Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 26, 1992 TAG: 9202260093
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
INSURANCE SAID TO BE MOTIVE
Hours after her husband was shot in the head, Frances Ann Truesdale sat in a hospital chair and spoke in the direction of the emergency room where he lay dead but for a life support system."Jerry Truesdale, you left us in a heck of a mess," she said, according to testimony Tuesday from Barry Keesee, a state police investigator.
"He left us with all kinds of bills; he left us in debt," Keesee quoted Truesdale as saying. The investigator tried to comfort Truesdale by saying there must be a life insurance policy to tide the family over.
"He ain't got but $25,000" in insurance, Keesee testified was Truesdale's answer. Hardly enough to pay for the funeral and then split the rest among their five sons, she said.
But in fact, Frances Truesdale was the sole beneficiary of seven insurance policies that totaled $285,000 on her husband's life.
And that, prosecutors allege, is why she killed him.
After completing a second day of testimony Tuesday in Roanoke Circuit Court, Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell rested a case that accuses Truesdale, 50, of shooting her husband as they drove through Roanoke in April 1988 and blaming it on two fictitious robbers.
Defense attorney Tony Anderson will begin today to attack a largely circumstantial case that he says is based on "absolute supposition."
With no eyewitnesses, no confessions and no murder weapon ever found, Anderson had asked Judge Clifford Weckstein to throw out the charges at the end of the prosecution's evidence. Weckstein overruled the motion.
In his opening statements to the jury, Anderson said Truesdale will testify; that may happen as early as today.
Truesdale is expected to stick by a story she told police the morning of April 21, 1988 - that two men approached her husband asking for money at an interstate rest stop, followed them until he pulled his van over on Interstate 581 to confront them, and shot him in the head.
After Truesdale called for help on a citizens band radio, the van she was driving was found on Hershberger Road near Valley View Mall. Jerry Truesdale, 41, was lying in the back of the van, shot once in the head. He died two days later at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Truesdale told police the shooting happened as she and her husband drove from Pennsylvania, where he was based as a truck driver, to their home in Winston-Salem, N.C.
At first, Keesee focused his investigation on tracking down the two men Truesdale described as attacking her husband.
But as each lead came up empty, investigators began to question Truesdale's story. There were inconsistencies from the beginning, including the exact location of the shooting and where Jerry Truesdale had been standing when he was shot.
About a month after the killing, Keesee received a telephone call that shifted the focus of his investigation. After speaking to one of Jerry Truesdale's relatives in South Carolina, Keesee testified, he began to investigate Frances Truesdale as the key suspect.
Details of that telephone call were not revealed to the jury, but authorities have said relatives were concerned because one of Frances Truesdale's previous husbands also had died under suspicious circumstances.
In 1967, her then-husband reportedly shot himself in the head while in a wheelchair at their home in Winnsboro, S.C. The death was ruled a suicide, although South Carolina authorities say it has received renewed scrutiny as part of a state police investigation into the current charges against Truesdale.
When questioned about the death of her most recent husband, Truesdale said she did not own a gun because she was afraid of them.
However, Caldwell called three witnesses who said Truesdale regularly carried a small handgun in her purse. And Jane Martin, a Roanoke police officer who responded to the shooting, had testified Monday that Truesdale was clutching her purse in an unusually possessive manner shortly after the killing.