FALL: The Rape and Murder of Innocence in a Small Town by Ron Franscell

FALL: The Rape and Murder of Innocence in a Small Town
Ron Franscell
New Horizon Press
Reviewed by: Laura T.

"Two men, two girls, one night, and nothing is the same. We all changed."

It seemed like an ordinary chilly night on September 24, 1973, when eighteen year old Becky Thompson and her eleven year old stepsister, Amy Burridge were asked by their mother to make a quick run to a local store to pick up a few groceries. That night, turned into something so unordinary and so horrific that it changed the two girls themselves and their community of Casper, Wyoming forever.

As the two girls emerged from the gas station/grocery store to head for home, Becky discovered that her right rear tire was flat. Two men appeared in a white Impala and offered help with the flat. Becky sent Amy to a nearby pay phone to call their mother and let her know about the flat, and that two "kind men" had stopped to offer assistance. They would be returning home as soon as possible. The mother of the girls, Toni Case, became more and more worried as that night crawled by with no more word from them.

Ronald Leroy Kennedy and Jerry Lee Jenkins, the men who offered help to the sisters, were by no means Good Samaritans. At knife-point, they forced Becky and Amy into the Impala's backseat floorboard, where they were told to lay face down.

The two men beat and terrorized the girls as they took them on a winding drive that finally led to the Fremont Canyon Bridge, which is located about forty miles southwest of Casper. The bridge is a one lane steel-beamed structure which hangs 112 feet above the North Platte River.

Ronald Kennedy removed young Amy from the car first, and threw her body over the bridge. Kennedy and Jenkins then drove 150 to 200 yards up the road, where they took turns raping Becky. Becky was then thrown over the bridge. Amy was dead. Becky, miraculously, survived.

Becky hid herself in a crevice of the canyon, freezing cold, half naked and in a great deal of pain, but she dared not move nor make a sound in case the killers were still up on the bridge watching for any signs of life from her.

At dawn, in thirty-four degree weather, Becky painfully dragged her shattered body up the canyon wall where she was found by Carl and Dorothy Strasser, who were on their way for some early morning fishing. Becky was rushed to the hospital, where among numerous injuries, her pelvis had been broken in five places.

Her sister Amy's lifeless body was recovered from under the bridge, resting at the bottom of thirty feet of water.

This story literally hit home for Ron Franscell, at the time of the incident he was sixteen years old, and the two stepsisters were his next door neighbors.

Thanks to Becky, Kennedy and Jenkins were found quickly, then tried and sentenced to death. However, the death penalty was overturned by Wyoming Supreme Court in 1977 and the verdicts for both men were changed to life imprisonment.

The reader would think that the story would end there, but it was far from over. Veteran newspaperman and novelist Ron Franscell kept this story stored in his heart and I believe that the shocking events which occurred concerning Becky on July 31, 1992, cried out to him that this story needed to be brought to light.

Many were forever haunted by this horrible crime, and what happened to then thirty-seven year old Becky brought back that haunting feeling; and with it, a life altering experience for Franscell. Almost thirty years later, he felt he had to tell this incredible story. This situation ended up becoming a tragedy within a tragedy of a true crime. Becky always felt survivor guilt and felt that it should have been her, instead of Amy, who had died.
Not only does Franscell tell the story of the crime in it's own cold facts, he also tells Kennedy's story, distorted as it is, as Kennedy is still living. Jenkins died in prison in 1998. As Franscell puts it quite accurately, Kennedy's story "reads like a bad movie script."

Full of facts, this horror that stunned an entire community will leave you breathless at its end. Especially chilling, is the fact that on September 24, 2003, Franscell spent the night of the thirtieth anniversary of the crime under the Fremont Canyon bridge in the spot Becky had been on the night that changed her life forever. He was trying to capture some of the feelings she must have felt during that hellish and terrifying night so long ago.

This book is a must read for the fans of the true crime genre. Franscell's personal feelings which he dealt with, in and of themselves, make this a memorable account of the crime. To put it in Franscell's own words, "Fall is a story about surviving in a messy world. None of us escapes untouched by evil. But we have a choice: we can struggle on or we can surrender."

This book is Franscell's first true crime. He has written two novels titled Angel Fire and The Deadline. He resides in Beaumont, Texas, where he is a lifelong newspaperman.