http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=27068

Ex-employee supports corruption claims
Witness, newly found notes suggest link between official misconduct, ’89 Franke killing

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Nov 16, 2004

Kevin Francke has never believed that his brother, Michael, was killed during a botched car prowl.

Michael Francke was the head of the Oregon Corrections Department when he was stabbed to death outside his Salem office on Jan. 17, 1989. A small-time criminal named Frank Gable eventually was arrested and convicted of the killing.

But Kevin Francke said that the week before he died, his brother personally warned the family of a likely threat on his life. According to Kevin Francke, Michael called his sister-in-law, Katie, and said he had discovered a network of corrupt officials within his department.

“Michael said he was going to clean house. I believe they had him killed,” Kevin Francke said.

State officials long have dismissed such allegations. They say there was no corruption in the Corrections Department at the time of Francke’s death, so there was no conspiracy to kill him.

But now the Portland Tribune has discovered information that supports Kevin Francke’s claims that at least one person his brother worked with was engaged in questionable behavior before and after the murder. Among other things, the Portland Tribune has interviewed a former Utah Corrections Department employee who claims firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing by Scott McAlister, the assistant Oregon attorney general who was assigned to the Corrections Department until shortly before Francke was killed.

Linda Parker worked for McAlister in 1989 after he was hired as the inspector general of the Utah Corrections Department. At one time, they also dated.

Parker told the Portland Tribune on Saturday that she saw McAlister with numerous documents related to the Francke murder investigation Ñ documents he should not have received since he was no longer working for the Oregon Justice Department. Parker said the documents were sent to him from Oregon after he moved to Utah.

“He had me file them for him. He was following the investigation very closely,” she said.

And, Parker said, she heard McAlister describe Francke’s killing as a botched hit that was “supposed to look like a suicide.”

“He was very angry that it had not been done right. He said they’d (screwed) it up,” Parker said.

She said that McAlister bragged about setting up inmates in Oregon and Utah on phony charges if they angered him, and that he personally transported cocaine from Oregon to Utah on at least two occasions and arranged for other shipments of cocaine from Oregon as well.

And Parker said McAlister used a sedative “like Valium” to beat a lie detector test about his knowledge of Francke’s murder. The Aug. 11, 1989, test appeared to show that McAlister had no inside knowledge of the murder.

McAlister currently is a lawyer in Tempe, Ariz. Contacted by the Portland Tribune, he adamantly denied Parker’s accusations.

McAlister denied knowing anything about Francke’s murder, describing him as “a friend.” He also denied possessing or using drugs in either Oregon or Utah, saying, “I was a law enforcement officer at the time.”

Gable, who is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a Florida prison, has maintained his innocence and asked the Oregon Court of Appeals for a new trial. His attorney, David Celuch, said he will pursue Parker’s claims on behalf of Gable.

“We are interested in all potential new evidence in the case and will follow up on it,” Celuch told the Portland Tribune.
Other charges proved true

Parker has made other allegations against McAlister that have been proved right.

In early 1990, she told the Utah FBI that McAlister possessed child pornography. Parker said McAlister gave her the films as part of what she claims was an ill-conceived effort to persuade her to have group sex with him and another woman.

The FBI got a search warrant for McAlister’s home, seizing more pornography. It referred the case to the Salt Lake County district attorney’s office, which charged McAlister with a felony count of sexual exploitation of a minor.

Parker testified against McAlister at a pretrial hearing on Aug. 2, 1990. He pleaded guilty to a class A misdemeanor charge of distribution of pornographic material on Oct. 12, 1990, and served seven days in a Salt Lake County jail.

A short time later, Parker was contacted by Roger Harris, one of Gable’s defense investigators. Harris was looking for evidence that other people could have been involved in Francke’s death. Parker agreed to talk about McAlister.

The result was a 12-page statement that Parker signed on Dec. 11, 1990. It details numerous accusations of illegal activities and official misconduct by McAlister, many with Oregon connections.

Parker said she stands by these charges, which include drug trafficking and drug use.

She also made the accusations to FBI and district attorney investigators during the pornography investigation, Parker said. She does not believe they were ever pursued.

“To this day, I don’t know why nothing more happened to McAlister,” she said. “As I told the FBI, if I did these things, I’d be in jail for a long time.”

The FBI has not yet responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Portland Tribune for its documents. Paul Murphy, the public information officer for the Utah attorney general’s office, said he can’t locate the office’s records on McAlister.

Parker, who has since remarried and changed her name, spoke to the Portland Tribune on the condition that her current name and address not be revealed. She said her life was threatened after she testified against McAlister in the child pornography case. That night, Parker said, all four tires on her car were slashed.

Parker said she also was threatened after filing a federal sexual harassment suit against McAlister and the Utah Department of Corrections. According to Parker, a letter sent to her home contained a note that said, “Drop the suit or you’re dead.” She said her house was broken into a few days later.

Parker said she reported the threats to the police, but they did nothing.

“I moved. I left the state because I believed if I stayed there, I’d be dead,” Parker told the Portland Tribune.

The state of Utah settled her sexual harassment case for an undisclosed amount in late 1990.
Notes raise other questions

The Portland Tribune has located other documents that raise questions about the investigation into Francke’s death.

They include two handwritten notes by Loren Glover, one of the state police detectives assigned to the case. They confirm Kevin Francke’s claim that Francke family members raised the corruption allegations with investigators within days of the murder.

The first note is dated Jan. 20, 1989, just three days after the killing. According to the note, Kevin Francke told Glover that Michael had called the week before he died and suggested he was “making a lot of enemies within the prisons in Oregon.”

The second note, dated the next day, summarizes a conversation with Michael’s widow, Bingta Francke. According to the note, Bingta said that “Kevin thought that some who worked in the corrections system could have killed Michael Francke.” Bingta also called the prison system a “good-old-boy system.”

The notes contradict claims by state officials that Francke’s family did not raise allegations of corruption at the time of the murder.

Former Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt’s legal counsel Cory Streisinger made that point in a confidential Aug. 22, 1989, memo to Goldschmidt.

“Nothing in Mike Francke’s files or anywhere else indicate that he was working on anything other than his pressing budget problems, and Mike’s family made no mention of the much-reported phone call about ‘organized criminal activity’ when they had their initial interviews with police,” Streisinger wrote.

Glover’s notes prove otherwise.

Another newly discovered document involves Jodie Swearingen, who was a 16-year-old Salem runaway when Francke was murdered. Swearingen repeatedly told investigators that she had witnessed the murder. She also testified before the Marion County grand jury that indicted Gable for the murder.

State police reports obtained by the Portland Tribune show that Swearingen told investigators she saw Gable kill Francke. But Swearingen told a different story to two Albany attorneys, J.D. Bispham and his wife, Carol Bispham, who took notes of the conversation.

According to the notes, Swearingen told the Bisphams that she had lied to the grand jury and was afraid of being charged with perjury and being an accessory to the murder. According to the notes, Swearingen said she actually saw a Salem drug dealer named Timothy Natividad kill Francke.

“Tim kinda took long strides up behind Francke as he opened car door,” the notes say. “Tim grabbed him Ñ Tims L hand on M.F. left shoulder Ñ T used R hand & stabbed MF as MF was turning to R clockwise.”

It’s not clear when Swearingen met with the Bisphams. Contacted by the Portland Tribune, they declined to discussed the meeting, citing attorney-client confidentiality.

But Thomas McCallum, a private investigator who worked on Gable’s defense team, confirmed the authenticity of the notes. McCallum said he and another defense investigator personally picked the notes up from the Bisphams’ office.

Natividad was shot and killed by his girlfriend, Elizabeth Godlove, during a domestic dispute a few weeks after Francke was killed. Godlove was found not guilty of any crime by a Marion County jury.
‘Pet theories’?

The new documents were found among thousands of pages of records compiled by Gable’s court-appointed defense attorney, Robert Abel. They were not entered into evidence in the trial because Abel did not attempt to show that anyone else had killed Gable.

Abel dismissed the McAlister and Natividad allegations as unsupported “pet theories” pursued by his investigators. Testifying during a May 2000 postconviction relief hearing in Marion County Circuit Court, Abel said the leads the defense team pursued were fruitless.

“And what I did was Ñ is I assigned these out and they were divided up, and they went back and came back to me with a bunch of garbage, just like 30,000 pages,” Abel said.

jimredden@portlandtribune.com