2. I mean, don't these guys do cold cases anymore?

I couldn’t help but notice just a couple of weeks ago that the Portland FBI office is offering a $50 thousand reward for information leading to the arrest of a man, identified as one David Durham, who’s accused of shooting a Lincoln City police officer back in 2011.

According to the press release, when the officer pulled him over for a traffic infraction there was an exchange of gunfire. The officer was wounded, Durham somehow managed to escape and he hasn’t been seen since.

As Kiernan Ramsey, the special agent in charge of the Portland office explained, the reward is being offered “in hopes that someone will come forward with information that will help us find Durham.”

“The fact” he said, “that David Durham has been a free man for a decade after nearly killing a Lincoln City police officer is unacceptable.”

And while it does the heart good to see the FBI sticking up for a fellow member of the law enforcement community like this, it also occurs to me that if the FBI can offer a $50 thousand dollar reward on behalf of a Lincoln City policeman who got wounded doing a traffic stop, it might  also be able to come up with at least that much for a ranking law enforcement official who was murdered in the performance of his duties. Stabbed to death, as a matter of fact, ­in front of the Department of Corrections office building where he worked in Salem, the night before he was scheduled to appear before a legislative committee and discuss the rats’ nest of corruption he’d discovered within his own department.

Or to put it another way: With the complete exoneration of the state’s chosen patsy and the murder of Michael Francke now quite officially an open case again, why isn’t the FBI, or for that matter, anyone else in a position of authority in Oregon, in politics or law enforcement, the least bit interested in finding out who killed him or why?

It kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if this isn’t just a continuation of the original cover-up in the Francke case, which was of course massive and instantaneous.

This is the Department of Corrections headquarters, or Dome Building, pretty much as it appeared in 1989. It has since been painted a reddish brown. Michael Francke’s body was found on the porch to the left of the photo.

The investigation of Francke’s murder was itself little more than a cover-up and the trial was a farce. As now seems clear, virtually everyone in official Salem, and not just those who might have been involved in the murder itself, had secrets they couldn’t afford to let see the light of day.

That goes for Corrections, of course, but also for the state police, whose drug enforcement shenanigans intersected all too nicely with the rampant prison drug trade. And for the Marion County DA’s office, too, which had its own extensive history of suppressed scandals to worry about.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the state’s Department of Justice, the AG’s office, which happened to have in its employ a lawyer who many of those familiar with this case consider a prime suspect in the plot to kill Michael Francke.

If indeed, of course, there was a plot to kill Franke in the first place. As I hope I’ve made clear, as far as I’m concerned this is still a great big mystery.

And if you’re still wondering why the current crop of Salem poohbahs is still so completely uninterested in getting to the bottom of it, it helps to keep in mind that they’re all the political descendants of the same machine that was running things back in 1989. Especially the state’s AG Ellen Rosenblum, who, bless her heart, has not only spent the last several years of her life trying to put the patsy Frank Gable back in prison, but also happens to be the protege of another one of the other major players in the original cover-up.

As probably not too many people are aware, shortly after the Francke murder the Portland FBI office, which was then not as lackadaisical as it appears to be now, actually poked around the Corrections department in Salem and came up with enough troubling questions that they felt a formal investigation was in order. I was told this, by the way, off the record at the time, by John McGinnis, who was then the number two ranking agent in the Portland office.

As McGinnis explained to me, in order to proceed, however, they had to submit a proforma request to the U.S Attorney’s office, which was always rubber-stamped whatever they said they wanted to do.

But this time, to the astonishment of everyone at the FBI, it came back denied. And you’ve got to have a lot of political juice to pull off something like that. But who could have gotten to the U.S. Attorney, Charles Turner, who didn’t appear to have a dog in this fight himself?

Over the years, though, as more documents from this time period have become available, it’s become clear that the person able to work this behind-the-scenes magic was none other than Oregon’s then-governor Neil Goldschmidt.

It was bulldog reporter Jim Redden of the Portland Tribune who found it in the state Archive – a memo from Goldschmidt’s legal advisor Corey Streisinger to the governor himself, game-planning along with the guv on how to keep the FBI from getting involved in the Francke case.

And why, you might wonder, would Goldschmidt, who like so many of the other participants in the cover-up almost certainly had nothing to do with the murder itself, have found it so vital to keep the FBI from investigating something he wasn’t involved in?

As we know now he had his own dirty secrets to hide. At this very time, he was in fact negotiating with the lawyers for a young woman he’d been screwing – well, what is the proper way to say it? – when he was mayor of Portland and she was a 13-year-old freshman at St. Mary’s Academy. And that, of course, is what our friends in the law enforcement business call statutory rape.

And whether Goldschmidt was simply worried that the FBI might happen upon this deep dark secret, or, as I think more likely, whether he was being blackmailed by others in Salem who had an even more urgent need to keep the lid clamped down tight, we’ll probably never really don’t know for sure. But one way or another it’s a story worth pursuing in greater detail, which is what we’ll be doing next week.

In the meantime, though, I should tell you that the idea of getting the FBI to offer a big cash reward strikes me as such a good one that and I’ve actually sent out feelers to various quarters on the matter, and I’ll certainly let you know if I hear anything back.

Don’t hold your breath, though, because this thing has been highly political from the start.