13. Suspect is armed and dangerous, approach with caution

When Liz’s story hits the news the state police swoop down on her apartment and try to convince her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

What she tells them is she’s at least ninety percent certain that the person she saw talking with Tim Natividad shortly before the murder of Michael Francke was indeed the prison lawyer Scott McAlister.

“So, on a scale of one to ten what would you give it? A five?” demands Loren Glover, who of course is not just one of the lead investigators on the Francke case but the state police officer who’s been assigned to keep the lid on things over at Corrections for the past thirteen years. “You’re really not sure, are you?”

“Oh c’mon, Loren,” says Kevin – who, if you’re keeping track here, has not exactly moved in with Liz yet but will soon – how about a three?”

For what it’s worth, in the end the state cops give her a seven – and as far as they’re concerned, that’s that. It’s all fairly silly, and ultimately meaningless, because they’re just writing a report to cover their own backsides. It’s interesting to us here, though, because it shows how touchy they are on this particular subject.

About a year earlier – which would be six months after the Francke murder – they’d had a similar problem when an OSP convict by the name of Konrad Garcia told his prison counselor that he’d been approached by this same Natividad with a proposition to kill Michael Francke.

At the time, Garcia was serving an almost unheard of 100-year-sentence for a knife-point rape. He said Natividad told him that in exchange for killing Francke he’d be getting out of prison. And it was clear to Garcia that Scott McAlister, who was not just the prison lawyer but ran the pension board as well, was in on it.

As was his duty, the counselor passed along the information to the Francke hotline, and since it was now part of the official case record it was something the Task Force couldn’t easily ignore.

About a month later, Ken Pecyna, who along with Glover was now spearheading the state police investigation, interviewed Garcia and wrote another brief CYA report, not even mentioning McAlister and dismissing Konrad’s story about Natividad’s proposal as unreliable.

At the time, Garcia, who was 29, was married to a woman named Melody, 41, who in a previous life had been an upper-middle class housewife living in Salt Lake City with a Stanford-educated engineer husband, three daughters, and a son. After a divorce, though, she apparently became a bit unhinged, and began partying and doing drugs with her daughters’ high school friends, and within a year she married a cousin named Veldon “Buck” Burgess, who was incarcerated in the Oregon State Prison in Salem.

As careful readers have no doubt already noted, that would  be the same Buck Burgess, by then out of prison, whose house Johnny Crouse pointed out to police shortly before he was dropped as a suspect in the Francke murder. And whatever that means – and we still can’t really say for sure – but it’s a piece of this puzzle.

Shortly after the marriage, Melody moves to Salem to be closer to Buck – and of course mule, or pack in drugs to him, which of course is the basic reason for their relationship in the first place.

And then one fine day, on one of her many excursions to the visitors room, Buck introduces Melody to his much younger and handsomer cellmate, Konrad Garcia. Melody, who would later explain that she was just getting tired of Buck’s incessant requests for money, divorces Buck and marries Konrad. So she is now she muling drugs into Konrad, sometimes even twice a day, and Buck doesn’t like it one bit.

Much of this information, by the way, comes from one of Melody’s daughters, Karie Rothschild, who was thirteen at the time and acutely aware of everything that was going on in their household, which had become a twenty-four/seven hangout for bikers and druggies. By this time Melody had sold off almost all the furniture from their house in Salt Lake, including Karie’s bed, and Karie, who sometimes had to go dumpster diving for food, was sleeping under the kitchen table with a blanket thrown over the top of it.

There’s much more to Karie’s story, as anyone who had a chance to listen to our podcast Murder in Oregon is already aware. Her mother tries to sell her for drugs. She’s actually befriended by Tim Natividad, who takes Karie and her sister out to McDonald’s to keep them from going hungry, and she witnesses a bloody murder in the hills outside Salem when Tim takes her along on a meth deal. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Melody and Konrad Garcia, with two of her daughters, Christy and Traci, pose for a photo in the Oregon State Prison visiting room

In time-honored custom, Karie recalls, Melody would bring the drugs in through the visitors’ room, usually in balloons tucked away in her mouth. The balloons would of course then be transferred with a kiss when she arrived, and the convict, in this case Konrad, would swallow them.

Do the guards know what’s going on? Of course they do. Especially when a particular visitor is making two trips a day. But at this moment in Oregon prison history, let’s face it, the job of the guards is not so much to prevent the prison drug trade as to manage it. And of course this relatively low-level balloon transaction was not the only way drugs found their way into the prison.

One marijuana grower whose story I came across while  putting this episode together, said the week he arrived in OSP he was approached by two guards who told him they knew he still had a grow operation on the outside and they expected him to arrange for the delivery of specified  amount of weed on a certain day each week to particular location. And of course he did as he was told.

But back to Melody, who would later recall that in November of 1988 – which would be about three months before he Francke murder – this guy she’d never seen before rings her front doorbell, introduces himself as Tim Natividad, and says he’s a good friend of Konrad’s. He says he wants to get on Konrad’s visitors list because he’s got something he wants to discuss with him.

As it turns out, Garcia doesn’t know this guy Natividad either, but he agrees to a meeting – and bit by bit, not mentioning the intended victim’s name at first, Natividad lays it out for him. He’s looking for someone to kill “the head guy” who he says has been looking into matters that would have a negative effect on the prison drug trade. They meet face to face twice in the visitors room and talk several times by phone before Konrad finally tells Natividad he’s not interested.

And if it wasn’t because Garcia’s conscience got the better of him, he probably did so because he was worried that he was being set up. If he’d agreed to carry out the murder, it would have been easy enough to have him killed and claim he was acting on his own.  

In fact, after Garcia turned down Natividad’s proposal, it appears he actually got himself thrown into the hole, or segregation unit, over a disciplinary matter so he wouldn’t be available for the job or be accused of it when the murder went down.

Obviously, Garcia only knows so much, but what he knows leads to Natividad. As does Liz Godlove’s story about the not-so-accidental meeting between Natividad and McAlister shortly before the Francke murder. And of course both stories bring up the even more disturbing possibility of a link between Natividad and Scott McAlister, the long-time prison lawyer who Francke had forced out his job a week before he was murdered – and that, as is quite clear by now, is somewhere the DA’s office and the state police are simply not willing to go.

So every other day now they’re dropping by Liz’s apartment on what they call “welfare checks.” When no one answers the door, Dennis O’Donnell, the crafty ex-narcotics agent who’s now charge of the state police investigation, raps on the window with a quarter and leaves a business card.

When Kevin calls him up to ask him to ask what the fuck that’s all about, he says in what sounds like a cheery voice, “That’s what we used to do with the dopers. Gets their attention.”

“I’m concerned about you, Kevin,” O’Donnell tells him. “About you getting involved in a drug bust or shot and killed.”

It doesn’t make it any easier, either, when O’Donnell starts telling Kevin’s aged father back in Kansas City that Kevin’s losing his mind, getting involved with a gun moll and the worst elements of Salem society. The father sends out big brother Pat to have a talk with Kevin, and Kevin manages to convince Pat he’s not entirely cuckoo.

Kevin gets a pager message to call a number that turns out to belong to a member of the Francke Task Force by the name of John McCafferty. They meet at the bar in the Black Angus and McCafferty shows Kevin the printout of a teletype that, best Kevin can remember, says:

  OFFICERS ADVISORY

SI [which stands for Suspect Individual] Kevin Francke should be considered armed and dangerous. Approach with caution. According to a normally reliable informant SI carries an assassin’s rifle in trunk of car. Also has list of persons he intends to kill including the governor.

“People just don’t know what side you’re on,” McCafferty says. “Be careful of everything you do because this could be a death warrant.”

Kevin thanks McCafferty and heads down to State Police headquarters, where he sneaks by O’Donnell’s secretary when her back is turned and barges into O’Donnell’s office.

“Hey, Dennis,” he says in a voice slightly louder than necessary, “what is this shit? And who is this normally reliable informant?”

“As you must know,” O’Donnell says, “under state law we are not allowed to disclose information like that.”

“Well, you know it’s bullshit and I want you to rescind it right now.”

“I can’t do that,” says O’Donnell, “It was all done on the advice of our lawyer.”

“And who is that?” says Kevin.

“I can’t tell you that either,” says O’Donnell.

“Well,” says Kevin, “Here’s what I can tell you. I’ve got a copy of this fucking officers advisory right here in my pocket, and if you don’t rescind it before I leave this office, it’s going to be on the Six O’Clock News tonight.”

And with that Kevin is taken off the state cops’ “armed and dangerous” list. However, it won’t be the last time they let Kevin know it’s just not safe for him to keep poking his nose into their business.