Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, December 17, 1993                   TAG: 9312170176
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WIFE CHARGED IN KILLING OF OTHER SPOUSE

Frances Ann Truesdale, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Virginia, was charged this week in a 1967 murder in Winnsboro, S.C.

Truesdale, a 52-year-old grandmother, now is accused of killing her third husband, Ronald Keith Beasley, according to Edward Byrne of the Fairfield County Sheriff's Department.

When Beasley was found shot to death in 1967, Truesdale authorities called it a suicide - even though he was paralyzed from the neck down when he supposedly shot himself in the head with a rifle.

It was only after Virginia State Police began to investigate the 1988 death of Truesdale's fourth husband - Jerry Daniel Truesdale, who was shot as they drove through Roanoke - that Beasley's case was re-examined.

In both cases, the story Truesdale originally told police was later challenged by criminal charges against her.

In Winnsboro, a small town north of Columbia, she told authorities her husband killed himself shortly after an illness left him paralyzed.

Within months of Beasley's death, she began to date Jerry Truesdale. They later married and moved to Winston-Salem, N.C.

In April 1988, they were passing through Roanoke on the way home from Pennsylvania, where Jerry Truesdale was based as a long-distance truck driver.

Responding to Truesdale's frantic cries for help on a citizens band radio, police found their van parked off Hershberger Road. Jerry Truesdale was lying in the back, a gunshot wound to his head.

Truesdale told state police investigator Barry Keesee her husband had been shot by two New York robbers who followed them for miles after a confrontation at an interstate rest stop.

But a Roanoke jury ultimately decided that Truesdale's story was a hoax, and convicted her of second-degree murder.

It was the investigation of Jerry Truesdale's death - which took Keesee to South Carolina on several occasions - and her subsequent conviction that led to a second probe of Beasley's death.

In the Roanoke case, authorities took pains to point out Truesdale's many marriages.

An indictment charging her with murder named the defendant as Frances Ann Truesdale, aka Frances Ann Scott, aka Frances Ann Scott Lucas, aka Frances Ann Scott Finch, aka Frances Ann Scott Finch Beasley, aka Frances S. Beasley Truesdale.