19. A laptop on the front seat

Back in August when I started this series on what is now quite officially the unsolved murder of Michael Francke, I suppose I had some vague hope that someone in a position of authority in Oregon, in politics or law enforcement, would suffer a twinge of conscience and, you know, do something.

In fact about the time I was cranking this thing up, the Portland FBI put out a press release announcing that they were offering a $50 thousand reward for information leading to the apprehension of a suspect who shot and wounded a Lincoln City police officer in the course of a traffic stop some twelve years ago.

So foolish me, I figured if the FBI could show that sort of fraternal solidarity with an ordinary police officer, who thankfully recovered from his wounds, surely they could do something of the sort for the likes of Michael Francke.

I mean, here was a high-ranking law enforcement official, murdered in in the performance of his duties, in front of the state office building where he worked – but here’s the catch – on the night before he was scheduled to appear before a legislative committee and expose a rats’ nest of corruption he discovered within his own Corrections department.

Which is obviously why, some thirty years later, no one, or at least no one who might be able to do anything about it, wants to go near it.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I were in the law enforcement business, and maybe honest besides, I’d be just a tiny bit worried about the long-term implications of allowing high-ranking officers to be stabbed to death in front of their workplaces and then have the whole thing swept under the rug.

Although I’ve got to admit, I was not terribly surprised by the total lack of interest from the political types, whether in Salem or the state’s congressional offices in DC. They are, after all, the political descendants of the people who ran the cover-up in the first place. It’s one of the joys of a one-party state.

So in terms of provoking any sort of further action on the Francke case itself, this foray into the Substack wilds has obviously been a bust. If it has accomplished anything, I hope, it’s been to put the final nail in the state’s big lie – which from the beginning has been that Michael Francke wasn’t investigating corruption in the Corrections Department. And certainly, contrary to what his younger brother Kevin tried to tell everyone, that he wasn’t about to expose it – because, well, there just wasn’t any corruption to expose in the first place.

As we know now – and you can read about it in more detail in the  “It’s going to blow the top off” episode – the week before he was murdered Francke told Mike Burton, then a member of the state legislature, that he’d discovered rampant corruption within the Corrections Department and that he’d be testifying about it next week before the senate judiciary committee.

This is a 1988 NEC laptop like the one Michael Francke told Mike Burton he was using to conduct his corruption investigation. It apparently was taken the night of the murder, and as Burton told Dale Penn a couple of weeks later, “If you find the computer, you’ll find the murderer.”

He'd been conducting his own investigation, he said, and his findings were all there on an NEC laptop computer sitting between them on the front seat. They were driving back from a prison inspection in eastern Oregon at the time. His testimony, he said, was going to “blow the top off” a deeply embedded criminal enterprise he’d discovered within the Corrections Department and would result in criminal charges.

Burton’s somewhat belated revelation is hardly the only proof that Francke was about to expose the corruption within his department. There is of course Kevin’s statement, which I reported in the column I was doing for the Oregonian at the time. And since that time the officer’s notes of Kevin’s initial interview with state police and a Polaroid photo of the whiteboard from Francke’s staff meeting the night he was killed have also surfaced. The whiteboard lists the “A Shed” – a provable case of arson and insurance fraud that had recently occurred at the state prison – as the final topic Francke would be presenting to the legislative committee the next day.

But in the beginning, it was just Kevin against Dale Penn, the Marion County DA who was running this so-called investigation. After several months of listening to Penn’s public assurances that the murder was the result of a bungled car burglary, Kevin finally went public with the account of a phone conversation he'd had with his brother, about three weeks before the murder, in which Michael said he’d discovered an “organized criminal element” within his department and was about to “clean house.”

After the column came out, Penn fired back in a newspaper interview with his favorite lapdog reporter, declaring he’d never heard of such a thing before. And from then on, Penn and the state police, and yes, the Oregonian as well, tried to make Kevin out as crazed with grief or just an out-and-out liar.

With Burton, however, what we have is more than just further proof that Francke was about to expose the corruption he’d discovered within his department.

About two weeks after the murder, Burton remembers quite clearly, he met with Penn and told him what Francke had told him on their trip back from eastern Oregon. “If you find that computer,” he told Penn, “you’ll find the murderer.”

Which means, of course, that Penn was lying through his teeth when Kevin’s story about the phone conversation with his brother hit the papers and Penn said he’d never heard of such a thing before. In fact, he had to know from the beginning – if only because Burton spoke with him a week or so after the murder – that the murder almost certainly had something to do with Francke’s corruption investigation.

And why, you are probably asking, would a fine, upstanding district attorney deliberately look the other way after the murder of a public official? In Penn’s case it was because just three years before, in 1986, he’d supervised the cover-up of another Corrections scandal. So for him, and of course for the state police who did so much of the dirty work here, the Francke murder investigation was just the cover-up of a cover-up. This time the only difference was that they had to cover up a murder as well.

In a corruption scandal like this it’s usually their lies that give them away. And in this case, the first big lie was that Francke wasn’t investigating corruption in the Corrections Department, or was in fact, about to expose it and clean house.    

Which led, naturally enough, to their second big lie which was, in its entirety, the case against Frank Gable. In order to divert attention from the corruption, which any honest investigation would have pursued as a possible motive, they needed a patsy. As two federal courts have made unmistakably clear, the Marion County DA’s office and the state police simply made up every bit of evidence against him – and they got away with it for almost thirty years.

If it weren’t for federal public defender Nell Brown’s brilliant petition, Gable would still be locked up in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he had absolutely nothing to do with.

It’s worth remembering that Penn and his lead prosecutor Sarah Moore actually tried to kill Gable as well. Knowing full well, as they had to, that they’d made up all the evidence against him, they asked for the death penalty and came within two jury votes of getting it. That’s how evil this is.

And now they’d like to pretend it never happened? Somehow – and please let me know if I’ve misjudged the Oregonian on this – I don’t think that’s going to fly.

NOTE TO READERS: There’s obviously more to be said about the Francke case, and I’m sure I’ll be getting back to it sooner or later. But for now I’ve said all I want to say and I’ve decided to give it a rest for a while.  I’m taking off for the rest of the month – ‘tis the season, after all.

And when I do return, I’m going to be writing about another, very different story I’ve been intending to do for some time. Sort of a Goodfellas story but set in the seedy Portland of the 70s and 80s, in case you’re into that sort of thing.  Who knows, you might even learn how they engineered that famous jail break from Rocky Butte. Of course I’ll give you fair warning when I’m ready to roll.