Placitas author Ron Franscell ties new novel to 1970 double murder

A Placitas writer is turning one of Sandoval County’s strangest murder cases into fiction, linking a new novel to a 1970 double killing that still echoes through local memory.

Ron Franscell’s Deep End is set for release May 5. The retired journalist and New York Times best-selling author says it is his 20th book, and it continues the story line from Deaf Row by bringing back homicide detective Woodrow Bell and the hard-edged crew from that earlier novel. The new book centers on the assassination of a Colorado cannabis billionaire, but its backstory reaches to a vanished hippie commune called Jericho.

That local thread matters in Placitas. Franscell has tied the novel to killings allegedly committed in December 1970 at a commune about four miles northwest of Placitas, where a man known as Donald Waskey took on the name Grant and claimed he was the reincarnation of President Ulysses S. Grant. In Franscell’s account, that identity carried a bizarre practical purpose: he believed it entitled him to free stamps at the Placitas post office and a federal pension.

The 1970 case has long carried a place-specific charge because it mixed counterculture idealism, violence and regional lore. Franscell has described the commune years as a time when the mood soured as drugs and less idealistic people moved in. He has also said the final conflict may have been either an attempted takeover of Grant’s commune or a dispute over communal furniture, underscoring how murky the violence still is more than half a century later.

Archival reporting from the time said Sandoval County authorities issued a first-degree murder warrant for Grant in 1970 and identified him as Donald Waskey, who had graduated summa cum laude from San Francisco State College under his birth name before adopting the Grant persona. Later reference material identifies the commune as Tawapa, also called Lower Farm, north of Placitas along Las Huertas Creek near the Sandia Mountains.

For local readers, the appeal is not just the true-crime angle. It is the way Franscell has folded a notorious Sandoval County episode into a new novel by a well-known Placitas author. Deep End takes a murder rooted in the county’s counterculture past and gives it a second life, this time through a contemporary mystery set far beyond New Mexico but still anchored in the memory of Placitas.