1. Who killed Michael Francke? And does anyone even care?

So off we go into the wild blue Substack yonder. And wouldn’t you know it, the first chapter, right off the bat, is about the Francke murder.

Yes, I know. As far as most of you out there are probably concerned, I’m obsessed with the Francke case, which implies some sort of out-of-control compulsive behavior – and who knows, maybe there’s even some truth to that.

If I have a choice in the matter, instead of obsessed I suppose I’d pick the word fascinated, because, in addition to all the legal and moral issues at play here, it’s always been a great mystery or whodunnit to me, suitable for a movie or a TV series. But for the record, I do hereby solemnly swear that before we’re done here there’ll be other topics to ruminate upon as well.

I have, come to think of it, written several books dealing with Oregon’s long and honorable history of official corruption, and there’s still more to be said about that – especially since, as I see it, the corruption that fed into the Francke murder and cover-up was very much like the sort I describe in Rose City Vice.

And down the road, I have a story I’ve been gathering string on for some time about the Steve Kessler-Roger Shirley bank robbery cum heroin gang that had Portland law enforcement rockin’ and rollin’ back in the early 80s. As anyone who’s been around long enough will remember, Kessler was the dashing celebrity criminal who shot a guard and escaped from Rocky Butte jail back in ‘82, and I just happen to know how they smuggled the gun in.

But for now, it’s the Francke case – which, to be sure, has always been a fascinating mystery. However now that two federal appeals courts have exonerated the state’s chosen patsy, Frank Gable, it’s quite officially an open murder case again.

The fact is that some thirty years later, we still don’t know who killed a ranking Oregon law enforcement official, in the performance of his duties, in front of the state office building where he worked, the night before he was scheduled to appear before a legislative committee and tell them about the rats’ nest of corruption he’d discovered within his own department.

That much we’re sure of – although it must be said that the very notion of of the possibility of corruption has been hotly disputed from the beginning.

Michael Francke’s body was found after midnight on January 18, 1989, on a porch of the Corrections office building in Salem. He’d been stabbed in the heart, and the time of death was presumably around 7 p.m. the previous evening.

In fact, as you may recall, almost the first words out of the Marion County DA’s mouth after the murder were that it was most likely a car burglary gone bad – which seemed somewhat fishy to me because they didn’t even have a suspect yet and none of the victim’s personal possessions had been taken.

I was writing a column for the Oregonian at the time, so I got in touch with Michael Francke’s younger brother Kevin, who it turned out was entertaining even more serious doubts about the murder, and it wasn’t long before he told me that in a phone conversation just three weeks prior to the murder, Michael had told him he’d discovered an “organized criminal element” within his department and that he was going to be cleaning house. As he also told me early on, he’d passed that information on to investigators when he first got to Salem after the murder.

This was all off the record, of course, because the state police investigators had asked the Francke family not to talk to the press.

But then just a few months later, angry and disgusted with how the investigation was going, Kevin gave me the go-ahead to write about it. Which I did, of course. And of course the Marion County DA, Dale Penn, didn’t miss a beat with his response.

It was all news to him, he said. And certainly, Kevin hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort to him or the state police before. And from there on out, the official line was that Kevin, undoubtedly crazed by grief, was making it all up.

In fact, it wasn’t until about ten years later, when I got my own set of the state’s investigative records – some thirty bankers boxes of them – that I discovered, in a little brown notebook belonging to Loren Glover, one of the two lead detectives on the case, that yes indeed, the morning after Kevin arrived in Salem following his brother’s death, he'd told Glover about the problems Michael was having at Corrections. It was right there in Glover’s own handwriting.

Which, in retrospect, is only fitting since as we now know the entire case against Gable – lacking as it did a shred of physical evidence connecting him to the crime scene – was a fabric of perjured testimony manufactured by the Marion County DA’s office and the state police.

But the grabber here, for me anyway, is that in 2005, some fifteen years after the murder itself, and after I’d already written about Glover’s notes in the Tribune where I was by then working, the Oregonian was still parroting the DA’s line, trying to make Kevin out as mentally unbalanced for raising questions about the investigation of his brother’s death.

At one point, in true when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife-style, they even got him to deny that he was crazy. You can read it for yourself in the paper’s epic face plant dated May 22, 2005, “Facts Dispute Francke Conspiracy,” in which, after much self-congratulatory huffing and puffing, they also concluded that Gable was guilty as charged and should spend the rest of his life in prison.

Of course they took the opportunity to take a few shots at me as well, but I figured it was just part of the game. And to be honest, I had been poking the bear to get a rise out of them.

But for them to attack, and in the most personal and demeaning manner, a member of a murder victim’s family, simply for questioning the official version of events, well, that’s something else again.

Because even if Kevin hadn’t been right ­– and as it turns out the points we’d both been making coincide very nicely with those raised by both federal appeals courts in their rulings ­– it’s something reputable news organizations just don’t do. It’s something decent people don’t do.

To be as blunt as possible, it has to rank right up there among the most despicable excuses for “investigative” reporting in the history of American journalism. And it is, of course, something we’ll be returning to as we proceed along this Substack journey, and probably more than once.

Or at least until the Oregonian, which has been falling all over itself lately apologizing for the moral lapses of editors and publishers who’ve been dead for more than a century, faces up to this one – which is, it’s hard not to notice, so much closer to home.