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

Author:Ron Franscell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781466886940
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-12-09T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

THE VERDICT

April 30, 1974

The jury’s deliberations were short.

On Tuesday night, the nine men and three women retired for their dinner break and ate their last supper together.

They entered the cramped jury room. On the enhanced murder charge, Wyoming’s law mandated the death penalty, so each juror knew the consequences of a guilty verdict. They could choose no lesser penalty. But only one expressed any hesitation about putting a man to death. After some tearful, sympathetic discussion with the other jurors, she assented. Ronald Leroy Kennedy and Jerry Lee Jenkins’ guilt was never the question, only whether the jurors could conscionably walk away with the killers’ blood on their hands.

Somebody mentioned how unmoved Kennedy and Jenkins appeared throughout the trial, even when a large photo of Amy’s corpse was displayed. To them, it seemed disrespectful at best, inhuman at worst.

They returned to court with their decision only four and a half hours later, just before 10:00 p.m.

In a deathly silent courtroom, the jury foreman, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who drove a Volkswagen and collected rocks, read the verdicts against Kennedy and Jenkins, who stood emotionless at the defense table as he read.

They were guilty on all counts.

Guilty of the assault and battery on Becky Thomson.

Guilty of her rape.

Guilty of murdering Amy Burridge.

The defense asked the judge to poll the jury.

“Do you concur with the findings?” District Judge John Raper asked each of them in turn.

“Yes,” said the young housewife and mother.

“Yes,” said the Wyoming Air National Guardsman whose sister was about the same age as Becky Thomson.

“Yes,” said the Catholic wife of an insurance examiner who volunteered at the local animal shelter.

“Yes,” said the postal worker who coached Little League and whose brother was a cop.

“Yes,” said the young city worker with a three-year-old son at home.

“Yes,” said the young father and Army veteran who ran the credit union for state highway workers.

“Yes,” said the newlywed who worked at the phone company and whose husband was a teacher.

“Yes,” said the electrical engineer and World War II veteran who lived in a wind-blown farm town just this side of the Nebraska state line.

“Yes,” said the state government worker with a college degree in child psychology who collected bottles and swam in the city pool for exercise.

“Yes,” said the childless postal worker who now spent his free time bowling or at the Elks Lodge.

“Yes,” said the former Air Force officer who had an eleven-year-old daughter.

There were no cheers in the courtroom, no nervous murmurs. Just silence.

Relief flooded Don Chapin, Jenkins’ lawyer. Not because he wanted his client to go to prison, but because the case that had consumed him, that had made his blood pulse so robustly that his nose bled over dinner, that had forced him to choose between flesh-and-blood friends and an abstract legal principle, was over. He’d given his best effort, as the law prescribed, to defend a man who was a rapist and a killer, but he knew, deep down, that if the man had been acquitted, he’d have lost some respect for the law.

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