Ron Franscell - The Darkest Night: Two Sisters, a Brutal Murder, and the Loss of Innocence in a Small Town

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dear Reader:

The book you are about to read is the latest bestseller from the St. Martins True Crime Library, the imprint The New York Times calls the leader in true crime! Each month, we offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. St. Martins is the publisher of bestselling true crime author and crime journalist Kieran Crowley, who explores the dark, deadly links between a prominent Manhattan surgeon and the disappearance of his wife fifteen years earlier in THE SURGEONS WIFE . Suzy Spencers BREAKING POINT guides readers through the tortuous twists and turns in the case of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five young children in the familys bathtub. In Edgar Award-nominated DARK DREAMS , legendary FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood and bestselling crime author Stephen G. Michaud shine light on the inner workings of Americas most violent and depraved murderers. In the book you now hold, THE DARKEST NIGHT, acclaimed author Ron Franscell explores a shocking story of abduction and murder.

St. Martins True Crime Library gives you the stories behind the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martins True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because its all true! The next time you want a crackling good read, make sure its got the St. Martins True Crime Library logo on the spineyoull be up all night!

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Executive Editor, St. Martins True Crime Library

FOR AMY BURRIDGE AND BECKY THOMSON

I remember you on this bridge, staring down into the void, but it cant be a real memory.

I wasnt here.

More like a belief, the faded ghost of something I never actually witnessed, a still life reappearing through layers of other memories painted over it. Its part of me, just deep down; real, just out of focus. And as I stand here tonight, thirty years later, I animate the whole heartbreaking movie, frame by frame through a time warped lens. I have the unnerving sensation, for a newspaperman, that I am hoping beyond hope to see what nobody saw, to watch a nightmare somebody else dreamed, to hear words unspoken, to walk paths journeyed only in another heart, to recall what almost nobody remembers.

But I remember you on this bridge.

And though I wasnt here, I asked about you later, about the color of the sky, the sound of the wind, and the light and dark in your heart.

Now the time is all mixed up for me. I have lived in your life for a long time now, and Im not sure when I cross the border between you and me, this present and that past.

This is your story, but it is also mine.

Ron Franscell

On Fremont Canyon Bridge

For once, I want to know what bones knowwhat we can only know after we have died. I have many fantasies that I cannot achieve in life as I have known itincluding being able to breathe under water and to flythat I may only be able to know after death.

Anne Arden McDonald who photographed a series of images on Death Row in Wyomings Frontier Prison

Let me not sink;

let me be delivered from them that hate me,

and out of the deep waters.

Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up,

and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.

Psalm 69: 1415

September 25, 1973

The cold and the dark and the fear of death kept her awake, praying for first light, for another morning.

Just one.

The long plunge into the black river had crippled her somehow. Her legs didnt work. Maybe when shed hit the rocks. Even at eighteen, shed never had a broken bone, but she now believed her legs were broken. They protruded from her frozen hips, useless and thick with pain.

They hadnt let her put her panties and brassiere back on, just her light sweater and jeans. When they dumped her off the bridge into the infinite darkness, she slammed hard into a stone ledge, but not the bottom. Her long, lithe body caromed off the wall and spiraled down again, seconds that seemed like forever, not knowing what was below. Then she hit the water, in the eye of a liquid detonation that embraced her rather than vaporized her.

Her body plunged deep into the river, like a knife through soft flesh. Her lungs smoldered, and water filled her sinuses and mouth, crashed against her eardrums, and trickled into her lungs. She wanted to scream, to exhale, to inhale, to know she was alive, but in the water down there in the dark, half blinded already by the beating shed suffered before the fall, she couldnt know the way to the surface. She sank farther, but there was no bottom.

Then she stopped. She clawed against the water with her hands, unable to make her legs obey. The weight of water pulled her down, and she fought against it so hard her pants slipped off her useless legs. She felt she might be a hundred, a thousand, feet below the surface, and her lungs would burst before she found air, but she clawed at it, raged against it.

When she burst through the placid surface of the deep river, the night air swept into and over her. It was near freezing but still warmer than the water and felt like her mothers hand on her face Its all right, baby, breathe, breathe but her mother wasnt there.

She was alive. She managed to paddle to the rocky granite slabs beside the river, where they formed not a soft shore, but an insurmountable curb. Dragging her deadened legs out of the black water into the black night, she wormed across the sharp stones, naked below the waist, beaten and bruised, in shock. What blood remained in her kept her heart beating and served only the most primitive part of her brain, where survival came before all else.

She grasped for purchase among the river stones, and a water rat skittered across her arm. She stifled a shriek, but she worried more about the two men who might be waiting above than any other vermin below. The autumn wind swirled in the bottom of the canyon, trapped like she was, chilling her naked skin. Silent.

Stones carved her flesh as she dragged herself toward softer, flatter earth. She collapsed in a clump of river brush rooted in the loose talus between two boulders, protected from the churning wind, from the Wyoming temperatures that fell abruptly after midnight, from the view of anyone who might come looking for hereven in the dark.

She folded herself into her stone womb, pulling her dead legs against her body with her hands until she was balled tightly in a fetal position. She draped her long brown hair across them, then covered herself with uprooted bushes, and waited.

Dont fall asleep . Her mind flashed out some ancient wisdom of warm-blooded humans in desperately cold climates. I wont wake up. Fall asleep and die .

Then she heard the voices from the lip of the canyon, more than a hundred feet above. Two men talking and laughing. It was them, she knew. All was black. Even if her left eye hadnt been swollen shut and throbbing, she couldnt see her own hand in front of her face, and they would not be able to see her, but she knew they were there and they were trying to see her. She made herself smaller and wished she were invisible, part of the earth itself. Unseeable. While it was dark, she was as close to invisible as she could be, but at dawn would they still be up there, watching?