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Speaker 1: Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio. I told you that Mike was a no hostage personality, and he told me that many times. He says, I don't believe in hostages. I traveled to Salem to meet with Phil Kevin and pattent person. Kevin recalled an old story about Mike that actually made a local paper and pretty much summed up his attitude about surviving a threat in as the story about the assistant Attorney General from New Mexico who was up at Long Beach Naval Station during his naval reserve time that had picked up a couple of people outside the naval base. They were transport boxes is what they would called some shot like that. If people needed a ride, you'd sit in there and you could pick them up and take them where where they need go, assuming they were with the navy. Bass and Mike picked up this couple. The gale was in front and the guy was in back, and they pulled a knife on Mike and put it to his throat and said we're going to kill you and take your car, give me a wallet. My getting the wallet, and the next thing you know, Mike bailed out of the car. He said, you got the car, you got my wallet, buck you and that was it. Yeah, it's driving down the street and he bailed. Somebody nearby said, grab the funking wheel, Grab the fucking wheel. Mike Frankie jumped from a moving vehicle to avoid becoming a victim. It's pretty hard to believe someone like that could be robbed or attacked without putting up a serious fight. He was not going to be in a hustage situation regardless, even with a knife at his throat. If you kill me or cut me, at least I've got a chance if I'm out and away from the situation and try to plug this in to everybody, Mike's not going to be taken has He's going to figure a way out. You do anything and everything to get out of the situation, regardless of cost. What's more, Mike was cool headed under pressure. He even kept Kevin out of more than a few barrown brawls. That's where the Mike Frankie is m came in because you don't know if the son of a bush has got a knife or a gun, So if you're going in there with your fist, you might get your head cut off. The fact that he would grab somebody who in their right mind thinks that Mike gives a ship about anything they're gonna steal out of a state car. Seriously, here's Phil Stanford's take. I think there's an argument to be made that it would have been a tough fight because Michael Frankie was very physical and he knew how to handle himself. But to me, that's a secondary argument because there's no evidence there was a fight. That's the thing at the car. Yeah, and you would have thought, particularly given Mike size, that something would have gotten dented, whether he was big or small. There would have been evidence of a fright on the ground inside the car, outside the car, there was no physical evidence. Police Clawsen, Mike's assistant director, told me she was instructed to go to the state police before she went to go see then Governor Goldschmidt the night of Mike's murder. I mean, I looked inside the car that night and I told the state police this. I said, everything looks exactly the way it did this afternoon at last, you know, best I could remember. I mean, it didn't look like anything was disturbed. And she told them you need to take my fingerprints because I was with Michael in his car this afternoon, and at least you'd know whatever other prints there are. And they didn't do it. Never took your fingerprints. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murdering Oregon. The three Frankie brothers grew up close in what seems like a quintessential American, almost Norman Rockwell upbringing. Here's pat My kind of were very close, growing up with a lot of stuff together. Ran away together. Yeah, we packed up some blowny sandwiches and I decided we were going to run away. I think we made it two blocks up to a water tower, and when we couldn't see the house anymore, we got scared, went home. Oh lord, maybe ten, so he would have been seven. We sledded, we skated, we played ball together, and it was a huge neighborhood. This is after the war. There were tons of kids in the neighborhood and no fences in the backyards. We played Caps of the Flag and war and all of those games until well into the night. Boy energy abounded in the Frankie household, but both parents were quick to reel it in. Neither one would shot away from discipline. I'll put it that way. Whoever got to you at first was the disciplinarian it was. It was never says, your dad's gotta mess to clean up when he gets and he's got to be even more pissed. We all had different names when Dad would talk. I was Jesus Christ, Pat, Mike Kevin, and Mike was Jesus Christ Pat Mike, and Pat was Jesus Christ Pat. Say I broke trail for all, he'd forget stat and his mind would have to go through this step category because he was so enraged until he hit the right person. Day was mad at assume. So I was always Jesus Christ, Mike, Pat Kevin. It's also easy to see where Mike's pulled to law and order came from. We were all alter boys, boy scouts. I was a boy scout, Mike was a boy scout. I was a boy scout at Eagle, which trust really loyal help for friendly courtisan bravery and okay, But while the Frankies were raised good Catholic boys, they certainly didn't sport Halo's Mike and and his good friend with a shock cop after a football game. Does anybody know what a cup is? He took his shoes off, go dance on on the best wall. Mike and his friend Bulldog was his name, got into beef with some guys at the Southwest and they beat the hell out him. Mike and Bulldog were successful in their encounter. How's that? So he goes away to college a second here, I think he came back for Christmas and he said a mixer, and he said he'd been drinking bourbon and he could never drink bourbon after that night. He could never drink hard like her. He sucked a drinking hard like her. Ago, No, he didn't give it a go. Let's go ahead and come in again. He was drinking bourbon that night, having a pretty good time at this gal and they're walking out the door, and so many tapped him on his shoulder and says, aren't you Mike Frankie, And he turned around. This guy popped him, and he and two of his friends proceed to kick this ship out of Mike and in the process kicked his nose and into his face. Never a dull moment. Flight to fight and wrestle. Phil Stanford believes that toughness came with the territory just because of where they grew up. And at the time they grew up, Kansas City was part of the sort of beginning of the West. It's uh, cowboy country. Well, yeah, it's a different mentality. It's not like growing up in in upstate New York or something like that. That's the way they see themselves. They're not going to back down from a fright. Not Pat, not Mike, not Kevin. Their close knit upbringing bonded the brothers and made inconsistencies in the early reports of Mike's murder that much more glaring. Kevin remembers the initial call from Dick Peterson, one of Mike's senior staffers. The whole scenario just seemed absolutely wrong and impossible to begin with. You know, Peterson told me on the phone when I was in Florida that he'd been shot, and I thought, Jesus, you know, that was even worse. But then I get out here and then you know, they think he might have been stabbed. That discrepancy would trigger a memory about something Mike told Kevin over the phone when discussing his new job. He had to clean house and he had to get start surrounding himself with people he could trust about having trouble getting rid of a guy that worked for him, and I said, why don't you just fire him? And he says, I can't fire him. He doesn't work for me, And I said, well, how does he work for me? He's appointed to work for me, but it doesn't work for me. That conversation, an initial confusion about how Mike died, foreshadowed the tone for the investigation. According to Phil Stanford, the person who had called him to tell him about his brother's death, Dick Peterson, the deputy director, had said, give me a call. I help you any time. Once Kevin got out there, he called him. And then when Peterson never returned to call, I think Kevin said he called him five times, and before he finally gave up. He knew from the beginning that they were not going to help and he was going to have to fight for any information he was going to get. Phil also explains the office dynamic and ranking Peterson was too Collie was the chief financial officer. I think they were both called assistant directors. There had already been some kind of staff shake up within the department. Frankie had already informed others that he didn't trust Peterson. He was going to get Rid of him. He'd already informed colleague that he was going to lose his job. But just over a week before that, another very significant member of the Corrections department was forced out of office and officially he resigned, but it was because Michael Frankie had written to the governor and asked for this person to be replaced. And we're talking about Scott McAllister, who was the a G lawyer who had for the previous twelver thirteen years been assigned to Corrections. And so that's the third member of that collection of the Department of Corrections officers on the outs with Frankie. McAllister's name would come up again after the murder when Kevin questioned Mike's wife about the employee he was having issues getting rid of identified him through what Bingdon I had talked about the first morning I got in here and identified that individual as Scott McAllister, who's Assistant Attorney General that was assigned by the Attorney General's office to do all the litigation work for the Department of Corrections. Scott McAllister is a key player in the theory. Both Phil Stanford and Kevin Frankie have spent thirty years pursuing regarding Mike's murder. Here's Mike's assistant director, Alice Clawson. Scott was our assistant a G and Scott was there a lot. I do remember at one point after a meeting with Scott McAllister, Michael said, I'm not sure I have confidence in his recommendation, something to that effect. He was not comfortable with whatever it was Scott was recommending. After McAllister left Corrections, some may have felt more loyal to him and the Old Boys system than Frankie, especially since Mike was planning to clean house. There had been issues in the prison system that he discovered and wanted to remedy. I think he made a number of people in the department comfortable, probably the head of Prisons, Dick Peterson, and I think some of the superintendents, because he was a take charge kind of guy and they had been pretty independent actors up until then and it wasn't probably going to be the case for him. Dave Coullie, who was the budget head, I think he made him a bit nervous as well, because Michael had the ability to pay lots of attention to that and had a very strong grasp on that kind of information in those kind of details, and in particular Clausen is still troubled by the dynamic with Dick Peterson, Mike's deputy director. I can't tell you why, but I always had an uncomfortable feeling about Dick Peterson. I didn't have a lot of confidence in him, and I know that Michael didn't. In fact, I know that Michael was contemplating replacing them. He seemed very anxious after Michael was stilled. Dick Peterson course is dead now, but he just always seemed kind of nervous and anxious and quite a figure out what that was about. Here's an interesting side note about Peterson from former state Representative Chuck Sides. The tours through the prison was so interesting to me because Dick Peterson had worked for my mother many years. She was she worked for him. Actually, if you knew my mother, he was working for her. Very nice guy. But inside the prison I saw a whole different side doing. If he got a stare from some cod he'd say, excuse me, Chuck. He would get that guy against the wall, face to face inches and said, you're looking at me or anybody else like that, You're going to salter and harsher terms that I just described. Let me go back to walking. Dick Peterson and Dave Coulie were the first to search the building looking for Mike. Frankie Kevin believes they were both fully expecting to find Mike's body that night, just not where it wound up. It was supposed to look like a suicide, an arranged suicide. And Dick Peterson, one of the good old boys from Oregon all those years, tells me the morning that he finds out that he's dead, that he was shot when he went to the Dome Building with Dave Collie that night that they got the call that Mike's carr door was found open. He wanted Collie with him as a witness, and he walked into the Dome Building expecting to find Mike with his brains blown out in his office. Of that, I am sure, and he probably freaked out when he walked back to his office and there was no Mike there, and there's no blood there. Dick Peterson would claim that the two men had performed an exhaustive search throughout the entire building, every single looking cranny, going all the way up to the third floor, yet they missed Mike's body on the front North Portico. According to Phil Kevin's arranged suicide theory, maybe much more than a hunch. There's no way he could have noticed that the window hadn't been broken out and there were broken pieces of glasses in that room right A lease Classen left with this horrible feeling that something was really wrong, and they tried to call Dave Cully, who was an assistant director in charge of financial matters. Turns out he was home, but he didn't answer the phone. He says he was watching TV and didn't hear it ring. About an hour later he got another call, which he obviously did here, and he came in. You have to remember Colly was the last guy in the Department of Corrections as far as we know, who saw Michael Frankie alive. He left the building at six. He came back nine something like that, and it's sort of remarkable. He went to his office and started making phone calls. This is after he'd been told that Michael Frankie was missing. His car door was found open. He didn't go to Michael Frankie's office to see if he was there. It's hard to explain why his explanation to the police shortly afterwards was that he was afraid he would find Michael Frankie's body in his office, that he was afraid that Michael Frankie had committed suicide, that he was distraught over the breakup of his marriage, and so he didn't go to Michael Frankie's office looking for him. After he got to the Dome Building, he called Dick Peterson. Dick Peterson came by the Dome Building and suicide doesn't sit well with Alice Clawson, who says Mike wasn't despondent, but rather open and pragmatic about a separation. I would say Michael was pretty stow it. He came into my office and said something like, it's been a tough morning. I think you should take your boss to lunch. And I said, okay. So we left for lunch, and he said I took Blinka, his wife to the airport today. She's leaving me and she'd gone. And she says Mike was focused on his presentation for the next morning, not personal issues. The day he was murdered, he said, I wish we were in the same session because I think he wasn't going to be in the Senate testifying, and I was going to be in the House testifying, and he said, before the end of the day, let's just kind of practice and talk about our various testimonies and our strategies. Did you get the chance to practice with him later that day? I did. At the end of the day, when I was done, I went in his office and we talked through a bunch of stuff and kind of what we were going to do and what our process was going to be and how we're going to approach it. But back to the meticulous search story, local television reporter Eric Mason never felt added up. They were people that were still in the Dome building at the time. Mike's pager was going off, but he was not returning calls. Searches had been made several times all over the building, and for some strange reason, they had missed or someone had not gone out to the porch to see the broken glass, the blood, the body laying there right there in front of the door where he had punched through the glass and tried to open the door with his own hand. And Kevin takes issue with where Mike's car keys ended up. They were in a drain at the end of the north portico near his body, but they weren't on his person. It was kind of but Alice Clawson offers another theory as to why Mike's body may have been missed. In those days, the porticos they didn't have lights on them and the shrubs were grown up really high, so we were, you know, walking up the main front step you couldn't see what was on those porticos. Some believe a janitor may have seen Michael Frankie's last steps to that portico. Here's Bill Stanford's take. One of the first witnesses to come forward in this case was a janitor by the name the last name of Huntsaker, who shortly after the murder talked to the police and told him that about seven o'clock on the night of the murder January, he had just gotten off work and had had left the Dome building at a side door on the north side of the building, and as he came around the corner, he heard a sound. It would have been to his left, about forty ft down, and it sounded like someone had been hit, and he saw two men, one who was wearing a trench coat, turned and started running west across the field there the grounds towards the old Salem Hospital, and the other turned and walked leisurely back towards the Dome building. And he didn't see anything wrong. There were some real problems right off the top, because, first of all, Hans Sacre said that the presumed assailant, the one who turned and ran, was the taller of the two. Well, Michael Frankie was six three or six four, and he was wearing cowboy woods, so this guy would have been NBA quality. But more than that, the second man, he said, walked leisurely back to the dome building. He said, if he thought that he was hurt, he would have gone to help. There was no sign that he was hurt. He wasn't been over, he wasn't staggering, he didn't seem to be in any sort of distress. Yeah, I don't think that if I had just been stabbed in the heart that I would be walking slowly anywhere. No, he said, leisurely. That's that's what that's what's in my notes. By the way, by the time it got to trial, they got hands sacred to say that he was walking briskly back to the dome building. But the problem is that. I don't think that was Michael Frankie out there. I think there were probably a couple of people involved in the murder, which perhaps had just taken place. I don't know, but it wasn't Michael Frankie. Soon after the murder, talk of another mysterious figure emerged. About a week after the murder, the police held a press confidence and announced they were interested in talking with a man who had been seen in the Dome building the night of the murder. There weren't too many specifics, but they said he was a person of interest. He wasn't a suspect. He was a person of interest and they wanted to talk to him. He was well dressed, well groomed. Hispanic looking man I think, they said, had olive skin, and he was seen in the own building at six thirty the night of the murder, which was about an hour after the building had been locked to the public. He was walking down the hallway, a deserted hallway, and he turned a corner and there was a woman who worked in personnel who was surprised because she'd never seen him before, and then working in personnel, she would know who worked in the Dome building. He said, hers pearl and probation. She pointed down the hall to where it was, and he went in that direction. He was wearing a dark suit, and the woman thought it was a pin stripe suit. He's quickly became known as the man in the pinstripe suit. Obviously very important because who would be in the Dome building on the night of the murder after it was locked, and no one knows who he is. Surely he would have come forward if he'd been there on legitimate business, just to clear up the whole thing. No one ever came forward, no one ever figured out who he was, which brings us back to Kevin's theory that Mike was never meant to die the way he died. Who's the guy in the pin stripe suit and is stabbing him the best thing? No, I don't think that was what was planned. I think was planned that he was there was supposed to be a suicide, and the pinstripe suit was supposed to disarm him, get him in his office and make it look like a suicide. I don't know if they knew that he always used the north portico door instead the main entry door because the pinstripe suit was seen at the main entry door, going back and forth and not here. So if he came at here and the objective was to kill him, and now he's getting loose and you have to stop him, and the ship is the fan, it's hard to visualize the logistics of the murder scene. That Mike could have been stabbed in plain sight by his car, which was parked in the spot reserved for the director, and died feet away on the porch of the Department of Corrections and no one found him for four hours. Patt and Kevin agreed to take me there so I could see it in person. Well, here in this one that's Mike's care was right here for the Frankie brothers. The Dome building has become a memorial for Mike, and the Department of Corrections has dedicated one there in his honor. It's a beautifully well died metal podium, decorated with intricate ivy like vines and topped with a gilded cup for vote of candles and a framed plaque that reads in memory of Oregon Department of Corrections Director Michael Frankie. End of watch January sevent inmates designed and built this memoil take a look at that. They gets gordless when we is dedicated were three years this summer they got tired of funding candles after over jan coming out and put candles in the doorway down here, and statues and wreaths and hurricane lamp we left one year with because it winded mons hard. We couldn't keep the candle. We went but lamp. You know, did you guys weigh in on the design at all? No? No, no, this was done opened by the inmates. The memorial stands between the spot where Mike's car was found with the door open and the portico where his body was discovered. So this is where his car was sat, door sounding open. At least Classen came out over here, I saw his sitting open, houded around, went back in, started making phone calls. No sign of him anywhere. He was obviously had already made it up the steps and down to that side door. With the timing have made sense that he would have already been up there, yes, oh yeah, didn't take him a minute or so to walk up through. They photographed his blood spatters and there's a doctor Leon Robert Lamb McDonald that wrote the book on blood spatter evidence, and they also invented the fingerprint rush system, and he could have measured the speed that Mike was walking by the how the blood hit the ground. Pretty fascinating blood spatters. So it was low velocity blood spatters that started right about where the monument is there. His spos were soaking up most of the blood started. But I still don't understand how there could have been no blood between that car and this. He had a top coat on, a sport coat on. But I know exactly what she's saying, Pat, How could there not be one drop of blood? I don't know. We'll revisit this later, but after Mike's murder, tips came in about possible killers and at least to involved mention of the murderer discarding bloody clothing. So if we was stopped by the car and that person had blood on their clothing, how did it not get anywhere else until right here? Why did you get on quite a d and fifty ft I don't agree with their story. I don't believe he was stabbed at his car. There's too much blood coming out of him through the types of wounds that he had to not leave even one drop of blood. This was cordoned off, and then everything became cordoned off after a couple of hours and a full grid search of all the grass, everything, and no blood found over there. The guard who found the body went up and immediately came back after he got his light on him and saw that it appeared to be a dead body, and he called the Calm Center. In the calm Center, some of the police parked out here and waited for the cops. The crash unit came from the fire department, and there was one fireman that went up on the right side that a visual didn't touch anything, and then backed out and said he's dead. There's no reason to transport. And then they had to wait for the state Police crime lab truck to get here, and then they made the decision to delay processing the crime scene until morning. And that was a real bad mistake. Poor, poor, poor mistake. When that decision was made, then you eliminate being able to establish the time of death. And time of death wasn't the only important piece missing from this puzzle. While Michael's wallet, money, and watch were still on his person, his briefcase and computer were nowhere to be found and probably is again and is not so much the computer, because the computers back then had the memory of a mouse, four legged mouse. What he would have had and what he did had a bunch of the old floppy disks, because that's the memory, that's your your treasure. So you would have had the floppy disk, that's the money. They would have held the meat of the corruption investigation. And they weren't anywhere, not in the car, not in the office. The floppy disks had vanished, along with Michael's main briefcase and his laptop. He would have had his briefcase, he had it down in Florida when he came to visit, and in fact it also had room that if he wanted to fit the computer and slots for the floppy disk, and none of it was ever none of it. Michael would have also had substantial amounts of office paperwork, which seems to have disappeared too. There were twenty three trash bags full of papers that were carried out of somewhere, and I would suspect some of it came out of his office and they were all shredded, And apparently they were shredded. The day after Mike's body was found, an inmate that worked at the dome building, you know, doing cleaning or some administrative work and stuff like that, and you go back to the prison at night, and I think he called somebody and it got reported. Why did they go in there on a Saturday. You're not getting paid to shred papers on a Saturday and shred twenty three bags of data. Former Representative Chuck Sides is still bothered by a conversation he had with Mike weeks before the murder. We went out to the Greek restaurant and sale as we were doing and know what's going on, and he just as well as knife was discovered in the prison, and I remarked, well, at least it wasn't a gun. He guys, you don't understand a knife far dangerous and a gun in prison. A gun makes a sound, a knife doesn't. And if you stick that knife in between the third and fourth rib, you hit the heart and that person's gone. That was three weeks before he was taken out, exactly like that, and that was the thing that happened. They stay. Police interviewed me three times because of my connection with my trying to pick up but they were totally lost. The Frankie brothers agree, yeah, all the standard questions, have you ever seen anything you might have any drug habits, might had any drinking habits, they have any gambling habits? Uh, do you know if he was having affairs with anybody? You sure he wasn't into gambling or did any stuff like that? What kind of drugs? Did recreational drugs did he use? I say he didn't. They tell you this, They tell you that, and I said no. What he told me was that he had uncovered an organized criminal element and it kind of went over his head. Not only would state police officer Lauren Glover and then District Attorney Dale Penn deny Mike Frankie was even investigating corruption, they'd claim his family never mentioned it or their fear he was targeted because of it. Absolutely, Dale pan Man Glover both denied that I had ever brought it up. And this is months later. They were still saying, oh, you never said anything about that, never said anything about that. The official story was that you never you know, the family, Banka didn't raise her concerns, You didn't raise your concerns. And yet there was something in uh Lauren Glover's notes that proved that within the first forty eight hours you had both expressed concerns that he was targeted absolutely, and it wasn't until we had the copies of the officers notes that you can see that it was written in there We're done at Santa Fe for for Mike's funeral, and I had the phone record from Santa Fe when I called back up three days later to talk to Renfrew, who was the head of the Criminal Division at that point in time, who put Dale Pen on the phone too, and I iterated what I said the glover to them to make sure that they had the story about the organized criminal element and that he had to clean house and identify as Gott McAllister who's assistant Attorney General, and Mike was having problems getting rid of him. All of that was put on the table within the first four days when Kevin returned home to Florida. Mike's murder was officially ruled a random car burglary gone bad and all his allegations of corruption ignored. But when he finally got Mike's autopsy, all hell broke loose. It was four pages that was probably blacked out redacted. The arrogance of those fucking bastards is what grips me to this day. They thought that both Pat and I would just kind of roll over and play dead and say, hey, brother got killed. Shed admens fuck you. Coming up on the next murder in Oregon, the Frankie Brothers reached a breaking point with the official investigation. It's an ancestuous bunch of criminals. Turns out there's an ancestors bunch of political official tu leading them to a disturbed suspect. I went to a psyche Thich. She said that he has somebody in custody right now. John okay, He said, let's see Krauss with a disturbing past and had been beaten by his father when he was twelve years old. Time to a chair and beat him till he was blue, and a murder confession that would end with a shocking twist. Murder and Oregon is hosted by Lauren Bright, Pacheco and Phil Stanford. Executive producers are Noel Brown, Lauren Bright, Pacheco, and Phil Stands. 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 Chocoygne 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. I told you that Mike was a no hostage personality, and he told me that many times. He says, I don't believe in hostages. I traveled to Salem to meet with Phil Kevin and pattent person. Kevin recalled an old story about Mike that actually made a local paper and pretty much summed up his attitude about surviving a threat in as the story about the assistant Attorney General from New Mexico who was up at Long Beach Naval Station during his naval reserve time that had picked up a couple of people outside the naval base. They were transport boxes is what they would called some shot like that. If people needed a ride, you'd sit in there and you could pick them up and take them where where they need go, assuming they were with the navy. Bass and Mike picked up this couple. The gale was in front and the guy was in back, and they pulled a knife on Mike and put it to his throat and said we're going to kill you and take your car, give me a wallet. My getting the wallet, and the next thing you know, Mike bailed out of the car. He said, you got the car, you got my wallet, buck you and that was it. Yeah, it's driving down the street and he bailed. Somebody nearby said, grab the funking wheel, Grab the fucking wheel. Mike Frankie jumped from a moving vehicle to avoid becoming a victim. It's pretty hard to believe someone like that could be robbed or attacked without putting up a serious fight. He was not going to be in a hustage situation regardless, even with a knife at his throat. If you kill me or cut me, at least I've got a chance if I'm out and away from the situation and try to plug this in to everybody, Mike's not going to be taken has He's going to figure a way out. You do anything and everything to get out of the situation, regardless of cost. What's more, Mike was cool headed under pressure. He even kept Kevin out of more than a few barrown brawls. That's where the Mike Frankie is m came in because you don't know if the son of a bush has got a knife or a gun, So if you're going in there with your fist, you might get your head cut off. The fact that he would grab somebody who in their right mind thinks that Mike gives a ship about anything they're gonna steal out of a state car. Seriously, here's Phil Stanford's take. I think there's an argument to be made that it would have been a tough fight because Michael Frankie was very physical and he knew how to handle himself. But to me, that's a secondary argument because there's no evidence there was a fight. That's the thing at the car. Yeah, and you would have thought, particularly given Mike size, that something would have gotten dented, whether he was big or small. There would have been evidence of a fright on the ground inside the car, outside the car, there was no physical evidence. Police Clawsen, Mike's assistant director, told me she was instructed to go to the state police before she went to go see then Governor Goldschmidt the night of Mike's murder. I mean, I looked inside the car that night and I told the state police this. I said, everything looks exactly the way it did this afternoon at last, you know, best I could remember. I mean, it didn't look like anything was disturbed. And she told them you need to take my fingerprints because I was with Michael in his car this afternoon, and at least you'd know whatever other prints there are. And they didn't do it. Never took your fingerprints. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murdering Oregon. The three Frankie brothers grew up close in what seems like a quintessential American, almost Norman Rockwell upbringing. Here's pat My kind of were very close, growing up with a lot of stuff together. Ran away together. Yeah, we packed up some blowny sandwiches and I decided we were going to run away. I think we made it two blocks up to a water tower, and when we couldn't see the house anymore, we got scared, went home. Oh lord, maybe ten, so he would have been seven. We sledded, we skated, we played ball together, and it was a huge neighborhood. This is after the war. There were tons of kids in the neighborhood and no fences in the backyards. We played Caps of the Flag and war and all of those games until well into the night. Boy energy abounded in the Frankie household, but both parents were quick to reel it in. Neither one would shot away from discipline. I'll put it that way. Whoever got to you at first was the disciplinarian it was. It was never says, your dad's gotta mess to clean up when he gets and he's got to be even more pissed. We all had different names when Dad would talk. I was Jesus Christ, Pat, Mike Kevin, and Mike was Jesus Christ Pat Mike, and Pat was Jesus Christ Pat. Say I broke trail for all, he'd forget stat and his mind would have to go through this step category because he was so enraged until he hit the right person. Day was mad at assume. So I was always Jesus Christ, Mike, Pat Kevin. It's also easy to see where Mike's pulled to law and order came from. We were all alter boys, boy scouts. I was a boy scout, Mike was a boy scout. I was a boy scout at Eagle, which trust really loyal help for friendly courtisan bravery and okay, But while the Frankies were raised good Catholic boys, they certainly didn't sport Halo's Mike and and his good friend with a shock cop after a football game. Does anybody know what a cup is? He took his shoes off, go dance on on the best wall. Mike and his friend Bulldog was his name, got into beef with some guys at the Southwest and they beat the hell out him. Mike and Bulldog were successful in their encounter. How's that? So he goes away to college a second here, I think he came back for Christmas and he said a mixer, and he said he'd been drinking bourbon and he could never drink bourbon after that night. He could never drink hard like her. He sucked a drinking hard like her. Ago, No, he didn't give it a go. Let's go ahead and come in again. He was drinking bourbon that night, having a pretty good time at this gal and they're walking out the door, and so many tapped him on his shoulder and says, aren't you Mike Frankie, And he turned around. This guy popped him, and he and two of his friends proceed to kick this ship out of Mike and in the process kicked his nose and into his face. Never a dull moment. Flight to fight and wrestle. Phil Stanford believes that toughness came with the territory just because of where they grew up. And at the time they grew up, Kansas City was part of the sort of beginning of the West. It's uh, cowboy country. Well, yeah, it's a different mentality. It's not like growing up in in upstate New York or something like that. That's the way they see themselves. They're not going to back down from a fright. Not Pat, not Mike, not Kevin. Their close knit upbringing bonded the brothers and made inconsistencies in the early reports of Mike's murder that much more glaring. Kevin remembers the initial call from Dick Peterson, one of Mike's senior staffers. The whole scenario just seemed absolutely wrong and impossible to begin with. You know, Peterson told me on the phone when I was in Florida that he'd been shot, and I thought, Jesus, you know, that was even worse. But then I get out here and then you know, they think he might have been stabbed. That discrepancy would trigger a memory about something Mike told Kevin over the phone when discussing his new job. He had to clean house and he had to get start surrounding himself with people he could trust about having trouble getting rid of a guy that worked for him, and I said, why don't you just fire him? And he says, I can't fire him. He doesn't work for me, And I said, well, how does he work for me? He's appointed to work for me, but it doesn't work for me. That conversation, an initial confusion about how Mike died, foreshadowed the tone for the investigation. According to Phil Stanford, the person who had called him to tell him about his brother's death, Dick Peterson, the deputy director, had said, give me a call. I help you any time. Once Kevin got out there, he called him. And then when Peterson never returned to call, I think Kevin said he called him five times, and before he finally gave up. He knew from the beginning that they were not going to help and he was going to have to fight for any information he was going to get. Phil also explains the office dynamic and ranking Peterson was too Collie was the chief financial officer. I think they were both called assistant directors. There had already been some kind of staff shake up within the department. Frankie had already informed others that he didn't trust Peterson. He was going to get Rid of him. He'd already informed colleague that he was going to lose his job. But just over a week before that, another very significant member of the Corrections department was forced out of office and officially he resigned, but it was because Michael Frankie had written to the governor and asked for this person to be replaced. And we're talking about Scott McAllister, who was the a G lawyer who had for the previous twelver thirteen years been assigned to Corrections. And so that's the third member of that collection of the Department of Corrections officers on the outs with Frankie. McAllister's name would come up again after the murder when Kevin questioned Mike's wife about the employee he was having issues getting rid of identified him through what Bingdon I had talked about the first morning I got in here and identified that individual as Scott McAllister, who's Assistant Attorney General that was assigned by the Attorney General's office to do all the litigation work for the Department of Corrections. Scott McAllister is a key player in the theory. Both Phil Stanford and Kevin Frankie have spent thirty years pursuing regarding Mike's murder. Here's Mike's assistant director, Alice Clawson. Scott was our assistant a G and Scott was there a lot. I do remember at one point after a meeting with Scott McAllister, Michael said, I'm not sure I have confidence in his recommendation, something to that effect. He was not comfortable with whatever it was Scott was recommending. After McAllister left Corrections, some may have felt more loyal to him and the Old Boys system than Frankie, especially since Mike was planning to clean house. There had been issues in the prison system that he discovered and wanted to remedy. I think he made a number of people in the department comfortable, probably the head of Prisons, Dick Peterson, and I think some of the superintendents, because he was a take charge kind of guy and they had been pretty independent actors up until then and it wasn't probably going to be the case for him. Dave Coullie, who was the budget head, I think he made him a bit nervous as well, because Michael had the ability to pay lots of attention to that and had a very strong grasp on that kind of information in those kind of details, and in particular Clausen is still troubled by the dynamic with Dick Peterson, Mike's deputy director. I can't tell you why, but I always had an uncomfortable feeling about Dick Peterson. I didn't have a lot of confidence in him, and I know that Michael didn't. In fact, I know that Michael was contemplating replacing them. He seemed very anxious after Michael was stilled. Dick Peterson course is dead now, but he just always seemed kind of nervous and anxious and quite a figure out what that was about. Here's an interesting side note about Peterson from former state Representative Chuck Sides. The tours through the prison was so interesting to me because Dick Peterson had worked for my mother many years. She was she worked for him. Actually, if you knew my mother, he was working for her. Very nice guy. But inside the prison I saw a whole different side doing. If he got a stare from some cod he'd say, excuse me, Chuck. He would get that guy against the wall, face to face inches and said, you're looking at me or anybody else like that, You're going to salter and harsher terms that I just described. Let me go back to walking. Dick Peterson and Dave Coulie were the first to search the building looking for Mike. Frankie Kevin believes they were both fully expecting to find Mike's body that night, just not where it wound up. It was supposed to look like a suicide, an arranged suicide. And Dick Peterson, one of the good old boys from Oregon all those years, tells me the morning that he finds out that he's dead, that he was shot when he went to the Dome Building with Dave Collie that night that they got the call that Mike's carr door was found open. He wanted Collie with him as a witness, and he walked into the Dome Building expecting to find Mike with his brains blown out in his office. Of that, I am sure, and he probably freaked out when he walked back to his office and there was no Mike there, and there's no blood there. Dick Peterson would claim that the two men had performed an exhaustive search throughout the entire building, every single looking cranny, going all the way up to the third floor, yet they missed Mike's body on the front North Portico. According to Phil Kevin's arranged suicide theory, maybe much more than a hunch. There's no way he could have noticed that the window hadn't been broken out and there were broken pieces of glasses in that room right A lease Classen left with this horrible feeling that something was really wrong, and they tried to call Dave Cully, who was an assistant director in charge of financial matters. Turns out he was home, but he didn't answer the phone. He says he was watching TV and didn't hear it ring. About an hour later he got another call, which he obviously did here, and he came in. You have to remember Colly was the last guy in the Department of Corrections as far as we know, who saw Michael Frankie alive. He left the building at six. He came back nine something like that, and it's sort of remarkable. He went to his office and started making phone calls. This is after he'd been told that Michael Frankie was missing. His car door was found open. He didn't go to Michael Frankie's office to see if he was there. It's hard to explain why his explanation to the police shortly afterwards was that he was afraid he would find Michael Frankie's body in his office, that he was afraid that Michael Frankie had committed suicide, that he was distraught over the breakup of his marriage, and so he didn't go to Michael Frankie's office looking for him. After he got to the Dome Building, he called Dick Peterson. Dick Peterson came by the Dome Building and suicide doesn't sit well with Alice Clawson, who says Mike wasn't despondent, but rather open and pragmatic about a separation. I would say Michael was pretty stow it. He came into my office and said something like, it's been a tough morning. I think you should take your boss to lunch. And I said, okay. So we left for lunch, and he said I took Blinka, his wife to the airport today. She's leaving me and she'd gone. And she says Mike was focused on his presentation for the next morning, not personal issues. The day he was murdered, he said, I wish we were in the same session because I think he wasn't going to be in the Senate testifying, and I was going to be in the House testifying, and he said, before the end of the day, let's just kind of practice and talk about our various testimonies and our strategies. Did you get the chance to practice with him later that day? I did. At the end of the day, when I was done, I went in his office and we talked through a bunch of stuff and kind of what we were going to do and what our process was going to be and how we're going to approach it. But back to the meticulous search story, local television reporter Eric Mason never felt added up. They were people that were still in the Dome building at the time. Mike's pager was going off, but he was not returning calls. Searches had been made several times all over the building, and for some strange reason, they had missed or someone had not gone out to the porch to see the broken glass, the blood, the body laying there right there in front of the door where he had punched through the glass and tried to open the door with his own hand. And Kevin takes issue with where Mike's car keys ended up. They were in a drain at the end of the north portico near his body, but they weren't on his person. It was kind of but Alice Clawson offers another theory as to why Mike's body may have been missed. In those days, the porticos they didn't have lights on them and the shrubs were grown up really high, so we were, you know, walking up the main front step you couldn't see what was on those porticos. Some believe a janitor may have seen Michael Frankie's last steps to that portico. Here's Bill Stanford's take. One of the first witnesses to come forward in this case was a janitor by the name the last name of Huntsaker, who shortly after the murder talked to the police and told him that about seven o'clock on the night of the murder January, he had just gotten off work and had had left the Dome building at a side door on the north side of the building, and as he came around the corner, he heard a sound. It would have been to his left, about forty ft down, and it sounded like someone had been hit, and he saw two men, one who was wearing a trench coat, turned and started running west across the field there the grounds towards the old Salem Hospital, and the other turned and walked leisurely back towards the Dome building. And he didn't see anything wrong. There were some real problems right off the top, because, first of all, Hans Sacre said that the presumed assailant, the one who turned and ran, was the taller of the two. Well, Michael Frankie was six three or six four, and he was wearing cowboy woods, so this guy would have been NBA quality. But more than that, the second man, he said, walked leisurely back to the dome building. He said, if he thought that he was hurt, he would have gone to help. There was no sign that he was hurt. He wasn't been over, he wasn't staggering, he didn't seem to be in any sort of distress. Yeah, I don't think that if I had just been stabbed in the heart that I would be walking slowly anywhere. No, he said, leisurely. That's that's what that's what's in my notes. By the way, by the time it got to trial, they got hands sacred to say that he was walking briskly back to the dome building. But the problem is that. I don't think that was Michael Frankie out there. I think there were probably a couple of people involved in the murder, which perhaps had just taken place. I don't know, but it wasn't Michael Frankie. Soon after the murder, talk of another mysterious figure emerged. About a week after the murder, the police held a press confidence and announced they were interested in talking with a man who had been seen in the Dome building the night of the murder. There weren't too many specifics, but they said he was a person of interest. He wasn't a suspect. He was a person of interest and they wanted to talk to him. He was well dressed, well groomed. Hispanic looking man I think, they said, had olive skin, and he was seen in the own building at six thirty the night of the murder, which was about an hour after the building had been locked to the public. He was walking down the hallway, a deserted hallway, and he turned a corner and there was a woman who worked in personnel who was surprised because she'd never seen him before, and then working in personnel, she would know who worked in the Dome building. He said, hers pearl and probation. She pointed down the hall to where it was, and he went in that direction. He was wearing a dark suit, and the woman thought it was a pin stripe suit. He's quickly became known as the man in the pinstripe suit. Obviously very important because who would be in the Dome building on the night of the murder after it was locked, and no one knows who he is. Surely he would have come forward if he'd been there on legitimate business, just to clear up the whole thing. No one ever came forward, no one ever figured out who he was, which brings us back to Kevin's theory that Mike was never meant to die the way he died. Who's the guy in the pin stripe suit and is stabbing him the best thing? No, I don't think that was what was planned. I think was planned that he was there was supposed to be a suicide, and the pinstripe suit was supposed to disarm him, get him in his office and make it look like a suicide. I don't know if they knew that he always used the north portico door instead the main entry door because the pinstripe suit was seen at the main entry door, going back and forth and not here. So if he came at here and the objective was to kill him, and now he's getting loose and you have to stop him, and the ship is the fan, it's hard to visualize the logistics of the murder scene. That Mike could have been stabbed in plain sight by his car, which was parked in the spot reserved for the director, and died feet away on the porch of the Department of Corrections and no one found him for four hours. Patt and Kevin agreed to take me there so I could see it in person. Well, here in this one that's Mike's care was right here for the Frankie brothers. The Dome building has become a memorial for Mike, and the Department of Corrections has dedicated one there in his honor. It's a beautifully well died metal podium, decorated with intricate ivy like vines and topped with a gilded cup for vote of candles and a framed plaque that reads in memory of Oregon Department of Corrections Director Michael Frankie. End of watch January sevent inmates designed and built this memoil take a look at that. They gets gordless when we is dedicated were three years this summer they got tired of funding candles after over jan coming out and put candles in the doorway down here, and statues and wreaths and hurricane lamp we left one year with because it winded mons hard. We couldn't keep the candle. We went but lamp. You know, did you guys weigh in on the design at all? No? No, no, this was done opened by the inmates. The memorial stands between the spot where Mike's car was found with the door open and the portico where his body was discovered. So this is where his car was sat, door sounding open. At least Classen came out over here, I saw his sitting open, houded around, went back in, started making phone calls. No sign of him anywhere. He was obviously had already made it up the steps and down to that side door. With the timing have made sense that he would have already been up there, yes, oh yeah, didn't take him a minute or so to walk up through. They photographed his blood spatters and there's a doctor Leon Robert Lamb McDonald that wrote the book on blood spatter evidence, and they also invented the fingerprint rush system, and he could have measured the speed that Mike was walking by the how the blood hit the ground. Pretty fascinating blood spatters. So it was low velocity blood spatters that started right about where the monument is there. His spos were soaking up most of the blood started. But I still don't understand how there could have been no blood between that car and this. He had a top coat on, a sport coat on. But I know exactly what she's saying, Pat, How could there not be one drop of blood? I don't know. We'll revisit this later, but after Mike's murder, tips came in about possible killers and at least to involved mention of the murderer discarding bloody clothing. So if we was stopped by the car and that person had blood on their clothing, how did it not get anywhere else until right here? Why did you get on quite a d and fifty ft I don't agree with their story. I don't believe he was stabbed at his car. There's too much blood coming out of him through the types of wounds that he had to not leave even one drop of blood. This was cordoned off, and then everything became cordoned off after a couple of hours and a full grid search of all the grass, everything, and no blood found over there. The guard who found the body went up and immediately came back after he got his light on him and saw that it appeared to be a dead body, and he called the Calm Center. In the calm Center, some of the police parked out here and waited for the cops. The crash unit came from the fire department, and there was one fireman that went up on the right side that a visual didn't touch anything, and then backed out and said he's dead. There's no reason to transport. And then they had to wait for the state Police crime lab truck to get here, and then they made the decision to delay processing the crime scene until morning. And that was a real bad mistake. Poor, poor, poor mistake. When that decision was made, then you eliminate being able to establish the time of death. And time of death wasn't the only important piece missing from this puzzle. While Michael's wallet, money, and watch were still on his person, his briefcase and computer were nowhere to be found and probably is again and is not so much the computer, because the computers back then had the memory of a mouse, four legged mouse. What he would have had and what he did had a bunch of the old floppy disks, because that's the memory, that's your your treasure. So you would have had the floppy disk, that's the money. They would have held the meat of the corruption investigation. And they weren't anywhere, not in the car, not in the office. The floppy disks had vanished, along with Michael's main briefcase and his laptop. He would have had his briefcase, he had it down in Florida when he came to visit, and in fact it also had room that if he wanted to fit the computer and slots for the floppy disk, and none of it was ever none of it. Michael would have also had substantial amounts of office paperwork, which seems to have disappeared too. There were twenty three trash bags full of papers that were carried out of somewhere, and I would suspect some of it came out of his office and they were all shredded, And apparently they were shredded. The day after Mike's body was found, an inmate that worked at the dome building, you know, doing cleaning or some administrative work and stuff like that, and you go back to the prison at night, and I think he called somebody and it got reported. Why did they go in there on a Saturday. You're not getting paid to shred papers on a Saturday and shred twenty three bags of data. Former Representative Chuck Sides is still bothered by a conversation he had with Mike weeks before the murder. We went out to the Greek restaurant and sale as we were doing and know what's going on, and he just as well as knife was discovered in the prison, and I remarked, well, at least it wasn't a gun. He guys, you don't understand a knife far dangerous and a gun in prison. A gun makes a sound, a knife doesn't. And if you stick that knife in between the third and fourth rib, you hit the heart and that person's gone. That was three weeks before he was taken out, exactly like that, and that was the thing that happened. They stay. Police interviewed me three times because of my connection with my trying to pick up but they were totally lost. The Frankie brothers agree, yeah, all the standard questions, have you ever seen anything you might have any drug habits, might had any drinking habits, they have any gambling habits? Uh, do you know if he was having affairs with anybody? You sure he wasn't into gambling or did any stuff like that? What kind of drugs? Did recreational drugs did he use? I say he didn't. They tell you this, They tell you that, and I said no. What he told me was that he had uncovered an organized criminal element and it kind of went over his head. Not only would state police officer Lauren Glover and then District Attorney Dale Penn deny Mike Frankie was even investigating corruption, they'd claim his family never mentioned it or their fear he was targeted because of it. Absolutely, Dale pan Man Glover both denied that I had ever brought it up. And this is months later. They were still saying, oh, you never said anything about that, never said anything about that. The official story was that you never you know, the family, Banka didn't raise her concerns, You didn't raise your concerns. And yet there was something in uh Lauren Glover's notes that proved that within the first forty eight hours you had both expressed concerns that he was targeted absolutely, and it wasn't until we had the copies of the officers notes that you can see that it was written in there We're done at Santa Fe for for Mike's funeral, and I had the phone record from Santa Fe when I called back up three days later to talk to Renfrew, who was the head of the Criminal Division at that point in time, who put Dale Pen on the phone too, and I iterated what I said the glover to them to make sure that they had the story about the organized criminal element and that he had to clean house and identify as Gott McAllister who's assistant Attorney General, and Mike was having problems getting rid of him. All of that was put on the table within the first four days when Kevin returned home to Florida. Mike's murder was officially ruled a random car burglary gone bad and all his allegations of corruption ignored. But when he finally got Mike's autopsy, all hell broke loose. It was four pages that was probably blacked out redacted. The arrogance of those fucking bastards is what grips me to this day. They thought that both Pat and I would just kind of roll over and play dead and say, hey, brother got killed. Shed admens fuck you. Coming up on the next murder in Oregon, the Frankie Brothers reached a breaking point with the official investigation. It's an ancestuous bunch of criminals. Turns out there's an ancestors bunch of political official tu leading them to a disturbed suspect. I went to a psyche Thich. She said that he has somebody in custody right now. John okay, He said, let's see Krauss with a disturbing past and had been beaten by his father when he was twelve years old. Time to a chair and beat him till he was blue, and a murder confession that would end with a shocking twist. Murder and Oregon is hosted by Lauren Bright, Pacheco and Phil Stanford. Executive producers are Noel Brown, Lauren Bright, Pacheco, and Phil Stands. 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 Chocoygne with music supervision by Noel Brown. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio
