Confessions of a Lie Detector: years of theft, sex, and murder

by Jim Wygant

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  The police deliberately withheld some details of the murder from the press. They wanted to preserve enough information to identify the true killer and eliminate any false confessions. They began to administer polygraph examinations to persons recently released or on temporary leave from the state correctional institutions in Salem, the city where the crime occurred. They did not necessarily believe that any one of them might have been the murderer, but with virtually no clues to give focus to their investigation there was little else for them to do. Each of the tests consumed about an hour and a half. Within the first three months the police reportedly tested about 100 persons. One of them, John Crouse, began to interest them.

  Crouse told contradictory stories, at one time even saying that he had murdered Francke. Columnist Phil Stanford obtained that information and launched the first of many columns speculating about Crouse. Admitting that he wrote to Crouse in custody, he quoted from the reply, “I wish that you would leave my family alone. You write things in you[r] paper that you only think you know. I’m sick of my name coming up in your paper.” Later, long after Crouse ceased to be of interest to anyone, Stanford harangued the District Attorney for conducting a “wild-goose chase” against Crouse. He did not acknowledge any responsibility for encouraging that “chase.”

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  As the months fell away with no arrests, columnist Stanford formed a closer, sympathetic, and encouraging relationship with Francke’s brother Kevin. It was Kevin who located a psychic in Florida, where Kevin lived at that time. And it was Stanford who eagerly reported the psychic’s typically ambiguous claims about the case. Stanford also reported Kevin’s claims that his deceased brother was about to expose an “organized criminal element” that fostered corruption within the Department of Corrections. Kevin said that his brother had told him about this shortly before he was murdered. No one else could be found who had heard any similar claim from the victim. Not even members of an independent task force which had been working closely with Francke had ever heard him speak about an “organized criminal element.” Stanford would suggest in later columns that a “cover-up” was in effect. Without much imagination he coined the awkward term “Franckegate.” It never caught on.

  The Governor, feeling the heat of the unrestrained criticism of a popular newspaper columnist, appointed a retired judge from the Oregon Court of Appeals to conduct a fresh inquiry. The judge hired several retired FBI agents as investigators. After three months they issued a 62-page report that said there was no connection found between the Francke murder and corruption in the Department of Corrections. They dismissed the notion of “any organized, sinister conspiracy.”

  Other investigations of corruption in the Department of Corrections were begun, some of them through the state legislature, one of them by a five-member State Police team. Eventually there were more than a dozen such investigations, audits, and probes. Stanford had complained that there were only four indictments from an investigation three years earlier. All of the new investigations together produced no additional indictments, but a substantial amount of tax money was spent to get to that point. In the meantime, there was still no suspect in the murder case.

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  When the Francke brothers asked for a copy of the autopsy report, the case took another bizarre turn. The autopsy report included a detailed description of the fatal wound. By omission it would also reveal what had not been done to the victim. The police were contented to allow rumors of nonexistent wounds and mutilations to persist, knowing that investigators might use such erroneous information to help eliminate false confessions. For a polygraph examiner, undisclosed details that would be known only to the real killer would permit use of a highly accurate test method, something not available if all details were disclosed in press reports.

  The District Attorney already knew of the Francke brothers’ close relationship with Stanford, and he presumably did not want to read the complete autopsy report in one of Stanford’s columns. He gave the brothers a copy of the report that had portions blacked out and was missing the entire narrative. As the D.A. had feared, one of the brothers apparently took the report directly to Stanford. From Stanford’s description in his column, it was apparent that he had seen the censored document the D.A. had entrusted to the Francke brothers.

  In that July 5, 1989, column Stanford reached the nadir of his low style of “reporting.” After complaining about the missing portions of the autopsy report, Stanford claimed that a lack of information only bred rumors. He then listed uncritically all those he claimed to have heard. They included rumors that the victim had been castrated, stabbed in the throat, had an earlobe cut off, that a horse had been bled in some kind of Satanic ritual, and that the victim’s heart had been removed. All of these speculations were false, but Stanford gave them credibility by printing them without question, leaving the possibility that any of them might be true. Was this column meant to convey a message to the District Attorney, a threat to disseminate more rumors if Stanford didn’t get the information he requested?

  One month later the Francke brothers, presumably encouraged by Stanford’s attention, filed suit against the State, demanding release of the complete autopsy report. That same month, August, 1989, the District Attorney convened a special Grand Jury to hear evidence on the Francke murder.

  In the press, the murder investigation had begun to take a back seat to renewed charges in Stanford’s column of corruption within the prison system. The news staff of The Oregonian quoted the District Attorney: “We’ve repeatedly asked Mr. Stanford and other people making allegations to provide the underlying basis or any leads to help us investigate the allegations. I’ve received nothing other than what I read in the media.”

  At about this same time, the first stories appeared about Scott McAlister. He had been an assistant Attorney General for 16 years in Oregon and had been assigned to the Department of Corrections at the time of the 1986 corruption investigation. He left his job only a few days before the Francke murder. He went to Utah, where he became inspector general in the corrections department there. In August, 1989, he was asked by the Francke investigators to undergo a polygraph examination. Other officials connected with Francke had also been polygraphed. McAlister reportedly passed his polygraph examination. He slipped back into the shadows, if only for a few months.

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  The front page of the Sept. 22, 1989, issue of The Oregonian carried a story about a new suspect in the Francke murder. His name was Frank Gable. The 30-year-old ex-convict had been arrested on Sept. 5. He was being held in a county jail on the Oregon coast, charged with assaulting his wife and violation of his parole. Sometime earlier, while he had been in the state penitentiary, he had attended a drug treatment program at the Oregon State Hospital, a short distance away. Francke’s office was located on those same grounds. Gable was no longer in drug treatment when the murder occurred, but he was at least familiar with the location of the murder.

  The new charges that Gable had assaulted his wife got him a one-year term in jail. Even with an early release for good behavior, he would serve at least seven months. The D.A. in the murder investigation had only that long to take a careful look at Gable and his associates. At the end of that time, Gable would be released if no new charges were filed.

  While still in jail, Gable was asked by the Francke murder investigators to undergo a polygraph examination. He agreed and presented himself to the State Police examiner with several evident scrapes and bruises he said he had sustained in fights over the previous few days. He complained about the polygraph test, said he was being “railroaded,” and predicted he would do poorly. He spontaneously commented that while in treatment at the State Hospital he’d been told, “one of these days you’re going to go off and kill somebody.” He said he had no history of violence before his stay at the State Hospital, but he became violent after leaving the treatment program because he’d been told it was his nature. However, later
in the same conversation he admitted to the examiner that he’d also been in frequent fights as a child.

  Gable denied any direct knowledge of the Francke murder. The police examiner attached the sensors and ran the test. As Gable had predicted, he flunked his polygraph exam.

  As 1989 wound down, columnist Stanford ran several columns that included tips and speculation from prison inmates, some not identified. When Stanford found out that an acquaintance of Gable’s in the Idaho penitentiary had talked to investigators, he asked to visit the inmate in Idaho. The warden refused. So Stanford sent the inmate a letter and asked him to phone collect. He did, and asked what was in it for him. Stanford told him there would probably be a movie (one was released six years later with Stanford as co-writer). Stanford printed the inmate’s uncorroborated statements and urged him to call back. When the man did, he revealed that he’d been told by investigators not to talk to the press. In his column Stanford quoted himself replying, “Well, let’s talk fast then.”

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  At the beginning of the new year, 1990, when the Francke murder case was only a few days short of one year old, The Oregonian ran a long summary of progress to that time. Police had questioned about 3,000 persons in four states. The cost of the investigation to that moment was estimated at $700,000. No one had been arrested, but investigators continued to focus on Frank Gable and to question all of his acquaintances.

  That same news story included comments from government officials critical of press coverage, without specific reference to Stanford’s column. The D.A. complained that, “because so much has been printed it’s very difficult to cull out the truth from either misperceived observations or fabricated lies.”

  But it was the Oregon Attorney General, Dave Frohnmayer, who more eloquently complained about what he termed “single-source reporting”. As Attorney General, handling primarily civil matters for the State, Frohnmayer had no direct involvement in the murder investigation. Still he did not like the atmosphere of journalistic sniping that surrounded the Francke case. “Why is there harm?” he asked rhetorically. “...It casts long shadows on the integrity of institutions that people depend on to work, and work with integrity. It costs an enormous amount of money investigating and re-investigating. It’s also an atmosphere in which people who have very shadowy motives can get great advantage over their long-time adversaries.”

  Frohnmayer was himself a man of impeccable reputation, widely respected among his colleagues. A month passed before Stanford attacked him, going so far as to suggest that Frohnmayer himself might be corrupt. Stanford requoted the Attorney General’s remark, characterizing it as “belly-aching about press coverage.” The columnist asserted that Frohnmayer only complained because he was afraid of the “shadow” cast over his own department. “Yes, there is a shadow,” Stanford wrote. “And it’s growing longer and darker by the hour.”

  No one else in the media, before or since that column, questioned Frohnmayer’s integrity or that of his office. Stanford never offered any specific allegation in support of that slur, but once again he had shown that he would use his column for personal attacks in response to criticism.

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  On Jan. 18, 1990, the civil suit the Francke brothers had filed against the State to obtain the autopsy report was settled. The D.A. had previously withheld all but a heavily censored version to protect information that the police hoped to use with murder suspects. In settlement of the law suit the brothers got the full report, in exchange for a pledge not to disclose it to the press. The newspaper columnist Stanford wrote a week later that he had spoken with brother Kevin about the report, but Stanford’s column contained nothing from the report itself.

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  The new year of 1990 soon proved to be a disaster for someone who had previously been only a minor player in the Francke drama, Scott McAlister. McAlister was the former assistant Attorney General and legal counsel to Francke’s Department of Corrections. McAlister had gone to a similar job in Utah only days before the murder. But twelve months later, in December, 1989, he had resigned the Utah position, which had gone unnoticed by the media in Oregon. After his August polygraph test – related to the Francke case – the media had lost interest in McAlister. Only later did they discover that he had quit his job in Utah because of what he termed unfounded complaints about sexual harassment.

  On Wednesday, January 31, 1990, FBI agents raided the Salt Lake City apartment of the 43-year-old attorney. The affidavit for their search warrant said they were looking for pornographic materials. The document mentioned two sex films with evidence labels from Oregon court proceedings.

  The source of the information was a woman who said she’d had an intimate relationship with McAlister. She was also one of his co-workers. She had already filed a sexual harassment complaint, claiming that he demoted and transferred her when their personal relationship ended. Shortly before the FBI raid, she met with a TV reporter and presented him with a box of eight-millimeter pornographic movies. She said that McAlister had given her the films in June, 1989, before she filed her sexual harassment complaint against him. She claimed that McAlister had tried to encourage her to participate in a three-person sexual encounter. When the TV reporter viewed the movies with the woman, they discovered that some of them included apparent juveniles in sexual circumstances. They notified the police, and within a few days the FBI was at McAlister’s door with a search warrant.

  Labels identified some of the materials as evidence submitted in a criminal trial in Portland more than 10 years earlier. As an assistant Attorney General, McAlister had signed out the films during legal work his office undertook after the trial. He had never returned them.

  Shortly after the FBI raid, a second female employee in Utah filed another sexual harassment complaint, claiming that McAlister had threatened to withhold promotion or terminate her if she did not participate with him in sex with multiple partners. None of these allegations made McAlister a suspect in the Francke murder, but the media seemed unable to mention McAlister’s name without also bringing up the prolonged Francke investigation. Since McAlister had been legal counsel to the Oregon Department of Corrections until shortly before Francke’s murder, the press tried to link everything together: the murder, the pornographic movies, the allegations of corruption. McAlister’s problems had become another ingredient in the Francke stew.

  The pot was stirred when the plaintiff from one of the sexual harassment suits said she had heard McAlister discussing the failure to make Michael Francke’s murder look like a suicide. The implication was that McAlister had put out a “hit” on Francke, his former boss. Even the defense attorney for the designated “official” suspect, Gable, dismissed the “hit” story as lacking credibility. However, the conspiracy theorists quickly adopted it and spun an entirely speculative tale that placed McAlister at the heart of complicated scheme that ended with Francke’s murder. No witnesses or evidence ever emerged to support that theory.

  Responding to the media blitz, the Governor quickly appointed a special ombudsman, a prosecutor on temporary leave who agreed to oversee the multiple corruption investigations.

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  In its April 8th edition The Oregonian revealed that Frank Gable would be released from jail in four days. He had been sentenced to one year in custody for assaulting his wife. Like almost all jail sentences, the term had been shortened. Gable had been locked up for about seven months and was about to be discharged. If the D.A. did not have a murder indictment against him by April 12, Gable might be hard to find again.

  The day after that news, April 9, Stanford again tried out another one of his conspiracy theories. He wrote that a corrections official known only as “Pat” had witnessed an apparent dispute between two other corrections officials at the location and time of Francke’s murder. The natural conclusion would be that one of the two in the dispute was Francke himself. The information came from a female inmate in the women’s correctional facility. She said that
the corrections official known as “Pat” had confided in her. Nobody could figure out who “Pat” was. There was nothing to corroborate the inmate’s story, but Stanford printed it anyway.

  In that same column Stanford also claimed that the autopsy report indicated that Francke had suffered a blow to the head. The family had promised not to release the report to the press. Had Stanford seen it anyway? Other events quickly overshadowed any “scoop” that Stanford hoped to achieve about the autopsy report.

  Unknown to the press, on Friday, April 6, 1990, the grand jury had issued a secret indictment against Frank Gable, charging him with six counts of aggravated murder and one count of murder (each count charging the murder of Michael Francke under a different legal theory). Over the weekend investigators removed Gable from the county jail on the Oregon coast where he was completing his assault sentence. They transported him to another jail and questioned him at length. On Monday, April 9, they brought him to court in Salem, where the murder charges became public for the first time.

  The victim’s brothers had mixed feelings. Both still held to the conspiracy theory. Patrick expressed relief at the indictment but said that he thought Gable had probably been only a “hit” man for somebody else. Kevin said that Gable might have useful information but was probably not the actual killer. At a press conference, District Attorney Dale Penn was asked about a conspiracy. He answered, “I don’t know of any admissible evidence to establish that.” Gable himself claimed that he was being “framed” by drug dealers in Salem.