December 5, 2019 • 43 mins
More than a year after Michael Francke's death, public and political pressure is mounting to capture his killer. Then, in April of 1990, a small time Salem drug dealer named Frank Gable is arrested and indicted for his murder. But the case the state mounts against him raises serious questions and concerns.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Murder in Oregon as a production of I Heart Radio.
Previously on Murder in Oregon. As a columnist for The Oregonian.
In the Portland Tribune, Phil wrote more than one columns
about Michael Frankie's murder. He was a public official who
discovered corruption in his own department. The night before he
was to address the legislative committee on this very subject,
(00:21):
he was stabbed in the heart in front of the
building where he worked. I think he made a number
of people in the department uncomfortable, probably the head of
Dick Peterson, Scott McAllister, who was the a g lawyer
who had for the previous twelver thirteen years been assigned corrections.
That's the third member of the Department of Corrections officers
(00:44):
on the alps with her. After Phil wrote an article
alleging the corruption Krauss had intimated to Pat and confesses
as much in greater detail to the investigators, Krauss recants
his confession and is dropped as a suspect out of nowhere.
They didn't like the people his confession would ultimately lead to.
(01:04):
That's what it looks like for sure. About a week
after the murder, the police held a press conference and
announced they were interested in talking with a man who
had been seen in the Dome building. He's quickly became
known as the man in the pinstripe suit. Conrad got
to see that. Six months after Michael Frankie has murdered,
he goes to his counselor in prison and tells the
(01:27):
counselor that he knows something about the murder. He said
says he was approached by Tim Natividad to do the murder,
and he knows that Scott McAllister, the prison lawyer, arranged it.
Tim always carried a knife. Tim had a huge knife collection.
Tim was violent. Tim told me he killed somebody, and
(01:47):
I think it's Michael. Look at this composite drawing. They
laughed and said, you can't convict a dead man. There's
nothing we can do here. By August, Johnny Krauss, the
(02:08):
man who confessed to the murder of Michael Frankie then recanted,
had been dropped as a suspect in the investigation. That's
when an internal memo landed on the desk of then
Governor Neil Goldschmidt that would raise some serious concerns about
the investigation into Michael Frankie's murder. This was something we
didn't find out until some years later. Actually we didn't
(02:30):
know about it at the time. But as the heat
was building up on the Frankie case because they had
dropped Krauss and they had nothing else in sight, or
so we thought, Governor Neil Goldschmidt's legal aid wrote him
a long memo on how to handle all this pressure
that was building up. It was a political problem for them,
and it is very revealing. We've obtained a copy of
(02:54):
that memo, and in light of what we now know,
there are sections that are at best concerning. Here are
some excerpts. Nothing in Michael Frankie's files or elsewhere, the
memo says, indicate 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
(03:18):
when they had their initial interviews with the police. But
we know that's not true. Yes, yes, we We also
would later find out from officers notes that in fact,
that Dave Kevin got out here to Oregon after his
brother's death, he told the police about this, and then
he called again from Santa Fe from Mike's funeral to
reiterate that the memoir goes on the Frankie family's activities
(03:40):
and the presence of Phil Stanford ensure that the issue
will continue to receive attention by the press in public
until some decisive step is taken to resolve it. So
they just wanted to go away. Oh they do. Indeed,
I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murdering Oregon. Another
(04:17):
key takeaway from that memo to gold Schmidt was the
idea that an FBI investigation wasn't exactly welcomed by the
Oregon state government. I know from my own interviews at
the time the FBI was interested in getting into this.
They didn't make it public, but certainly Goldschmidt and his
people knew it, and they did not want the FBI
(04:37):
to investigate corruption down there was their resistance to the
FBI stepping into the investigation. It's in the memo, Uh,
how to get rid of this this problem? It is
also possible that you could get federal assistance, but I
believe it is crucial not to turn this into an
FBI investigation if you want any assurance that it will
(04:58):
stay within the bounds you have set. If you want
any assurance that it will stay within the bounds you
have said, what does that mean? Well, it meant something
to the person who was writing the memo, and it
meant something to gold Schmidt. But even when we finally
got this memo, when it finally became public, it wasn't
(05:20):
clear what were the bounds that gold Schmidt had set.
What were his reasons for not wanting an investigation. That's
that's the question. It sounds like he wanted something contained.
Oh yes. And then eight months later, in April of
seemingly out of nowhere, a small time drug dealer from
(05:42):
Salem named Frank Gabel is arrested and charged with the
murder of Michael Frankie. Frank Gable has found himself a
key figure in the Michael Frankie murder investigation. He says
he didn't do it. He is currently serving a year
sentence in the Coop's County jail for assaulting his wife,
but others say he's done much worse than beat his wife.
(06:03):
Mike Kieran's, a convict from the Idaho State Penitentiary, claims
Frank Gable told him he killed Frankie during a car burglarate.
Remember at this point, Johnny Krauss had already confessed knowledge
of the murder, recanted his confession, and was granted immunity
to not recant his recantation. Liz god Love also had
(06:25):
gone to the police with her belief Tim Nativodad was
the man in the pinstripe suit and could have killed Frankie,
only to have them laugh and say they couldn't convict
a dead man. Frank Gable's name came out of nowhere,
even to the three journalists most heavily involved in the case,
(06:47):
Phil Stanford, TV reporter Eric Mason, and Steve Jackson at
The Statesman Journal. Here's Jackson, Gable wasn't on my radar
at all at that time. By this time, I was
already having difficulties with the way the investigation was handled,
and Jackson found the arrest of Gable oddly convenient for
(07:09):
the police. The only one that was really pursued was
the easy one for the police to settle on, some
guy who had basically no support, no money, no friends,
people willing to turn on him. He was sort of
an outsider even in that met group. He was an
easy target. Yeah, he was an easy target with with
not many resources to call on to um protect himself.
(07:33):
Here's Phil's take. Well, at the time, no one knew
what to think. I mean, Gable was completely new name
out there, and all of a sudden, the state police
are promoting him as their prime suspect. Even now, it's
something of a mystery how they picked him. And it
appears that it all happened in about May of eighty nine,
(07:57):
just as Krauss was peering as a suspect. This is
when Cross started talking about possible connections to corrections officials.
Gable was also clearly confused as to what was happening
to him and struggle to articulate what his accusers could
possibly gain by pitting the murder on him. Here he
is at an interview at the time of his arrest.
(08:20):
I believe it's because a lot of the people like
Kerns and several other inmates are jumping on the bandwagon, thinking, well,
we can get our charges dropped, you know, point the
finger at Gable, We'll get there and get our charges drop.
So my name keeps coming up. The Mike Karns Gable
spoke of in that interview was another of Salem's usual
suspects who happened to be at the Marion County lockup
(08:43):
when police arrested Gable. He was the first in a
rogues gallery of criminals used to try and tie Gable
to the killing. Karns was the first one to go
public and say that Gable had confessed to him. He
would later go public and say he made it all
up with Of course he did. That's how it got started.
And then they state police started finding other so called
(09:07):
witnesses who would say that Gabel confessed to them. But
according to Gabel, he had a solid alibi, and one
that didn't exactly paint him as a saint. He claimed
to be busily committing an entirely different crime at the
time of Mike's murder. I was a friend of mine's
(09:28):
house named Chris A. Rillo's with him and two other girls.
I didn't leave my home, I believe, until at least
eight o'clock that night, and I went from there to
a friend of mine's house and delivered some drugs and
then went to Chris's house and spent the rest of
that evening there and came home about five that morning.
(09:50):
So fifty two days away from finishing a sentence for
an unrelated domestic abuse charge. Frank Gabele now feared he
was going to be charged with Michael Frankie's murder. I've
been so scared, you know, each day you don't know
if you're getting out in fifty two days or if
you're gonna get put to death penalty for crime you
(10:10):
didn't come in, you know. So yeah, I'm scared, more
scared than I've ever been in my life. You know.
I believe that I walked into a complicated drug ring
and really don't know how complicated it was until now,
and it would get even more complicated and even more perplexing.
There was never any physical evidence linking Gable to the
(10:32):
murder his cellmates. False accusation, along with the testimony from
characters entwined in Salem's Underworld, were the only quote unquote
evidence the police had to go on. Who were the
people who came forward as the state's witnesses? Um, well,
they did not come forward that the police selected them,
uh and helped them manufacture the stories they wanted using
(10:56):
lie detective tests. That's one of the more remarkable things
about about this case and the way lie detector tests
were used to shape testimony. The two star witnesses for
the state from the beginning where Jody swear Engine and
Shorty hardened. Jody was a seventeen year old runaway who
had been in and out of Hillcrest, the girls school,
(11:19):
certainly part of the suaker scene there. Shorty Harden's names
come up before. He was friends with Tim Natividad. They
ran in the same drug dealing circle. Yeah, they did
business together. Shorty and Jody would become the state star
witnesses linking Gable to the murder after twenty three polygraphs.
(11:41):
It took them that long to get Jody to to
tell the story they wanted. Jody's story was that Gable
had who by the way, she hadn't met until about
six months later, had driven her to the Dome building
that night, and while she was at the Dome building,
she called Shorty to come pick her up. They didn't
have cell phones in those days, so she had to
(12:02):
walk a distance to a pay phone, which the police were.
By the way, we were never able to find or identify.
And the story is that just before the murder occurred,
short He drove up in his Mustang parked there. Jodie
got into his car. Shorty said he saw Frankie coming
out of the Dome Building yelling at Gable, who was
(12:25):
in the car at the time. He got to the car.
Gable lunged out of the car and stabbed Frankie. Shorty
said he started his car and I and Jodie drove
off into the night. The state didn't seem to mind
that the version Jody and Shorty settled upon contradicted the
account of the only eyewitness on record, Wayne hans Acker,
(12:47):
the maintenance man who had seen two men interacting the
night Frankie was murdered. They put all these meet up
witnesses in front of the grand jury, including Jody and Shorty,
of course, and in fact, they even allowed Jody and
Shorty to meet privately in a room before the grand
(13:08):
jury so they could get those stories straight. And they did,
and they testified that they had been there at the
Dome Building on the night of the murder and seeing
the murder testimony that had been coerced, and they threatened her.
She finally came up with a story that she was
present when he stabbed Michael. Frankie. Shorty was a local
(13:30):
tough guy. He had done business with Tim Nativit Dad
he was UH deeply entrenched in in the sattlement underworld,
made multiple deals with the cops along the ways, and
they got him to testify against Gable two. And Kevin says,
great effort went into bringing Shorty heart and inn and
getting him on board. There was a very very big
(13:54):
police presence in Rendan Shorty down for a pearl dialation.
They had City of Salem cops, they had a police
helicopter in the air tract. They had the police rounded
him down and he was doing his best to get away,
and I think he went over a large like a
ten foot fence or something like that and tour attendant
into his hand or some nonsense. Anyway, they eventually caught him,
(14:18):
took him to sale possibility as surgery, and as he
was coming out of surgery, he said he was the
state's next million dollar baby. Holly had to do was
hanging rap on a murder rap on front Gable. It
became a pattern. Here's Tom McCallum, the lead investigator for
Gables defense, I mean Shorty and Jody and you know
(14:41):
their lineup of all the people that they did all
the polygraphs on, and Uh sort of developed their testimony
they're all drugg eas and they knew that everything was.
It was pretty crazy. Here's bills take. But several months later,
Odie spoke with Tom McCallum, who was the lead investigator
(15:04):
for the defense, and confessed that she made up the story.
She wasn't there, It wasn't what happened. She also talked
to Steve Jackson at the Salem Paper and then she
took off. The state police went after her and arrested
her and brought her back and put her in jail.
So she tried to flee town so she wouldn't have
(15:24):
to testify or she did. Yes, Jody and Shorty weren't
alone and feeling pressured by the state police. I was
at my desk the Oregonian got a call from a
prison guard in Clark County Jail, which is just right
across the river in Vancouver, Washington, and he said, you
won't believe this, but I've got a guy over here
who says the state police are pressuring him to make
(15:46):
up a story about Gable. You want to come over
and talk to him? I said, oh yeah, So I
went over there and there's this guy, Guessner. He's in
his twenties and says, they want me to say that
Gable confessed to the murder. He didn't. Then he went
on to say he'd already been convicted on drug charges
and they were really pressuring him. This U S attorney
had charged him with violation federal gun laws, which would
(16:08):
add another decade or so to his sentence. And so
he says, the guessner says to me, what am I
supposed to do? What's the guy supposed to do? All
of which could explain gable shock and confusion at being targeted.
Local television reporter Eric Mason was one of the reporters
who spoke to Gable following his arrest. Do you remember
(16:32):
how you found out that Frank Gable was arrested. I
think it was a press conference that Dale Penn had,
and my thinking was, wow, there's so many other folks
that are probably yet that's the last person I want
to you know, it didn't make sense, the idea that
he was the loan assailant of Michael Frankie just there
(16:54):
was more to it than that. Obviously, there was more
to it than that. He just looked like a kid
that would never get close to Mike Frankie after being
up close to Mike Frankie and seeing him play basketball
and meeting him on the steps of the capital to
do an interview with him, and it seemed like a mismatch.
Frank Gable was thin and spindley and looked like someone
(17:17):
who had been on meth and just didn't look physically
strong enough to take on a guy like Mike Frankie.
It just didn't make sense. When Mason sat down with
Gable after his arrest, he just didn't get the feeling
that this was a murderer. And he'd interviewed a number
of them, was at Oregon State Penitentiary, and I believe
(17:40):
my first few interviews around the phone with Frank Gable
and the little bell goes off in my head that says,
this person is telling me the truth. He just was
the wrong guy. It didn't look like a guy that
I was interviewing that was responsible for the crime. His
body language didn't reveal it, his eyes did reveal it,
(18:01):
his presence didn't reveal it. You got the feeling that
he was a guy who was involved in math and
involved in small time crime and certainly had a problem
with his wife. But a guy that was not a
person who was a natural born killer at all. Meanwhile,
(18:31):
Kevin Frankie is back at his home in Florida battling
the issues of trying to keep interest going in his
brother's murder from long distance. So it was just constantly
poking the bear, trying to keep the thing going and
keep it in the face of the public, in the
ears and eyes of the public, doing video shoots from
the station, then in Florida, where I'd get in front
(18:53):
of the blue screen and do the remote shots and
things like that. So everybody was getting to know me
and getting to know Pat. And the visibility of the
Frankie brothers and the media led to a nickname with
certain members of the press. I don't know who coined
the term, the Cranky Brothers, but we became the Cranky
(19:16):
Brothers to the press, and I liked it. Goldschmidt, Penn
in that group didn't get it. Yeah, we were cranky,
we're piste off. Well, that nickname didn't bother them. The
anonymous calls and rumors circling around Mike's murder did. Rumors
(19:40):
that you hear from phone calls that you get that
you don't know who it is. So I'd get calls
and rumors, you know, your brother was mutilated, his heart
was removed. Weird, weird ship. I had one letter that
was Mike was killed as part of a Satanic ritual
and this was carved in his chest and blah blah blah,
(20:00):
and I'd send this to him and they said, we
can't comment on it. At the same time, the state
continued to push the narrative that Gable was the killer.
After months of back and forth phone calls and over
a year since his brother's murder, Kevin got a call
from the police captain heading up the investigation. I got
(20:22):
the phone call at home on April ninth, the morning
of April ninth, and I'm going to say it was
around seven or eight o'clock in the morning, and it
was Captain Dennis O'Donnell on the line, and he stated
his purpose with the call was to informed me that
they had indicted Frank Gable for the burger Mike. I
(20:45):
said something to the effect that you've got to be
shipping me. I said, why are you calling me instead
of because I was expecting it that if there was
a call that had become the d a's office, and
he said, we flipped the coin and I lost. So
that's how they chose to tell the brother of a
(21:07):
murder victim that someone had been indicted in the crime.
And Kevin was far from convinced they'd indicted the right man.
And I said, well, I'm going to be coming out
there for the trial. And he said, no, you don't
need to do that. Is you know, put yourself through that,
your family and all that. You'll get contemporarious updates from
(21:29):
everybody here. And I thought, you know, why didn't he
want me to come out there for the trial? And
I said, I'm going to be coming out there anyway.
And there's this long pause and he said, well, there's
nothing I can do to dissuade you. And he said, anyway,
don't try to contact me. I'm going on vacation. A
week later, Kevin would decide to leave Florida altogether. They
(21:52):
didn't have anything to stay in Florida for, so in
August he set out again for the town where his
brother was brutally murdered. On the way, he stopped by
Prairie Village, Kansas, to visit for his mother's birthday. It
was the first time he'd seen his parents since Michael's death.
As he walked up the path to his childhood home,
(22:13):
he was greeted by his overjoyed mother and it was
beautiful summer morning. I was tired as hell, and she
was a sight for sore eyes. I saw my old
man come out out on the front door, and they
didn't know I was going to be there, and he
was just ballowed like a baby. She'd I was there,
(22:34):
skipped down the stairs like that in years. It was
good to see them, and I told him if it
was thinking about going to Oregon, and they were trying
to talk me out of it. Anyway, I left the
next day, and the entire trip, Kevin's thoughts were on
Mike and his accused killer. By the time I seventy
(22:56):
West came up, I was there and West Stern, Colorado
opened up before me, and into Utah and watching the
sun go down, going up into Idaho and coming down
the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon in the middle of
the night pitch black, and then dawn in Portland, Oregon,
(23:18):
seven O'clockville and into town and it was like I
blinked in here I was. But certain people seem to
know Kevin was there too, and didn't exactly give him
a warm welcome. The very first night that I was
in Oregon, I got my tire slashed, and then I
got a note saying, welcome to Oregon, Now go home.
(23:41):
I was placed on the windshield and it wouldn't end there.
I started to feel like I was being watched. I
started paying attention to that, and I started seeing the
same cars and the same people, and I'd stopped and
they would go away, and then I'd find me again.
(24:01):
And it is It does make you feel a little nets.
But despite this, Salem is where Kevin would remain, determined
to solve his brother's murder no matter what, and one
of the first people he got into touch with was
television reporter Eric Mason. I'm Dolian interview with Kevin right away,
within a few days of him coming to town. He
(24:23):
has nowhere to stay and he's trying to find a
place to stay, and I say, you know, listen, I'll
do anything to try to help you, and so I
think he did at one point camp out overnight in
the in the office until I can find something to
you know, stay with permanently. Eric Mason's office became a
(24:45):
sort of bunker for Kevin to pour through all the
interviews and press conferences involving Mike's investigation in Gables indictment.
He had all the video equipment, theories, and the interviews
with Scott McCallister that I was interested in a lot
of the bullshit. Goldschmidt was bouncing off the walls and
likening us, my brother Pat and myself to in one
(25:08):
he had to cut out, but he said he was
like an hysterical female. It was just another in a
line of statements and insults like the cranky brothers used
to try to discredit Kevin and Pat's efforts. Yeah, I
remember early on that Kevin had the level of suspicion
in his mind that would put cops on edge, and
(25:32):
that he was not only suspicious of the people that
surrounded Mike in the prison system, he was also very
suspicious of the people that were investigating his brother's murder.
And he made that really clear early on and didn't
pulling bunches with that. He wanted some level of oversight
and that any reporter that was going to take extra
(25:52):
time to go digging, he was going to try to
help them with what was going on with the with
the investigation, and so Kevin turned to the press for
that oversight and to help him draw attention to what
he considered serious flaws in the investigation. Steve Jackson was
on top of it every day. From the Statesman Journal,
(26:14):
Phil Stanford had a column that he could push in
the limits of journalism into opinion really far with some
really speculative material. And Phil Stafford actually I think brought
the eye of his own, you know, colleagues at the
Oregonians Life. I mean, he kept a lot of it
coming and a good degree of content within the ballpark
(26:36):
of what is possible when corruption is going on. But
Phil was quickly finding himself at odds with his own
paper over his columns on the Frankie investigation. Well, the
pushback was coming not from my immediate superior, but from
the news operation and the news editor, who was supporting
(26:57):
a couple of basically inept reporters who had been assigned
to cover the Frankie case. But we're instead just carrying
water for the state police and the district attorney. So
every time I raised questions about the case, they felt
that they were being criticized, I think, and eventually, very
(27:19):
soon they started uh dropping things into their news stories
about me. It was very strange. It was very strange.
Phil was one of several prominent journalists raising questions. Here's
Eric Mason again. So there were questions about the way
that the d A was handling things and with witnesses.
(27:43):
That was Steve Jackson's specialty. Here's Steve Jackson. That's what
troubled me the most about a lot of this case.
I think the prosecution was myopic and they settled on
this is this is what happened, and we're going to
do everything we can to prove and this is what happened,
not that something happened, and we're going to gather the
(28:04):
evidence and see what makes sense and what we can prove.
And they all seemed dead set on avoiding the possibility
that corruption within Corrections could have led to Michael Frankie's murder,
or examining the staff members he was at Oddswick at
the time of his death, including Scott McAllister, the assistant
a g he told Kevin he wanted removed. Here's Eric Mason.
(28:28):
Early on that was a question, what was it about
Scott McAllister that irked a brand new corrections director from
New Mexico so bad he didn't want to go on
vacation with him. There would later be talked about that vacation,
a team building ski trip that Michael Frankie went on
(28:50):
shortly after joining Corrections in Oregon. Frankie, an avid skier,
was looking forward to the work retreat, but for some
reason abruptly left. Years later, Eric Mason would interview Mike
Frankie's then secretary about his hasty return from that trip.
What Evelyn Meeks said was within a day of Mike arriving,
(29:13):
something had upset him so much that he wanted to
get right back on the road for Oregon, either on
a plane or in a rental car, to get him
back as quickly as possible, because he didn't want anything
to do with the people who were on that ski
trip with Scott McAllister on that ski trip, yes, and
that actually when he returns, it is clear to the
(29:35):
inner circle there at Corrections that Mike wanted Scott McAllister
not to be the attorney for the Corrections Division any longer.
Mason's pursuit of the case led him to ten Nativodad's
ex Liz god Love, who, as we spoke about last episode,
had come forward to the police with information she believed
(29:57):
pointed to Natividad as the potential murder, and was basically dismissed.
She had was now a main character inside the world
of Michael. Frankie, you know, I had a flow chart
in my office with photographs and Tim to Tivodad and
Liz god Love were on my chart right away. Yeah,
(30:18):
after hearing this. At first, Liz didn't want to go
public with the information and was even cautioned by authorities
not too So you and your lawyer make the decision
to go public. We didn't yea why, you know, We
just wanted the truth to come out. We needed closure,
(30:40):
Michael needed justice, and we just we did. We had
just the feeling. It was Tim, that must have been
like a difficult decision. You had just been through a
really traumatic life experience. Traumatic is right, it was. It
was tough. I was really scared, but also drawn strongly
(31:00):
to do it, to talk about it. Since Kevin was
spending so much time at Eric's office and knew Liz
was a person of interest in his brother's case, he
went to her attorney's office to observe that interview. Eric
was there and Liz was there, and her sister Karen
was there, and I was there, and we introduced each other.
(31:22):
They were going to back shoot Liz so that they
could just see the profile on TV. And of course
I could see everything. The camera couldn't see the facial
expressions and things like that. Eric Mason conducted the interview
while Kevin looked on. Liz laid everything out on the
line about her belief that ten Native Dad, the father
(31:43):
of her child and man she killed in self defense,
was the man in the Pens Tripe suit, Michael Frankie's
potential killer. I think that that really pushed a lot
of buttons, and not in a good way, made a
lot of people extremely uncomfortable that I was sitting there
(32:04):
talking with Liz and that Liz was now coming out
with information about nintimidated. Kevin immediately saw something in Liz
that struck a chord with him. I knew the pain
that she had felt and then she was feeling, and
the absolute horror that she went through with the murderer
and the trial and the accusations and the bullshit basically,
(32:29):
and I could identify with that. As he listened to
Liz tell her story, Kevin found more and more to
identify with. I was shocked that the system, the state police,
the district attorney's office, the governor's people, and the governor
himself would take exception to me and my brother Pat
(32:55):
having more than a casual interest in the murder of
my brother for christ sake, and to just shoot you
off as they go, mind your own business. We'll take
care of it. We'll let you know if we find anything.
So you had that on top of the grieving, and
you know, it's just a blunderful of bullshit that I
(33:17):
could relate to lose with that. So Kevin asked her
out for dinner. The traumatized ex girlfriend and killer of
his brother's likely murderer. You stop and think about it.
Oh my god, the two of us, You know what
we had gone through. Here we are together on a date.
Who's like a you know, he wanted to spend more
(33:39):
time with me, and I did him and it grew
pretty quickly. But really we leaned on each other and
it was very very nice. I didn't get any pushback.
Pat might have said something like you sure you okay,
and you're sure you're doing the right thing. Think Pat
knew me well enough and knows me well enough to
(34:01):
know that I knew where I was stepping, and you know,
I didn't fall into this thing as a blind idiot.
And that date, ultimately it turned into what's now a
nearly thirty year marriage, despite the many obstacles they had
to overcome. Well, we make a great team. And he
(34:25):
makes me laugh every single day. He's funny. Yeah, the
kids and the dogs and the cats and the parents,
and you know, the whole thing is it's it's fun.
(34:48):
But all of that came much later after Lizza's interview
with Mason. Kevin continued to pursue his own interviews with
people he believed to be connected to his brother's murder,
not believing Frank Gable, who would soon stand trial, to
be involved. That was leading Kevin deeply into Salem's criminal element.
(35:09):
It was also leading him into a very acrimonious and
increasingly targeted relationship with the police. Anytime I was getting followed,
I thought that there was a chance that I could
get pulled over on the side street or something like
that and the byeline would be reached for a gun,
(35:30):
or he did something stupid and felt threatened, and that
sort of nonsense. The police had taken to more than
verbally threatening Kevin. Well, it's not verbal when there's a
gun pointing in your temple, And that happened several On
several occasions, Kevin says he was constantly being followed by
(35:50):
state police cars and felt like he and Liz were
in danger. It got so bad they considered packing up
and leading town for good. And there was one I'm
uh state police car pulls up next to me and
slides over in front of me and slows down real slow.
And then another one suddenly it pairs out of a
side street and is next to me, and then there's
(36:13):
one behind me, and Liz goes, oh shit. I pulled
over a curb and a gas station and got around
on the other side go in the other direction, and
they couldn't get off to come pursue me. But it
was just a little we know you're here type of ship.
(36:37):
It seemed they were sending Kevin a message that they
wanted him gone. Another time, Kevin got a page from
a policeman who asked him to come meet him down
at a local bar. That's how Kevin found out there
was an officer's advisory on the law enforcement data system
(37:00):
stating he could be armed and dangerous. He said officers
safety advisory UH that the subject individual approach with caution
something to that effecting to carry weapons and regarding a
assassin's rifle with a high powered scope in the trunk
(37:20):
of his car, a gun that Kevin didn't have. It
gives basically a cop the wherewithal to take out if
he if he's a dirty cop. And there was also,
you know, the great possibility because of that officer's safety advisory,
that there was anybody's opportunity to take my head off
(37:43):
and say, yeah, we told you he had an assassin's
rifle and he was armed. The whole purpose was to
get me the hell out of town, I think, And
then it all came to a head. It seemed the
Salem and State police were no longer content with me
or intimidation. One night, after drinking at a local bar
with his friend John Bray, things escalated. We were coming
(38:10):
down Center Street in Salem by the deck End, and
there was a Salem cop that pulled out and started
following me. Then there was another one, and then suddenly
there's a state cop and like a Marion County cup
I think there were a total of six cars, five
cop cars in this white tea bird, and uh, they're
(38:31):
following me down Center Street. And I only lived about
a block east of Cordon Road, right off Center Street,
and they lit me up right as I got to
the stop sign. I kept going, stopped at Cordon Road
and the sirens came on. Then they were whooping it up.
They kept in pursuit even as Kevin neared his home.
(38:54):
I pulled in right in front of where we lived,
and the cops pulling behind me, and all their lights
are going on, which wakes Liz up. And that was
when they got on the p A system and gave
me the orders to let me see your hands, and
(39:15):
exit the vehicle and get on your knees. And I
wasn't gonna get on my knees. I sat there waiting forward.
I was just wondering if I was going to see
the wind Shiel blow out before my brains. All kinds
of weird things were coming into my head. And there
was a guy sitting over to my right, and I
kept watching the cops in my rear view mirror, and
(39:36):
because they had the lights shining in the outside mirror here,
so I redirected that to shine the light back towards them.
And I had my other mirror over here that I
had so I could wash and see, and I could
see about five cops back there, and I saw a
couple with shotguns, and I saw the rest with their
handguns out. I said, Sean, who is that guy to write?
(39:59):
And he says, it's fun and Heart and Heart was
Oregon State Police. Heart and Lauren Glover used to do
all the criminal investigations at the joint. And he's got
a shotgun, a right gun pointed in the window. And
that's when I really really really got scared. You thought
you were dead, man, Yeah, I did. And then Liz
(40:23):
came out and started yelling Kevin, what the hell is
going on? And John's father in law comes out of
the house for the shotgun, and he says, what the
hell is going on down there? So all these people
are coming down and Heart is looking around and he's
screaming Liz to get back in the house. Yeah, everybody
(40:44):
in the world and his brother and all the lights
are coming on over at John's house. And this when
they threw me in the back of the car and
slammed the door in my feet and search the car
and didn't find anything illegal, obviously because there wasn't anything illegal.
Look euns did they say they were doing this? They
said that they had gotten a report that I had
(41:04):
threatened somebody with a gun, And I said who It
wouldn't tell me you and I tried to get the
police report and it was an anonymous tip phoned in
that I had threatened somebody with a gun. And the
only thing I could figure is probably fucking heart that
phoned it in and then joined the parade, because he
(41:25):
was probably giving him coordinates or or where I watched.
They said, I was phoned in from a pay phone.
How did that end? Everybody was coming out? Uh, They
went up and searched the card John was. They had
John faced down out on the grass, and boom, they
just disappeared. The guy said, you know, you'd better be careful, Kevin.
(41:48):
The next guy might shoot you. On the next murder
In Oregon, the state mounts a baffling murder trial based
on questionable witnesses. All those people have told the different
(42:09):
stories sixteen different times. You can't rely on anybody's testimony
to testify. Nan trial, a severely compromised defense team if
I was going to pick an attorney to handle that is,
I would have picked several other people first. That ends
with a shocking verdict or a stunt he did not
(42:30):
make the sense. Murder and Oregon is hosted by Lauren
Bright Pacheco and Phil Stanford. Executive producers are Noel Brown,
Lauren Bright Pacheco, and Phil Stanford. Supervising producer and lead
editor is Taylor Shacoyne. Sound designed by Tristan McNeil, Story
editing by Matt Riddle, written by Phil Stanford, Matt Riddle,
(42:54):
and Lauren Bright Pacheco. Music written and performed by the
Diamond Street Players and mixed by Taylor your Coin with
music supervision by Noel Brown. Additional music by Tristan McNeil.
Archival elements courtesy of KGW in Portland, Oregon. The station
behind the podcast, Urged to Kill. Murder and Oregon is
a production of I Heart Radio.
Murder in Oregon as a production of I Heart Radio.
Previously on Murder in Oregon. As a columnist for The Oregonian.
In the Portland Tribune, Phil wrote more than one columns
about Michael Frankie's murder. He was a public official who
discovered corruption in his own department. The night before he
was to address the legislative committee on this very subject,
(00:21):
he was stabbed in the heart in front of the
building where he worked. I think he made a number
of people in the department uncomfortable, probably the head of
Dick Peterson, Scott McAllister, who was the a g lawyer
who had for the previous twelver thirteen years been assigned corrections.
That's the third member of the Department of Corrections officers
(00:44):
on the alps with her. After Phil wrote an article
alleging the corruption Krauss had intimated to Pat and confesses
as much in greater detail to the investigators, Krauss recants
his confession and is dropped as a suspect out of nowhere.
They didn't like the people his confession would ultimately lead to.
(01:04):
That's what it looks like for sure. About a week
after the murder, the police held a press conference and
announced they were interested in talking with a man who
had been seen in the Dome building. He's quickly became
known as the man in the pinstripe suit. Conrad got
to see that. Six months after Michael Frankie has murdered,
he goes to his counselor in prison and tells the
(01:27):
counselor that he knows something about the murder. He said
says he was approached by Tim Natividad to do the murder,
and he knows that Scott McAllister, the prison lawyer, arranged it.
Tim always carried a knife. Tim had a huge knife collection.
Tim was violent. Tim told me he killed somebody, and
(01:47):
I think it's Michael. Look at this composite drawing. They
laughed and said, you can't convict a dead man. There's
nothing we can do here. By August, Johnny Krauss, the
(02:08):
man who confessed to the murder of Michael Frankie then recanted,
had been dropped as a suspect in the investigation. That's
when an internal memo landed on the desk of then
Governor Neil Goldschmidt that would raise some serious concerns about
the investigation into Michael Frankie's murder. This was something we
didn't find out until some years later. Actually we didn't
(02:30):
know about it at the time. But as the heat
was building up on the Frankie case because they had
dropped Krauss and they had nothing else in sight, or
so we thought, Governor Neil Goldschmidt's legal aid wrote him
a long memo on how to handle all this pressure
that was building up. It was a political problem for them,
and it is very revealing. We've obtained a copy of
(02:54):
that memo, and in light of what we now know,
there are sections that are at best concerning. Here are
some excerpts. Nothing in Michael Frankie's files or elsewhere, the
memo says, indicate 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
(03:18):
when they had their initial interviews with the police. But
we know that's not true. Yes, yes, we We also
would later find out from officers notes that in fact,
that Dave Kevin got out here to Oregon after his
brother's death, he told the police about this, and then
he called again from Santa Fe from Mike's funeral to
reiterate that the memoir goes on the Frankie family's activities
(03:40):
and the presence of Phil Stanford ensure that the issue
will continue to receive attention by the press in public
until some decisive step is taken to resolve it. So
they just wanted to go away. Oh they do. Indeed,
I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murdering Oregon. Another
(04:17):
key takeaway from that memo to gold Schmidt was the
idea that an FBI investigation wasn't exactly welcomed by the
Oregon state government. I know from my own interviews at
the time the FBI was interested in getting into this.
They didn't make it public, but certainly Goldschmidt and his
people knew it, and they did not want the FBI
(04:37):
to investigate corruption down there was their resistance to the
FBI stepping into the investigation. It's in the memo, Uh,
how to get rid of this this problem? It is
also possible that you could get federal assistance, but I
believe it is crucial not to turn this into an
FBI investigation if you want any assurance that it will
(04:58):
stay within the bounds you have set. If you want
any assurance that it will stay within the bounds you
have said, what does that mean? Well, it meant something
to the person who was writing the memo, and it
meant something to gold Schmidt. But even when we finally
got this memo, when it finally became public, it wasn't
(05:20):
clear what were the bounds that gold Schmidt had set.
What were his reasons for not wanting an investigation. That's
that's the question. It sounds like he wanted something contained.
Oh yes. And then eight months later, in April of
seemingly out of nowhere, a small time drug dealer from
(05:42):
Salem named Frank Gabel is arrested and charged with the
murder of Michael Frankie. Frank Gable has found himself a
key figure in the Michael Frankie murder investigation. He says
he didn't do it. He is currently serving a year
sentence in the Coop's County jail for assaulting his wife,
but others say he's done much worse than beat his wife.
(06:03):
Mike Kieran's, a convict from the Idaho State Penitentiary, claims
Frank Gable told him he killed Frankie during a car burglarate.
Remember at this point, Johnny Krauss had already confessed knowledge
of the murder, recanted his confession, and was granted immunity
to not recant his recantation. Liz god Love also had
(06:25):
gone to the police with her belief Tim Nativodad was
the man in the pinstripe suit and could have killed Frankie,
only to have them laugh and say they couldn't convict
a dead man. Frank Gable's name came out of nowhere,
even to the three journalists most heavily involved in the case,
(06:47):
Phil Stanford, TV reporter Eric Mason, and Steve Jackson at
The Statesman Journal. Here's Jackson, Gable wasn't on my radar
at all at that time. By this time, I was
already having difficulties with the way the investigation was handled,
and Jackson found the arrest of Gable oddly convenient for
(07:09):
the police. The only one that was really pursued was
the easy one for the police to settle on, some
guy who had basically no support, no money, no friends,
people willing to turn on him. He was sort of
an outsider even in that met group. He was an
easy target. Yeah, he was an easy target with with
not many resources to call on to um protect himself.
(07:33):
Here's Phil's take. Well, at the time, no one knew
what to think. I mean, Gable was completely new name
out there, and all of a sudden, the state police
are promoting him as their prime suspect. Even now, it's
something of a mystery how they picked him. And it
appears that it all happened in about May of eighty nine,
(07:57):
just as Krauss was peering as a suspect. This is
when Cross started talking about possible connections to corrections officials.
Gable was also clearly confused as to what was happening
to him and struggle to articulate what his accusers could
possibly gain by pitting the murder on him. Here he
is at an interview at the time of his arrest.
(08:20):
I believe it's because a lot of the people like
Kerns and several other inmates are jumping on the bandwagon, thinking, well,
we can get our charges dropped, you know, point the
finger at Gable, We'll get there and get our charges drop.
So my name keeps coming up. The Mike Karns Gable
spoke of in that interview was another of Salem's usual
suspects who happened to be at the Marion County lockup
(08:43):
when police arrested Gable. He was the first in a
rogues gallery of criminals used to try and tie Gable
to the killing. Karns was the first one to go
public and say that Gable had confessed to him. He
would later go public and say he made it all
up with Of course he did. That's how it got started.
And then they state police started finding other so called
(09:07):
witnesses who would say that Gabel confessed to them. But
according to Gabel, he had a solid alibi, and one
that didn't exactly paint him as a saint. He claimed
to be busily committing an entirely different crime at the
time of Mike's murder. I was a friend of mine's
(09:28):
house named Chris A. Rillo's with him and two other girls.
I didn't leave my home, I believe, until at least
eight o'clock that night, and I went from there to
a friend of mine's house and delivered some drugs and
then went to Chris's house and spent the rest of
that evening there and came home about five that morning.
(09:50):
So fifty two days away from finishing a sentence for
an unrelated domestic abuse charge. Frank Gabele now feared he
was going to be charged with Michael Frankie's murder. I've
been so scared, you know, each day you don't know
if you're getting out in fifty two days or if
you're gonna get put to death penalty for crime you
(10:10):
didn't come in, you know. So yeah, I'm scared, more
scared than I've ever been in my life. You know.
I believe that I walked into a complicated drug ring
and really don't know how complicated it was until now,
and it would get even more complicated and even more perplexing.
There was never any physical evidence linking Gable to the
(10:32):
murder his cellmates. False accusation, along with the testimony from
characters entwined in Salem's Underworld, were the only quote unquote
evidence the police had to go on. Who were the
people who came forward as the state's witnesses? Um, well,
they did not come forward that the police selected them,
uh and helped them manufacture the stories they wanted using
(10:56):
lie detective tests. That's one of the more remarkable things
about about this case and the way lie detector tests
were used to shape testimony. The two star witnesses for
the state from the beginning where Jody swear Engine and
Shorty hardened. Jody was a seventeen year old runaway who
had been in and out of Hillcrest, the girls school,
(11:19):
certainly part of the suaker scene there. Shorty Harden's names
come up before. He was friends with Tim Natividad. They
ran in the same drug dealing circle. Yeah, they did
business together. Shorty and Jody would become the state star
witnesses linking Gable to the murder after twenty three polygraphs.
(11:41):
It took them that long to get Jody to to
tell the story they wanted. Jody's story was that Gable
had who by the way, she hadn't met until about
six months later, had driven her to the Dome building
that night, and while she was at the Dome building,
she called Shorty to come pick her up. They didn't
have cell phones in those days, so she had to
(12:02):
walk a distance to a pay phone, which the police were.
By the way, we were never able to find or identify.
And the story is that just before the murder occurred,
short He drove up in his Mustang parked there. Jodie
got into his car. Shorty said he saw Frankie coming
out of the Dome Building yelling at Gable, who was
(12:25):
in the car at the time. He got to the car.
Gable lunged out of the car and stabbed Frankie. Shorty
said he started his car and I and Jodie drove
off into the night. The state didn't seem to mind
that the version Jody and Shorty settled upon contradicted the
account of the only eyewitness on record, Wayne hans Acker,
(12:47):
the maintenance man who had seen two men interacting the
night Frankie was murdered. They put all these meet up
witnesses in front of the grand jury, including Jody and Shorty,
of course, and in fact, they even allowed Jody and
Shorty to meet privately in a room before the grand
(13:08):
jury so they could get those stories straight. And they did,
and they testified that they had been there at the
Dome Building on the night of the murder and seeing
the murder testimony that had been coerced, and they threatened her.
She finally came up with a story that she was
present when he stabbed Michael. Frankie. Shorty was a local
(13:30):
tough guy. He had done business with Tim Nativit Dad
he was UH deeply entrenched in in the sattlement underworld,
made multiple deals with the cops along the ways, and
they got him to testify against Gable two. And Kevin says,
great effort went into bringing Shorty heart and inn and
getting him on board. There was a very very big
(13:54):
police presence in Rendan Shorty down for a pearl dialation.
They had City of Salem cops, they had a police
helicopter in the air tract. They had the police rounded
him down and he was doing his best to get away,
and I think he went over a large like a
ten foot fence or something like that and tour attendant
into his hand or some nonsense. Anyway, they eventually caught him,
(14:18):
took him to sale possibility as surgery, and as he
was coming out of surgery, he said he was the
state's next million dollar baby. Holly had to do was
hanging rap on a murder rap on front Gable. It
became a pattern. Here's Tom McCallum, the lead investigator for
Gables defense, I mean Shorty and Jody and you know
(14:41):
their lineup of all the people that they did all
the polygraphs on, and Uh sort of developed their testimony
they're all drugg eas and they knew that everything was.
It was pretty crazy. Here's bills take. But several months later,
Odie spoke with Tom McCallum, who was the lead investigator
(15:04):
for the defense, and confessed that she made up the story.
She wasn't there, It wasn't what happened. She also talked
to Steve Jackson at the Salem Paper and then she
took off. The state police went after her and arrested
her and brought her back and put her in jail.
So she tried to flee town so she wouldn't have
(15:24):
to testify or she did. Yes, Jody and Shorty weren't
alone and feeling pressured by the state police. I was
at my desk the Oregonian got a call from a
prison guard in Clark County Jail, which is just right
across the river in Vancouver, Washington, and he said, you
won't believe this, but I've got a guy over here
who says the state police are pressuring him to make
(15:46):
up a story about Gable. You want to come over
and talk to him? I said, oh yeah, So I
went over there and there's this guy, Guessner. He's in
his twenties and says, they want me to say that
Gable confessed to the murder. He didn't. Then he went
on to say he'd already been convicted on drug charges
and they were really pressuring him. This U S attorney
had charged him with violation federal gun laws, which would
(16:08):
add another decade or so to his sentence. And so
he says, the guessner says to me, what am I
supposed to do? What's the guy supposed to do? All
of which could explain gable shock and confusion at being targeted.
Local television reporter Eric Mason was one of the reporters
who spoke to Gable following his arrest. Do you remember
(16:32):
how you found out that Frank Gable was arrested. I
think it was a press conference that Dale Penn had,
and my thinking was, wow, there's so many other folks
that are probably yet that's the last person I want
to you know, it didn't make sense, the idea that
he was the loan assailant of Michael Frankie just there
(16:54):
was more to it than that. Obviously, there was more
to it than that. He just looked like a kid
that would never get close to Mike Frankie after being
up close to Mike Frankie and seeing him play basketball
and meeting him on the steps of the capital to
do an interview with him, and it seemed like a mismatch.
Frank Gable was thin and spindley and looked like someone
(17:17):
who had been on meth and just didn't look physically
strong enough to take on a guy like Mike Frankie.
It just didn't make sense. When Mason sat down with
Gable after his arrest, he just didn't get the feeling
that this was a murderer. And he'd interviewed a number
of them, was at Oregon State Penitentiary, and I believe
(17:40):
my first few interviews around the phone with Frank Gable
and the little bell goes off in my head that says,
this person is telling me the truth. He just was
the wrong guy. It didn't look like a guy that
I was interviewing that was responsible for the crime. His
body language didn't reveal it, his eyes did reveal it,
(18:01):
his presence didn't reveal it. You got the feeling that
he was a guy who was involved in math and
involved in small time crime and certainly had a problem
with his wife. But a guy that was not a
person who was a natural born killer at all. Meanwhile,
(18:31):
Kevin Frankie is back at his home in Florida battling
the issues of trying to keep interest going in his
brother's murder from long distance. So it was just constantly
poking the bear, trying to keep the thing going and
keep it in the face of the public, in the
ears and eyes of the public, doing video shoots from
the station, then in Florida, where I'd get in front
(18:53):
of the blue screen and do the remote shots and
things like that. So everybody was getting to know me
and getting to know Pat. And the visibility of the
Frankie brothers and the media led to a nickname with
certain members of the press. I don't know who coined
the term, the Cranky Brothers, but we became the Cranky
(19:16):
Brothers to the press, and I liked it. Goldschmidt, Penn
in that group didn't get it. Yeah, we were cranky,
we're piste off. Well, that nickname didn't bother them. The
anonymous calls and rumors circling around Mike's murder did. Rumors
(19:40):
that you hear from phone calls that you get that
you don't know who it is. So I'd get calls
and rumors, you know, your brother was mutilated, his heart
was removed. Weird, weird ship. I had one letter that
was Mike was killed as part of a Satanic ritual
and this was carved in his chest and blah blah blah,
(20:00):
and I'd send this to him and they said, we
can't comment on it. At the same time, the state
continued to push the narrative that Gable was the killer.
After months of back and forth phone calls and over
a year since his brother's murder, Kevin got a call
from the police captain heading up the investigation. I got
(20:22):
the phone call at home on April ninth, the morning
of April ninth, and I'm going to say it was
around seven or eight o'clock in the morning, and it
was Captain Dennis O'Donnell on the line, and he stated
his purpose with the call was to informed me that
they had indicted Frank Gable for the burger Mike. I
(20:45):
said something to the effect that you've got to be
shipping me. I said, why are you calling me instead
of because I was expecting it that if there was
a call that had become the d a's office, and
he said, we flipped the coin and I lost. So
that's how they chose to tell the brother of a
(21:07):
murder victim that someone had been indicted in the crime.
And Kevin was far from convinced they'd indicted the right man.
And I said, well, I'm going to be coming out
there for the trial. And he said, no, you don't
need to do that. Is you know, put yourself through that,
your family and all that. You'll get contemporarious updates from
(21:29):
everybody here. And I thought, you know, why didn't he
want me to come out there for the trial? And
I said, I'm going to be coming out there anyway.
And there's this long pause and he said, well, there's
nothing I can do to dissuade you. And he said, anyway,
don't try to contact me. I'm going on vacation. A
week later, Kevin would decide to leave Florida altogether. They
(21:52):
didn't have anything to stay in Florida for, so in
August he set out again for the town where his
brother was brutally murdered. On the way, he stopped by
Prairie Village, Kansas, to visit for his mother's birthday. It
was the first time he'd seen his parents since Michael's death.
As he walked up the path to his childhood home,
(22:13):
he was greeted by his overjoyed mother and it was
beautiful summer morning. I was tired as hell, and she
was a sight for sore eyes. I saw my old
man come out out on the front door, and they
didn't know I was going to be there, and he
was just ballowed like a baby. She'd I was there,
(22:34):
skipped down the stairs like that in years. It was
good to see them, and I told him if it
was thinking about going to Oregon, and they were trying
to talk me out of it. Anyway, I left the
next day, and the entire trip, Kevin's thoughts were on
Mike and his accused killer. By the time I seventy
(22:56):
West came up, I was there and West Stern, Colorado
opened up before me, and into Utah and watching the
sun go down, going up into Idaho and coming down
the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon in the middle of
the night pitch black, and then dawn in Portland, Oregon,
(23:18):
seven O'clockville and into town and it was like I
blinked in here I was. But certain people seem to
know Kevin was there too, and didn't exactly give him
a warm welcome. The very first night that I was
in Oregon, I got my tire slashed, and then I
got a note saying, welcome to Oregon, Now go home.
(23:41):
I was placed on the windshield and it wouldn't end there.
I started to feel like I was being watched. I
started paying attention to that, and I started seeing the
same cars and the same people, and I'd stopped and
they would go away, and then I'd find me again.
(24:01):
And it is It does make you feel a little nets.
But despite this, Salem is where Kevin would remain, determined
to solve his brother's murder no matter what, and one
of the first people he got into touch with was
television reporter Eric Mason. I'm Dolian interview with Kevin right away,
within a few days of him coming to town. He
(24:23):
has nowhere to stay and he's trying to find a
place to stay, and I say, you know, listen, I'll
do anything to try to help you, and so I
think he did at one point camp out overnight in
the in the office until I can find something to
you know, stay with permanently. Eric Mason's office became a
(24:45):
sort of bunker for Kevin to pour through all the
interviews and press conferences involving Mike's investigation in Gables indictment.
He had all the video equipment, theories, and the interviews
with Scott McCallister that I was interested in a lot
of the bullshit. Goldschmidt was bouncing off the walls and
likening us, my brother Pat and myself to in one
(25:08):
he had to cut out, but he said he was
like an hysterical female. It was just another in a
line of statements and insults like the cranky brothers used
to try to discredit Kevin and Pat's efforts. Yeah, I
remember early on that Kevin had the level of suspicion
in his mind that would put cops on edge, and
(25:32):
that he was not only suspicious of the people that
surrounded Mike in the prison system, he was also very
suspicious of the people that were investigating his brother's murder.
And he made that really clear early on and didn't
pulling bunches with that. He wanted some level of oversight
and that any reporter that was going to take extra
(25:52):
time to go digging, he was going to try to
help them with what was going on with the with
the investigation, and so Kevin turned to the press for
that oversight and to help him draw attention to what
he considered serious flaws in the investigation. Steve Jackson was
on top of it every day. From the Statesman Journal,
(26:14):
Phil Stanford had a column that he could push in
the limits of journalism into opinion really far with some
really speculative material. And Phil Stafford actually I think brought
the eye of his own, you know, colleagues at the
Oregonians Life. I mean, he kept a lot of it
coming and a good degree of content within the ballpark
(26:36):
of what is possible when corruption is going on. But
Phil was quickly finding himself at odds with his own
paper over his columns on the Frankie investigation. Well, the
pushback was coming not from my immediate superior, but from
the news operation and the news editor, who was supporting
(26:57):
a couple of basically inept reporters who had been assigned
to cover the Frankie case. But we're instead just carrying
water for the state police and the district attorney. So
every time I raised questions about the case, they felt
that they were being criticized, I think, and eventually, very
(27:19):
soon they started uh dropping things into their news stories
about me. It was very strange. It was very strange.
Phil was one of several prominent journalists raising questions. Here's
Eric Mason again. So there were questions about the way
that the d A was handling things and with witnesses.
(27:43):
That was Steve Jackson's specialty. Here's Steve Jackson. That's what
troubled me the most about a lot of this case.
I think the prosecution was myopic and they settled on
this is this is what happened, and we're going to
do everything we can to prove and this is what happened,
not that something happened, and we're going to gather the
(28:04):
evidence and see what makes sense and what we can prove.
And they all seemed dead set on avoiding the possibility
that corruption within Corrections could have led to Michael Frankie's murder,
or examining the staff members he was at Oddswick at
the time of his death, including Scott McAllister, the assistant
a g he told Kevin he wanted removed. Here's Eric Mason.
(28:28):
Early on that was a question, what was it about
Scott McAllister that irked a brand new corrections director from
New Mexico so bad he didn't want to go on
vacation with him. There would later be talked about that vacation,
a team building ski trip that Michael Frankie went on
(28:50):
shortly after joining Corrections in Oregon. Frankie, an avid skier,
was looking forward to the work retreat, but for some
reason abruptly left. Years later, Eric Mason would interview Mike
Frankie's then secretary about his hasty return from that trip.
What Evelyn Meeks said was within a day of Mike arriving,
(29:13):
something had upset him so much that he wanted to
get right back on the road for Oregon, either on
a plane or in a rental car, to get him
back as quickly as possible, because he didn't want anything
to do with the people who were on that ski
trip with Scott McAllister on that ski trip, yes, and
that actually when he returns, it is clear to the
(29:35):
inner circle there at Corrections that Mike wanted Scott McAllister
not to be the attorney for the Corrections Division any longer.
Mason's pursuit of the case led him to ten Nativodad's
ex Liz god Love, who, as we spoke about last episode,
had come forward to the police with information she believed
(29:57):
pointed to Natividad as the potential murder, and was basically dismissed.
She had was now a main character inside the world
of Michael. Frankie, you know, I had a flow chart
in my office with photographs and Tim to Tivodad and
Liz god Love were on my chart right away. Yeah,
(30:18):
after hearing this. At first, Liz didn't want to go
public with the information and was even cautioned by authorities
not too So you and your lawyer make the decision
to go public. We didn't yea why, you know, We
just wanted the truth to come out. We needed closure,
(30:40):
Michael needed justice, and we just we did. We had
just the feeling. It was Tim, that must have been
like a difficult decision. You had just been through a
really traumatic life experience. Traumatic is right, it was. It
was tough. I was really scared, but also drawn strongly
(31:00):
to do it, to talk about it. Since Kevin was
spending so much time at Eric's office and knew Liz
was a person of interest in his brother's case, he
went to her attorney's office to observe that interview. Eric
was there and Liz was there, and her sister Karen
was there, and I was there, and we introduced each other.
(31:22):
They were going to back shoot Liz so that they
could just see the profile on TV. And of course
I could see everything. The camera couldn't see the facial
expressions and things like that. Eric Mason conducted the interview
while Kevin looked on. Liz laid everything out on the
line about her belief that ten Native Dad, the father
(31:43):
of her child and man she killed in self defense,
was the man in the Pens Tripe suit, Michael Frankie's
potential killer. I think that that really pushed a lot
of buttons, and not in a good way, made a
lot of people extremely uncomfortable that I was sitting there
(32:04):
talking with Liz and that Liz was now coming out
with information about nintimidated. Kevin immediately saw something in Liz
that struck a chord with him. I knew the pain
that she had felt and then she was feeling, and
the absolute horror that she went through with the murderer
and the trial and the accusations and the bullshit basically,
(32:29):
and I could identify with that. As he listened to
Liz tell her story, Kevin found more and more to
identify with. I was shocked that the system, the state police,
the district attorney's office, the governor's people, and the governor
himself would take exception to me and my brother Pat
(32:55):
having more than a casual interest in the murder of
my brother for christ sake, and to just shoot you
off as they go, mind your own business. We'll take
care of it. We'll let you know if we find anything.
So you had that on top of the grieving, and
you know, it's just a blunderful of bullshit that I
(33:17):
could relate to lose with that. So Kevin asked her
out for dinner. The traumatized ex girlfriend and killer of
his brother's likely murderer. You stop and think about it.
Oh my god, the two of us, You know what
we had gone through. Here we are together on a date.
Who's like a you know, he wanted to spend more
(33:39):
time with me, and I did him and it grew
pretty quickly. But really we leaned on each other and
it was very very nice. I didn't get any pushback.
Pat might have said something like you sure you okay,
and you're sure you're doing the right thing. Think Pat
knew me well enough and knows me well enough to
(34:01):
know that I knew where I was stepping, and you know,
I didn't fall into this thing as a blind idiot.
And that date, ultimately it turned into what's now a
nearly thirty year marriage, despite the many obstacles they had
to overcome. Well, we make a great team. And he
(34:25):
makes me laugh every single day. He's funny. Yeah, the
kids and the dogs and the cats and the parents,
and you know, the whole thing is it's it's fun.
(34:48):
But all of that came much later after Lizza's interview
with Mason. Kevin continued to pursue his own interviews with
people he believed to be connected to his brother's murder,
not believing Frank Gable, who would soon stand trial, to
be involved. That was leading Kevin deeply into Salem's criminal element.
(35:09):
It was also leading him into a very acrimonious and
increasingly targeted relationship with the police. Anytime I was getting followed,
I thought that there was a chance that I could
get pulled over on the side street or something like
that and the byeline would be reached for a gun,
(35:30):
or he did something stupid and felt threatened, and that
sort of nonsense. The police had taken to more than
verbally threatening Kevin. Well, it's not verbal when there's a
gun pointing in your temple, And that happened several On
several occasions, Kevin says he was constantly being followed by
(35:50):
state police cars and felt like he and Liz were
in danger. It got so bad they considered packing up
and leading town for good. And there was one I'm
uh state police car pulls up next to me and
slides over in front of me and slows down real slow.
And then another one suddenly it pairs out of a
side street and is next to me, and then there's
(36:13):
one behind me, and Liz goes, oh shit. I pulled
over a curb and a gas station and got around
on the other side go in the other direction, and
they couldn't get off to come pursue me. But it
was just a little we know you're here type of ship.
(36:37):
It seemed they were sending Kevin a message that they
wanted him gone. Another time, Kevin got a page from
a policeman who asked him to come meet him down
at a local bar. That's how Kevin found out there
was an officer's advisory on the law enforcement data system
(37:00):
stating he could be armed and dangerous. He said officers
safety advisory UH that the subject individual approach with caution
something to that effecting to carry weapons and regarding a
assassin's rifle with a high powered scope in the trunk
(37:20):
of his car, a gun that Kevin didn't have. It
gives basically a cop the wherewithal to take out if
he if he's a dirty cop. And there was also,
you know, the great possibility because of that officer's safety advisory,
that there was anybody's opportunity to take my head off
(37:43):
and say, yeah, we told you he had an assassin's
rifle and he was armed. The whole purpose was to
get me the hell out of town, I think, And
then it all came to a head. It seemed the
Salem and State police were no longer content with me
or intimidation. One night, after drinking at a local bar
with his friend John Bray, things escalated. We were coming
(38:10):
down Center Street in Salem by the deck End, and
there was a Salem cop that pulled out and started
following me. Then there was another one, and then suddenly
there's a state cop and like a Marion County cup
I think there were a total of six cars, five
cop cars in this white tea bird, and uh, they're
(38:31):
following me down Center Street. And I only lived about
a block east of Cordon Road, right off Center Street,
and they lit me up right as I got to
the stop sign. I kept going, stopped at Cordon Road
and the sirens came on. Then they were whooping it up.
They kept in pursuit even as Kevin neared his home.
(38:54):
I pulled in right in front of where we lived,
and the cops pulling behind me, and all their lights
are going on, which wakes Liz up. And that was
when they got on the p A system and gave
me the orders to let me see your hands, and
(39:15):
exit the vehicle and get on your knees. And I
wasn't gonna get on my knees. I sat there waiting forward.
I was just wondering if I was going to see
the wind Shiel blow out before my brains. All kinds
of weird things were coming into my head. And there
was a guy sitting over to my right, and I
kept watching the cops in my rear view mirror, and
(39:36):
because they had the lights shining in the outside mirror here,
so I redirected that to shine the light back towards them.
And I had my other mirror over here that I
had so I could wash and see, and I could
see about five cops back there, and I saw a
couple with shotguns, and I saw the rest with their
handguns out. I said, Sean, who is that guy to write?
(39:59):
And he says, it's fun and Heart and Heart was
Oregon State Police. Heart and Lauren Glover used to do
all the criminal investigations at the joint. And he's got
a shotgun, a right gun pointed in the window. And
that's when I really really really got scared. You thought
you were dead, man, Yeah, I did. And then Liz
(40:23):
came out and started yelling Kevin, what the hell is
going on? And John's father in law comes out of
the house for the shotgun, and he says, what the
hell is going on down there? So all these people
are coming down and Heart is looking around and he's
screaming Liz to get back in the house. Yeah, everybody
(40:44):
in the world and his brother and all the lights
are coming on over at John's house. And this when
they threw me in the back of the car and
slammed the door in my feet and search the car
and didn't find anything illegal, obviously because there wasn't anything illegal.
Look euns did they say they were doing this? They
said that they had gotten a report that I had
(41:04):
threatened somebody with a gun, And I said who It
wouldn't tell me you and I tried to get the
police report and it was an anonymous tip phoned in
that I had threatened somebody with a gun. And the
only thing I could figure is probably fucking heart that
phoned it in and then joined the parade, because he
(41:25):
was probably giving him coordinates or or where I watched.
They said, I was phoned in from a pay phone.
How did that end? Everybody was coming out? Uh, They
went up and searched the card John was. They had
John faced down out on the grass, and boom, they
just disappeared. The guy said, you know, you'd better be careful, Kevin.
(41:48):
The next guy might shoot you. On the next murder
In Oregon, the state mounts a baffling murder trial based
on questionable witnesses. All those people have told the different
(42:09):
stories sixteen different times. You can't rely on anybody's testimony
to testify. Nan trial, a severely compromised defense team if
I was going to pick an attorney to handle that is,
I would have picked several other people first. That ends
with a shocking verdict or a stunt he did not
(42:30):
make the sense. Murder and Oregon is hosted by Lauren
Bright Pacheco and Phil Stanford. Executive producers are Noel Brown,
Lauren Bright Pacheco, and Phil Stanford. Supervising producer and lead
editor is Taylor Shacoyne. Sound designed by Tristan McNeil, Story
editing by Matt Riddle, written by Phil Stanford, Matt Riddle,
(42:54):
and Lauren Bright Pacheco. Music written and performed by the
Diamond Street Players and mixed by Taylor your Coin with
music supervision by Noel Brown. Additional music by Tristan McNeil.
Archival elements courtesy of KGW in Portland, Oregon. The station
behind the podcast, Urged to Kill. Murder and Oregon is
a production of I Heart Radio.
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