no danger, and I think in retrospect our
parents had grown complacent about that. So this was at least from the perspective of us kids an innocent place. We grew up in a neighborhood that was full of kids, and and we had spent a lot of years together growing up, and we had become a little more than friends, and maybe a little less than brothers and sisters, but in that kind of interesting relationship between and So next door were these this family that had had these girls.
Eleven year old Amy, who was a tomboy and joined in all the ballgames and and really conducted herself in every way like one of the boys, and her older sister, Becky, who was the neighborhood beauty. And as we're growing up, we are seeing her blossom, and as we're getting to know our own maturity, I guess we're seeing her blossom and become this young woman. So in nineteen seventy three, when I'm sixteen, when Amy's eleven and Becky is eighteen, this horrible thing happens.
Right now, tell us a little bit about Amy and Becky and their family, the Beerage family. Amy and Becky are not birth sisters, so they're stepsisters. So tell us a little bit about the family dynamic and what type of family up next door.
Again, a hard working family, Their stepfather was a was an oil field worker. Mom was common at the time, stay at home mom. They were in some ways a blended family. Amy and Becky were half sisters, and uh did. But but they we didn't see that. You know, we're kids. We don't see that. We're not thinking about that. And it's in in in some ways it's irrelevant because they considered themselves sisters in much the same way that all of us in that neighborhood kind of considered ourselves related
in some way. So it was a family that, like like many, you know, had its ups and downs, but but it was I think a basically good family.
Right And uh no, these two you say, was the stepfather worked in the oil rigs? Was there was there any trauma in these young girls' lives up to that point you talk about that in nineteen seventy three in this small town. You didn't know evil from It was just a concept in a movie to you. But what was Amy and Becky's life? Like what you say, it was typical, But was there any trauma in their life?
Had they what was their disposition Amy and Becky? What type of personalities were they and had they received had they had they encountered any sort of trauma in their life up to that point.
Not that I know of, and nothing that in my research of the story that I could really see. I mean, their mother had been married a couple of times, and so they had that kind of unbalanced you know, working against them, But there was nothing that certainly showed itself to the rest of the world. Amy was absolutely the most vibrant little little girl in you can imagine. In fact, we didn't even see her as a girl. She was just part of the ball team. She was absolutely the
most active and vibrant, dynamic little girl that you could imagine. Becky, on the other hand, was again beautiful with long dark hair and a woman really by the time the crime happens in nineteen seventy three. But there was no you know, we again, in much the same way we viewed the world through our rose colored glasses, we probably viewed each
other through our rose colored glasses. But nothing that, nothing that really turned up in my later research suggested that they had a life that was you know, traumatic in any way.
Right now, take us to the faithful Day in nineteen seventy three, where they met Ronald Leroy Kennedy and Jerry Lee Jenkins. Tell us what prompted Amy and Becky to be out at night, and tell us approximately what time did they venture off on their journey because of their mother wanted them to do something. Tell us what exactly what this chore was and what actually happened.
Take you back a little bit to that idyllic town and remember that because it plays a role here. It's around nine o'clock at night when mom needs something from the grocery store. There's a neighborhood market, oh maybe a mile away, and so she asks Becky to go to the market and pick up these items for her. Becky takes her little sister Amy down to the store. They pull up at this little market and there's not a big supermarket now, it's really just kind of a neighborhood market,
a small, small store. They pull into the parking lot and get out of the car and go into the store. Unknown to them, these two, these two criminals, Jenkins and Kennedy, were in their own car, just pulling into the lot. And remember I said, Becky's this beautiful young woman. They see her and immediately fixate on her, and Kennedy in particular decides he wants to meet her. Jakos as well. Listen, just just go up and talk to her, and Kenny says, no,
I've got a better idea. So, while the girls are in the store, they pull up next to Becky's car. Kennedy pulls out a pocket knife and flattens one of Becky's tires. Then they retreat across the parking lot and wait. When the girls come out, they get in the car and they start to drive off, and Becky realizes she has a flat tire. She stops and lo and behold here these two guys drive up and say, hey, can we help you? And that's where it begins.
Now the now they have a flat tire, and then these two people offer to help. What exactly did they say in terms of what was the help that they were going to offer?
What it ends, well, they were at first they made a big show out of trying to change the tire, but the story becomes that they've lug wrench doesn't work, so they say we will we will give you a ride home and Becky. Becky's a little iffy about this, but she agrees and Amy. Then she she tells Amy to go call their mom and tell the mom don't worry. We had a flat tire, but a couple of nice fellows are going to bring us home. And and she does that. She goes to a payphone and calls mom
and tells her that. When she returns, Kennedy's pulls out his knife and he forces them into the car, into his and Jenkins car, and they begin motoring around town, you know, in a very meandering way, beating the girls in frighting them and telling them just horrific stories about what's going to happen to them and why, and it's a it's a horror. They are terrorized through the night. And sometime after midnight they these two guys take them far far away from the city, out out into the
prairie to to of a canyon. And over this canyon is a is a bridge twelve stories above the North Platte River, a very very narrow, almost sheer canyon. And uh, almost as soon as they arrive, Kennedy takes little Amy out into the darkness and and when he returns, she's not with him. He's thrown her off the bridge.
What does what does Becky do? What does Becky believe that has happened? There was a ruse there that you know, it's a clumsy one, but they are telling these girls something. So what does at that moment, what does Becky believe has happened with Amy?
They've been telling the girls that they had a friend who was killed or injured by a car that matched the girls car's description, and that they had to take the girls out to meet the leader of a motorcycle gang who would decide their fate. And Kennedy's story was that Amy would be the first one to go to meet the man. And you know, it's kind of a haunting turn of phrase, but in fact, when he comes back to the car without Amy, he said as she
ran away. So he and Jenkins then turned to the rape of Becky and they when they've both taken their turn with her, they take her out to the bridge and on this very incredibly dark night, moonless night, and they throw her off the bridge too.
Wow, Now what happens to Becky after she has thrown off this bridge?
Imagine if you can a night so black that you can't see your hand in front of your face. And I know this because I spent a very dark night that matched the sky and weather conditions underneath that bridge and it was an unnerved, unnerving evening night, I believe me, and it seemed endless and I've covered wars.
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Every else I've I've covered hurricanes from inside, but without a doubt, that was the most unsettling night of my life.
Interesting.
Becky caroms off the the site of the canyon wall twelve stories now. She hits about a third of the way down off a rock ledge and it bounces into deeper water. When she hits that ledge, she breaks her pelvis in five places. She she breaks some ribs. She she has numerous other injuries. She's been beaten by these guys. She's been raped by them. She's wearing only a very thin blouse and otherwise naked on a thirty two degree night,
and she plunges into a river in utter darkness. She's able to dog paddle her way to the shore and drag herself across these sharp rocks out of the water, and she finds a little place down there among the brush and the rocks and the rats to hide herself because she believes these guys are still up there. She believes they know she's lived through this horrific experience and that they are going to try to come and get her.
She's also beginning to believe that maybe this is what happened to her sister too, and her sister is down there someplace and very likely dead. So you can imagine what's going through her mind as she hides down there in this utter blackness, hoping that they aren't going to come down after her, and freezing because it's it's right at the freezing mark in temperature. It The night that
I spent down there was very similar. It was the same temperature, the same moonless night, and yet I was wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and I was freezing. Today, you can imagine this half naked woman who's been in the water and who's been raped, and who's who's in shock because of her injuries. This this just it makes it makes me shiver just to think of it.
Right, Yeah, you know, you spent an incredible amount of time describing that, and it really does get an investment from the reader in her terror. And like you say, she survived this, but now she wants to go to sleep, She wants some relief. From all of this stress and pain and everything. But she says to herself, no, I can't go to sleep. She thinks that she hears these guys' voices still, and then she says, and she says to herself in your book that she just wants to
wait till the dawn. And then you talk about and this is just sort of indicative of what happens in this story anyway, a false dawn. Explain what a false done is. You just talked about the darkest type of night. What is this false dawn?
There are there is a period during every year when a very short period, as a matter of fact, when the sky conditions are such that in places away from city lights, like this canyon out in the middle of nowhere, where around three two thirty three o'clock in the morning, the sky begins to lighten because the atmosphere is reflecting light from the Milky Way. And again it only happens right at in this autumnal period, and it can only
be seen in this kind of utter darkness. Had there been a moon that night, it wouldn't have been as accentuated as it was. But again, this is a night when there's no moon, and it is as black as you can imagine. So Becky who has determined that when dawn comes, she will try to get out of there somehow. She doesn't know how impossible that is. She can't see anything, She didn't see anything. She's not familiar with this area. She doesn't know exactly how daunting an escape from this
canyon really is going to be. But she's determined that when dawn comes she will try to get out. Well, here, she begins to see this light and she's convinced that down is coming. She begins to feel that relief, but in fact it's just this false don and she's hours away from reel Don. And I found that to be heartbreaking because because of all the horrors that had been visited on her, because of the betrayal of her, because of her her being totally alone in this in this darkness,
that seemed to be the ultimate last betrayal. As we learn in the book it isn't. But at that moment, I think that that that that that brief that's not even brief. It's for a couple of hours, it looks like dawn is coming, and you can imagine the hope in her heart that ultimately is dashed because she's she's literally six hours from dawn when she thinks it's at hand right now.
The next morning, Carl and Dorothy Stratser were going to go They got up early, and they were going to go fishing. And tell us what happened in terms of Becky and the Strassers, Well.
This elderly couple on their day off, decide they're going to go out to the lake fishing, and so they get up early. They want to be at the lakeside as early as possible. And as they cross this bridge, which is really thirty five thirty six miles from the nearest town, they notice this strange, almost otherworldly site at the end of the bridge. It looks like a girl and she's wearing this bright pink blouse but otherwise looks naked. And as they pull up they see it is exactly
that it's Becky. Becky has dragged herself out of this canyon. Now, the photos in the book give some idea of what an accomplishment this was. It is a sheer canyon. Becky cannot walk, she can't use her in any way, she's
broken her pelvis. She has dragged herself up literally with her back against the canyon wall, pushing herself inch by inch with her hands and occasionally sliding back down and having to start all over again, but almost It takes her about two hours to get you know, up this one hundred and thirty hundred and forty foot steep wa wash of near the bridge and come out on the top. She is cut by the stones. She's still bloody from
the experience of the night before. And this this couple arrives like angels, and they find her and they wrap her up, and they take her to the nearest settlement died, the nearest gas station, and they call the sh sheriff, and the sheriff comes and Becky is taken to the hospital. And it's at the hospital that she begins to describe her assailants. Cops. This is a small town, remember, yeah. They they know exactly who she's talking about from her description.
Jenkins is this sort of short, fat, greasy looking guy with glasses, his good buddy and you know, partner in crime. Literally. Ron Kennedy is a tall, skinny, sort of bug eyed, crazy looking guy. The description probably had barely gotten out of her mouth before the cops knew exactly who she was talking about. So they went out and they found
Kennedy and Jenkins. Kennedy is arrested literally at high noon on the main street in front of the courthouse by by a detective who draws his gun and pulls him out of his car steps away from the courthouse. So there's there's a lot of dramatic element to this too, that again, if I made it up, you wouldn't believe it. I present this as a fiction, it would be difficult to believe.
Now, they first picked up Ronald Kennedy, and then they and they soon after picked up Jerry Jenkins, and and they wasn't it that Jenkins had the white Impala the car, The car itself tell us a little bit about the arrest of Jerry Jenkins and and the seizing of that vehicle.
Jenkins actually is arrested while walking. They see him walk walking out in sort of the down part of town, and he's arrested there and taken in. Kennedy is driving his own pickup truck which is stopped there on the street, and he's arrested. They later, of course get the car that was involved, and there are bits of evidence in there that come into play during the trial. But Jenkins. Jenkins is questioned and he gives a story that is startlingly similar to the story that Becky tells in her
hospital bed. Now we can assume they didn't collude, We can assume that they didn't come up and fabricate a story together. So we know that the story they tell is probably pretty close to what happened, because they're both telling it. Kennedy, on the other hand, is taken in for interrogation and and one of the detectives confronts him.
Kennedy's not really sure why he's there, yea, and a detective kind of skirts around the issue and says, you know, well this girl that you know, where were you and Jenkins last night? And and you know were you with a girl? Did you did? Were you out at the canyon?
And Kennedy's response is weird. He says, but you know, you know, you don't have any evidence, and then the cop says, well, I'm going to tell you, mister, son of a bitch, one of them lived, And at that moment, Kennedy shuts up and he does not talk about this case to his lawyer, to the police, to anybody except maybe some cell mates until I approach him thirty years later, or an interview.
Right now, What what happens in the interview with Jerry Lee Jenkins with police interrogating him. What's what's the difference there?
Well, Jenkins, you have to understand these two guys, they are very similar to the culprits and the in cold blood murders of Hickock and Smith. They Jenkins is the follower who needs a leader. Kennedy is the leader who needs a follower. And and when you they they spent that day before the crime drinking and doing drugs. When you introduce the chemicals with these two personalities, you get
a third, completely different personality. And it's that third personality in the body of these two guys that that really commits that crime. It seems clear looking back at these guys that neither one of them on his own would do such a thing. I see together and then with the with the alcohol, it became something else entirely. And so Jenkins, when he's arrested, sort of immediately rolls over.
He immediately spills the beans and and he ultimately tells a fairly complete story about what happened, and as I said, kind of matches Becky's account on all the key elements and a few of the details, so he he is probably telling the truth, of course. And and what he does is he talks about, you know, Kennedy being the gas in the engine of this whole crime. And and that's born out.
Sure. Now we talked about this right in the very beginning of this the impact of this story, the particulars of this because it's a small town, because of the heinous nature of this crime, it's disgusting. What is what are the newspaper reaction, what's the town's reaction? What is you and your your chum's reaction? How does this impact this Casper Wyoming, this small, peaceful, innocent town. What happens as a result when the reports come out.
Well, you can imagine the shock of it. One of the compelling reasons I wrote this book was because I had well, let me let me just say, I'd never really thought about writing this story. It was after nine to eleven. I was coming back from the Least, where I'd been sent for in the in the first several months after nine to eleven, to do some reporting for
the Denver Post. And it was on a return trip that that I saw in a French news magazine a picture of two people who had leapt from the World Trade centers holding hands, and in my mind, I began to think of Becky and Amy. Now, of course they hadn't been thrown from the bridge together, and they couldn't have been holding hands, but that image caused this weird
flashback for me. That that without minimizing, because you can't minimize what happened on nine to eleven, I had already had a kind of nine to eleven in my life. I had, I had had a moment when when that the night before the world was one way and the next day it was comple letely different, right, and and and that's that was the effect. It had, not just on the kids who surrounded Amy and Becky and the
people who knew them, but the town itself. The media reaction was, as you might imagine, you know, swift and shocked. The town began to talk about lynchings. This is the West, the wild after all. There was there was a horror, there was a disgust. There was this sudden awakening to our naivete and our complacence, not not us kids, but
but those parents. It's also nineteen seventy three, and we didn't have the same We didn't have the same infrastructure in place, emotional infrastructure or support infrastructure that we have now. Parents believed that children were best protected from this kind of thing. There certainly weren't grief counselors visiting schools right there. Certainly weren't even victims services that could help Becky deal with with all the horrors that she had that she
had just endured. Children were kept away from the funerals, from from Amy's funeral. It was purposely planned at a time when kids would be in school and it could kind of be whitewashed.
Uh.
There were no Teddy Bear memorials. Nobody came and established scholarship funds. It was it was better if the kids didn't know. And what that results in is a kind of incomplete grieving. And I found that not only in myself, but particularly in the kids who were closest to Amy and Becky. As close as I was, there were others who were closer, and I found evidence that their mourning had been so twisted and so frustrated that even as forty year old people, they were dealing with this in
a way that was very sad and very tragic. So that was part of the effect. I like to think we've evolved since then. Maybe we've evolved too far in the other direction, but that's better than hiding it, and that's better than not dealing with it. And we certainly saw that.
Well, just for our audience to know the sort of the magnitude of this case, this trial, and its effect on this community and in this state there was available to death penalty, and shortly after tell us what the prosecutor was looking for and how he was describing what they were going to do with these two men.
What's very interesting about this is that this happens in nineteen seventy three. What's important about that date. In nineteen seventy two, the United States Supreme Court had effectively outlawed the death penalty across the United States. They deemed that it was applied in an unconstitutional way, and everybody's death laws were thrown out. That sent all these states going back to the drawing board and trying to craft death laws that would meet the Supreme courts the strict standards.
Wyoming was one of those, and Kennedy and Jenkins were the first accused killers to be tried under Wyoming's new death laws. The prosecutor a small town prosecutor who really has a very very good case, and in Wyoming, which has been described as a small town with exceptionally long streets, there's hardly a way to change venue, which they did and escape the notoriety of the case. They couldn't. They did move the case to the capital city of Cheyenne.
The prosecutor put on a very good case. The defense put on a very good case at their own peril. One of the def was a publicly appointed and very well liked guy who'd never handled a criminal case before, and he had to suffer through a lot of the public backlash about defending a criminal that, of course, everybody
was convinced was guilty as sin. In the end, of course, Kennedy and Jenkins are convicted and their sentenced to die, and they go off to death row at the Wyoming prison and their cells are literally about six or seven paces from the gas chamber. They wake up every morning and they see the gas chamber, they see where they're
going to die. They are of course immediately on appeal, and in nineteen seventy seven, the Supreme Court rules that indeed, Wyoming had failed to satisfy the Supreme Court's wishes by crafting a constitutional death law, and once again Wyoming's death penalty was struck down and Kennedy and Jenkins were immediately
commuted to life. The problem is, in Wyoming at the time, there was no provision for life without parole, and so on that day, literally ten days before Gary Gilmore became the first inmate to be executed in Utah since that Supreme Court decision in seventy two, Kennedy and Jenkins went back to the general population at the Wyoming prison and were again eligible for parole. Must imagine what that does to Becky, who has now endured several years here of
dealing with her. She's convinced that now they'll get out and they'll come back for her, and that sets her even into into an even steeper tail spin.
Right, Yeah, tell us before we get into it, because we don't want to spend too much time with basically these ne'er do wells. These I mean, it doesn't matter so much to me about the background of some of these guys, but we'll get to that because interestingly, you have a lot of that information at the end of the book when you interview Kennedy and Jenkins has already passed away by that time. But let's let's get to what happens. Like we skipped over the trial a little bit,
but it's a foregone conclusion. These guys are as guilty as sin. Of course, Becky is strong enough to testify successfully against them, and there's over overwhelming information. What I thought was interesting just to to to secure. If you're the trial too, what the bit of information that really nailed them was one of Becky's contacts was found in
the backseat of the car. But tell us a little bit about the her testifying at trial, like she was not out of the woods there either, because she thought her life was in danger. And what we have is one of the strongest characters in your book, too, is a officer named Dave Devola. So tell us how he if he's one of the people that arrest one of the killers. Tell us his role right up to the very end. Tell us about Dave Devola.
Dave Deball was a was a homicide detective in this small town police force. At the moment this case breaks for them, of course, everybody is scrambled, and he's among several detectives who are out looking for these guys take a statement from Becky. He's there when Becky gives her statement. He's one of the guys who knows who these guys are. He knows them that well, he knows his town that well. He then goes out and he's the one who arrests Kennedy there at high noon in front of the courthouse.
In this process, Devalla kind of becomes a father figure, another father figure for for Becky, and he becomes very protective of her. He watches over her. He's there during the trial. She's she's afraid of these guys. Of course, she's she's afraid to look at them. You know, all the things that you can just imagine go through the mind of a young woman who's been raped her They intended to kill her, of course, they killed her little sister. This is a horror for her, and this is a
very difficult thing. But she becomes she is the star witness. And really there's even even Kennedy and Jenkins lawyers admit years later that they really only wanted to keep their clients from being executed. They even tried the insanity defense, which of course requires you to say, yeah, I did it, but I was crazy, right, So they had very little to go on, including two clients who didn't talk to them. Did marvelous work, they really did on behalf of these guys.
But Becky, Becky is a real trooper and she she hangs in there. She gives amazing testimony, very difficult testimony, talking about the rape, talking about all the beatings and and and then what she went through that night. So you know that the trial is kind of the pulling together of all those loose ends. But then you know that that that all happens, and the really, the the great bulk of the story is still to be told.
These guys and being convicted and being sent to death row, then being taken off of death row, and then Becky's you know, personal travails that erupt from all of this. That's really the second half of the story is really Becky's second life.
Now you talk about that she had some difficulties obviously processing what had happened to her. Her sister is killed, she has traumatized, raped at it at a young age, at a formative age. You do put in the book to that that she was she was a virgin before that. So this is a hell of an initiation into anything, let alone, you know, sexual relations. Now, tell us about how this strong woman, what she did to try to
rebuild her life. What what was some of the some of the things that happened in her life that seemed to make her life a little bit more normal. Tell us about her life after this trial.
Well, she she begins to. She she wants to put her life back together. She she wants to be whole again. She she wants to be the girl that she always thought she would be. She she goes out and gets work.
She she works a lot of jobs and and until she she at some point though, she finds that she she has a talent for talking to people and and selling people, and so she she begins to she gets she gets into the media scene of of Casper, and she's selling advertising for a local radio station, and occasionally she'd move over to different different places. But she she's
she's actually putting on a very good front. She's she's got this sunny sort of life, a lively kind of personality, but behind that is something very dark, and she's hiding it from everyone else. She's she's she's getting more and more dependent on drugs and alcohol. She has never truly developed an ability to to be emotionally intimate with anybody, but especially men, so so there's a certain promiscuity that begins.
She she's having a difficult time dealing with this and and is increasingly convinced that these guys are ultimately going to get out of prison and and then come after her. At one point, does the citizens of Wyoming take up a petition too uh for the parole board to to just not consider parolling these guys?
Uh?
And I there there were there are tens of thousands of signatures collected. At some point, Becky gets a copy of that, and she begins obsessively making copies of the copies of the copies and and hiding them away in her apartment. She at one point seeks psychological help, and she's at this particular moment she's a recovering drug addict. But the doctor gives her a truth serum drug and
a gas that she completely blacks out. But during this blackout period, she's got this sort of dreamy impression that this doctor is having sex with her, and she just never talks about it until she hears one of her friends in her women's group, talking about how this man had taken advantage of her during a counseling session. And then somebody else pipes up, and then somebody else, and it turns out that Becky very likely had been raped a second time by a man that she had hired
to help her. Again, we talk about the betrayal of this crime. We talk about the betrayal of the faults Dawn. We talk about a betrayal that Becky felt that God had abandoned her and her sister, and here now she's betrayed by somebody she wanted to trust. It's all part of this downward spiral in her life.
Now, she really liked working at this small radio station. But by this time she has a daughter, and maybe you can tell us the turn of events. She has a daughter, she meets a guy named Ross or Ross, and she thinks she's actually fallen in love. She gets a chance to work at a big radio station that has a health plan and so her daughter can be taken care of and a lot more money. But again, it seems that one glimpse of light just reveals itself
to be dark again. So tell us sort of up and down where it seems like, well, jeez, that would seem to be the solution to a lot of her problems, that should be moving forward. But she didn't.
Well she didn't. And she met russ and and married and they had a daughter, and but but things just weren't good and they were ultimately divorced, and she finds herself a single mother again. Else she finds herself as a single mother. She does get the job at the bigger radio station. And again, remember she's trying to exude this sunny, bright, warm personality, and what that's doing is hiding that the real turmoil in her and so nobody, nobody who who's likely to help her really has an
inkling that they should be helping her. She again goes through some relationships. She's got an increasing dependence on the drugs and alcohol, until one night she takes her daughter out to that same bridge with with her latest boyfriend, and and and she begins to lose it. She begins to tell the story of what had happened there about
nineteen years before. She's now in her late thirties, and this this boyfriend decides that this is a little too too much for those this year and a half toddler to try to absorb, and he takes her back to the car. And while he's while he's walking her back to the car, here's a splash and Becky's gone. Was it a tragic accident? Did she slip and fall? Did she jump? I know what I want to believe, But who knows? There there's only one There was only one person who knew what happened.
Do you think she took her Do you think she took her own life?
I want to believe she did. I want to believe that for once, Becky decided that she was going to be in control of the next most important decision in her life. And while I disagree to my core with the choice she made, I'm glad that she was the one making it, because it's really too much for me to contemplate thinking that a gust of wind, or a slippery place on the bridge railing, or anything else, just one more tragedy, one more betrayal, was responsible for her end.
I guess. I just want to believe that she was the one who decided, and even if I disagree with what she decided, I want to believe that it was her choice. Am I right?
I don't know, it seemed to be a culmination of all her pain, and that's why it's sort of an unexpected, incredibly emotional conversation ensued on that bridge, and so it really seems to be that, you know, listen, these demons are still haunting me, and this is the place where it all started, and this is a place where it's going to end. What I found was very, very tragic. And even another interesting twist is the officer Dave Davola. He made the arrest of Kennedy. He confront he comforted
the mother, Tony, Becky's mother. He was her bodyguard at trials and make her feel secure. He even stood up for her at her wedding because she saw him as a father figure. And then when she did jump off the bridge or fell off that bridge, when she went over that bridge, who did they call well?
And he was at that time the sheriff of this county. He had risen through the ranks and had become the sheriff, had been elected sheriff, and so everybody knew about his fondness for her. It wasn't sexual, it wasn't romantic. It was more fatherly, and he was in every way her protector. And her guardian and to this day is protector and
guardian of her memory. But yeah, I mean another again, you know, it seems kind of hardly possible, but this is a small town and those relationships are are are many, and they're lasting.
Now, another really interesting aspect to the book, not that this wasn't enough, that is that at the sentencing phase of this trial, that's when we get, you know, the pleas for these people's lives and and real it's really pathetic. But we get another pathetic figure doing what she can for her pathetic, you know, pathetic, pathetic, murderous, raping son.
But the mother goes to the court and tries to save the son's life, and of course he was sentenced to death, but then it was again it was commuted to a life sentence. Then you get this guy decides to pen his memoirs. So part of this memoir that he is given to you through his sister, his younger sister, is part his life and so you know, he talks about, you know, he did have a horrible life. The mother
attested to that. It's it seems reasonable that this guy didn't have some of the breaks that other people was raised in abject poverty and neglect and abuse. But tell us about these memoirs, especially when it comes to what he had to say about the abduction and rape. What was his take on that.
Well, these memoirs are of course a fantasy. There there are something between the Grim's fairy Tales and Kent House Forum. You know there there is just nonsense. It's the life that Ron Kennedy wished he could relate. The fact is, yeah, he had some things in his background that were bad, but not everybody who's beaten by his father, or or teased by his father, or grows up in a poor part of town turns into a rapist and a killer.
He's trying to justify that that it's him, it's it's him against the world, and that's typical of his of the sociopath's makeup. But but I included some lot of his autobiography in the book because it offered this fascinating glimpse inside the sociopathic mind that we rarely get. We rarely get the actual words of these killers that we write about, and so this was for me a chance to give the reader a glimpse inside that twisted mind. Ron Kennedy is an unfinished soul and my time. I
spent fourteen hours doing interviews with him. You know, he exudes this sort of country boy charm that's pretty seductive, but it's just part of his sociopathic makeup. I'm angry at some of the questions that I'd ask him, usually those that were about his treatment by the by society or the law, and he'd choke up at others, usually a about his mother. He talked about what he could see beyond the prison walls. He'd talk about his friends and family. He was very genial, and he joked freely,
but he never stopped playing me. And really, this interview with him was the most important piece of this story to me. Not because he was the last survivor of the four people whose lives converged on that bridge that night, and not because he's likely to reveal anything new about the crime itself, much less except the blame, which he doesn't. And it's not because, you know, the jailhouse interview is an important part of true crime writing these days, but
because he was my mirror. You know, I wanted to know something about me. You know, I believe deeply in the value of honest journalism. I think messengers have played a role in the human community since we first started gathering and tribes. But I wanted to know if my deep set feelings about this man, or at least what he represented, were stronger than my passion as a journalist.
And I knew that if I couldn't take a step back from my feelings and allow him to tell his own story in his own voice, then I wasn't going to be the newspaper man that I thought I was. And in a sense, he would have raped me of that too. So this was a critical part of the story.
For me, right what was interesting too? And you point this out and just to further show the inequity of not so much the system, it's just life itself. It's not so fair Becky's life. It just is that Ronald Kennedy found somebody to marry, an old childhood sweetheart. He had conjugal visits. He was a jail house lawyer. You did say he probably endured some you say, some sodomy or some jailhouse revenge. You know that he got his. But in general he lived a fairly comfortable life based
on his background. He was comfortable with jail anyway, and he had the ability to make endless appeals. He got married, he had I don't know if he had a child. I mean, this guy's he's continued to live while the strong victim continued to slowly die. It's an interesting parallel in this book.
And he enjoyed a marvelous life as far as prison goes. I mean, if you're going to be in prison, you'd want his life. He was allowed briefly to keep a pet in his cell, a little dog. He was allowed on at least two occasions to attend family parties back in Casper, Wyoming, not far from where Becky he was living at the time, and with only one guard who you know, pictures suggest this guard wasn't going to be able to do anything if Kennedy had decided to bolt, but.
He had.
He enjoyed some enormous privileges, including the conjugal visits for about ten years every month, got to sleep with his wife. So I think the book there's a picture even of him and a dance with his wife, a prison dance. We don't normally think of dances in prison. There he is, So you know, it's an incredible story. If I made it up, people would shoot me down and say impossible. These things couldn't happen. And that's the beauty of the truth.
It's incredible, even though it's got to be totally credible.
Yeah, and it really is. You know, sometimes there is a a little glimmer of somewhat of a happy ending. This is not a happy ending. It's just it's just not it's just it.
Isn't in the sense that that we want justice to be done and that we want the victims to come out whole again in some way. But it is in the sense that she that Becky gave us a roadmap to how we deal with these traumas, not just these these horrific but but microcosmic events in our lives and
our communities, but even the big ones like nine to eleven. Uh. She gave us a roadmap that that we need each other, we need to talk, we need to we need to build those relationships, we need to depend on one another. And I think that in that sense there is a silver lining. But it is an in terribly terribly dark story.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a very interesting story. Run. I'm glad we had this chat this evening about it. It's just a wonderful book, and I'm sure audience appreciated again you coming on and speaking about so eloquently about this very very We've had you on and talked about more and more as we've come on, talked about personal stories, but this one really really will grip the reader because it's just has all those elements, just a fascinating story.
And really Becky was a poster child or a poster woman for how you try to come back from something that most people just can't come back from at all.
Yes, and you know, I was privileged to be able to keep her memory alive and to use their experience as an example for the rest of us. And that's what they gave us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very good. Well, Ron, I want to thank you very much for coming on once again and pleasure and audience with this great description of this book. For those who have been listening to the program, we've been featuring the book The Darkest Night by a journalist and author Ron Francel. Two sisters, a brutal murder, and the loss of innocence in a small town, The Darkest Night.
Thank you very much, Ron, have yourself a good evening and the best of luck in the near future, Thank you Dan, and to you two, thank you very much.
Good Night,