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The 1989 murder of Michael Francke, then the director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, is back in the news.
Today, House Majority Leader Ben Bowman (D-Tigard) and House Minority Leader Christine Drazan (R-Canby) wrote to FBI director Kash Patel, asking him to open an investigation into Francke’s murder.
“Thirty-six years later, we still do not know who killed Michael Francke or why they killed him,” the caucus leaders wrote to Patel. “This is unacceptable. The people of Oregon have a compelling interest in knowing the answer to these questions.”
Francke was stabbed to death outside his office in Salem. Then-Gov. Neil Goldschmidt had hired Francke, a former judge and corrections leader in New Mexico, during a time when Oregon was expanding its prison system and also dealing with legacy issues of corruption.
Because Francke’s murder occurred on state property, Oregon State Police led the investigation, but they never found an eyewitness or a murder weapon and did not make an arrest for more than a year after Francke’s death. The man they arrested, Frank Gable, was convicted and sentenced in 1991 to life in prison.
But many people, led by Francke’s brothers, Kevin and E. Patrick, and former Oregonian and Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford, never believed the prosecution’s version of events.
Related: Should You Believe This Man? Greg Johnson says he knows who really killed Michael Francke, and why.
After Gable exhausted all his appeals in the state system, federal public defender Nell Brown took up his case in 2014. In the investigation she led, many of the people who’d testified against Gable recanted. Brown’s investigation revealed the trial court had wrongfully excluded evidence about another suspect. A federal magistrate judge, John Acosta, ruled in 2019 that Gable had been wrongfully convicted. He was released from prison that year. State officials agreed to pay him $2 million this year, the Salem Statesman Journal reported.
The two lawmakers’ letter comes on the heels of that settlement with Gable.
“We have consulted with members of the Francke family, who have endured unimaginable heartache and pain for over three decades with no resolution,” they wrote. “They are in full support of this request.”
The FBI’s long-standing policy is not to comment on any aspect of agency investigations.
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering Oregon.