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In 1978, one of Wyoming's most infamous killings took place in Rock Springs. Rock Springs Director of Safety Ed Cantrell shot his deputy Michael Rosa, who was in the backseat of a car. Cantrell said he shot Rosa in self-defense, while others suggested that Cantrell was trying to keep Rosa from testifying about local corruption he had witnessed.
Cantrell hired Wyoming Attorney Gerry Spence and was acquitted of first-degree murder in Pinedale. Award-winning investigative journalist Rone Tempest has written about the incident in his new book,
The Last Western. He sets the stage by describing Rock Springs at the time.
"Beginning in the mid 1970s, a plan to build the Jim Bridger power plant, the second largest power plant in the West, was underway. There was the upturn of mining and upturn of production that started to peak in Sweetwater County. And because of the OPEC oil embargo, oil and gas exploration was really building. So Rock Springs went from basically a dead or dying town to a huge boomtown. Its population swells from 12,000 to 26,000 people. And it attracted all sorts of incoming laborers and workers, it was in an extreme boom. And then, with all the things that come with boomtowns, it started to have some notoriety.