Judge West screws the pooch

Letter #7

I sent this one to Greg West who was the presiding judge in the Gable trial.

Hello Greg,

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, after spending thirty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the patsy in the Francke murder case, Frank Gable, has been completely exonerated by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals – and as it turns out, not just because the state police fabricated all the evidence against him. No siree, Greg.

As the appeals court ruling also made clear, the trial court – meaning you, of course, since you were the presiding judge at Gable’s trial – committed the fairly breath-taking judicial error of refusing to allow the testimony of another man, Johnny Crouse, who’d already confessed to the murder several times and knew things about the murder he couldn’t have known unless he’d been there.

In other words, Greg, you really screwed the pooch on this one. So spectacularly, in fact, that the rest of us out here - non-lawyers for the most part, I must admit – have to wonder whether you just weren’t paying attention that day or what?

Please let me know, because as I should probably explain at this point, I’m writing a book on the Francke case and this is your chance to respond to all these troublesome questions that keep popping up regarding your performance in what I suppose we can all agree is the most important criminal case in recent Oregon history.

For example, your appointment of Bob Abel as Gable’s defense counsel – although you had to know, if only because you used to share office space with him, that he was an incompetent, falling-down drunk. As his girlfriend later told me, during the trial he was drinking half a gallon of vodka a day, with Squirt mixers no less.

When you appointed Abel he was on the skids, so broke he didn’t even have an office. Not only was this the only job he could get but it was an extremely lucrative one – so he was completely at your disposal. The head of the Gable’s investigative team, Tom McCallum, recalls the times Abel would come back from meetings with you with instructions not to get into “that conspiracy stuff.”

Meaning of course anything involving Johnny Crouse – who the state cops had dropped as their prime suspect once he told them two Corrections officials offered him money to commit the murder. Who knows whether he was telling the truth about that or anything else, but he obviously knew something.

Or a local gangster named Tim Natividad – who, as the state police also knew, had approached an inmate, Konrad Garcia, with a proposition – which he told Garcia had the backing of the Corrections lawyer – to kill Francke and get out of prison free.

Both of which are the stuff of conspiracies, to be sure. The problem being, though, not so much that they were conspiracies, because that just means two or more people plotting together – and is, in fact, what the state police are charged with in a multi-million dollar civil suit for violating Gable’s constitutional rights – but that they apparently involved Corrections officials.

And since the state police and DA’s office simply weren’t going there, that left them no choice but to make up a case against a patsy and try him for the murder – making sure, of course, that a jury would never hear the names of Crouse or Natividad because that would surely create enough doubt in the jury’s mind to blow their phony case out of the water.

And I don’t know how they pulled it off, Greg, but as the trial record shows, there was never a chance that Abel was going to raise either of their names in your court. In fact, you ruled them irrelevant. I’m hoping you can fill us in with some of the details on how this came about.

Indeed, the tale of the cover-up in the Francke case is at least as intriguing as the murder itself. I mean, here’s the death of a ranking law enforcement official, stabbed to death in front of his office the night before he’s scheduled to testify before a senate committee to expose the corruption he’s discovered within his own Corrections Department. And from the get-go the official line is that it’s a car burglary gone bad?

It’s easy enough to understand why the Corrections Department had to sweep the whole thing under the rug. And the state police, too, who for years had been sitting on the various Correction rackets, including the rampant drug trade into the prison.

And of course the same goes for the Marion County DA’s office, which, like the state police, had just three years earlier in 1986, whitewashed a previous Corrections investigation – making the Francke murder investigation, oddly enough, the cover-up of a cover-up.

But there’s more to it that because almost from the start, everyone in town it seems, whether they had anything to do with the murder itself or the actual corruption that led to it, had something to hide. Which means that everyone had something on someone else. Starting with the DA’s office, which in addition to their previous Corrections cover-up, had a drug problem of their own to worry about.

For some time now, the boys and girls over at the DA’s office had been participating in cocaine-fueled hot tub parties. And while no true-blue Oregonian could possibly disagree with a fellow citizen’s right to chemically befuddle himself, the fact is that at this time cocaine was quite illegal in the state, and as members of the law enforcement community they were immediately compromised.

And of course it wasn’t just the young DA’s, either. You almost had to have been there to realize what a craze cocaine was in the 80s, at least among the affluent classes who could afford it. Jonathan’s, one of the most popular restaurants in town, even had a mirror on a stand in the men’s room where you could do a line or two before returning to your razor clams.

Lobbyists, legislators, lawyers, they all got caught up in it. And yes, some judges too, who probably missed out on the heady excitement of the late 60’s and 70s because they were too busy carving out successful legal careers. But now that they could afford to kick back a little, as they probably told themselves – well, why not?

Which brings us, Greg, to Val Sloper, who was of course the senior circuit court judge in Marion County at the time. And I’m hoping, since you were considered Sloper’s Boy among the Salem legal community, you can tell me more about the time in the early 80s when he got caught up in a sheriff’s department investigation of massage parlor suspected of prostitution.

Of course the DA’s office declined prosecution and nothing ever came of it. However, as one of the detectives who worked the case told me, “We had them cold.”

Then there was that weekly bridge game at the Black Angus, attended by Sloper, prison warden Hoyt Cupp, and two senior Salem lawyers, which got regular deliveries from a coke dealer. That’s according to the dealer’s lawyer.

And then there’s another report – this time from a woman named Melissa, who was working as a call girl in Salem when we interviewed her – of seeing Sloper at a hot tub party. She was seventeen at the time but remembered his scarred, knobby knees. Also a big plate of cocaine off to the side. And funny thing was, she said you were there too.

So if Melissa is making this up – because when you get right down to it, coke dealers and working girls are sometimes no more reliable than the state cops or lawyers at the Marion County DA’s office, who as the Ninth Circuit has made clear, were lying their asses off from day one – please let me know and I’ll be sure to include your comments in whatever I write.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Phil Stanford