TheCars1986
06-29-2017, 10:20 AM
I could've sworn there was a larger thread dedicated to this case, but I couldn't find it through search. I apologize if this has been posted before, but I've been digging into this case recently and came across an article written in 2005. I'll preface it by saying that after rewatching the Francke segment on Amazon, I came away thinking one thing: where is this evidence of a organized hit and coverup? One olive complected guy smoking in the lobby? The crime scene had blood from Francke's car, up the steps, and onto the porch of the Dome Building where his body was found. The conspiracy presented on UM was that men abducted Francke going to his car, and then brought him back to his office to retrieve documents before Francke runs away and then is overtaken and stabbed on the porch. If the conspiracy angle is to be believed, if the killers wanted Francke's documents (speculated to be located in his office in the Dome Building), why would they kill him for running away? They needed him alive at that point. And why would blood evidence be found at Francke's car, the steps, and onto the porch if Francke was making a mad dash to get away from his captors?
Here is the article (http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2005/05/facts_dispute_michael_francke.html) I found. And here are the highlights:
In an effort to get to the bottom of one of the state's most sensational crimes, The Oregonian conducted the deepest examination of the case since Gable's conviction in 1991. Over five months, reporters reviewed thousands of pages of documents, tracked down dozens of key figures, and spent more than eight hours interviewing Gable.
In the end, the paper found no substance to Kevin Francke's conspiracy theory. Nor does Gable's alibi hold up: The witnesses and evidence he cites fail to account for his whereabouts at the time Francke was stabbed.
An local newspaper would absolutely love to find evidence of a grand conspiracy involving the government, so the fact that they could find "no substance" in the conspiracy claims is telling.
In his interviews with The Oregonian, Gable summed up his view of the conspiracy theory with one word:
"Madness."
Frank Gable was the man convicted of murdering Francke.
But at the time of his death, the 42-year-old Francke was a troubled man.
His second marriage was unraveling. Shortly before the murder, his wife, Bingta, had left, taking their young son. Child support and tuition from Francke's earlier marriage, plus his own spending habits, had stretched their finances. They had to borrow from family and Francke's co-workers to pay for ordinary expenses.
At work, Francke absorbed crushing pressure.
Goldschmidt had high hopes for Francke, a charming and articulate administrator from a new generation in prison management. Corrections leaders typically came from the ranks of wardens and superintendents. Francke was a University of Virginia law school graduate, former assistant attorney general and judge.
But not long after Francke's arrival, his blunders got his boss's attention.
Memos and correspondence from Goldschmidt's archives show that Francke was often out of step with the governor's agenda. He alienated lawmakers by making spending decisions without their OK. Though Francke loved the public spotlight, he seemed to have a tin ear for politics.
Lawmakers trusted by Goldschmidt quietly complained, and he feared Francke was becoming a liability. A month before the murder, Goldschmidt sent his prisons chief a scathing two-page memo.
"There's no room for more speeches about 'We don't have a crime problem,' or 'Prisons won't help,' " Goldschmidt wrote. Blasting Francke's management style, he added: "This is more of a warning than anything else. . . . I don't want every issue or decision to be dumped on me."
In the weeks before his death, Francke was on the phone regularly with Goldschmidt's office as he prepared for an upcoming presentation to lawmakers. "Corrections told to watch budget" was the top story on a copy of The (Salem) Statesman-Journal found in his car.
The typical tenure for corrections administrators was short, and Francke was looking ahead. On Jan. 3, 1989, he had fired off his resume to a New Mexico firm, according to a review of his computer files.
He planned to be in Oregon only one more year.
Francke's personal life was completely omitted from the UM segment. It's also interesting to note that Francke apparently was ruffling feathers with the Governor of Oregon. This seems to be one reason why people buy into the conspiracy angle. However, Francke had submitted his resume roughly 2 weeks before he was murdered. He wasn't staying long. Why bother killing the guy if he was going to be gone within months? Let him go and carry on business as usual.
Sometime in the year before his brother's death, [Kevin] Francke contends, Michael Francke told him he had uncovered an "organized criminal element" in the prison system. He planned to shake up his staff. He didn't mention names.
At the time, Kevin Francke didn't find the comment remarkable, he told The Oregonian. Michael Francke never mentioned it again. Later, after the murder, Francke cited the conversation to suggest that his brother was killed by someone in state government.
An examination of media accounts and police interviews over the years shows that Francke has shifted accounts of this crucial conversation, however, casting doubt on its reliability.
Francke has variously placed it the Friday before the murder, less than a month before his brother's death and around Thanksgiving. His former-wife, now deceased, told a reporter in 1990 that the conversation never took place.
Recently, Francke told The Oregonian he cannot recall when the conversation happened. And he says it might not have been a phone call: His brother may have mentioned the "organized criminal element" during a visit to Kevin's home in Florida the summer before he died.
His ex-wife says the conversation never happened. Interesting.
Last year, Francke also added a new detail to the conversation by naming the supposed mastermind behind his brother's murder: Scott McAlister, a former assistant attorney general who had once represented the Corrections Department.
In one of Stanford's Tribune columns last August, Kevin Francke said his brother was troubled by McAlister.
"It's him or me," Kevin said his brother told him.
But if the conversation took place in the weeks before the murder -- as Kevin Francke has said -- it's unlikely Michael Francke would have been worried about McAlister.
In early December, McAlister announced that he was resigning. He was headed to Utah to take a new job with that state's prison system.
So McAlister resigned a month prior to Francke's murder and got another job out of state...and still wanted to murder him? :confused:
In Kevin Francke's conspiracy plot, McAlister holds center stage.
Francke depicts him as a corrupt bureaucrat who was cozy with inmates and benefited from some kind of black-market prison trade.
His brother threatened to halt McAlister's dealings, Francke believes, so McAlister turned to underworld associates, including Timothy Natividad, a 24-year-old Salem meth dealer with a violent streak.
The murder plot, Francke maintains, called for Natividad and two other men to force the prison chief into his car and drive off, kill him and make it appear like suicide.
Something went wrong, Francke says, and Natividad ended up sneaking behind Francke as he walked to his car, spinning him around and thrusting the knife into his chest.
Timothy Natividad is the man that Gable supporters have said is the real killer. Yes because when I picture someone wanting to stage a suicide, I see them stabbing them in the heart the moment they encounter them. :rolleyes:
Kevin Francke has never produced credible evidence to support this version of events. Nor can he explain why someone would kill his brother in a state parking lot when he presented a far easier target at his rural Marion County home, where he lived alone.
Another very salient point.
In August of 1990, [Elizabeth] Godlove [Natividad's girlfriend at the time] told Gable's defense team that Natividad came home in a panic during the early morning hours "on or about" the night of the murder. She noticed a wound on his leg and a gash on his head.
A day or two later, Natividad told her he'd killed a man.
But when Godlove relayed the story to police in September 1990, she said she couldn't be certain the night Natividad arrived home with wounds was the same night Francke was stabbed.
"Tim never told her who he killed or where it happened," Oregon State Police Detective Loren Glover wrote in his report.
Police ran down leads on Natividad, testing his knives and clothing. But they found no link to the murder.
Today, the theory that Natividad was the murderer remains part of Gable's legal appeal.
Nonetheless, Gable told The Oregonian that he doesn't think Natividad was involved.
"I just don't see him (McAlister) going and hiring some low-level dope fiend or drug addict to go do a murder," Gable said. "It don't make no sense."
One would think that if Natividad was contracted to murder a high ranking official in the Oregon government, he would've at least mentioned that to his girlfriend at the time.
Natividad's own story will never be known -- Godlove shot and killed him two weeks after Francke's death. A jury acquitted her that spring after she claimed Natividad had been abusing her for years and had held a gun to her head the day she killed him.
Godlove and Kevin Francke married in 1994.
Anyone wonder why Francke's brother is implicating Natividad now? He's married to the woman whom Natividad used to allegedly abuse!
To Francke, the motives of Natividad and McAlister are obvious.
With Michael Francke gone, Natividad would have had an easy time peddling drugs in prison. And McAlister had two reasons to kill his brother, Francke speculates.
One was professional -- he wanted Francke's job. The second was malice -- McAlister sought revenge for something that happened on a vacation he and Francke had taken the previous March.
In 1988, Michael Francke told his brother he was going skiing near Reno, Nev., after a conference. Kevin Francke maintains his brother never hit the slopes and instead booked a flight home the next morning. Francke recalls that the last-minute change cost his brother an extra $218.
When he asked what happened, his brother didn't answer. Later, Kevin Francke learned that McAlister was on the trip. Something "horribly horrendous" in Reno triggered McAlister's plan to kill his brother, Francke believes.
Records cast doubt on the scenario, however.
Michael Francke's carefully documented travel schedule from 1988 shows he didn't leave Oregon for work in March. Instead, the records say he went to Nevada in January and met with McAlister in Reno.
Far from arranging a hasty retreat, Francke canceled his return flight and drove 10 hours from Reno to Salem.
McAlister shared the ride with him.
Anyone else starting to see the conspiracy theory crumbling?
In August 1989, McAlister passed a polygraph exam about Francke's murder. Police records show he answered no when asked if he killed Francke, if he knew the killer's identity and whether he conspired to have Francke killed.
Polygraphs are inadmissible in court, but I find this, coupled with everything else, to be clear that McAlister had NOTHING to do with any conspiracy to murder Francke.
When Dennis O'Donnell, retired deputy superintendent of the Oregon State Police, was assigned to oversee the Francke case, one of the first things he did was call the columnist [Phil Stanford, who cowrote the screenplay of the movie based on the case].
Stanford laid out what to O'Donnell sounded like a bewildering scheme that involved inmates being let out on weekends to go to Arizona, where they would buy drugs. They would return to prison and pay kickbacks to guards, who would launder the cash through their retirement accounts.
"When I walked out of there, my eyes were crossed it was so screwy," O'Donnell told The Oregonian. Still, whenever Stanford uncovered new information, O'Donnell spent evenings trying to chase it down.
Stanford's leads went nowhere, O'Donnell says.
Another MacDonald-esque rabbit hole investigation it seems.
Soon after, Goldschmidt appointed John Warden, a retired Oregon appellate judge, to lead an independent review. The three-month inquiry and follow-up investigations found no connection between Francke's murder and prison corruption.
Likewise, the Oregonian looked for any credible evidence suggesting Michael Francke had confided to his colleagues about discovering corruption in his agency and found none.
The Governor of Oregon ordered an independent review of the case and found nothing. One could argue that this was another part of the elaborate cover up. But why would a local newspaper also corroborate this cover up? There was no evidence that Francke had ever told any of his coworkers anything that would indicate that someone wanted him dead. Are they involved in the cover up as well?
But those assertions ignore incriminating remarks that Gable made to police and to four other trial witnesses, including Gable's former wife, each of whom told The Oregonian they stand by their accounts.
The ex-wife, Janyne Vierra, described to The Oregonian a tearful confession she says Gable made three or four months after the murder. During an argument, Gable told his wife she didn't understand the pressure he was under.
"I stuck the guy," Gable said, sobbing.
"What guy?" she asked.
"The guy at the hospital," Gable answered. Francke's office was on the state hospital grounds, where Vierra worked as a nurse at the time.
It wasn't just addicts and ex-cons who Gable was confessing to. He confessed to his wife at the time as well.
I think this other article (http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/03/oregon_innocence_project_misse.html) sums up the murder perfectly:
Michael Francke was stabbed to death by Frank Gable, a low-level thief, thug and drug dealer, after Francke happened to stumble upon him breaking into his car.
The true Gable case was simply too mundane for the press to accept at face value in 1989.
The truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction.
Here is the article (http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2005/05/facts_dispute_michael_francke.html) I found. And here are the highlights:
In an effort to get to the bottom of one of the state's most sensational crimes, The Oregonian conducted the deepest examination of the case since Gable's conviction in 1991. Over five months, reporters reviewed thousands of pages of documents, tracked down dozens of key figures, and spent more than eight hours interviewing Gable.
In the end, the paper found no substance to Kevin Francke's conspiracy theory. Nor does Gable's alibi hold up: The witnesses and evidence he cites fail to account for his whereabouts at the time Francke was stabbed.
An local newspaper would absolutely love to find evidence of a grand conspiracy involving the government, so the fact that they could find "no substance" in the conspiracy claims is telling.
In his interviews with The Oregonian, Gable summed up his view of the conspiracy theory with one word:
"Madness."
Frank Gable was the man convicted of murdering Francke.
But at the time of his death, the 42-year-old Francke was a troubled man.
His second marriage was unraveling. Shortly before the murder, his wife, Bingta, had left, taking their young son. Child support and tuition from Francke's earlier marriage, plus his own spending habits, had stretched their finances. They had to borrow from family and Francke's co-workers to pay for ordinary expenses.
At work, Francke absorbed crushing pressure.
Goldschmidt had high hopes for Francke, a charming and articulate administrator from a new generation in prison management. Corrections leaders typically came from the ranks of wardens and superintendents. Francke was a University of Virginia law school graduate, former assistant attorney general and judge.
But not long after Francke's arrival, his blunders got his boss's attention.
Memos and correspondence from Goldschmidt's archives show that Francke was often out of step with the governor's agenda. He alienated lawmakers by making spending decisions without their OK. Though Francke loved the public spotlight, he seemed to have a tin ear for politics.
Lawmakers trusted by Goldschmidt quietly complained, and he feared Francke was becoming a liability. A month before the murder, Goldschmidt sent his prisons chief a scathing two-page memo.
"There's no room for more speeches about 'We don't have a crime problem,' or 'Prisons won't help,' " Goldschmidt wrote. Blasting Francke's management style, he added: "This is more of a warning than anything else. . . . I don't want every issue or decision to be dumped on me."
In the weeks before his death, Francke was on the phone regularly with Goldschmidt's office as he prepared for an upcoming presentation to lawmakers. "Corrections told to watch budget" was the top story on a copy of The (Salem) Statesman-Journal found in his car.
The typical tenure for corrections administrators was short, and Francke was looking ahead. On Jan. 3, 1989, he had fired off his resume to a New Mexico firm, according to a review of his computer files.
He planned to be in Oregon only one more year.
Francke's personal life was completely omitted from the UM segment. It's also interesting to note that Francke apparently was ruffling feathers with the Governor of Oregon. This seems to be one reason why people buy into the conspiracy angle. However, Francke had submitted his resume roughly 2 weeks before he was murdered. He wasn't staying long. Why bother killing the guy if he was going to be gone within months? Let him go and carry on business as usual.
Sometime in the year before his brother's death, [Kevin] Francke contends, Michael Francke told him he had uncovered an "organized criminal element" in the prison system. He planned to shake up his staff. He didn't mention names.
At the time, Kevin Francke didn't find the comment remarkable, he told The Oregonian. Michael Francke never mentioned it again. Later, after the murder, Francke cited the conversation to suggest that his brother was killed by someone in state government.
An examination of media accounts and police interviews over the years shows that Francke has shifted accounts of this crucial conversation, however, casting doubt on its reliability.
Francke has variously placed it the Friday before the murder, less than a month before his brother's death and around Thanksgiving. His former-wife, now deceased, told a reporter in 1990 that the conversation never took place.
Recently, Francke told The Oregonian he cannot recall when the conversation happened. And he says it might not have been a phone call: His brother may have mentioned the "organized criminal element" during a visit to Kevin's home in Florida the summer before he died.
His ex-wife says the conversation never happened. Interesting.
Last year, Francke also added a new detail to the conversation by naming the supposed mastermind behind his brother's murder: Scott McAlister, a former assistant attorney general who had once represented the Corrections Department.
In one of Stanford's Tribune columns last August, Kevin Francke said his brother was troubled by McAlister.
"It's him or me," Kevin said his brother told him.
But if the conversation took place in the weeks before the murder -- as Kevin Francke has said -- it's unlikely Michael Francke would have been worried about McAlister.
In early December, McAlister announced that he was resigning. He was headed to Utah to take a new job with that state's prison system.
So McAlister resigned a month prior to Francke's murder and got another job out of state...and still wanted to murder him? :confused:
In Kevin Francke's conspiracy plot, McAlister holds center stage.
Francke depicts him as a corrupt bureaucrat who was cozy with inmates and benefited from some kind of black-market prison trade.
His brother threatened to halt McAlister's dealings, Francke believes, so McAlister turned to underworld associates, including Timothy Natividad, a 24-year-old Salem meth dealer with a violent streak.
The murder plot, Francke maintains, called for Natividad and two other men to force the prison chief into his car and drive off, kill him and make it appear like suicide.
Something went wrong, Francke says, and Natividad ended up sneaking behind Francke as he walked to his car, spinning him around and thrusting the knife into his chest.
Timothy Natividad is the man that Gable supporters have said is the real killer. Yes because when I picture someone wanting to stage a suicide, I see them stabbing them in the heart the moment they encounter them. :rolleyes:
Kevin Francke has never produced credible evidence to support this version of events. Nor can he explain why someone would kill his brother in a state parking lot when he presented a far easier target at his rural Marion County home, where he lived alone.
Another very salient point.
In August of 1990, [Elizabeth] Godlove [Natividad's girlfriend at the time] told Gable's defense team that Natividad came home in a panic during the early morning hours "on or about" the night of the murder. She noticed a wound on his leg and a gash on his head.
A day or two later, Natividad told her he'd killed a man.
But when Godlove relayed the story to police in September 1990, she said she couldn't be certain the night Natividad arrived home with wounds was the same night Francke was stabbed.
"Tim never told her who he killed or where it happened," Oregon State Police Detective Loren Glover wrote in his report.
Police ran down leads on Natividad, testing his knives and clothing. But they found no link to the murder.
Today, the theory that Natividad was the murderer remains part of Gable's legal appeal.
Nonetheless, Gable told The Oregonian that he doesn't think Natividad was involved.
"I just don't see him (McAlister) going and hiring some low-level dope fiend or drug addict to go do a murder," Gable said. "It don't make no sense."
One would think that if Natividad was contracted to murder a high ranking official in the Oregon government, he would've at least mentioned that to his girlfriend at the time.
Natividad's own story will never be known -- Godlove shot and killed him two weeks after Francke's death. A jury acquitted her that spring after she claimed Natividad had been abusing her for years and had held a gun to her head the day she killed him.
Godlove and Kevin Francke married in 1994.
Anyone wonder why Francke's brother is implicating Natividad now? He's married to the woman whom Natividad used to allegedly abuse!
To Francke, the motives of Natividad and McAlister are obvious.
With Michael Francke gone, Natividad would have had an easy time peddling drugs in prison. And McAlister had two reasons to kill his brother, Francke speculates.
One was professional -- he wanted Francke's job. The second was malice -- McAlister sought revenge for something that happened on a vacation he and Francke had taken the previous March.
In 1988, Michael Francke told his brother he was going skiing near Reno, Nev., after a conference. Kevin Francke maintains his brother never hit the slopes and instead booked a flight home the next morning. Francke recalls that the last-minute change cost his brother an extra $218.
When he asked what happened, his brother didn't answer. Later, Kevin Francke learned that McAlister was on the trip. Something "horribly horrendous" in Reno triggered McAlister's plan to kill his brother, Francke believes.
Records cast doubt on the scenario, however.
Michael Francke's carefully documented travel schedule from 1988 shows he didn't leave Oregon for work in March. Instead, the records say he went to Nevada in January and met with McAlister in Reno.
Far from arranging a hasty retreat, Francke canceled his return flight and drove 10 hours from Reno to Salem.
McAlister shared the ride with him.
Anyone else starting to see the conspiracy theory crumbling?
In August 1989, McAlister passed a polygraph exam about Francke's murder. Police records show he answered no when asked if he killed Francke, if he knew the killer's identity and whether he conspired to have Francke killed.
Polygraphs are inadmissible in court, but I find this, coupled with everything else, to be clear that McAlister had NOTHING to do with any conspiracy to murder Francke.
When Dennis O'Donnell, retired deputy superintendent of the Oregon State Police, was assigned to oversee the Francke case, one of the first things he did was call the columnist [Phil Stanford, who cowrote the screenplay of the movie based on the case].
Stanford laid out what to O'Donnell sounded like a bewildering scheme that involved inmates being let out on weekends to go to Arizona, where they would buy drugs. They would return to prison and pay kickbacks to guards, who would launder the cash through their retirement accounts.
"When I walked out of there, my eyes were crossed it was so screwy," O'Donnell told The Oregonian. Still, whenever Stanford uncovered new information, O'Donnell spent evenings trying to chase it down.
Stanford's leads went nowhere, O'Donnell says.
Another MacDonald-esque rabbit hole investigation it seems.
Soon after, Goldschmidt appointed John Warden, a retired Oregon appellate judge, to lead an independent review. The three-month inquiry and follow-up investigations found no connection between Francke's murder and prison corruption.
Likewise, the Oregonian looked for any credible evidence suggesting Michael Francke had confided to his colleagues about discovering corruption in his agency and found none.
The Governor of Oregon ordered an independent review of the case and found nothing. One could argue that this was another part of the elaborate cover up. But why would a local newspaper also corroborate this cover up? There was no evidence that Francke had ever told any of his coworkers anything that would indicate that someone wanted him dead. Are they involved in the cover up as well?
But those assertions ignore incriminating remarks that Gable made to police and to four other trial witnesses, including Gable's former wife, each of whom told The Oregonian they stand by their accounts.
The ex-wife, Janyne Vierra, described to The Oregonian a tearful confession she says Gable made three or four months after the murder. During an argument, Gable told his wife she didn't understand the pressure he was under.
"I stuck the guy," Gable said, sobbing.
"What guy?" she asked.
"The guy at the hospital," Gable answered. Francke's office was on the state hospital grounds, where Vierra worked as a nurse at the time.
It wasn't just addicts and ex-cons who Gable was confessing to. He confessed to his wife at the time as well.
I think this other article (http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/03/oregon_innocence_project_misse.html) sums up the murder perfectly:
Michael Francke was stabbed to death by Frank Gable, a low-level thief, thug and drug dealer, after Francke happened to stumble upon him breaking into his car.
The true Gable case was simply too mundane for the press to accept at face value in 1989.
The truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction.