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Speaker 1: Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio. The Frankies laid Mike to rest, but not their questions about his murder. Here's pat from here to Santa Fe. The state had him in closed casket, but they hit him at the Supreme Court Building for a day, and then they had a fabulous service at the cathedral and an internment at the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. There's quite a ceremony of quite a funeral that filled up the cathedral and it was beautifully done. It's done a pretty place. I've got done a couple of times a year, and I put sunflowers on his grave because there's a Kansas boy. And I also have a beer with him. I've got a lot of pictures of me drinking Budweiser's at the Santa Fe Cemetery, and I've had a few over here in front of the Dome building. After the funeral, Kevin returned to Florida. But the official investigation and seemed to be going nowhere, and Kevin began to bristle at the lack of progress. It's been so many months. Mike was dead. We knew that, but there were so many rumors swirling around the world is full of koks and cranks and Pat were very vocal because of the resistance, because of the kickback and the struggle just to get the autopsy report, but to get any kind of answers to find out what was going on. Any time I question who is this person? Who is at why do you need to know that? And it was just this constant bullshit. What who are you? You're just his brother. We'll tell you who killed him soon enough, don't worry. And that's how and why Phil got hooked up with the Frankie brothers. Here's Pat. He was writing on these great columns and I just want to talk to There are so many different people involved in this thing it hurts your brain after a while, but they're all interconnected because it's an incest. She was a bunch of criminals down here. Turned out there's an ancestral bunch of politicians, political officials and such two and I think a lot of them had stuff that they needed to get cleaned up, covered up. Pat seemed to be the one who was speaking for the family, so I got in touch with him. He started talking about discrepancies of the case. So I said, Pat tell me more, and he said, guy, you need to talk to about that's my brother, Kevin. He's the one who's up on that. So we started talking. The first conversations were you could see he was very wary. There must have been no three or four months into the investigation after the murder. They weren't being straight with him. I think that's the main thing. There were other things involved. They're trying to get the autopsy, but he wasn't getting information from them. They just kept sort of shining the more on, saying trust us, don't interfere with the investigation. And well, as he just said screw it and told me I could go ahead and write about the organized criminal element. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco and this is murdering Oregon. Kevin's back in Florida feeling beyond frustrated. When a friend stopped by. He was with the local sheriff's department and brought along a depressing update. Our friend of mine into Charlotte Kenny surers department. He said, Man, they're going nowhere with the deal. He says, right, I get me. He said, they put a query up there and they said there was nothing to offer. Other agencies that it's all being handled in the house. Then he gave Kevin a newspaper article mentioning a woman he thought could help solve Mike's murder, along with her business card. He gave me this gal's member. Her name was Jane Doe. That's what I said on the card. He said, you need to go talk to this gal. She helped us with a missing person's case and then she was spot on found the guy and I said how how did she find it? He said she's the psyche and I said, yeah, I don't need this ship. But while he was skeptical, he was also desperate, and Kevin decided he had little to lose. I called her up and I said, do you do criminal investigations? And she said what's your name? And I said this Kevin and I she said, okay, um, what was this about? And I said it's about a murder. And it was very quiet for a few seconds, and she said one of your brothers and I said, yeah, knock on the door and she's in a mumu and very colorful, lively lady. She said, you mentioned something about your brother being murdered. Regardless of what you believe or think about psychics, Kevin has kept detailed notes of what you're about to hear, and many parts have proven pertinent over the years. She said, what time was he killed? And I said, they're saying somewhere around seven o'clock and her nose she's got seven seven oh five written down, and then says, there's something wrong with these times. I don't know if this is the proper time that he was killed. But something happened at seven o'clock, and then something happened again later, one person inside, two or three people outside, and it was a planned hit. They knew your brother's schedule, they knew it was going to be at this meeting. There are people that he trusted that he shouldn't have trusted, and those very people are having a meeting. And you wouldn't believe this, but they're meeting right now. She then went into very specific detail about a place Kevin would eventually visit much later. It's a big house overlooking a lake, and it's got gates on the front and some kind of security system looking down on it, like cameras or something. And they're meeting right now talking about this, the ones that were responsible for it. And I see a rose. I don't know what it means. And then she said something that caught Kevin absolutely off guard. They've got somebody in custody right now. They think he might have done it, but he didn't do it, but he knows more than he should know. His name's John Kay something. As soon as Kevin left, he called the state police officer investigating the murder. Lauren Glover asked him. I said, do you have somebody in custody right now? He said, yeah, who snitched yet? We got a leak in There's who told you about that? And I said, I went to a psyche and she said that he had somebody in custody right now named John Kay. He says c Krauss. He says, did she tell you he did it? And I said no. She said he probably didn't do it, but he had some information about it. Krauss wouldn't just prove a central figure in Mike's murder, but a magic one as well. Here's pill from an early age. He had been beaten by his father. I mean they would punish him when he was twelve years old, time to a chair and beat him till he was blue. It's in the record someplace, and so of course, he started stealing cars at an early age. Johnny Croft did. And uh, he was notably disturbed kid. I mean, he was barely average intelligence if that, and terribly disturbed. Besides, Kross also knew disturbingly specific and classified details about Michael Frankie's murder. One of the most obvious things that Johnny Cross knew that he couldn't have known unless he had been there, was the nature of the Frankie's wounds. One stab mark to the left arm, probably a defensive wound, and the fatal wound to the heart. It hadn't been released to the public, and Johnny Cross knew that. In addition to that, he said Frankie had come up on him when he was breaking into the car. I had to get away. He couldn't. Frankie was too strong. They struggled. He had a knife. He started slicing at him, and then he stabbed him. And he turned and ran towards the old hospital, across the huge green lawn there and around the green generator, which is exactly what Hauntsakre. The janitor the State Cops first witness said he saw that Hansaker was that maintenance worker at the dome building who initially was the only eyewitness to come forward back to Kevin. He said he turned because he heard something like a grunt sound or hurt sense, like somebody getting punched in the gut, And he turned around and he saw two guys facing each other at that instant. One turned and ran this way, and the other one went back into the dome building. But Krauss wasn't even on anyone's radar for the murder or brought in because of it. He got a I said, for a pro viotalife embly the morning after the murder, when this hit the news, he told some of his cohorts was living in a flop house there, that he really stepped in it and he had to get out of town. He confessed his mother, he confessed to his girlfriend, and he confessed to his brother. He went in and told his prole officers that he'd seen the murder. But what he said, and of course he later said that he just made it up. What he did was that he'd seen five Mexicans with the murder, and then he chased them, he said, for for about two or three miles before they got away. And then he dropped out of side again and and then and was re arrested a couple of months later in Central Oregon and brought back and questioned again, and that's when that's when he confessed to Martin Eck. Randy Martineck was an investigator for the Oregon Justice Department. Here's Kevin. He was an investigator that was assisting with the investigation. And that's where Martin att got the confession. He brought in a polygrapher who was with the FBI, flew him in and did the polygraph instead of having the state police to the polygraph because he knew they were shipped, and he passed the polygraph, and he passed the polygraph. Here's Phil. This was after he confessed. The FBI polygrapher concluded that Prowess was telling the truth. Tom McCallum was the private investigator wh would ultimately work for the defense of another man, the one arrested for Mike's murder. Here's his take on Krause. The Department of Justice guy that talked to him was kind of a neutral. I always thought investigator. He wasn't with the d a's office, he wasn't with the state police, and they were all, you know, going in other directions, so I kind of weighed that into my opinion of what he had to say. And he totally believed the cross had did it, and some of the things that he said were things that nobody would have known. Physical things, and the way that he described what he did, we're pretty right on. I mean, I had read the police reports and I read his stuff, so I knew nobody knew some of those details. So it seemed pretty interesting. And um certainly warned us going and talking to him. So you're feeling was that Kraus knew things he couldn't have known unless he had been at the scene of the murder. That's the way I read to me. After Johnny Kraus's confession, he even took the cops on a ride to show them where they could find the bloody clothes he ditched after the murder. During that ride, he also suggested a bit of a detour. The police took him in the police car to show them where he had buried some closed that he had worn that night, and as they were driving down a street park Avenue I think it's called, uh two blocks from the Dome building, which is where Michael Frankie worked. Krall said, if you want to go see where the knife was that killed Mike Frankie, go over to ninety two Park Avenue. Cross was headed to buck Burgesses. Only for some reason the cops didn't go. And that's what Dale Penn in the car. Dale pen was the then d A overseeing the investigation and to state cops and Steve gorm Crosses attorney, and they couldn't take two minutes out of their drive to the penitentiary to stop by two Park Avenue just to check him out. I got a lunch, an engagement or something. I really want to go over there, Johnny, No, I was kitten. Can't you take a joke? You'll soon understand the ignation behind the Frankie brothers laughter. But first, here's Phill's take on the man who lived at that address, Buck Burgess. What's important about buck Burgess is that he is a completely dissolute criminal. His first charge in California, back when he was in his twenties, was for the murder of a one year old child. He eventually got off with manslaughter. He had done time for burglary, for assault, He's a pedophile. Most recently, he served time in Colorado for US sexually assaulting a young girl. He's a very dangerous guy. He was out on parole, just like Johnny Kraus was out on parole, and he was living two blocks from the Dome building. It's worth noting that when Johnny Krauss started getting beyond the simple story that he stabbed Frankie when Frankie caught him burglarizing his car, he started bringing in Buck Burgess. His name and Johnny Craft used to hang out with buck Burgess. He was he was a real fringe character even in the underworld. He would hang out in the bushes around Buck's house. And who was Buck living with at the time, a woman named Elaine Young, who Kevin eventually talked to when he came out to investigate on his own. This wasn't the first time buck Burgess's name had come up in the investigation, and it won't be the last. The morning January, when they were doing a circumferential concentric search where they were going out in bigger and bigger circles looking for any kind of evidence, they came across Elaine Young's van with Buck Burgess at the wheel and question him what he was doing there, took his name and all that information, and he said that he did some kids breaking into his house and he was trying to see if he could catch him. But Kevin believed Burgess was more concerned about being caught. My contention is that the ship didn't go down the way it was supposed to when he was waiting for the cops to come to his house. Here in case, Johnny Crafts started yeap and on our trip to the Dome building, we drove to Buck Burgess's then house to get an idea of its proximity to the location of Mike's murder. Avenue of the Tan building with the red trim right there, so Buck is here and you can see his house directly straight through there. So he's sitting here watching his own house. And then when he pulled off, the police came back through here the state place that we're doing the search, and I think they were assisted by Salem cops found a knife with blood on it there and it was almost like an in your face type deal, and they figured that he left it, but they couldn't prove it. Did the blood it came back to, I think of his animal blood. But in the discovery, when they're taking Krauss out to where Kraus says that he buried the clothing he wore. Dale Pens in the car Steve gorm Cross's attorney, Kennicott chief of security for Department of Corrections, and he had a guy named stubble Field that was his assistant. Mike fired stubble Field and he was rehired after Mike got killed. In Buck's personal belongings, he had the little contact list. Bob Kennicott's home phone number was in that. The goddamn thing. When did that come out? It didn't come out because I finally got to Elane after the trial and everything else, and after Buck had left and absconded, he left that behind and he's got Bob Kennicott's home phone number in their chief of security and Kennicott is in that car with gorm Dale, penn State Police driver. Why he was in there is he's get his ears on to tell the council what's going on. Remember Scott mc allister, that was the assistant a g. Mike was having trouble getting removed. And Kraus says, if you want to go by, the murderer's house is at Park Avenue, So that is buck Burgess's house, and that's where Johnny Crafts would go quite often. Elaine Young used to come home from work. She worked up at one of the sawmills, and she come home from work and Johnny Kraus would be hiding in the bushes there waiting for Buck to get in. And he'd never talked to her because she wasn't part of the group, but he'd just hiding the bushes and she'd go into the house say hi, Johnny, and he wouldn't say anything. It was that kind of weird ship. Pat Frankie visited Kraus in prison, hoping to leave with answers about Mike's murder. I went to the penitentiary with the Cross's lawyer and I had a series of questions written out on the three but five cars that I showed Cross through the glass. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to recorded what I was asking and what he was responding to. And I asked him about eight or ten questions and he indicated that he didn't do it, but he knew who did do it, and if he'd be willing to cooperate along those lines. Pat called Phil with a bombshell crow shared. He said, Pat, this goes beyond this goes to Corrections. You're onto something Pat told me. I put that in the column. It was after Phil printed that allegation that the infamous car ride with Johnny Krausse took place. Within the week they Open and a couple of cops took Johnny Cross out on an excursion. He said he would show them where he buried his clothes that night, and as they passed the house at Park Avenue, this was, you know, just two blocks away from the Dome building. He pointed at the house and said, if you want to know who did it or where the knife is, it's over there. He's pointing at buck Burgess's house. And we have the transcript of this. This is what Pat and Kevin were ridiculing earlier. The man who claims to know who killed the head of Corrections offers to take the police to the location of the murder weapon, and they pass and that afternoon, the record shows he came back and had a meeting with the Open and Sarah Moore, who was then the lead prosecutor on the case, and said that he had been approached by officials and Corrections offered ten tho dollars killed Frankie but had backed out of it, and that someone else had then. So all this is going on behind the scenes and we don't know it until the records are released. Some time later, after Phil wrote an article alleging the corruption Krause had intimated to Pat and confesses as much in greater details to the investigators, something incredible happens. Krauss recants his confession and is dropped as a suspect out of nowhere. It was on the news. You know that Henry candid and they have given him another polygraph and he passed saying he didn't do it, and Krauss seems to have had incentive. Shortly after that, Johnny Krauss was eventually given immunity by the d a's office on the condition that he not recant his recantation. So it's not just that they didn't like his confession. They didn't like the people his confession would ultimately lead to. That's what it looks like for sure. It was around this time Kevin and Phil finally met in person. What were your first impressions of one another? As my dad would say, we were kind of signiffict each other's ass. They quickly bonded over the issue that interest in solving Mike's murder seemed to be waning. I expected this uproar and anger, you know, over my brother's murder, instead of this, just shut the hell up, We'll take care of it, don't worry. Where was the outrage? And that's I wrote Goldschmidt about that. You know, where is your fucking outrage? Why aren't you backing a reward fund? You're saying, don't put a reward fund on the table? Why with no response? And you asked him that too in the papers, So why don't you do the reward fund? And they never did it. Kevin had been instructed not to talk to the press, but at this point he'd had enough and sick of following orders. I had to make a commitment, and I made the commitment to fill because he hadn't liked me, and they had not just once, but repeatedly, and then the denial of the autopsy report and saying that they couldn't trust us not to leak the information, as if we were at odds with them trying to solve the murder, that we're going to do something to jeopardize it. What idioty and that's Dale Penn. Well, that's what they accused him of. Later, Kevin finally went public with what his brother had told him, that he was investigating his department, that he discovered an organized criminal element and was going to clean house, and they accused him of making it up, as if he would make up something to derail the investigation of his brother's case. I mean, they set up a straw man so that they wouldn't have to deal with the basic question, which was was their corruption and was Michael Frankie investigating corruption? Which would have been easy enough to prove if they'd wanted to, the rest of us could find evidence of it. Several people and different papers were following it, and it was clear. But they set up a straw man, and they attacked Kevin for saying it, and they tried to ruin him, and they did, they thought. But what they didn't anticipate was Kevin would fight back through the relentlessness at Phil Stamford, who was continuing to write about the case for the Oregonian, and newspaper reporter Steve Jackson, who was doing the same thing at the Statesman Journal, creating a productive, if somewhat competitive triangle to solve the case. I was constantly on the phone with either one of them all day, and it was Jackson. I can tell you exactly what's going to come out of his math as soon as I get him online. Okay, don't tell Stanford. But and then he tells me something and I calls Phil. He says, Okay, did you talk to Jackson? He says, okay, but don't tell him. I talked to you. But what did he say? And I just said, okay, well, don't tell him. I told you this. But I thought, okay, okay, don't worry about that. But they kept lighting each other's fire. Here's Steve Jackson's take. Pill was a calumnist Um, and he did not buy the official explanation. At least, you know, he was questioning some things, and you know, so I had some respect for Phil early on as somebody who you know, at least he's not buying the party line here and is asking some different questions. I recognized fairly early on that Um Kevin in particular, was passing information from me, talking to me and then talking to Phil Um, because I would see this sort of pop up in Phill's columns a little bit later, and I knew he wasn't down in Salem and looking at some of this stuff. But it involved to a point of you know, go would call me and asked what was going on in my investigation, and we would talk and he would ask permission, but he would run some of what I was doing, almost as a sort of review of what was going to come out in the Statesman Journal. The next day he would have it in his column up in the Oregonian back to Kevin. So it was people that didn't take the Oragonian, that were in the Salem area that would see Jackson. Referring to a recent column by Phil Stanford, mentions that there was a drawing of the man in the pin stripe suit that they said on for six months. Yeah, that's sketch. The drawing of the man in the pin stripe suit, which police initially refused release, would become a huge piece in the puzzle of Mike's murder. It released a couple others that were badly done and he could have been anyone. But there was this other line that was circulating. And I called down to Dale Penn, the district attorney, and I said, why haven't you released it. He said, well, because it's just not very good. So you know, what did I know? But I kept calling and uh finally got in touch with Bink too, and she said, oh why not, and so she faxed it to me thirty minutes before my deadline too. You know, I had a eleven thirty deadline for the column, and I had the column already written, and I was going to have to go without the picture, but I put it there. It was this picture of the Spanic man, well dressed, well groomed, mustache wearing a suit. Man in the pinstripe suits became known as and I finished with the picture at the bottom, and I said, who is this man? And Phil would soon find himself a target too on a very public stage. That's what set off Goldschmith. And next thing I knew, he was holding the press conference and radio reporter called me. I was, I was at my desk and played me the tape. I didn't know what was going to happen. He's saying, issue after issue is in the paper and nobody has ever stopped to say, where does this garbage come from? This is the young You're impugning the character of the Oregon State police, which is an independent investigation. Talk is cheap, and so you held another conference in press conference and called it VS. So suddenly you're being attacked by the governor of Oregon. Yeah, oh yeah. In a way, it was sort of a heady experience. You know, I was writing a column going toe to toe with the governor. You know, the reporter asked me for a comment and I said, I think the governor is getting bad advice. Well, as it turns out, it was at least that. I'm not sure that that's all it was. But in the news room, especially with my editors, this had a huge effect because at the time, Goldschmith was the golden boy of Oregon politics. After these articles, Ran and Phil began to raise questions about the investigation and what the police were hiding. D A. Dale Pen also turned to the press to discredit Kevin. Let's not forget that Dale Penn. At the same time, I was going along with his strategy and making statements to the press that he had never even heard about this organized criminal element until he read about it in the paper, meaning my column. So um. In other words, they were calling Kevin a liar, and this was the beginning of their strategy, I guess, to paint him as a disturbed, distraught family member who has just gone over the edge and is making things up. I was too fullish to realize that they were trying to make me feel like I was met, so I didn't go to nets because I realized that I was telling the truth. Therefore, they couldn't guess like it was their only chance to discredit you for what you said about what your brother had been doing when he was killed, that he was investigating corruption. They had to attack you because they couldn't attack the evidence on corruption, and so they were lying from the beginning about them that I never said anything about it to him, kiss my ass. That's what they kept coming to the Governor's office was using that as an excuse too. How dare Kevin Frankie say anything bad about the state police when they're the same people that cleaned this mess up the last time. They didn't clean it up, they just very arranged the furniture. Information Phil and Kevin would eventually uncover would clarify their confusion as to why they were targeted. It's pretty clear now that by making him the issue, diverting attention from the real issue, which was was Michael Frankie investigating corruption and even more to the point, was their corruption in the corruption system. That's what they had to avoid at all costs, and that's why they went after Covin. It's one of the more despicable things I've ever seen, and going after a family member of a victim who is raising questions about his brother's murder. Seriously, it sounds like you guys were turning over stones and you found more than a few snakes. Yeah, and a lot of them are still out there. Coming up on Murder and Oregon, the town of Salem is stripped back to reveal rank corruption. When you got a gun to the the state of Oregon and it's not gone down fedophile any thanks possible untethered evil. You had somebody who was desperate enough to take the risk of killing the head of corrections. You must have something really big to hide and terror, I mean, it was getting really, really scary and really bad. And he said he had killed a man and watched him die, and much of it would seem linked to the miss Serious Man in the Pinstripe suit. 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 Chikogne. Sound designed by Tristan McNeil, Story editing by Matt Riddle, written by Phil Stanford, Matt Riddle and Lauren Bright Pacheco. Music written and performed by The Diamond Street Players and mixed by Taylor Chikogne, with music supervision by Noel Brown. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio. The Frankies laid Mike to rest, but not their questions about his murder. Here's pat from here to Santa Fe. The state had him in closed casket, but they hit him at the Supreme Court Building for a day, and then they had a fabulous service at the cathedral and an internment at the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. There's quite a ceremony of quite a funeral that filled up the cathedral and it was beautifully done. It's done a pretty place. I've got done a couple of times a year, and I put sunflowers on his grave because there's a Kansas boy. And I also have a beer with him. I've got a lot of pictures of me drinking Budweiser's at the Santa Fe Cemetery, and I've had a few over here in front of the Dome building. After the funeral, Kevin returned to Florida. But the official investigation and seemed to be going nowhere, and Kevin began to bristle at the lack of progress. It's been so many months. Mike was dead. We knew that, but there were so many rumors swirling around the world is full of koks and cranks and Pat were very vocal because of the resistance, because of the kickback and the struggle just to get the autopsy report, but to get any kind of answers to find out what was going on. Any time I question who is this person? Who is at why do you need to know that? And it was just this constant bullshit. What who are you? You're just his brother. We'll tell you who killed him soon enough, don't worry. And that's how and why Phil got hooked up with the Frankie brothers. Here's Pat. He was writing on these great columns and I just want to talk to There are so many different people involved in this thing it hurts your brain after a while, but they're all interconnected because it's an incest. She was a bunch of criminals down here. Turned out there's an ancestral bunch of politicians, political officials and such two and I think a lot of them had stuff that they needed to get cleaned up, covered up. Pat seemed to be the one who was speaking for the family, so I got in touch with him. He started talking about discrepancies of the case. So I said, Pat tell me more, and he said, guy, you need to talk to about that's my brother, Kevin. He's the one who's up on that. So we started talking. The first conversations were you could see he was very wary. There must have been no three or four months into the investigation after the murder. They weren't being straight with him. I think that's the main thing. There were other things involved. They're trying to get the autopsy, but he wasn't getting information from them. They just kept sort of shining the more on, saying trust us, don't interfere with the investigation. And well, as he just said screw it and told me I could go ahead and write about the organized criminal element. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco and this is murdering Oregon. Kevin's back in Florida feeling beyond frustrated. When a friend stopped by. He was with the local sheriff's department and brought along a depressing update. Our friend of mine into Charlotte Kenny surers department. He said, Man, they're going nowhere with the deal. He says, right, I get me. He said, they put a query up there and they said there was nothing to offer. Other agencies that it's all being handled in the house. Then he gave Kevin a newspaper article mentioning a woman he thought could help solve Mike's murder, along with her business card. He gave me this gal's member. Her name was Jane Doe. That's what I said on the card. He said, you need to go talk to this gal. She helped us with a missing person's case and then she was spot on found the guy and I said how how did she find it? He said she's the psyche and I said, yeah, I don't need this ship. But while he was skeptical, he was also desperate, and Kevin decided he had little to lose. I called her up and I said, do you do criminal investigations? And she said what's your name? And I said this Kevin and I she said, okay, um, what was this about? And I said it's about a murder. And it was very quiet for a few seconds, and she said one of your brothers and I said, yeah, knock on the door and she's in a mumu and very colorful, lively lady. She said, you mentioned something about your brother being murdered. Regardless of what you believe or think about psychics, Kevin has kept detailed notes of what you're about to hear, and many parts have proven pertinent over the years. She said, what time was he killed? And I said, they're saying somewhere around seven o'clock and her nose she's got seven seven oh five written down, and then says, there's something wrong with these times. I don't know if this is the proper time that he was killed. But something happened at seven o'clock, and then something happened again later, one person inside, two or three people outside, and it was a planned hit. They knew your brother's schedule, they knew it was going to be at this meeting. There are people that he trusted that he shouldn't have trusted, and those very people are having a meeting. And you wouldn't believe this, but they're meeting right now. She then went into very specific detail about a place Kevin would eventually visit much later. It's a big house overlooking a lake, and it's got gates on the front and some kind of security system looking down on it, like cameras or something. And they're meeting right now talking about this, the ones that were responsible for it. And I see a rose. I don't know what it means. And then she said something that caught Kevin absolutely off guard. They've got somebody in custody right now. They think he might have done it, but he didn't do it, but he knows more than he should know. His name's John Kay something. As soon as Kevin left, he called the state police officer investigating the murder. Lauren Glover asked him. I said, do you have somebody in custody right now? He said, yeah, who snitched yet? We got a leak in There's who told you about that? And I said, I went to a psyche and she said that he had somebody in custody right now named John Kay. He says c Krauss. He says, did she tell you he did it? And I said no. She said he probably didn't do it, but he had some information about it. Krauss wouldn't just prove a central figure in Mike's murder, but a magic one as well. Here's pill from an early age. He had been beaten by his father. I mean they would punish him when he was twelve years old, time to a chair and beat him till he was blue. It's in the record someplace, and so of course, he started stealing cars at an early age. Johnny Croft did. And uh, he was notably disturbed kid. I mean, he was barely average intelligence if that, and terribly disturbed. Besides, Kross also knew disturbingly specific and classified details about Michael Frankie's murder. One of the most obvious things that Johnny Cross knew that he couldn't have known unless he had been there, was the nature of the Frankie's wounds. One stab mark to the left arm, probably a defensive wound, and the fatal wound to the heart. It hadn't been released to the public, and Johnny Cross knew that. In addition to that, he said Frankie had come up on him when he was breaking into the car. I had to get away. He couldn't. Frankie was too strong. They struggled. He had a knife. He started slicing at him, and then he stabbed him. And he turned and ran towards the old hospital, across the huge green lawn there and around the green generator, which is exactly what Hauntsakre. The janitor the State Cops first witness said he saw that Hansaker was that maintenance worker at the dome building who initially was the only eyewitness to come forward back to Kevin. He said he turned because he heard something like a grunt sound or hurt sense, like somebody getting punched in the gut, And he turned around and he saw two guys facing each other at that instant. One turned and ran this way, and the other one went back into the dome building. But Krauss wasn't even on anyone's radar for the murder or brought in because of it. He got a I said, for a pro viotalife embly the morning after the murder, when this hit the news, he told some of his cohorts was living in a flop house there, that he really stepped in it and he had to get out of town. He confessed his mother, he confessed to his girlfriend, and he confessed to his brother. He went in and told his prole officers that he'd seen the murder. But what he said, and of course he later said that he just made it up. What he did was that he'd seen five Mexicans with the murder, and then he chased them, he said, for for about two or three miles before they got away. And then he dropped out of side again and and then and was re arrested a couple of months later in Central Oregon and brought back and questioned again, and that's when that's when he confessed to Martin Eck. Randy Martineck was an investigator for the Oregon Justice Department. Here's Kevin. He was an investigator that was assisting with the investigation. And that's where Martin att got the confession. He brought in a polygrapher who was with the FBI, flew him in and did the polygraph instead of having the state police to the polygraph because he knew they were shipped, and he passed the polygraph, and he passed the polygraph. Here's Phil. This was after he confessed. The FBI polygrapher concluded that Prowess was telling the truth. Tom McCallum was the private investigator wh would ultimately work for the defense of another man, the one arrested for Mike's murder. Here's his take on Krause. The Department of Justice guy that talked to him was kind of a neutral. I always thought investigator. He wasn't with the d a's office, he wasn't with the state police, and they were all, you know, going in other directions, so I kind of weighed that into my opinion of what he had to say. And he totally believed the cross had did it, and some of the things that he said were things that nobody would have known. Physical things, and the way that he described what he did, we're pretty right on. I mean, I had read the police reports and I read his stuff, so I knew nobody knew some of those details. So it seemed pretty interesting. And um certainly warned us going and talking to him. So you're feeling was that Kraus knew things he couldn't have known unless he had been at the scene of the murder. That's the way I read to me. After Johnny Kraus's confession, he even took the cops on a ride to show them where they could find the bloody clothes he ditched after the murder. During that ride, he also suggested a bit of a detour. The police took him in the police car to show them where he had buried some closed that he had worn that night, and as they were driving down a street park Avenue I think it's called, uh two blocks from the Dome building, which is where Michael Frankie worked. Krall said, if you want to go see where the knife was that killed Mike Frankie, go over to ninety two Park Avenue. Cross was headed to buck Burgesses. Only for some reason the cops didn't go. And that's what Dale Penn in the car. Dale pen was the then d A overseeing the investigation and to state cops and Steve gorm Crosses attorney, and they couldn't take two minutes out of their drive to the penitentiary to stop by two Park Avenue just to check him out. I got a lunch, an engagement or something. I really want to go over there, Johnny, No, I was kitten. Can't you take a joke? You'll soon understand the ignation behind the Frankie brothers laughter. But first, here's Phill's take on the man who lived at that address, Buck Burgess. What's important about buck Burgess is that he is a completely dissolute criminal. His first charge in California, back when he was in his twenties, was for the murder of a one year old child. He eventually got off with manslaughter. He had done time for burglary, for assault, He's a pedophile. Most recently, he served time in Colorado for US sexually assaulting a young girl. He's a very dangerous guy. He was out on parole, just like Johnny Kraus was out on parole, and he was living two blocks from the Dome building. It's worth noting that when Johnny Krauss started getting beyond the simple story that he stabbed Frankie when Frankie caught him burglarizing his car, he started bringing in Buck Burgess. His name and Johnny Craft used to hang out with buck Burgess. He was he was a real fringe character even in the underworld. He would hang out in the bushes around Buck's house. And who was Buck living with at the time, a woman named Elaine Young, who Kevin eventually talked to when he came out to investigate on his own. This wasn't the first time buck Burgess's name had come up in the investigation, and it won't be the last. The morning January, when they were doing a circumferential concentric search where they were going out in bigger and bigger circles looking for any kind of evidence, they came across Elaine Young's van with Buck Burgess at the wheel and question him what he was doing there, took his name and all that information, and he said that he did some kids breaking into his house and he was trying to see if he could catch him. But Kevin believed Burgess was more concerned about being caught. My contention is that the ship didn't go down the way it was supposed to when he was waiting for the cops to come to his house. Here in case, Johnny Crafts started yeap and on our trip to the Dome building, we drove to Buck Burgess's then house to get an idea of its proximity to the location of Mike's murder. Avenue of the Tan building with the red trim right there, so Buck is here and you can see his house directly straight through there. So he's sitting here watching his own house. And then when he pulled off, the police came back through here the state place that we're doing the search, and I think they were assisted by Salem cops found a knife with blood on it there and it was almost like an in your face type deal, and they figured that he left it, but they couldn't prove it. Did the blood it came back to, I think of his animal blood. But in the discovery, when they're taking Krauss out to where Kraus says that he buried the clothing he wore. Dale Pens in the car Steve gorm Cross's attorney, Kennicott chief of security for Department of Corrections, and he had a guy named stubble Field that was his assistant. Mike fired stubble Field and he was rehired after Mike got killed. In Buck's personal belongings, he had the little contact list. Bob Kennicott's home phone number was in that. The goddamn thing. When did that come out? It didn't come out because I finally got to Elane after the trial and everything else, and after Buck had left and absconded, he left that behind and he's got Bob Kennicott's home phone number in their chief of security and Kennicott is in that car with gorm Dale, penn State Police driver. Why he was in there is he's get his ears on to tell the council what's going on. Remember Scott mc allister, that was the assistant a g. Mike was having trouble getting removed. And Kraus says, if you want to go by, the murderer's house is at Park Avenue, So that is buck Burgess's house, and that's where Johnny Crafts would go quite often. Elaine Young used to come home from work. She worked up at one of the sawmills, and she come home from work and Johnny Kraus would be hiding in the bushes there waiting for Buck to get in. And he'd never talked to her because she wasn't part of the group, but he'd just hiding the bushes and she'd go into the house say hi, Johnny, and he wouldn't say anything. It was that kind of weird ship. Pat Frankie visited Kraus in prison, hoping to leave with answers about Mike's murder. I went to the penitentiary with the Cross's lawyer and I had a series of questions written out on the three but five cars that I showed Cross through the glass. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to recorded what I was asking and what he was responding to. And I asked him about eight or ten questions and he indicated that he didn't do it, but he knew who did do it, and if he'd be willing to cooperate along those lines. Pat called Phil with a bombshell crow shared. He said, Pat, this goes beyond this goes to Corrections. You're onto something Pat told me. I put that in the column. It was after Phil printed that allegation that the infamous car ride with Johnny Krausse took place. Within the week they Open and a couple of cops took Johnny Cross out on an excursion. He said he would show them where he buried his clothes that night, and as they passed the house at Park Avenue, this was, you know, just two blocks away from the Dome building. He pointed at the house and said, if you want to know who did it or where the knife is, it's over there. He's pointing at buck Burgess's house. And we have the transcript of this. This is what Pat and Kevin were ridiculing earlier. The man who claims to know who killed the head of Corrections offers to take the police to the location of the murder weapon, and they pass and that afternoon, the record shows he came back and had a meeting with the Open and Sarah Moore, who was then the lead prosecutor on the case, and said that he had been approached by officials and Corrections offered ten tho dollars killed Frankie but had backed out of it, and that someone else had then. So all this is going on behind the scenes and we don't know it until the records are released. Some time later, after Phil wrote an article alleging the corruption Krause had intimated to Pat and confesses as much in greater details to the investigators, something incredible happens. Krauss recants his confession and is dropped as a suspect out of nowhere. It was on the news. You know that Henry candid and they have given him another polygraph and he passed saying he didn't do it, and Krauss seems to have had incentive. Shortly after that, Johnny Krauss was eventually given immunity by the d a's office on the condition that he not recant his recantation. So it's not just that they didn't like his confession. They didn't like the people his confession would ultimately lead to. That's what it looks like for sure. It was around this time Kevin and Phil finally met in person. What were your first impressions of one another? As my dad would say, we were kind of signiffict each other's ass. They quickly bonded over the issue that interest in solving Mike's murder seemed to be waning. I expected this uproar and anger, you know, over my brother's murder, instead of this, just shut the hell up, We'll take care of it, don't worry. Where was the outrage? And that's I wrote Goldschmidt about that. You know, where is your fucking outrage? Why aren't you backing a reward fund? You're saying, don't put a reward fund on the table? Why with no response? And you asked him that too in the papers, So why don't you do the reward fund? And they never did it. Kevin had been instructed not to talk to the press, but at this point he'd had enough and sick of following orders. I had to make a commitment, and I made the commitment to fill because he hadn't liked me, and they had not just once, but repeatedly, and then the denial of the autopsy report and saying that they couldn't trust us not to leak the information, as if we were at odds with them trying to solve the murder, that we're going to do something to jeopardize it. What idioty and that's Dale Penn. Well, that's what they accused him of. Later, Kevin finally went public with what his brother had told him, that he was investigating his department, that he discovered an organized criminal element and was going to clean house, and they accused him of making it up, as if he would make up something to derail the investigation of his brother's case. I mean, they set up a straw man so that they wouldn't have to deal with the basic question, which was was their corruption and was Michael Frankie investigating corruption? Which would have been easy enough to prove if they'd wanted to, the rest of us could find evidence of it. Several people and different papers were following it, and it was clear. But they set up a straw man, and they attacked Kevin for saying it, and they tried to ruin him, and they did, they thought. But what they didn't anticipate was Kevin would fight back through the relentlessness at Phil Stamford, who was continuing to write about the case for the Oregonian, and newspaper reporter Steve Jackson, who was doing the same thing at the Statesman Journal, creating a productive, if somewhat competitive triangle to solve the case. I was constantly on the phone with either one of them all day, and it was Jackson. I can tell you exactly what's going to come out of his math as soon as I get him online. Okay, don't tell Stanford. But and then he tells me something and I calls Phil. He says, Okay, did you talk to Jackson? He says, okay, but don't tell him. I talked to you. But what did he say? And I just said, okay, well, don't tell him. I told you this. But I thought, okay, okay, don't worry about that. But they kept lighting each other's fire. Here's Steve Jackson's take. Pill was a calumnist Um, and he did not buy the official explanation. At least, you know, he was questioning some things, and you know, so I had some respect for Phil early on as somebody who you know, at least he's not buying the party line here and is asking some different questions. I recognized fairly early on that Um Kevin in particular, was passing information from me, talking to me and then talking to Phil Um, because I would see this sort of pop up in Phill's columns a little bit later, and I knew he wasn't down in Salem and looking at some of this stuff. But it involved to a point of you know, go would call me and asked what was going on in my investigation, and we would talk and he would ask permission, but he would run some of what I was doing, almost as a sort of review of what was going to come out in the Statesman Journal. The next day he would have it in his column up in the Oregonian back to Kevin. So it was people that didn't take the Oragonian, that were in the Salem area that would see Jackson. Referring to a recent column by Phil Stanford, mentions that there was a drawing of the man in the pin stripe suit that they said on for six months. Yeah, that's sketch. The drawing of the man in the pin stripe suit, which police initially refused release, would become a huge piece in the puzzle of Mike's murder. It released a couple others that were badly done and he could have been anyone. But there was this other line that was circulating. And I called down to Dale Penn, the district attorney, and I said, why haven't you released it. He said, well, because it's just not very good. So you know, what did I know? But I kept calling and uh finally got in touch with Bink too, and she said, oh why not, and so she faxed it to me thirty minutes before my deadline too. You know, I had a eleven thirty deadline for the column, and I had the column already written, and I was going to have to go without the picture, but I put it there. It was this picture of the Spanic man, well dressed, well groomed, mustache wearing a suit. Man in the pinstripe suits became known as and I finished with the picture at the bottom, and I said, who is this man? And Phil would soon find himself a target too on a very public stage. That's what set off Goldschmith. And next thing I knew, he was holding the press conference and radio reporter called me. I was, I was at my desk and played me the tape. I didn't know what was going to happen. He's saying, issue after issue is in the paper and nobody has ever stopped to say, where does this garbage come from? This is the young You're impugning the character of the Oregon State police, which is an independent investigation. Talk is cheap, and so you held another conference in press conference and called it VS. So suddenly you're being attacked by the governor of Oregon. Yeah, oh yeah. In a way, it was sort of a heady experience. You know, I was writing a column going toe to toe with the governor. You know, the reporter asked me for a comment and I said, I think the governor is getting bad advice. Well, as it turns out, it was at least that. I'm not sure that that's all it was. But in the news room, especially with my editors, this had a huge effect because at the time, Goldschmith was the golden boy of Oregon politics. After these articles, Ran and Phil began to raise questions about the investigation and what the police were hiding. D A. Dale Pen also turned to the press to discredit Kevin. Let's not forget that Dale Penn. At the same time, I was going along with his strategy and making statements to the press that he had never even heard about this organized criminal element until he read about it in the paper, meaning my column. So um. In other words, they were calling Kevin a liar, and this was the beginning of their strategy, I guess, to paint him as a disturbed, distraught family member who has just gone over the edge and is making things up. I was too fullish to realize that they were trying to make me feel like I was met, so I didn't go to nets because I realized that I was telling the truth. Therefore, they couldn't guess like it was their only chance to discredit you for what you said about what your brother had been doing when he was killed, that he was investigating corruption. They had to attack you because they couldn't attack the evidence on corruption, and so they were lying from the beginning about them that I never said anything about it to him, kiss my ass. That's what they kept coming to the Governor's office was using that as an excuse too. How dare Kevin Frankie say anything bad about the state police when they're the same people that cleaned this mess up the last time. They didn't clean it up, they just very arranged the furniture. Information Phil and Kevin would eventually uncover would clarify their confusion as to why they were targeted. It's pretty clear now that by making him the issue, diverting attention from the real issue, which was was Michael Frankie investigating corruption and even more to the point, was their corruption in the corruption system. That's what they had to avoid at all costs, and that's why they went after Covin. It's one of the more despicable things I've ever seen, and going after a family member of a victim who is raising questions about his brother's murder. Seriously, it sounds like you guys were turning over stones and you found more than a few snakes. Yeah, and a lot of them are still out there. Coming up on Murder and Oregon, the town of Salem is stripped back to reveal rank corruption. When you got a gun to the the state of Oregon and it's not gone down fedophile any thanks possible untethered evil. You had somebody who was desperate enough to take the risk of killing the head of corrections. You must have something really big to hide and terror, I mean, it was getting really, really scary and really bad. And he said he had killed a man and watched him die, and much of it would seem linked to the miss Serious Man in the Pinstripe suit. 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 Chikogne. Sound designed by Tristan McNeil, Story editing by Matt Riddle, written by Phil Stanford, Matt Riddle and Lauren Bright Pacheco. Music written and performed by The Diamond Street Players and mixed by Taylor Chikogne, with music supervision by Noel Brown. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio
