Podcast revisits murder mystery with N.M. ties
Man convicted of killing former corrections secretary in Oregon released this year; victim’s brothers say they don’t think he is killer
Michael Francke, who served as New Mexico Corrections Department secretary in the mid-1980s, was hired in 1987 as Oregon’s corrections chief. Less than two years later, he was stabbed and killed near his office in Salem, Ore.
Though a man was tried and convicted of Francke’s murder in 1991, a federal magistrate in April of this year ruled the man convicted of the killing, Frank Gable, had to be retried within 90 days or released. In June, Gable walked out of prison after serving nearly 30 years of a life sentence without possibility of parole.
Now the killing of the onetime state district judge from Santa Fe, and the state’s deteriorating case against Gable, are the subject of a new 12-episode podcast series called Murder in Oregon: Who killed Michael Francke?, which debuts Thursday.
One of the writers, Oregon journalist Phil Stanford, has written extensively about Francke’s killing. And one of the major contributors
to the series is Francke’s brother Kevin Francke, who says he doubted Gable’s involvement in the slaying from the beginning and who, along with another brother, Patrick Francke, worked many years for Gable’s release.
“There was no physical evidence linking Gable to the crime,” Kevin Francke told The
New Mexican in a recent interview. “There was no DNA, no witnesses. Seven of the eight eyewitnesses have recanted their stories.”
U.S. Magistrate John V. Acosta, according to Oregon news accounts, determined Gable’s constitutional rights were violated when the 1991 trial court refused to allow the jury to consider evidence pointing to another suspect who had confessed to the homicide but later recanted. Acosta also faulted Gable’s trial lawyers for not properly challenging the confession’s exclusion.
The judge also noted that so many witnesses had recanted their testimony against Gable. He also found that investigators had used coercive interrogation methods, including flawed polygraph tests.
Gable isn’t out of the woods yet. Oregon’s Department of Justice has appealed Acosta’s decision. Kevin Francke said he’s confident the state will lose that appeal.
So if Gable didn’t kill his brother, who did? Kevin Francke said he is convinced his brother’s murder was connected to his efforts to investigate and root out corruption in the Oregon corrections system.
“There was a lot of illegal activity going on in the prisons,” Kevin Francke said. “There was corruption rampant throughout the system.”
Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt had hired Michael Francke for the purpose of cleaning up his state’s prisons. In a 1988 interview, Goldschmidt said that he was looking for someone who had dealt with a failing prison system when he hired Michael Francke.
New Mexico Gov. Toney Anaya, at the outset of his administration in 1983, had tapped Michael Francke as his corrections secretary to deal with severe inmate crowding and implement prisonrelated legislation passed in the wake of the 1980 Santa Fe prison riot that left 33 inmates dead and $12 million in damage to the state penitentiary.
At the time of the riot, Michael Francke was working with the state Attorney General’s Office as general counsel for the Corrections Department. He was one of the first civilians to go into the prison not long after the riot was quelled.
Kevin Francke said he once visited his brother at his Santa Fe office, where he kept a soiled old pair of boots that were in disrepair. When he asked why he kept those boots there, Michael Francke told him those were the boots he was wearing when he entered the prison that day.
“The high-water mark on those boots was blood,” the brother recalled. The ruined footwear served as a vivid reminder of what could go wrong at a prison. While heading New Mexico’s Corrections Department, Michael Francke oversaw
a $95 million, four-prison construction project for the state.
Between his stint with the Attorney General’s Office and his years as New Mexico corrections secretary, Michael Francke was a state district judge for the First Judicial District, appointed at the age of 33 in 1980 by then-Gov. Bruce King. He won election to the bench later that year.
Though raised in Kansas, Michael Francke already had roots in New Mexico before he began working in state government in 1977. He’d earned his undergraduate degree in the 1960s at New Mexico Highlands University, which his brother said he attended on an athletic scholarship. He received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1971.
Michael Francke, a U.S. Navy veteran, is buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery.
Kevin Francke said he was living in Florida at the time of his brother’s slaying. He went to Salem immediately after the killing, then returned in 1990 to start his own investigation. He has lived there since.
He and brother Patrick Francke, who lives in Kansas, questioned Johnny Crouse, the man who had once confessed to Michael Francke’s murder. However, the brothers told the Oregonian in April that they don’t believe Crouse killed Michael Francke.
Patrick Francke told the paper that Crouse, who has since died, told him he wasn’t the killer but wouldn’t say who was.
Kevin Francke has been in frequent contact with Gable throughout the years, and the brothers started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to help Gable adjust to life outside of prison.
“Mike Francke’s legacy should not be that an innocent man’s life was tossed onto the trash pile of incarceration, then left to rot outside the walls, forgotten and abandoned,” the fundraising website says.
As of Tuesday, the site had raised $3,600 for Gable. The brothers hope to raise $60,000.