Ron Franscell

Retired from a big-city homicide beat to a small Colorado mountain town, ex-detective Woodrow "Mountain" Bell yearns only to fade away. He's failed in so many ways as a father, a husband, friend, and cop that it might be too late for a meaningful life. When he stumbles across a long-forgotten, unsolved child murder, his first impulse is to let it lie ... but he can't. He's drawn into the macabre mystery when he realizes the killer might still be near....

"When a world-renowned forensic anthropologist journeys to Winchester, Wyoming, to examine the long-dead remains of a woman who claimed to be Etta Place -- the Old West's most mysterious and legendary female outlaw -- he's not expecting to find a man's headless corpse in her crypt. The grisly discovery plunges him and Jefferson Morgan -- the editor of the weekly Winchester Bullet -- into a shadowy and deadly world of satellite-savvy highway pirates,...

The Rocky Mountains hold a celebrated place in the "wildest" West of both myth and reality--yet this is the first-ever travel guide to the many sites associated with Colorado and Wyoming's notorious past, complete with precise GPS coordinates of significant places. Written with the same fast-paced, gripping style of bestselling crime author Ron Franscell's widely praised earlier work, The Crime Buff's Guide to the Outlaw Rockies takes you on a time-traveling...

Where else does a list of a city's top five most recognized citizens include a mass murderer? Stand in the footsteps of Manson, the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker, the Black Dahlia's killer, and the Onion Field slayers. Visit crime scenes where Hollywood's weird history took fatal turns for O.J. Simpson, John Belushi, Ramon Novarro, Phil Hartman, Dorothy Stratten, Sal Mineo, and so many others....Includes GPS coordinates and photos.

"A father-and-son love story set against epic backdrops and overlooked places. After Ron Franscell's divorce, he feared he was the continuing link in a long chain of estranged fathers. But when the author and his teenage son embark on a road trip to the Yukon to seek out a macabre cocktail containing an amputated human toe, they unwittingly begin a journey into their own past, present, and future. The Sourtoe Cocktail Club is a true-life love story...

This novel of a small-town reporter drawn into a chilling cold case is "an impressive debut that will keep you on the edge of your seat" (San Francisco Chronicle). A dying convict's last request thrusts small-town newspaperman Jefferson Morgan into a deadly maelstrom as he explores a fifty-year-old case of child murder—a wound his town still isn't ready to scrape open. Under the heaviest deadline of his life, and amid threats from unexpected foes,...

"The pulse-pounding story of the first time in history that the FBI Behavioral Unit created a profile to catch a serial killer. On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of her tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow. The largest manhunt in Montana's...

"The pulse-pounding story of the first time in history that the FBI Behavioral Unit created a profile to catch a serial killer. On June 25, 1973, a seven-year-old girl went missing from the Montana campground where her family was vacationing. Somebody had slit open the back of her tent and snatched her from under their noses. None of them saw or heard anything. Susie Jaeger had vanished into thin air, plucked by a shadow. The largest manhunt in Montana's...

One chilly autumn night in 1973, Evil strode into Casper, Wyoming, stalking and taking two of their own, eleven-year-old Amy Burridge and her eighteen-year-old half-sister Becky Thomson. That night the picturesque steel expansion bridge that spans the 110-foot drop above the deep river was the scene of a horrific life-altering crime. Ron Franscell was a young boy when murder struck his close-knit community, but everyone he knows was touched. Franscell...