What a dirty little town

And it wasn’t just the Corrections Department, either. The Marion County DA’s office was a clown car with its own particular brand of sleaze.

In the early ‘80s long-time DA Gary Gortmaker, who’d been convicted of pocketing money from his department’s expense account, was replaced by an up-and-coming young political star Chris Van Dyke, who besides being the son of the famous actor, as it turned out, also had a bit of a coke habit.

Now, nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Unless of course you’re sending people off to prison for doing basically the same thing you’ve been doing. And of course, it helps if you don’t do anything too stupid yourself while you’re under the influence – which, unfortunately, Van Dyke was not able to keep from doing.

In fact, after he’d been in office a little over a year, Van Dyke got into a drug fueled domestic situation – his girlfriend had to get patched up at the hospital – all of which, of course, was successfully hushed up.

So Van Dyke was eased out of office, actually resigning before his term was up, and leaving the job open for the very ambitious Dale Penn, who of course would go on to oversee the cover-up of a Corrections corruption scandal in 1986. The only problem being that once Francke was killed they had to cover up a murder, too.

However, it was also important for the DA’s office to keep the Van Dyke scandal under wraps, because to tell the truth, a goodly share of the guys and gals down at the DA’s office, in addition to Van Dyke, had also been partying their buns off. According to veteran defense attorney Charlie Burt, who is no longer with us, there were video tapes in circulation at the time of naked DAs doing blow at hot tub parties, and you can only imagine how that might have gone over if it had ever gotten out.

One of the more intriguing stories from this period involves a young female prosecutor at the DA’s office, Sarah McMillen, who according to the man who claims to have been her boyfriend, was dating a career criminal and meth cook by the name of Ron Spier.

Spier has actually bragged about the alleged relationship online. “Here’s a little known fact,” he emailed a female Francke researcher in an apparent attempt to impress her with his credentials as a lady-killer. “I dated Sara (sic) Moore for about a year prior to the murder. She used to be married to Bill McMillen... but after her & Bill divorced... Sara and I started dating. She’s pretty High Maintenance so it didn’t work out & we just spit up... but stayed friends.”

Besides everything else, Spier was also a crooked auto mechanic who worked at Marion Auto Service, and in addition to selling drugs out of the repair shop he had a couple of young hoodlums who stole car parts for him. One of them, now grown up and gainfully employed after serving some time in prison, told me that Spier also boasted to him about how tight he was with Sarah at the DA’s office and said he actually saw her down at Marion Auto once or twice.

This story, if true, is significant if only because Sarah would go on, as Sarah Moore, to be the lead prosecutor in the Frank Gable trial and therefore one of those most responsible for fabricating all the evidence against him. I’ve tried twice – by email and then again by a registered Federal Express letter – to get her to respond to these allegations, but so far no response.

Posing with the prosecution’s fake murder weapon, Sarah Moore delivers the closing argument in the Gable trial. Since the actual murder weapon was never found, they just bought a knife at the hardware store.

In fairness once again, though, this was Oregon in the mid-80s, and all the young DAs had only recently been college students, where of course they had partaken in all the college rituals and probably figured they’d just keep on doing what they were doing. But it wasn’t just the youngsters, either. In Salem, it seems, everybody, or at least everybody who could afford it – lobbyists, legislators, lawyers, even judges – were all partaking of this rich man’s version of meth.

In Salem, the epicenter for the party hearty crowd was Jonathan’s, where, as one ex-bartender explained it to me, a customary tip was a bindle of coke. On a stand in the men’s room they even had a mirror for doing lines.

And there was a bridge club meeting of judges and senior lawyers, every week on the second floor of the Black Angus restaurant, that used to get regular deliveries from one of Salem’s coke dealers. Of course they thought they were being discreet by having him leave the package in a booth downstairs. But he hung around once and saw who picked it up.

It was, indeed, a time of great license in Salem, and it went right to the top. As Jay Boutwell, a retired Salem vice officer, would recall some years later, the county’s longtime chief judge Val Sloper – who, along with then prison chief Hoyt Cupp, was one of the regular bridge partners at the Black Angus – was also a regular customer at the French Quarter, a massage parlor that, it was strongly suspected, also engaged in prostitution.

“And we had them cold,” says Boutwell. “We had a guy on the inside, a retired army intelligence officer, collecting records. We interviewed all the girls and they talked.”

But when Boutwell took his information to Dale Penn, who was running the DA’s office by now, he says, Penn told him to forget it. He wasn’t going to prosecute. “Most corrupt place I’ve ever seen,” says Boutwell.

And whether Boutwell is indulging in a bit of hyperbole here or not, at this point in time, in little old Salem, there was what can only be described as a serious implosion of the forces of law and order – and of course the state police (who will be the subject of a future Substack episode) were right in the middle of it too.