8. "Kevin," she said, "this is going to blow your mind"
After the funeral, Kevin returns to his construction business in Florida where he tries to keep up with the investigation – but it isn’t easy, especially in these pre-internet days.
The day after the funeral, Dale Penn, the Marion County DA, holds a press conference to announce they’re looking for a dark-haired man in a light-colored coat seen running from the Dome Building shortly after 7 p.m. on the night of the murder. “We feel this is the person who stabbed and killed Michael Francke,” says Penn. Once again he says police believe the most likely motive for the killing is a random robbery.
And then two weeks later, investigators put out the word they’re also looking for a man in a pinstriped suit seen in the Dome Building on the night of the murder. Someone apparently got a good look at him because he’s described as a nice-looking man in his mid-30s, dressed in a black or navy pin-striped suit, about 5-10 or 5-11 and neatly groomed, with black hair and a mustache. He’s not a suspect, they say, just someone they want to talk to.
Now this is interesting: Someone inside the Dome Building after closing time, after the doors had been locked, on the night of the murder. If he’d been there on some sort of legitimate business, he’d have heard the police were looking for him and come forward to clear the air. And if he wasn’t, then he’s probably involved in the murder.
And then nothing. Weeks pass. Nothing more on the man in the trench coat. And nothing more on the mysterious olive-skinned man in the pinstriped suit seen in the Dome Building after closing time, who they say isn’t a suspect but they’d just like to talk to him.
More weeks go by. The state police announce they’ve set up a Francke Task Force with 25 men working around the clock. They say they’ve conducted 700 interviews of patients and staff at the state hospital, which is where the man in the trench coat disappeared from view, as well as anyone who might have been in the vicinity of the Dome Building on the night of the murder. But despite the brave face they’re presenting to the public, it’s obvious the investigation is stalled.
Back in Florida, Kevin is conducting his own long-distance investigation, picking names almost at random from a Corrections department phone directory. He doesn’t know anyone there, and Dick Peterson, the deputy director who called to tell him about the murder, for some reason won’t even return his phone calls.
Of course, Kevin has already told Glover, the grizzled state cop who interviewed him in Salem, that he won’t talk to the press - but how else is he going to get any information? A reporter at the Salem newspaper tells Kevin this is hardly the first time the Correction department has been accused of wrongdoing. He sends Kevin a package of news stories on a 1986 investigation – shortly before Michael was hired – into corruption in the Oregon prison system.
It’s clear that the ’86 investigation, which concluded with a few officials being allowed to resign or transfer, was a whitewash. In fact, when it was over the state senator who’d demanded the investigation in the first place, L.B. Day, sent a letter to Governor Atiyeh, Goldschmidt’s predecessor, saying he was ”disillusioned” with the outcome, and that the investigation had failed to deal with “widespread corruption by a great many people.”
Unfortunately, Senator Day would die of a heart attack shortly afterward, and that was the end of it. as
Kevin tracks down Bob Merchant, mentioned in the news stories as one of the guards who’d provided L.B. Day with information on the theft, fraud, and flourishing drug trade at the prison. It hasn’t stopped, either, Merchant tells Kevin. In addition to all the issues left hanging from the ’86 investigation, there was also a suspicious fire just a few months earlier – of a prison warehouse, the A-Shed as it was called.
I was working for the Oregonian at the time and had already written a couple of columns about the murder although I didn’t really know much of anything about the case besides what I’d read in my own newspaper. Almost from the beginning, though, something about it didn’t seem right. Two days after the murder and they were already saying it was a random car burglary gone bad? How could they be so sure if they didn’t even have a suspect?
So I got in touch with Kevin, who, after asking a few questions of his own to figure out where I was coming from, filled me in on what he’d been able to pick up: Virtually no physical evidence to go on at the crime scene. No sign of forced entry on Francke’s car. No sign of a struggle in or around the car.
If it was a simple robbery, he said, why were none of Francke’s possessions taken? Francke still had his watch and wallet when they found his body. And why, when you stop to think about it, would anyone be stupid enough to burglarize a state-owned vehicle in a clearly marked the Director of Corrections parking slot?
And then there’s the matter of the “thorough search” of the Dome Building supposedly conducted that night after the two women found Francke’s car door open. According to Dick Peterson, the deputy director, he searched an hour starting about 9 p.m. – which means Francke was already dead and his body was lying on the south portico outside his office.
If Peterson or Dave Caulley, who joined him in the search, had even looked in Francke’s office, why hadn’t they seen glass from door Francke broken in a futile effort to get back inside the building after he’d been stabbed? Glass shards would have been lying all over the floor at that time.
Kevin also tells me about the conversation he’d had with Michael about three weeks before he was murdered – the one in which Michael said he was about to blow the whistle on the corruption he’d discovered in his department – but that’s off the record for now. He’s not supposed to be talking to the press anyway, and if that came out they’d know exactly where it came from.
So I write a couple more columns on the case, raising some of the more obvious questions about the investigation to date. Kevin gets a call from Glover, warning him that someone has been talking to the press. Kevin says it wasn’t him.
More than three months since the murder and the official investigation seems to be going nowhere. Kevin’s been doing the best he can by long distance, running up monthly phone bills – at a time when long-distance phone calls were extremely expensive – of $12,000 to $16,000 a month. His business is going down the tubes because he’s spending so much time and money on the phone.
One day Kevin’s roofing supplier, who also happens to be a member of the local sheriff’s reserve, stops by with a suggestion.
“I don’t know if you believe in psychic abilities or not,” he says, “but we’ve got a gal we’ve worked with a couple times and she’s helped a lot.”
One time, he said, she led them right to a 78-year-old man who’d been missing for days. Described the terrain where he’d be and the deputies recognized it right away from her description. They found him in thirty minutes. He was dead, but that’s where he was. Another time she told them where to find a young girl who’d been abducted. She was alive, thank goodness.
The deputy writes down the name and number of the woman and hands it to Kevin. “Jane Doe,” the note says. “She doesn’t like publicity,” the deputy explains.
Kevin is willing to try anything, so he gives the woman a call.
Over the phone he tells her only that his name is Kevin and he needs to talk about his brother who’s had a tragic accident. He doesn’t give her his last name and he doesn’t say anything about what has happened to his brother.
“You have two brothers, don’t you?” Jane says.
That stops Kevin in his tracks. She has no way of knowing that.
“And the one you’re talking about is way out there on the coast, right?”
“Yes,” says Kevin, and all the emotion he’s been holding back for the past three months escape him and he starts to cry.
“There something very wrong here,” Jane says, “and I can tell I need to see you right away.” She says she’s booked solid for the next two months but she’ll make time for him the next Monday.
It turns out Jane, full name Jane Scogna, lives in a spacious house in a fashionable part of Sarasota, which is about a half hour drive north of Port Charlotte. She’s in her mid-forties, wears a muumuu and sandals, and as she tells Kevin while they’re settling down in her living room, when she was younger she’d actually served a few years as a police officer in Bethlehem, Pa., which is where her specials talents were first put to use.
She was married to and Air Force officer at the time, and after he was killed in a plane crash she figured she had to get out of Pennsylvania. So she moved to Florida and got into the real estate business – in addition to doing readings for a number of clients in music and show business. “I charge them a lot,” she says, “but this is for free.”
For at least a half hour, Kevin remembers, they sat there exchanging small talk – about the contracting business, the price per square foot for housing in Charlotte County. Anything but why he was there. Every so often Jane would write something on a pad of paper, but then it was back to building or real estate.
Then abruptly she puts down the pad and pencil and tells him why they’ve been engaging in all this small talk. It was necessary, she says, because she could tell that Kevin had walled himself in emotionally. And before she could start receiving anything, as she put it, she had to get past that wall.
“Your brother’s no longer with us,” she says.
“That’s right, he was murdered,” says Kevin. “Stabbed in the heart.” He tells her it happened in front of the building where he worked, and that he was director of Corrections.
Jane takes off her glasses and looks at her notes.
She tells him there was a meeting that night. There was a double-cross. Michael trusted someone he shouldn’t have. Five or six men were involved. Three participated in the murder itself.
It’s a cover-up of a cover-up, she says. Something was taken from a briefcase. Or maybe the briefcase was taken, she doesn’t know for sure. But she sees a hand taking some tapes out of a briefcase.
There were two wounds, not just the fatal one to the heart that the public had been told about. She says there was a second knife wound was to his left shoulder. Kevin would later learn she was right about this.
“And Kevin,” she says, “this is going to blow your mind, but they’ve got someone in custody right now that is very close to this. Right now, as we sit here. I don’t know if he was one of the three, but I know you’re going to get a whitewash.
“His name is John. Last name starts with a Kah-kah sound. Maybe a K.”
When Kevin gets back home to Port Charlotte he calls detective Glover on the phone and tells him he hears they’ve got someone in custody.
“Someone’s been leaking,” says Glover. “Who’d you hear this from?”
“A psychic told me,” says Kevin. “She said his first name is John and his last name starts with a K.”
“No, it’s a C,” says Glover. “Johnny Crouse. Did she say he did it?”
Which is not a bad question at all – one in fact that haunts the Francke case to this day. And if you’re one of those hidebound rationalists who doesn’t believe in psychics, you’ve at least got to admit this is one helluva coincidence.
Because they actually do have a guy in custody named Johnny Crouse, and as we speak, he’s confessing to the murder of Michael Francke.
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I mostly scoff at psychics.....or maybe I scoff at most psychics.........still....that's not to say all are fake......likely there are some that are real out there..............and like you say.....one helluva coincidence.