"FACTS DISPUTE FRANKE CONSPIRACY."

The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon). 2005.

Portland, Oregon. June 20, 2023. This is a copy of a 2005 article which was published by the Oregonian Newspaper. It is shared here to illustrate the importance of accurate journalism and the moral implications as to why accuracy and fairness is important in journalism.

The biased and faulty message of this Oregonian article was that accused and then later, “convicted murderer” Frank Gable was in fact guilty of the vicious 1989 murder of Michael Franke.

As we now understand, Frank Gable did not commit the murder of Michael Francke, and has been fully exonerated, “without prejudice.” This occurred in March 2023, by the venerable Judge John V. Acosta, clearly a man who honors the bench.

This copied article demonstrates that when there is “no physical evidence” to tie a person to a murder scene, that could be because the accused was not present and not responsible for said murder.

This is something all journalists might want to remember when taking on the enormous challenge of writing articles filled with incorrect declarations and false assertions about a complex homicide and who may or may not be guilty.

*If there is no physical evidence to tie a person to a crime, it may be because they were not there.

If anything, what this 2005 hit piece article does accomplish in it’s careless, faulty reasoning, is it makes the case that prison corruption was at the core of the motive to murder Michael Francke. It does this in what it repeatedly refuses to consider a viable possibility and that is the very stark reality of … PRISON CORRUPTION being a present and historically relevant aspect of American culture.

Repeatedly, the article scoffs at the idea of prison corruption being even a remote possibility in Oregon. Repeatedly, the two journalists claim that according to their “investigation” into the murder, “The Oregonian” found no connection to prison corruption, and any motive to murder Michael Francke.

They were wrong.

Anyone who has studied criminology, criminal causation, juvenile justice, the courts, prison administration, or the history of American and European prisons is fully aware that prison corruption is and has always been a consistent challenge for prison administrators and staff.

When corrections officers work in such confined and often unsupervised quarters, corruption and even regular occurrences of rape become easy. This is common knowledge for any criminology major completing a university degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice.

Did Noelle Crombie and Les Zietz really not understand how patterns of prison corruption come about, and how those patterns are as American as apple pie?

Seriously?

When newspapers and journalists do not carefully consider accuracy and sourcing, motive and the underlying dynamics that impact crime and how that impacts prison corruption when they write about crime, they produce yellow journalism instead.

Cheap, yellow journalism benefits no one, and in fact devastates lives. When armchair investigators don’t have common sense or understand the complexities of the human condition, they can’t tell the difference between a cold blooded killer and a person who would never kill. In a nutshell that was what Noelle Crombie and Les Zaitz demonstrated, themselves, when they wrote their notoriously flawed 2005 hit piece, on Frank Gable and the 1989 Michael Francke murder.

When they forgot that in America citizens are innocent until proven guilty, they lost credibility.

They sacrificed their reputations for the business end, for sales, clicks and for money.

~Theresa Griffin Kennedy

*****************************************************************

FACTS DISPUTE FRANKE CONSPIRACY

The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)

May 22, 2005 Sunday, SUNRISE EDITION

Copyright 2005. The Sunday Oregonian

Section: LOCAL STORIES; Pg. A01

Length: 3746 words

Byline: NOELLE CROMBIE and LES ZAITZ - The Oregonian

BODY

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 states most notorious murders.

Micheal Franke 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 Pontiac.

“Hey, what are you doing in my car?” Franke yelled, according to one witness.

As Franke approached, Frank Gable, a small-time meth dealer and ex-con, swung from the driver’s side with a blade. He stabbed Franke three times, one thrust piercing his heart. Within minutes, Franke bled to death.

That is the official version of one of Oregon’s most notorious murders.

It is not Kevin Francke’s version.

Possessed by sadness and anger, Micheal 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 Jan. 17, 198 murder of Michael Francke marked a pivotal moment for Oregon. The killing came as Francke oversaw a historic expansion of the state's prisons under a demanding boss, Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, who made corrections reform a top priority in an era when victims demanded ever-harsher punishment for criminals.

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 brothers death and by Gables 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 Francke was stabbed.

Keven 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 Portland Tribune.

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 Oregon’s corrections chief could be the casualty of an ordinary car burglary seemed too simple to be true.

To Kevin Francke, things didn’t add up. In 1990, he ditched his life in Florida, packed his Chevrolet Caprice and headed to Salem to investigate.

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 say 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 fiances. 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 ranges 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 he 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 (Salem) Statesman-Journal found in his car.

The typical tenure for corrections administrators was short, and Francke was looking ahead. On Jan.3,1989, he had fired off his resume to a New Mexico firm, according to a review of his computer files.

He planned to be in Oregon only one more year.

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 Salem. They confided dark secrets of the state penitentiary, a world where Kevin Francke suspected that officials brokered drug deals and doctored the books of prison operations.

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 gook 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 Florida the summer before he died.

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.

“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 he was resigning. He was headed to Utah to take a new job with that state’s prison system.

THE ALLEGED PLOT

Scott McAlister, now 58, raised in small-town Oregon and educated at Duke University law school, had a reputation as a cock renegade that made him a liability in the eyes of the consensus-building Michael Francke.

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 Oregon, he was convicted in Utah of a misdemeanor for possessing two videos depicting teen sex -- evidence from an old case McAlister prosecuted.

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 Salem meth dealer with a violent streak.

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 look 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 his 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 Marion County home, where he lived alone.

Instead, Francke relies on witness accounts that are vague or unreliable, The Oregonian Found.

Records show that police and investigators for Gables 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 Marion County grand jury that Gable was the killer.

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, he 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,” Oregon State Police Detective Loren Glover wrote in his report.

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 murder 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 Reno, Nev., after a conference. Kevin Francke maintains his brother never hit the slopes and instead booked a flight home the next morning. Francke recalls that the last-minute change cost his brother an extra $218.

When he asked what had happened, his brother didn’t answer. Later, Kevin Francke learned that McAlister was on the trip. Something “horribly horrendous” in Reno triggered McAlister’s plan to kill his brother, Francke believes.

Records cast doubt on the scenario, however.

Michael Francke’s carefully documented travel schedule from 1988 shows he didn’t leave Oregon for work in March. Instead, the records say he went to Nevada in January and met with McAlister in Reno.

Far from arranging a hasty retreat, Francke canceled his return flight and drove 10 hours from Reno to Salem.

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 heart McAlister and friends at a dinner party in July of 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 known 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 to a website 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-con’s, the talk went.

Detectives sifted through the fine details of Francke’s life, looking fir a jilted lover, a wronged co-worker, an ex-con with a grudge. They combed the Corrections Department fir evidence of corruption.

But the trails fizzled, and the speculation grew.

“Without any real facts to go on,” Stanford wrote on Feb. 8, 1989 “the mind can entertain an endless number of possibilities.”

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 homicide investigators.

When Dennis O’Donnell, retired deputy superintendent of the Oregon State Police, was assigned to oversee the Francke case, one of the first things he did as call the columnist.

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 Oregon appellate judge, to lead an independent review. The three-month inquiry and follow-up investigations found no connection between Francke’s murder and prison corruption.

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 Gables former wife, each of whom told The Oregonian they stand by their accounts.

The ex-wife, Janye Vierra, described to The Oregonian a tearful confession she says Gable made three or four months after the murder. During the 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 or 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.”

EDITORS NOTE: Reporters Noelle Crombie and Les Zaitz began investigating 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 Florida to meet with Frank Gable.

Final Reflection:

Portland, Oregon, June 20, 2023. Part of what makes this deplorable “hit piece” article so enjoyable to read is that it’s now 2023 and not 2005. This article represents a kind of journalistic ancient history.

The article is filled with so many omissions, so many over simplifications and so much pro-establishment propaganda, that it is honestly comical to read.

With what we now know about Gable’s innocence, and the pervasive prison corruption that actually did exist in Salem, corroborated by so many Salem drug people, as well as what we all know about Neil Goldschmidt being a rapist predator who raped a 13-year-old girl, Elizabeth Dunham, a straight A student who’s life instantly became derailed, dying at only 49, makes this article an important article to read, examine and think about.

Do a close reading. Read it aloud. Think about it and try not to laugh, while you try not to weep.

Because there is more than enough sadness and heartache to go around when you consider the colossal collateral damage that resulted from the 1989 murder of Michael Francke and all those who suffered.

That includes the entire Francke family, and of course, Frank Gable, an innocent man, framed for a crime he did not commit and would never have committed, given his stable temperament and generally humble and straightforward personality.

This article is important because of what it represents—crime, lies, ruthless elitist classism, protecting the powerful, at the expense of the little people of the world.

This story represents the theft of 33 years of TIME from Frank Gable’s life, a man who has now changed his name and left the state of Oregon, all in an effort to get away from the warped legal journey that defined and shaped his entire adult life and robbed him of so much.

We can read an article like this and laugh, at the mediocre writing, the mystery novel language, at all the known dynamics that exist in prisons the globe over, that were ignored and never broached in the article.

We can chuckle at how naive the authors were, in agreeing to write such a glowing example of yellow journalism and pro-establishment muck, because again, it is now 2023 and not 2005.

So, does the Oregonian Newspaper, and editor Therese Bottomly owe Frank Gable an apology for smearing him, and for slandering him? Do they owe Kevin and Patrick Francke an apology, for smearing the Francke family name ? Do they owe Phil Stanford an apology, for smearing him?

Do they owe an apology to the memory of Michael Francke? For smearing him with all of that nauseating victim blaming?

Yes, they do.

And again, they know it.

~Theresa Griffin Kennedy