Highway patrol gone wild

Have you ever felt like the highway patrol was out to get you?

Normally I would say “Driver your just being pessimistic that officer was just doing his job”, Or are they? Now former Wyoming highway patrol officer Franklin Ryle Jr. definitely wasn’t “just doing his job”. Franklin Ryle Jr. dreamed up a scheme that he thought would make him rich over night!

Franklin Ryle Jr.

His plan: To arrest a Wal-Mart truck driver under bogus claims that he had a warrant in Colorado,  murder him and stage a crash in order to collect a settlement from the company. On top of that he had planned to throw his wife into the mix and collect on her life insurance.

The investigation of Ryle began in mid-January after his brother-in-law – a Casper police officer – contacted Highway Patrol officials in Cheyenne to report that Ryle had planned to collect a settlement from Wal-Mart by staging an accident involving his patrol car and a company truck, according to the affidavit, which was signed by FBI Special Agent Richard Fanelli.

On Jan. 15, Wal-Mart truck driver Richard Smidt showed up at a Highway Patrol office in Cheyenne and told an official he’d been stopped by Ryle a week earlier while driving on Interstate 25 near Douglas. Smidt said Ryle arrested him on a Colorado warrant and drove him to Douglas in his patrol car.

Smidt told the Highway Patrol that Ryle stopped at a home in Douglas and went inside for 10 minutes, leaving him handcuffed in the car. Ryle eventually returned and drove Smidt back to his truck and released him, claiming there had been a mistake about the warrant.

The Highway Patrol asked the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation to look into the matter on Jan. 16. Two state agents spoke with Ryle the same day, and according to the affidavit, the trooper admitted to stopping a Wal-Mart truck and arresting the driver on Jan. 8 near Douglas. He claimed a radio check revealed there was a warrant for the driver, but after driving to Douglas, a second check indicated the warrant information was incorrect.

The agents also questioned Ryle about why the traffic stop hadn’t been recorded by his patrol car’s camera. Ryle said he must have forgotten to insert a hard drive into the new camera, according to the affidavit. In the same interview, Ryle denied planning to use the Wal-Mart truck to stage an accident.

I call BS I can smell a lie like a fart in a car and this “claim of his” has stank all over it.

Ryle pleaded guilty to felony charges for depriving a trucker of his rights and using a firearm in a violent crime. Ryle faces up to 19 years in prison for the murder scheme. Ryle is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 29 by U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer in Wyoming.

A psychiatrist has concluded the former state trooper suffered from “reduced mental capacity” when he kidnapped the trucker while on duty in January, federal court documents show.

However, the prosecutor in the case claims the psychiatrist’s report on Franklin Ryle Jr. is unreliable because the doctor failed to consider a pattern of criminal activity beyond Ryle’s money-making scheme to murder the trucker.

Read the full story on trib.com

What do you think about this, is this officer crazy? How would you as a driver deal with a lunatic like this? That I’m not even sure about.

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Tags: driver, gone wild, killer, trucker, Truckers on police, walmart

Category: Truckers on police, Trucking in general