The long fall

Riveting story details repercussions of Wyoming rape, murder

Karen Algeo Krizman, Special to the News

Published January 12, 2007 at midnight

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In 1973, two girls were kidnapped in front of a Casper, Wyo. convenience store and driven to a remote steel bridge spanning a deep, swift river. There, 11-year-old Amy Burridge was tossed 120 feet to her death. Her half-sister Becky Thomson, 18, was brutally raped before being thrown off the bridge herself.

Miraculously, Thomson survived the fall and crawled up the steep canyon to the bridge, where she was found the next morning, battered and nearly nude.

"I climbed up backwards with my hands like that, scooting," Thomson testified in court. "And I would slide back down and then I would get up again and slide some more, and I cried and cried. And then I finally realized I was hurting really bad by my right side, and I looked down and I had a great big opening in my side and I started crying worse. Finally I got to the top."

But Thomson's stay at the "top" didn't last long. Despite surviving her physical injuries and the trials of Jerry Jenkins and Ron Kennedy - the two men who were convicted of the crime - Thomson struggled for the rest of her life with her emotional wounds.

Her story, and that of the small town that endured this breach of its innocence, is the subject of Ron Franscell's breathless Fall, a true-crime tale that grabs readers on the first page and doesn't let go until long after the final word. A former Denver Post reporter, Franscell is particularly well-suited to tell the story: Growing up in Casper, the author lived next door to the Thomson/Burridge family. Franscell recalls his mother telling him matter-of-factly that Amy was dead when he returned from football practice the night after the sisters were kidnapped.

As for her sister: "Becky Thomson lived two lives," Franscell recalls.

"One was the essentially happy life of a little girl in a family of girls, growing up to begin eagerly finding her way and her place in the world, dreaming of places she'd never been, boys, and her own children. The life she hadn't yet begun.

"Her first life ended at the exact moment her second life began, on Fremont County Bridge . . .

"Her second life was the life of a dead girl who simply hadn't stopped breathing. One represented the blossoming of a girl into a young woman, and the other represented a woman in decay."

The emotional aftereffects of the attack eventually proved too much for Thomson. In an event that would make headlines across the nation, she returned to the bridge in 1992 and in front of her boyfriend and 2-year-old child hurled herself off the very same spot where she had been tossed over before.

"Becky had fallen almost 120 feet, crashing into a rock ledge just three feet under water," Franscell writes. "Her neck was broken and because there was no water in her lungs, death was presumed to be instantaneous. The violence of her impact was so great that the autopsy noted the woven imprint of her clothing on her skin in some spots . . .

"But no death certificate has a blank that would have allowed (the coroner) . . . to write a different truth: 'She died of sadness. . . . She died because she had already been murdered many years before. She fell from such a height that it took 19 years to hit the bottom.' "

Franscell freely injects himself into the story. Rather than intrusive, his presence helps relate the shock and anger that spread through the small, windswept town of Casper at the time of the initial attack and again when Thomson died the "second time."

He also was able to talk at length with Kennedy during jailhouse interviews. But don't look for sympathy from the author.

"Ron Kennedy and Jerry Jenkins took many things from me - my friends, my sense of security, a certain amount of childhood innocence," Franscell writes. "Decades later, as I inventory what's left, I find a surplus of memory and only a thin residue of forgiveness."

Thanks to Franscell's daily journalism experience, his polished, yet conversational writing style appeals to the Everyman. It's only when he shares excerpts from a book written by Kennedy that the reader is thrown off his pace - mainly because of the disgust that is aroused by the egocentric and delusional writing in the unpublished "autobiography."

"Ronald Kennedy's memoir represents the life he wished he'd led," Franscell explains. "A generous reader might say his memory was just a little foggy, perhaps misremembered. In fact, like (A Million Little Pieces author James) Frey's, it's a patchwork of fantasies stitched together by a slender thread of half-truths and richly re-imagined incidents - and a few familiar scenes from Hollywood movies."

True crime fans may be reminded of another recent contribution to the genre while reading this book: Strange Piece of Paradise, which was released in 2006. However, where Terri Jentz's much-ballyhooed Piece failed to deliver, Fall barely stumbles as Franscell delivers a crackling story of lives and innocence lost.

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

Fall: The Rape and Murder of Innocence in a Small Town

• By Ron Franscell. New Horizon Press, 272 pages, $24.95.

• Grade: A-

Karen Algeo Krizman is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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