ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 22, 1996 TAG: 9604230084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WINNSBORO, S.C.
SOURCE: KIM CURTIS SSOCIATED PRESS
HIS SON'S DEATH was ruled a suicide in 1967. K.C. "Red" Beasley has waited until now for a sheriff to share his suspicions.
A half-page coroner's report in 1967 ruled Ronald ``Little Red'' Beasley's death a suicide, but his father, K.C. ``Red'' Beasley never believed it.
Neither did Beasley's good friend, Herman Young. Twenty-five years later, Young became Fairfield County sheriff and started the rusty wheels of justice turning.
Now Little Red's former wife - who was convicted four years ago in Roanoke of killing a man she married shortly after Beasley died - faces trial here on charges of killing the third of her four husbands.
``It was in the back of my mind all those years that Red could not have done that. There was no way,'' Young said recently.
In July 1967, Little Red's wife, Frances Beasley, told police he loaded a his brains out.
But 29-year-old Little Red had suffered a stroke a few months earlier. He could not walk or feed himself and wore diapers, and he required around-the-clock care, Young said.
Even so, the handwritten report by then-Coroner Earl Bowler, a barber, was clear: ``No inquest demanded. No inquest held. Death caused by self-inflicted wound.''
That didn't stop rumors from flying around this rural town of 3,500 people that Frances Beasley got tired of taking care of her husband and killed him. Red Beasley recalls that the day before Little Red died, she told his mother she didn't want to spend the rest of her life cleaning up after him.
Young, a pallbearer at the funeral, said he drove to the house afterward to let Frances Beasley know he would help her however he could.
``When I drove up on the yard, they were inside having a party. He had just been buried,'' the sheriff said. ``I just sat in the yard and cried like a baby.''
Red Beasley never approved of his son's wife - she had Little Red wrapped around her little finger, he said. And he said she didn't want to use Little Red's insurance money to pay the $2,000 for his funeral.
She denied even having received the $10,000 insurance check, he said.
``I told her I knew she was lying,'' Beasley said. ``She just got in her car and drove away. I got a call from the undertaker later, and he said the bill was paid in full.''
Family members never pressured authorities for a further investigation for fear she would cut them off from their 11-month-old grandson, he said.
``We didn't feel we could get any justice in this little town,'' Beasley said.
Current Coroner Joe Silvia said the family was probably right.
``Back then, this was a good ol' boys town,'' he said. ``I'm positive it wasn't an outright case of covering up a murder. People just didn't do anything about it.''
Frances Beasley married Jerry Truesdale about a month after Little Red died, and they moved to Winston-Salem, N.C. She helped run a service station they owned; he was a long-distance truck driver based in Pennsylvania.
In April 1988, as they drove through Roanoke on their way home from Pennsylvania, Jerry Truesdale was shot in the head. He died two days later at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
The now-Frances Truesdale told her husband's family that someone in a passing car shot him in the van - but she told police her husband pulled over, got out and was shot by two men who had followed them from an interstate rest stop.
At the hospital, she told Truesdale's sister, Anne Letrick, that he was shot with a .22-caliber handgun - yet the bullet was still in his brain.
Virginia investigators found other inconsistencies. They learned Truesdale was lying down when he was shot, but plastic was under the quilt he was lying on in the back of the van and there were no blood stains.
Two years later, police charged Frances Truesdale with killing her husband. In February 1992, she went to trial with prosecutors calling her account of the killing "a tale of deceit and deception." A Roanoke jury convicted her of second-degree murder and sentenced her to 20 years in prison. During the trial, prosecutors suggested that Truesdale killed her husband to collect more than $250,000 in life insurance.
Chief Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Betty Jo Anthony, who prosecuted the case, said Truesdale became eligible for parole last December, but was turned down by the state Parole Board. Truesdale has a mandatory release date for her Virginia conviction in 2002, Anthony said.
In the Roanoke case, authorities were quick to point out her 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, 54, refused to comment when contacted through Virginia prison officials recently. But what Barry Keesee, a Virginia State Police homicide detective based in Salem, discovered in Winnsboro during the Truesdale murder investigation convinced him she killed Little Red, too.
``Things that were said to me just didn't make sense,'' said Keesee, a 31-year police veteran.
Letrick, who was in fourth grade when her brother married, said she heard all her life that her brother's new wife had killed her last husband. Neighbors in Winnsboro talked about it; her teachers talked about it; the family even asked her brother about it.
``He got really mad,'' she said. ``He never believed it. He loved her.''
Letrick kept detailed notes from every conversation she had with her brother's wife and pressured South Carolina authorities to reopen Little Red's case. ``If she would've been convicted of killing Little Red Beasley, my brother would still be alive,'' she said recently.
In 1989, Keesee gave his files to then-Sheriff Leroy I. Montgomery. The sheriff concluded Little Red had not killed himself, but he did not have enough evidence to prosecute.
``I was very much interested in the case, and we had not pushed it away,'' Montgomery said.
But Winnsboro police Capt. Bobby Byrd said that when he asked Montgomery to reopen the case after Truesdale's conviction, the sheriff ``had a natural-born fit about it.''
Byrd thinks Montgomery did not want his father, S. Leroy Montgomery, who was sheriff in 1967, to look bad. The coroner's report says deputies interviewed Frances Beasley and her father-in-law before they closed the case, but no one could find the sheriff's records, Byrd said.
Montgomery said his father, with only five deputies compared with 48 now, did the best he could.
When Young became sheriff in 1992, one of the first things he did was to reopen the Beasley case.
``It was all sitting there for anybody to do ... but nobody was told to do it until Sheriff Young took office,'' Byrd said. ``It didn't take no Columbo to put this all together.''
On Jan. 22, a Fairfield County grand jury indicted Truesdale for murder. The case should make it to trial in June, according to the Fairfield County prosecutor's office.
Red Beasley, now 80 and in failing health, still waits for justice.
``We didn't get any justice then,'' Beasley said. ``I'd like to see it tried and disposed of while I'm still alive.''
Staff writer Laurence Hammack contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Long : 136 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: File/1992. Frances Ann Truesdale, shown leaving theby CNBRoanoke Courthouse in 1992 with her attorney, Tony Anderson, was
convicted of second-degree murder in the death of her fourth
husband. She now is suspected in her third husband's death. color.