17. "If you want to know who did it, he's over there"

A week after the trial Kevin got a call from Tom McCallum, the head defense investigator, asking him if he’d be interested in a copy of the state’s “discovery,” which is legal jargon for the prosecution’s investigative records, which they are required to turn over to the defense before trial.

There were thirty bankers boxes of them. And although, as we now know, the state police investigation was little more than a cover-up, they contained all sorts of intriguing leads the official investigators had received – usually on the Francke Task Force tip sheet – and then done their best to ignore.

Among them was the one from a prison inmate, Konrad Garcia, that shortly before the murder a local gangster named Tim Natividad had approached him with a proposition to kill Michael Francke in exchange for getting out of prison.

A state police officer, Ken Pencyna, then did a short cover-your-ass follow-up report, not even mentioning that Garcia also thought the prison lawyer Scott McAlister was behind the deal – and as far as the official investigation was concerned, that was that.

Knowing what we do some thirty years later, it seems fairly obvious that Natividad was involved in the murder one way or another. The federal habeas corpus petition cites an affidavit by Vince Taylor, a longtime friend of Natividad’s and fellow drug dealer, saying Natividad told him several days before the murder that he was going to kill the head of Corrections. Then several days after the murder, Taylor said, Natividad showed him $30 thousand he said he’d been paid to do it.

And before that another former Natividad associate, Greg Kellcy, told Willamette Week’s Nigel Jaquiss that on the night of the murder he dropped Natividad off at the Dome Building, and when he picked him up later he was covered with blood. Kellcy also said he was with Natividad a few days later when Natividad  received a payoff of several thousand dollars from two Corrections officials.

At the time, however, immediately after the Gable trial, all Kevin really knew was that there was a rumor on the streets that Natividad was involved, and that his girlfriend, Liz Godlove, who’d previously been living with Natividad, thought so too. The night of the murder, she said, he came home looking like he’d been in a fight.

Then there was a tip, passed along by another dealer friend of Natividad’s, that shortly before the Francke murder Natividad had bragged to him that he was in the big time now. He had a connection, he said, and was selling directly into the Oregon State Prison.

But who was the connection? – that’s what Kevin wanted to know. Because if Natividad was in fact involved in the murder, it didn’t make sense that he was acting on his own.

The dealer didn’t know. All Natividad had told him was that it was the guy who stabbed his old lady over by the Dome Building a while back.

So Kevin started with Melody Garcia, Konrad Garcia’s wife. Pecyna’s police report said Natividad had contacted her when he wanted to get in touch with Konrad. Whatever was going on here, Kevin figured, she was probably right in the middle of it. And certainly, although he couldn’t have known it yet, one of the most fascinating characters to appear in this or any other true crime podcast series.

Until recently Melody had been an upper-middleclass housewife with four children, married to a Stanford-educated engineer, living in Salt Lake City, Utah. After a divorce, though, her life seemed to have gone completely haywire.

She married a cousin, Veldon “Buck” Burgess who at the time was incarcerated in the Oregon State Prison for armed robbery. Whether out of pity for cousin Buck or something else entirely, Melody then moved to Salem with her three daughters to be closer to Buck and of course to mule drugs into prison for him. Then about a year after that she dumped Buck and married his younger and handsomer cellmate, Konrad Garcia, whom she’d met in the prison visiting room.

Veldon “Buck” Burgess, dressed here for prison after his 1995 conviction for the rape of two young girls in Colorado, lived at 942 Park Avenue in Salem, just across the street from the Dome Building.

So Melody was now muling drugs into OSP for Konrad, sometimes even twice a day. And when she answered the door for Kevin, she was all made up for another trip to the joint. Kevin remembers thinking she would have been an attractive woman except for the odor of propenal meth, which smells something like cat piss, hanging over her and everything else in the house.

“Are you kidding?” said Melody when Kevin asked her about getting on Konrad’s visiting list. “No way in hell they’re going to let you get near him. You can write him if you want and see where that gets you.”

What Kevin was really interested in, though, was Buck whose name had come up a couple of times in the police reports. First, as the subject of an inconclusive and perhaps intentionally bungled polygraph exam. And second, although not by name, in another police report that told of another statement, this one by Johnny Crouse, who was then the leading suspect in the murder.

At the time, Crouse, who’d already confessed to the murder and was therefore considered the state’s leading suspect, was being taken on an excursion to find the missing murder weapon (which of course was never found). In the car, along with the Salem police officer who wrote the report, was the district attorney Dale Penn and the Correction’s department head of security, Robert Kennicott.

And just as they passed 942 Park Avenue, which is located just across the street and a block-wide stretch of grass from the Dome Building, Crouse pointed out the window and said: “If you want to know who did it, he’s over there.”

The records show that the investigators never made an effort to find out who lived at 942 Park. However, as they could have figured fairly easily, if only because his address was already in their records and listed on the inconclusive polygraph exam, it was Buck Burgess.

Not much later, of course, Crouse recanted his confession, and after he told investigators that Corrections officials were involved in commissioning the murder, he was dropped entirely as a suspect in the Francke murder case.

When Kevin asked Melody if she’d kept in touch with Buck, she seemed a bit taken back that he even knew about him. “Well, we see each other from time to time,” she said. “Hard not to do, being relatives and all.”

“But you were married, right?” said Kevin, pushing it a little.

“Well, yes,” said Melody. Buck was obviously not the sort of family member you’d want to brag about.

Before the robbery he was doing time for when Melody married him, he’d served time in New Mexico for burglary, and before that in California for the death of a girlfriend’s year-old infant at a drive-in movie theater. An initial charge of murder was reduced to manslaughter. He was a pedophile and would later serve time in Colorado for raping two young girls.

On a hunch, Kevin asked Melody if Buck and Tim knew each other. “Are you kidding me?” she said, her eyes getting big with surprise, or maybe it was fright.

“Buck and Tim were airtight,” she said. “Hey, look, you’re stepping in a lot of shit here and you don’t know what you’re stepping in.” And with that the interview was at an end.

So Kevin began staking out 942 Park Avenue. There was a very practical-looking woman who went in and out there – she must have been Buck’s wife Alean – plus a teenage girl and two grown boys who were probably her kids. But no Buck.

Finally, after about two weeks of watching the place off and on, he knocked on the door.

“Buck’s not here,” the woman said. “I have no idea where he is and couldn’t care less.” And then after a short pause, “At least not since I got him arrested for trying to stab me with that knife.”

As Alean explained, she’d discovered that Buck was having sex with her 13-year-old daughter – got her pregnant, in fact, she said – and so she went after him with a knife. But Buck got the knife away from her and chased her out into the street, yelling that he was going to kill her.

The Salem police arrived in time to put a stop to it, however Buck was arrested and sent back to prison for six months on a parole violation. He finished his time and was released a month before the Francke murder. She hadn’t seen him since.

So at least Kevin now knew who Tim’s bigtime drug connection into the state prison was. But did she think he could have been involved in the murder?

“Well, if he was, he wouldn’t have done it himself,” she said. “He would have got someone else to do it.”

“One time he threatened me,” she said. “We were out camping and all of a sudden Buck was nowhere to be found. So I went looking for him and he was down by creek watching a couple of young girls swimming, pants down and playing with his wingwang. When I told him what I thought about that he said I’d better keep it to myself or I’d be sorry.

“He said he was part of a something he called Murder Inc. They could hit anybody, anywhere. Inside or out. Just like the guy across the street, he said.”

And of course, across the street from 942 Park Avenue was the Dome Building.

Alean said she knew who Johnny Crouse was. She’d only seen his face a couple of times, but she always knew he was there because he was hunkered down behind the bushes waiting for Buck to get home. When she asked Buck who he was he said, “That’s Johnny Crouse, a buddy of mine.”

Things seemed to be coming together, alright, but they created more questions than answers.

She also showed Kevin the address book Buck had left behind when he was carted off to prison the last time. In it Kevin found  the home number of the prison security chief Robert Kennicott.

And ask yourself, as Kevin has many times since: How in the world did the personal phone number of a state official like that end up in the address book of a creature from the depths like Buck Burgess?