14. Enter the Prince of Darkness
The unpleasant truth – based, if nothing else, on the rulings of two federal appeals courts which found that the Oregon State Police and Marion County DA’s office fabricated every bit of the evidence against Frank Gable – is that the Michael Francke murder investigation was just plain crooked.
What they needed, of course, was a patsy to draw attention away from the very real possibility that someone in Corrections, or perhaps several of them, commissioned the murder.
Which goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise silly efforts of the state police to get Liz Godlove to change her story about seeing Tim Natividad meet with the former prison lawyer, Scott McAlister, shortly before the murder.
Or their utterly dismissive response to a report, passed on to the Francke Task Force by a prison counselor, that Natividad told a convict named Konrad Garcia he could get him out of prison in exchange for killing Francke. According to Garcia, the former prison lawyer, Scott McAlister, was involved in that one too.
The state police officer who was then obliged to interview Garcia wrote a brief CYA report dismissing Garcia’s claims and not even mentioning McAlister.
The state police never even pretended to make a pass at investigating either Natividad, who some thirty years of research later, stands out as the most likely perpetrator of the actual murder. And the same goes for McAlister, who, whether he’s guilty or not of anything related to the murder, should at least have been given a chance to clear the air. While writing his episode I certainly reached out to him with some questions of my own but haven’t heard back yet.
McAlister, who was actually employed by the state’s AG’s office, had served thirteen years as the lawyer assigned to the Corrections Department when Francke forced him out of job just a week before the murder. From Oregon, McAlister went directly to a job as Inspector General for the Utah prison system in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he quickly got in trouble again.
Much of this information, by the way, comes from an affidavit by a woman named Linda Parker, who would successfully sue him and the state of Utah for sexual harassment and then testify against him in a child pornography case in which McAlister eventually pled guilty.
Parker became McAlister’s secretary shortly after he moved to Utah. Shortly after he arrived, she said, he started bringing in people he’d surrounded himself with in Oregon.
It was a cult-like group, as she saw it. Including a policeman, Al Imig, who was a sort of gofer. A woman named Grace Caudill, who Parker said brought McAlister coke from Oregon and later took over her job as secretary when she refused to participate in group sex.
And finally, Harol Whitley, who’d been director of security at the Oregon State Prison until he was forced to resign in the ’86 scandal. McAlister quickly found Whitley a job at a prison near Salt Lake.
McAlister himself, Parker said, was obsessed with power and reveled in his ability to make or break people. His nickname, which he gave himself, was The Iceman. He had a sign made for his office door: The Iceman, Prince of Darkness.
“People who did not please Scott McAlister, whether they were inmates or corrections personnel, were put on Scott’s hit list,” Parker said. For example there was an inmate named Tom Humphries who’d been fighting Corrections over double bunking in a cell built for just one person. McAlister arranged to have a hypodermic needle and syringe planted in Humphries’ cell and Humphries was put in isolation. She was in the office when McAlister and Imig set it up.
A couple of months after she became McAlister’s secretary, Parker, who was going through a rough divorce herself, and McAlister started dating. Not long after that, she said, McAlister started putting pressure on her to engage in group sex – and when she refused, he urged her to start doing coke “to help me relax and feel better about it.” She refused that too.
She saw McAlister use coke in his office several times. “He kept a small bag of cocaine in the far back right side of his computer stand in his office,” she said. Once he told her he couldn’t have it delivered to his home any more so was going to have it sent to her home address. Parker said if he did that she’d notify the Postal Inspector so McAlister found another way to get it.
About this time, McAlister also gave her a box of pornographic films – which he apparently viewed as a sort of training aid for his group sex project – which Parker shoved into a closet and forgot about.
When it was finally clear that Parker wasn’t going to get with the program, McAlister transferred her to a mailroom job in an outlying prison. Buckling under to all the pressures she’d been subjected to – at this point McAlister was even conspiring with her ex-husband to have her declared an unfit mother – she tried to commit suicide by over-dosing on pills. After she recovered, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, which was eventually settled for $95 thousand.
About the time the sexual harassment lawsuit was being filed, the Salt Lake City FBI also learned about the box of pornographic films McAlister had left behind with Parker – which included two of special interest to them entitled “Young Arabian Nights” and “Pre-Teen Sex:” Child pornography, in other words – generally entitling the person in possession of it to several years in federal prison.
“In the criminal case against Scott McAlister,” Parker said, “I testified at a hearing in August 1990... All four of my tires were slashed that night. A few days later a delivery guy came to the door with an envelope for me. I opened it and it contained a note that said drop the suit or you’re dead. I have been told the police caught a guy who was a former inmate. I understand he admitted he had been sent by Scott McAlister.”
But McAlister’s luck, if that’s what it is – and some speculate that he was able to call in favors from the same officials who’d protected him in Oregon – held out again. Instead of being arraigned in federal court, he was charged with a violation of state law – to which he pled guilty and was sentenced to serve a week in the Salt Lake jail.
Soon afterward he moved to Arizona, where his luck must have held out once more because he was allowed to keep his license to practice law. In fact, if you’re looking for a particular kind of lawyer – and please don’t consider this a recommendation one way or the other – you can still find him listed in the Tempe phone directory.
But we haven’t even come to the kicker from Parker’s affidavit yet. In the summer of 1989, which would have been about six months after McAlister took the Utah job, there was a dinner party at his house.
“I cooked the dinner,” Parker said. “Al Imig, Grace Caudill, Scott, and Harol and Wanda Whitley were all there. We were all in the living room when the subject of Michael Francke’s murder came up. ...
“Harol and Scott were talking and Grace was sitting on the floor near them. I walked out of the kitchen and stood by Scott and Harol. They were really talking Francke down. They all really disliked Francke. ...
“Scott said, ’Yeah, it’s really stupid. What was supposed to look like a suicide was really fucked up.’ Harol just looked at Scott.
“Scott said, ‘Everybody that knew him knew that he never used that door’.”
What McAlister is referring to here is the door to the north portico where Francke’s body was found later that night. After he was stabbed, he’d apparently crawled there to try to get back into his office.
If McAlister knows what he’s talking about – and it’s obviously up to him at this point to say if he doesn’t – then what this means is that the plan was to intercept Francke as he left the Dome Building that night through the main entrance. Then hold him – undoubtedly at gunpoint – take him back to his office, and shoot him with his own handgun, which he always carried in his briefcase, to make it look like a suicide.
Instead, Francke surprised them, leaving by the door onto the north portico, which adjoined his office – and when he did, all their plans to make it look like a suicide flew out the window.
“They were stupid,” Parker remembered hearing McAlister say. And maybe they were.
But who were “they,” to use McAlister’s own intriguing plural pronoun? And how in the world does McAlister seem to know so much about what actually went down that night?
All of which might have been good questions to ask him at the time. But of course he was never questioned by the state investigators. And to the very end, the Marion County DA Dale Penn would maintain there was no need to do so because McAlister was not a suspect in the Francke murder.
And although Gable’s defense attorney, Bob Abel, had the affidavit a full five months before the trial began, he never once brought it up during the trial. Neither Natividad’s or McAlister’s name ever surfaced in those proceeding.
Abel’s chief investigator Tom McCallum says he believes Abel had an agreement with the presiding judge Greg West “not to waste time or money on this corruption thing” in court – and Abel, whether from sheer incompetence or something else again, never did.
The investigation was a cover-up but the trial was a farce.
Anne, the only real investigation of the official investigators in this case was performed by the federal public defender, Nell Brown, who demonstrated to the satisfaction of two federal appeals courts that the case against Gable was a complete put-up job. The result of "government misconduct," as the Ninth Circuit Court put it. I doubt, however, that the state police or prosecutors who were responsible for this miscarriage of justice will ever be subject to the sort of investigation I believe you're suggesting. The current crop of politicians and law enforcement officials in Oregon would like to pretend it never happened.
Any proper investigation would have immediately looked into Scott, and the relationship he had with Mike. Mike fires McAllister and a week later is murdered outside his office, come on.