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Oregonian,
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Author: NOELLE
CROMBIE and LES ZAITZ - The Oregonian
Summary: An
investigation of the Oregon prisons chief's shocking death 16 years ago finds
no evidence to support the convicted killer's alibi or the conspiracy theories
still swirling around one of the state's most notorious murders
Michael Francke
stepped into the cool winter night, the pressure of another day as Oregon's
prison chief behind him, when he spotted someone rifling through the front seat
of his state-issued
"Hey, what are you
doing in my car?" Francke yelled, according to one witness.
As Francke approached, Frank
Gable, a small-time meth dealer and ex-con, swung
from the driver's side with a blade. He stabbed Francke three times, one thrust
piercing his heart.
Within minutes, Francke bled
to death.
That is the official
version of one of
It is not Kevin Francke's
version.
Possessed by sadness and
anger, Michael Francke's
younger brother has held tight to a more sinister theory: A constellation of
shadowy figures, from high-ranking bureaucrats to ex-cons, conspired to kill
his brother to cover up widespread corruption inside the state's prison system.
In his quest, Francke has
befriended Gable and is convinced he is innocent.
The
Now, Goldschmidt's point
man for reform was himself a homicide victim. And finding the killer wasn't
easy. Investigators searched for 16 months before charging Gable -- creating a
news vacuum that sucked in a gusher of speculation, rumor and innuendo worthy
of the darkest whodunit.
Sixteen years later,
doubts still echo about the case. They are fed by Francke's conviction that a
conspiracy led to his brother's death and by Gable's appeal, which argues that
his lawyers never presented his alibi at trial.
In an effort to get to
the bottom of one of the state's most sensational crimes, The Oregonian
conducted the deepest examination of the case since Gable's conviction in 1991.
Over five months, reporters reviewed thousands of pages of documents, tracked
down dozens of key figures, and spent more than eight hours interviewing Gable.
In the end, the paper
found no substance to Kevin Francke's conspiracy theory. Nor does Gable's alibi hold
up: The witnesses and evidence he cites fail to account for his whereabouts at
the time Francke
was stabbed.
Kevin Francke's
theories might be easily dismissed as the obsession of a grief-stricken brother
if it weren't for Phil Stanford, a former columnist with The Oregonian who now
writes for the
Stanford was one of
Kevin Francke's
earliest and most influential advocates. In more than 60 columns he wrote on
the murder before he left The Oregonian in 1994, Stanford hammered at the
corruption theme -- "Franckegate" he called
it.
He has vigorously
championed Gable's innocence in columns over the past year.
Far from shedding new
light on the murder, the evidence shows that Francke and Stanford, now
friends, have mostly recycled stale information. They have been effective in
sowing doubt but not much else.
Not even Gable, now 45,
thinks much of his friends' version of what happened that night.
In his interviews with
The Oregonian, Gable summed up his view of the conspiracy theory with one word:
"Madness."
A TORMENTED BROTHER
Skepticism dogged the
case against Gable from the start. After all, no physical evidence linked Gable
to the murder.
Prosecutors relied
heavily on the testimony of ex-cons and drug addicts. To many, the idea that
To Kevin Francke,
things didn't add up. In 1990, he ditched his life in
Francke, now 51,
sank into the city's underworld. He eventually married the ex-girlfriend of the
man he now thinks is the real killer. He remains tormented by his brother's
death.
"It just wasn't
supposed to go down like that with him," Francke wrote in an e-mail to
The Oregonian.
Francke becomes
emotional, sometimes tearing up, when he talks about his brother. In
interviews, he described an indomitable presence, an athlete, a much admired
sibling and cowboy with his own way of doing things.
But at the time of his
death, the 42-year-old Francke was a troubled man.
His second marriage was
unraveling. Shortly before the murder, his wife, Bingta,
had left, taking their young son. Child support and tuition from Francke's
earlier marriage, plus his own spending habits, had stretched their finances.
They had to borrow from family and Francke's co-workers to pay for ordinary expenses.
At work, Francke
absorbed crushing pressure.
Goldschmidt had high
hopes for Francke,
a charming and articulate administrator from a new generation in prison
management. Corrections leaders typically came from the ranks of wardens and
superintendents. Francke
was a University of Virginia law school graduate, former assistant attorney
general and judge.
But not long after Francke's
arrival, his blunders got his boss's attention.
Memos and correspondence
from Goldschmidt's archives show that Francke was often out of step
with the governor's agenda.
He alienated lawmakers
by making spending decisions without their OK. Though Francke loved the public
spotlight, he seemed to have a tin ear for politics.
Lawmakers trusted by
Goldschmidt quietly complained, and he feared Francke was becoming a liability.
A month before the murder, Goldschmidt sent his prisons chief a scathing
two-page memo.
"There's no room
for more speeches about 'We don't have a crime problem,' or 'Prisons won't
help,' " Goldschmidt wrote.
Blasting Francke's
management style, he added: "This is more of a warning than anything else.
. . . I don't want every issue or decision to be dumped on me."
In the weeks before his
death, Francke
was on the phone regularly with Goldschmidt's office as he prepared for an
upcoming presentation to lawmakers. "Corrections told to watch
budget" was the top story on a copy of The (
The typical tenure for
corrections administrators was short, and Francke was looking ahead. On
He planned to be in
THE CONVERSATION
To hear Kevin Francke tell
it, Michael Francke
was looking over his shoulder. He slept with a loaded .45 under his pillow. He
talked about surrounding himself with people he could trust.
Francke's version of his brother's death has been shaped by
ex-convicts, inmates and other sources he cultivated around
His suspicions started
with a phone call.
Sometime in the year
before his brother's death, Francke contends, Michael Francke told him he had
uncovered an "organized criminal element" in the prison system. He
planned to shake up his staff. He didn't mention names.
At the time, Kevin Francke
didn't find the comment remarkable, he told The Oregonian. Michael Francke
never mentioned it again. Later, after the murder, Francke cited the conversation
to suggest that his brother was killed by someone in state government.
An examination of media
accounts and police interviews over the years shows that Francke has shifted accounts of
this crucial conversation, however, casting doubt on its reliability.
Francke has
variously placed it the Friday before the murder, less than a month before his
brother's death and around Thanksgiving. His former-wife, now deceased, told a
reporter in 1990 that the conversation never took place.
Recently, Francke told
The Oregonian he cannot recall when the conversation happened. And he says it
might not have been a phone call: His brother may have mentioned the
"organized criminal element" during a visit to Kevin's home in
Last year, Francke also
added a new detail to the conversation by naming the supposed mastermind behind
his brother's murder: Scott McAlister, a former assistant attorney general who
had once represented the Corrections Department.
In one of Stanford's
Tribune columns last August, Kevin Francke said his brother was troubled by McAlister.
"It's him or
me," Kevin said his brother told him.
But if the conversation
took place in the weeks before the murder -- as Kevin Francke has said -- it's unlikely Michael Francke would have been worried
about McAlister.
In early December,
McAlister announced that he was resigning.
He was headed to
THE ALLEGED PLOT
Scott McAlister, now 58,
raised in small-town
McAlister's personnel
file at the attorney general's office portrays him as a hard worker with sharp
legal skills. But in an interview with The Oregonian, he acknowledged that his
personal life was the subject of gossip about the time of Francke's murder.
McAlister said he was a
womanizer and hard drinker. After leaving
In Kevin Francke's
conspiracy plot, McAlister holds center stage.
Francke depicts
him as a corrupt bureaucrat who was cozy with inmates and benefited from some
kind of black-market prison trade.
His brother threatened
to halt McAlister's dealings, Francke believes, so McAlister turned to underworld
associates, including Timothy Natividad, a
24-year-old
The murder plot, Francke
maintains, called for Natividad and two other men to
force the prison chief into his car and drive off, kill him and make it appear
like suicide.
Something went wrong, Francke
says, and Natividad ended up sneaking behind Francke as
he walked to his car, spinning him around and thrusting the knife into his
chest.
Kevin Francke has
never produced credible evidence to support this version of events. Nor can he
explain why someone would kill his brother in a state parking lot when he
presented a far easier target at his rural
Instead, Francke
relies on witness accounts that are vague or unreliable, The Oregonian found.
Records show that police
and investigators for Gable's defense interviewed four witnesses who implicated
Natividad in the murder.
Two of the witnesses
were Melody Garcia and her inmate husband, Konrad.
In July 1989, Melody
Garcia, then 41, told detectives that Natividad had
asked her months before the killing if she knew someone who would commit a
murder. Police reports say she later assumed he was talking about Francke --
though he never specified.
"I told him I knew
a lot of crazy people," Garcia told police.
"Natividad wouldn't tell me who he was supposed to
kill."
Jodie Swearingen,
another of the four to implicate Natividad, gave
conflicting accounts. In one, she said she was standing by a tree when she saw Natividad stab Francke. In another, she told a
Police found Swearingen,
a teenager, so hard to pin down that she underwent 13 polygraphs during their
investigation. She ultimately appeared as a defense witness at Gable's trial,
claiming she had lied when she fingered him.
Swearingen, now 33,
declined to be interviewed by The Oregonian.
The fourth witness was
Kevin Francke's
wife, Elizabeth, formerly Elizabeth Godlove, who at
the time of Francke's
murder was Natividad's girlfriend.
And her account of Natividad's involvement is fuzzy on critical points, The
Oregonian's investigation found.
A DEAD SUSPECT
In August of 1990, Godlove told Gable's defense team that Natividad
came home in a panic during the early morning hours "on or about" the
night of the murder. She noticed a wound on his leg and a gash on his head.
A day or two later, Natividad told her he'd killed a man.
But when Godlove relayed the story to police in September 1990, she
said she couldn't be certain the night Natividad
arrived home with wounds was the same night Francke was stabbed.
"Tim never told her
who he killed or where it happened,"
Police ran down leads on
Natividad, testing his knives and clothing. But they
found no link to the murder.
Today, the theory that Natividad was the murderer remains part of Gable's legal
appeal.
Nonetheless, Gable told
The Oregonian that he doesn't think Natividad was
involved.
"I just don't see
him (McAlister) going and hiring some low-level dope fiend or drug addict to go
do a murder," Gable said. "It don't make no
sense."
Natividad's own story will never be known -- Godlove
shot and killed him two weeks after Francke's death. A jury acquitted her that spring after she
claimed Natividad had been abusing her for years and
had held a gun to her head the day she killed him.
Godlove and Kevin Francke married in 1994.
To Francke, the motives of Natividad and McAlister are obvious.
With Michael Francke
gone, Natividad would have had an easy time peddling
drugs in prison. And McAlister had two reasons to kill his brother, Francke
speculates.
One was professional --
he wanted Francke's
job. The second was malice -- McAlister sought revenge for something that
happened on a vacation he and Francke had taken the previous March.
In 1988, Michael Francke told
his brother he was going skiing near
When he asked what
happened, his brother didn't answer. Later, Kevin Francke learned that McAlister
was on the trip. Something "horribly horrendous" in
Records cast doubt on
the scenario, however.
Michael Francke's
carefully documented travel schedule from 1988 shows he didn't leave
Far from arranging a
hasty retreat, Francke
canceled his return flight and drove 10 hours from
McAlister shared the
ride with him.
AN EX-LOVER'S STATEMENT
For Kevin Francke, one
of the most tantalizing pieces of evidence against McAlister sits in the dozens
of boxes containing Gable's voluminous defense files.
It's an 11-page
statement by Linda Parker, one of McAlister's ex-girlfriends, who says she
heard McAlister and friends at a dinner party in July 1989 discuss how Francke's
death was supposed to look like a suicide.
Writing in the Tribune
last fall, Stanford called the document "dynamite." The newly
"unearthed" statement, he wrote, and other "revelations" might
be enough to get Gable a new trial.
But Parker's statement
is nothing new. It's been sitting in defense files for 15 years.
At the time, Gable's
lawyer, Bob Abel, dismissed the account as not credible.
Parker and McAlister,
who worked together at the Utah Department of Corrections, had a romance that
ended bitterly.
Parker sued the state
and McAlister for sexual harassment and received a $95,000 settlement.
Today, Parker, now Linda
Neff, stands by her original statement.
She says she did not
know what McAlister was talking about when she overheard the dinner
conversation.
Neff, a paralegal in
Denver, says it took years and a dozen electroshock treatments to resolve her
troubled feelings over McAlister.
One person Neff says
attended that night has no recollection of the party. Harol
Whitley, a retired Oregon corrections official and friend of McAlister's, says
the discussion Neff describes never took place.
McAlister also denies
Parker's story, saying the dinner party never happened.
In August 1989,
McAlister passed a polygraph exam about Francke's murder. Police
records show he answered no when asked if he killed Francke, if he knew the
killer's identity and whether he conspired to have Francke killed.
McAlister, now a
criminal defense attorney in Tempe, Ariz., remains mystified by theories
linking him to the murder.
A map to his home and
his photograph, taken recently by an ex-con associate of Kevin Francke's,
are posted on a Web site dedicated to freeing Gable.
McAlister says he
ignores the case.
"I feel sorry for
Kevin in this respect," McAlister told The Oregonian. "It's hard to
think your brother died for no good reason."
THE COLUMNIST
Other theories
proliferated during the long span between the murder and Gable's arrest. Some
came from Michael Francke's
family and friends. Many came from inmates. Maybe he was killed by the Mexican
mafia or vengeful ex-cons, the talk went.
Detectives sifted
through the fine details of Francke's life, looking for a jilted lover, a wronged
co-worker, an ex-con with a grudge. They combed the Corrections Department for
evidence of corruption.
But the trails fizzled,
and the speculation grew.
"Without any real
facts to go on," Stanford wrote on
It was his first column
on the case for The Oregonian, and it set the tone for many that speculated on
a murder plot.
Stanford often gave
Kevin Francke
a voice in his columns, portraying him as a crusading hero, a brother out to
uncover the truth.
Francke says he
remembers how interested Stanford was in the case and how quickly the two
"hit it off."
"His antennas were
up," Francke
says. "He was picking up the frequency that something was wrong."
Stanford co-wrote a screenplay
for a 1995 movie based on the murder, "Without Evidence." The film
perpetuated the conspiracy myth, offering $1 million for information leading to
the killer's conviction.
"I remain convinced
there's more to it than came out in the trial, and I'm going to keep trying to
prove it," Stanford told a reporter in 1997, after he had left The
Oregonian and was working as a radio host.
Stanford declined to be
interviewed or respond to questions for this story. In a March 16 e-mail to The
Oregonian, he characterized Gable's conviction as "a disturbing
miscarriage of justice."
"Why is this man
serving life without parole for a crime he didn't commit?" he wrote.
"And if he didn't, who did?"
LOTS OF DEAD ENDS
Stanford's columns at
The Oregonian rippled through the ranks of the homicide investigators.
When Dennis O'Donnell,
retired deputy superintendent of the
Stanford laid out what to
O'Donnell sounded like a bewildering scheme that involved inmates being let out
on weekends to go to Arizona, where they would buy drugs. They would return to
prison and pay kickbacks to guards, who would launder the cash through their
retirement accounts.
"When I walked out
of there, my eyes were crossed it was so screwy," O'Donnell told The
Oregonian. Still, whenever Stanford uncovered new information, O'Donnell spent
evenings trying to chase it down.
Stanford's leads went
nowhere, O'Donnell says.
In the summer of 1989,
Stanford called then-U.S. Attorney Charles Turner. He told the prosecutor he
had information supporting a possible conspiracy.
Turner agreed to meet, and he invited then-Marion County District Attorney
Dale Penn to join them. But Stanford offered no evidence to back his theory,
Turner says.
"He didn't have
anything with him -- no telephone records, no photographs, no documents,"
Turner recalled in an interview with The Oregonian. "There was nothing,
absolutely nothing, of substance."
Still, Stanford's
columns made Goldschmidt's aides jittery.
"I normally don't
take Phil Stanford very seriously," Goldschmidt press secretary Gregg Kantor wrote his boss that June. "But today's piece on
corruption in the Corrections Department has me worried."
Soon after, Goldschmidt
appointed John Warden, a retired
Likewise, the Oregonian
looked for any credible evidence suggesting Michael Francke had confided to his
colleagues about discovering corruption in his agency and found none.
THE CASE AGAINST GABLE
While promoting the
notion of a murder plot, Stanford and Kevin Francke have also attacked the
case against Gable. The addicts and ex-cons who testified at his trial had good
reason to cooperate with police, they say. Two witnesses, including Swearingen,
have recanted statements implicating Gable.
But those assertions
ignore incriminating remarks that Gable made to police and to four other trial
witnesses, including Gable's former wife, each of whom told The Oregonian they
stand by their accounts.
The ex-wife, Janyne Vierra, described to The
Oregonian a tearful confession she says Gable made three or four months after
the murder. During an argument, Gable told his wife she didn't understand the
pressure he was under.
"I stuck the
guy," Gable said, sobbing.
"What guy?"
she asked.
"The guy at the
hospital," Gable answered. Francke's office was on the state hospital grounds, where Vierra worked as a nurse at the time.
Gable flatly denied any
part of Vierra's account, calling his ex-wife
vengeful.
Kevin Francke, who
deals in real estate and runs a day care out of his Salem home with his wife,
said he talks about his brother's murder every day. He freely admits his
theories are speculative, arguing that "anything other than Mike Francke's
testimony is speculation."
He insists he is neither
obsessed nor crazy.
"It's a very fine
distinction between a nut and a hero," he says. "I don't want to
paint myself as a Don Quixote out there chasing windmills. There has been a
horrible wrong committed."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Reporters
Noelle Crombie and Les Zaitz
began investigation the Michael Francke murder late last year. They examined approximately
90,000 pages of police, defense and state Justice Department documents, some of
which have never been public. They interviewed 60 people and traveled twice to