Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 28, 1992 TAG: 9202280314
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WOMAN GUILTY OF MURDER
Frances Ann Truesdale's "tale of deceit and deception" was unraveled Thursday night by a Roanoke jury that convicted her of killing her husband.Jurors rejected her story of how mysterious robbers gunned down her husband in a roadside encounter.
Truesdale, 50, stood by her attorneys as the verdict was read, then collapsed backward into her chair as the jury recommended she serve 20 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Jerry Daniel Truesdale.
At issue was the credibility of a woman described as both a loving, devoted wife and a pistol-packing, calculating killer.
With no eyewitnesses except Truesdale herself, the jury was asked to decide if it believed her story of how her husband died alongside U.S. 220 four years ago - or if the account was what prosecutors called a "tale of deceit and deception."
Truesdale had insisted that she had no reason to want her husband of 20-some years dead.
But Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell argued to the jury that one reason might be the seven insurance policies on Jerry Truesdale's life that totaled $285,000.
He also pointed to inconsistencies in Frances Truesdale's story that began the morning of April 21, 1988, when motorists responding to her frantic calls for help on a citizens band radio found a van parked on Hershberger Road.
Jerry Truesdale was found in the back of the van, a bullet from a .22-caliber weapon in his head.
Truesdale told police at the time that her husband was killed by two "deadbeat Yankees" who pestered him for money at an interstate rest stop, then followed the van for miles until he pulled over to confront them.
Because the case was based largely on circumstantial evidence, defense attorney Tony Anderson appealed to the jury's sense of fairness in asking that his client be acquitted.
"Are we serious?" he asked. "Is this what our system of justice has come to? . . . You are not tried and convicted on innuendo and speculation.
"I ask you again," he told the jury. "Are we serious?"
To which Caldwell responded in his rebuttal argument: "Deadly serious."
In attacking Frances Truesdale's story of how her husband was shot just as he stepped out of his van, Caldwell's voice rose and fell as he roamed around the courtroom.
He began by sitting in the witness stand, asking jurors to imagine that the swivel chair was the bucket seat of the Chevrolet van Jerry Truesdale was driving that night.
Stomping his foot to the floor, the prosecutor simulated how - at least by Frances Truesdale's account - an angry Jerry Truesdale would have hit the brakes to stop his van and confront his tormentors.
Caldwell then bounded from the witness stand and paced past rows of spectators to a spot in the back of the courtroom, a distance that he said was at least how far the assailants' car must have been behind the van.
How could it be, he asked the jury, that Jerry Truesdale was shot point-blank the second he stepped from the van if his assailants had so much ground to cover?
Striding back to the front of the courtroom, Caldwell offered what he called a more plausible explanation.
Lying down in front of the jury, he suggested that Frances Truesdale shot her husband as he slept on a mattress in the back of the van.
Given the angle of the bullet wound and the fact that blood was found in the back of the van - but not at the driver's seat area where his wife said he was shot - Caldwell said Frances Truesdale must have shot him as he slept.
"It's perfectly consistent with a man lying on his side," Caldwell said as he lay stretched out on the courtroom carpet.
Truesdale - who lied to police about the amount of insurance on her husband's life and later hid information from various companies as she filed claims for benefits - would have no qualms in lying again to the jury, the prosecutor said.
"It means absolutely nothing for her to sit on this stand, look you in the eye and say: `I didn't do it,' " he said.
"We have no way of knowing what went on," Caldwell said. "She is the only person who can tell us what happened," he said as he pointed at Truesdale. "So her credibility becomes the fulcrum on which everything rests."
After hearing four days of testimony, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for about four hours before returning a verdict Thursday night. It shocked a courtroom filled with friends and family members; medics were called after one of Truesdale's relatives fainted at the news.
Truesdale was allowed to remain free on bond until a hearing scheduled for this afternoon.
In the four years since the shooting, Truesdale was successful in at least temporarily keeping police off her trail.
Authorities spent months trying to track down the two robbers she described. But as leads continued to come up empty, state police investigator Barry Keesee received a telephone call that changed the focus of his probe.
A relative told police of how another one of Frances Truesdale's husbands also died under suspicious conditions. In what was ruled a suicide in 1967, her then-husband shot himself in the head with a rifle while sitting in a wheelchair, authorities have said.
Although the jury heard no mention of that incident, it nonetheless determined that Truesdale's story was what Caldwell called it: "A complete deception, a complete fraud, a complete lie."