18. The gun under the pillow

Michael Francke’s home in Oregon was on an acreage outside Scotts Mills, a tiny country town about twenty miles east of Salem. On their first afternoon in Salem, the day after his body was found, his brothers Kevin and Pat were driven out to take a look around, and what they saw made them even more uncomfortable.

The back yard, which sloped down to a wooded area, was littered with shotgun shells. On the deck, leaning against a sliding glass door that opened onto the master bedroom, was a government issue 12-gauge shotgun. Their friendly driver, a Corrections employee, said Michael had checked out the riot gun from the armory the previous weekend. To do some target practice, he said.

From Loren Glover, the state police officer who’d interviewed Kevin that morning, they already knew that in the early morning hours after the murder, a police detail had gone out to secure the Scotts Mills premises. So when they got there Kevin and Pat were pleased to see that the cops hadn’t trashed the place with the fingerprint chemicals forensics teams use at a crime scenes. In fact the place looked almost tidy.

Inside the bedroom, lying on the bed, was a copy of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. When Kevin slid his hand under the pillow he touched something hard and came out with a fully loaded .45. “Strange bedfellows,” he said to Pat. Something  was wrong.

When they got back to Salem, they ran into Glover again and thanked him for having the forensics crew take such care not to mess the place up. “Oh, we haven’t sent the team out yet,” said Glover.    

Now that didn’t add up, either. They should have already fingerprinted the place. But what Kevin really couldn’t get past was why Mike didn’t have the gun with him in the first place. Mike was quite aware that he was in a dangerous business – now more than ever, judging at from all the shotgun shells in the back yard – so why would he leave the handgun at home?

Kevin remembered the time he was visiting Mike in Sante Fe where Mike had just taken over as head of the corrections system. The phone rang and there was some sort of emergency Mike had to attend to. He grabbed his .45 off the top shelf of a bookcase in the living room, dropped it in his briefcase, and headed out the door. He never went anywhere without a handgun, either in his briefcase or in the glove box.

It would be another two years, after the trial was over and he got the state’s discovery, before Kevin would give this much thought again. When he started going through the records, he found a police report Glover himself had written, concerning a trip he and Dave Caulley, the prison system’s financial officer who’d just been fired by Francke, had taken to Scotts Mills in the early morning hours after Francke’s body was discovered. Caulley, it will be remembered, had also been called in to search for Michael Francke after his car door was found open earlier that night and they somehow missed his body lying on the porch outside his office.

As Glover had written, the trip was to “secure” the place.

A small matter, perhaps. But then why wouldn’t Glover have said that two years ago, when the subject first came up – that he’d personally driven all the way out there just to secure it? And if that was their sole purpose in going out there, why wouldn’t Glover have just called a sheriff’s office closer to Scott’s Mills to do it for them?

A .45 caliber Taurus semiautomatic similar to the one Kevin found – fully loaded and with a round in the chamber – under the pillow on Michael Francke’s bed in Scotts Mills.

Fast forward thirteen years to 2004. Kevin gets a call from Ken Hadley, the lawyer who’d represented Gable in his unsuccessful post-conviction appeal. Hadley had a whole bunch of records – and not just state’s discovery this time, which Kevin already had, but all the defense investigators’ reports from the original trial as well. They were sitting in a barn in Otis if Kevin wanted to pick them up.

And that’s when, to his astonishment, Kevin came upon the affidavit by Linda Parker, who’d been Scott McAlister’s secretary in Utah shortly after he was forced out of his job as the lawyer for the Oregon Corrections Department.

We’ve already covered it pretty thoroughly in this substack series, in the “Enter the Prince of Darkness” episode. But in case you missed it, it’s the one in which Parker says she overheard McAlister and another former Oregon Corrections official, former security chief Harol Whitley, discussing the Francke murder at a dinner party in Utah. “They fucked up,” McAlister had said. “It was supposed to look like a suicide.”

At first Kevin thought it must be a joke. Surely, someone with a twisted sense of humor must have made it up and inserted it in the defense file.

How could Gable’s defense team have had such a jaw-dropping  piece of evidence – and the date on the affidavit showed that they’d received it four months before the trial – without making it a major issue in court?

But when he called Tom McCallum, Abel’s slow-talking chief investigator, McCallum assured him that affidavit was bonafide. Gable’s lawyer Bob Abel had simply brushed it off, saying the woman was unreliable.

Yet it was clear, from the affidavit itself, that the woman, Linda Parker, was quite level-headed and reasonable. In fact, she’d just won a $95 thousand sexual harassment suit against McAlister – in the course of which, McAlister had tried quite unsuccessfully to pin the same “unreliable” label on her.

Today, some thirty years later, it’s still a troubling bit of evidence, and one that certainly raises the question of what, if anything, McAlister knew about the murder and how he knew it. But the point here is the connection Kevin would immediately make between the affidavit and the .45 automatic he’d discovered under the pillow in Michael’s house.

Because, one: If McAlister wasn’t just making it all up, and the murder was supposed to look like a suicide . . . .

And two: If, as Glover wrote, he and Caulley made that otherwise pointless trip out to Scotts Mill at 3 a.m. the night of the murder. . . .

And three: Recalling Caulley’s statement to the police after the unsuccessful search that he couldn’t even bring himself to look in Francke’s office because he was afraid he’d find that Francke had shot himself ­– when to this day there is no believable evidence that Francke was suicidal or even depressed. . . .

Then yes, given the above, it is entirely possible that that gun was planted under Francke’s pillow.

Which, of course, might be the ultimate Francke conspiracy theory out there. Maybe there’s something to it and maybe there isn’t. But wouldn’t it have been interesting if the Francke Task Force had actually looked into it?

Instead this is what happened: As has now been established beyond any doubt, Dale Penn, the Marion County DA, lied from the beginning about whether Michael Francke had even been investigating corruption within the Corrections Department. And then, to make sure that no one connected any possible dots leading from Francke’s murder back to the corruption, the DA’s office, along with the state police, selected a patsy and made up all the evidence against him. Simple as that.

And that’s not just a conspiracy theory, folks. That’s a conspiracy fact.