I’ve lived in Oregon for two thirds of my life now, and I’ve seen and heard a lot of things here that leave you shaking your head. Probably the most outrageous of these was the 1989 murder of Michael Francke, the young head of the corrections department, who had discovered corruption and was about to blow the lid off it. The people he was about to expose killed him, and then, to the shame and disgrace of everyone who lives here, they successfully covered it up and had a patsy, a poor bastard named Frank Gable, serve 30-some years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
Some of the people who know what happened are still alive. And they have never told the truth about it.
My friend Phil Stanford was a columnist for the Oregonian at the time, and he never let go of the story. He’s been writing about it on and off ever since it happened. He’s managed to draw national, even international, attention to the unsolved mystery. Most recently he’s been on Substack posting pointed questions to some of the dudes who presided over the legal charade that followed the murder.
Now Stanford’s released a whole book, “Who Killed Michael Francke,” and that title does not end with a question mark. A Kindle version of it “dropped,” as the kids say, earlier today, and apparently there’s a paperback going on sale in a few days.
This is an important book for a lot of reasons. But to me the most important is that it’s Phil summing up decades of blood, sweat and tears he’s shed over this case. On an hourly basis, he would have made more money working at McDonald’s. At this point, it seems, he just wants the truth.
I think we all do. Or at least, most of us.