New reasons for a new trial

By Phil Stanford

The Portland Tribune, Nov 16, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

In the past few months, the Portland Tribune has published a number of articles outlining some of the glaring flaws in the investigation of the murder of Oregon Corrections Director Michael Francke and the trial of Frank Gable.

From start to finish, the case has been a mockery of justice.

With 15 years’ hindsight, it is clear that there is no case against Frank Gable, the low-level Salem street dealer eventually convicted of the crime. He was railroaded for a crime he didn’t commit.

Taken with everything else, the revelations about documents that recently were unearthed and new interviews in the case may even be enough to convince the court that, at the very least, Gable, now serving a life sentence without parole, deserves a new trial from the state of Oregon.

• • •

Fourteen years later, private investigator Roger Harris remembers the moment well enough. It was, he says, the most exciting interview he did in the course of his work for the defense team in the Francke murder case.

“The woman was so frightened, she was shaking,” he recalls. “She was scared for her life.”

As soon as Harris finished talking to her, he hurried back to his Salt Lake City hotel, typed up a report and faxed it back to the defense office in Salem.

It was Ñ and still is Ñ dynamite.

In it, the woman, Linda Parker, describes a party she attended in Salt Lake during the summer of 1989, just months after Francke’s killing.

Present at the party was her sometime-boyfriend, Scott McAlister, former legal counsel for the Oregon prison system, who had resigned his position a few weeks before the murder.

According to Parker, none of the partygoers Ñ including former Oregon prison security chief Harol Whitley Ñ liked Francke very much.

At one point, she said, she walked out of the kitchen, where she was cooking dinner, and stood next to McAlister and Whitley.

“They were really talking down Francke,” she said. “They all really disliked Francke.”

Then, she said, someone brought up the murder itself.

On the night of Jan. 17, 1989, Francke had been stabbed to death outside the state corrections office building in Salem. Police investigators determined that the murder occurred about 7 p.m.

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