6. So who's the man in the pinstripe suit?

Some thirty years later, about the only thing we know for sure about the murder of Michael Francke is that Frank Gable didn’t do it.

And it’s not just that two federal appeals courts have found that the Oregon State Police and the Marion County prosecutors fabricated every single bit of evidence against him – framed him, in other words – but that he had an airtight alibi for the night as well.

Not surprisingly, this didn’t come out in Gable’s trial. His chief defense attorney, Bob Abel, was a seriously over-matched drunk. As his girlfriend later told me, during the trial he was drinking a quart of vodka a day, with Squirt mixers, no less.

But even without the alcoholic stimulation, he wouldn’t have been up to the task. In fact, that was probably the reason he was appointed in the first place by presiding judge Gregory West, who once had had an office just down the hall from Abel. Salem, it’s well to keep in mind, is a small town and all the lawyers know each other very well.

The alibi actually didn’t come to light till almost thirty years later when Nell Brown, the federal public defender, submitted the brilliant petition that would lead to the Gable’s exoneration. Of course, it all would have been much easier if Gable himself had been able to recall what he’d been doing that night, but he wasn’t arrested till eight months after the murder, and who among us is likely to remember what he might have been doing on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday night that long ago. Especially when the Salem newspaper didn’t report the murder till Thursday?

What Nell and her sidekick Wendy Kunkel were able to prove, using phone records and statements from the others who were present at the time, was that in fact Gable was doing a drug deal that night and was home from 5 to 8 or 9 p.m. – which of course is the time-period in which the murder had to occur. Also that night, Gable and his wife Janine had had a raucous party in their apartment that resulted in an eviction notice the next morning, which helped nail down the events of that evening even more.

The accepted version of the murder, of course, is that it occurred shortly after 7 p.m. on the night of January 17. Francke had a staff meeting that night to prepare for his testimony the next day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, broke up about 6:30.

It is also generally agreed that Dave Caulley, the Corrections financial administrator, who Franke had already informed he was being demoted, was the last person on the staff to see him as Caulley left for home at about 6:45.

And that shortly after 7 p.m., a maintenance man named Wayne Hunsaker emerged from the basement entrance at the north end of the Dome Building, and as he stepped beyond the corner of the building, on his way to the parking lot, he heard a sort of muffled sound, and turned to see two men facing each other in front of the building, about 40 feet away.

But after that we’re left with huge questions.

One of the men, who Hunsaker said was wearing a light brown, three-quarter length coat, turned and ran west across the grassy field in front of the Dome Building, toward the hospital rehab center on the other side of 23rd Street. The other turned and walked back towards the Dome Building.

And since that time, the official version of the case has been that what Hunsaker saw, was the actual stabbing of Michael Francke. And it may have been – but there are problems with this scenario that don’t stop with the state’s contention, which we now know to be absolutely false, that the man running away from the Dome Building was Frank Gable.

In the first place, as Hunsaker originally described it – to me, Eric Mason of Channel 6, and Kevin Francke at various times – the man walking back to the Dome Building, presumably Francke, who had just been fatally stabbed in the heart, was not staggering or stumbling but walking “leisurely” as if “he didn’t have no place to go.”

And second, the sound he heard, as he described it to me, Eric and Kevin, was a sort of “oof” or an “oomph” – “like somebody being punched in the gut.” But by the time he got to trial and had a chance to be reinterviewed by the prosecutors, it sounded “like someone being hurt.”

At trial Hunsaker also testified that the man who turned back toward the building was walking “briskly” – which still doesn’t sound like someone who’s just received a fatal wound to the heart – but like the “someone being hurt” sound, is certainly more in keeping the official view that this was, indeed, Francke making his way back to bleed to death on the north portico.

Because if it wasn’t, we’ve got ourselves a real problem here. We already know that the man running away from the Dome Building wasn’t Gable. But if the second man wasn’t Francke, either, then who was he? An accomplice?

In any case, a couple of days after the murder, without naming Hunsaker of course, investigators announced they had an eyewitness and were looking for a man wearing a trench coat who’d been seen fleeing the scene of the murder.

And then two weeks later, out of the blue, they announced they were also looking for a well-groomed, olive-skinned man in a pinstripe suit. But not as a suspect, they said. They just wanted to talk to him.

As it turned out, he’d been seen in the Dome Building on the night of the murder after the staff meeting was over. At about 6:45, as a matter of fact – well after the building had been locked up for the night – and no one knew who he was.

Jan Curry, who’d been in the meeting and was just coming back downstairs from the computer room, saw him in the main hallway. And since she didn’t recognize him – and as a member of the personnel staff she knew everyone in the building – she asked if she could help.

The man said he was looking for Parole and Probation, Curry pointed down the hallway, and that was that. She didn’t really think more about it at the time. But of course after the murder she told investigators about her strange encounter.

Weeks went by and the investigation seemed to be going nowhere. No leads on the man in the trench coat. And not a peep from man in the pinstripe suit, which seemed very strange.

Because surely, if he’d been there on legitimate business, he’d have come forward by now, just to clear this whole thing up, right? And if not, he was almost certainly up to no good.

In fact, if he’d put on a coat when he went outside, he could just as easily have been the man in the trench coat, the murder suspect himself, seen running away from the Dome Building that night.

Following up on a rumor that investigators had been circulating a drawing of the man in the pinstripe suit among those close to the case, I called Dale Penn, the Marion County DA, to see if I could get a copy. Penn acknowledged there was such a drawing but said he couldn’t release it. When I asked why, he said because it “just isn’t any good”.

Kevin also got pretty much the same runaround when he spoke with Dennis O’Donnell, the crafty state police captain and former narcotics cop, who by now had been put in charge of the Francke investigation. What O’Donnell told him was that they weren’t releasing it because “it looks like just anybody.”

Out of desperation, I guess, because I was on deadline and had written a column about the man in the pinstripe suit but still had several inches of empty space to fill at the bottom of the page, I called Bingta Francke, Michael’s widow, and asked if she’d seen the drawing.

“Oh, sure,” she said. Why, she even had a copy which she’d be happy to fax me if I wanted.

And when the drawing arrived several minutes later, it didn’t look like just anybody, as O’Donnell had said. And quite the opposite of what Dale Penn had told me, it was stunningly good.

Jan Curry herself, who was obviously the source for the drawing, would later say it was a good likeness although she thought the nose was a trifle thin. It had, in fact, been done by Jeanne Boylan, one of the top forensic artists in the country.

So just in time, I stuck it in the column and sent it off to the printers with a caption in bold, Who is this man?

And to this day, that’s one of the major unanswered questions still hanging over this case. Because how can you possibly claim to know who killed Michael Francke without knowing who the man in the pinstripe suit is? Fittingly enough, the subject never even came up in Gable’s trial.

But while we’re at it, why would Penn and O’Donnell have taken the trouble to make up such obviously lame excuses for not releasing the drawing in the first place?

It’s easy enough to understand why they lied about whether Michael Francke was investigating corruption in Corrections department. That was the big, essential lie in this case – the basic lie behind the entire cover-up. But why this relatively minor lie?

And here’s another question for you:

What if it wasn’t such a minor lie after all?