Oregon lawmakers on Monday asked FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate the 1989 murder of the state’s top prison official.
Michael Francke, the former Director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, was found dead outside the agency’s headquarters in Salem on Jan. 17, 1989. Some three decades later, a federal judge released the person convicted of killing Francke, citing new “evidence of witness recantations.”
Kash Patel, President Donald Trump's new Director of the FBI, speaks during a swearing-in ceremony, Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, in the Indian Treaty Room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Mark Schiefelbein / AP
Leaders of the Oregon House of Representatives asked Patel in a letter for the agency’s help to solve the case.
“The lack of resolution of this case is a grave injustice of the Francke family and the State of Oregon,” Democratic House Majority Leader Ben Bowman and Republican House Minority Leader Christine Drazen wrote. “A new, impartial investigation, led by the FBI, is necessary for justice to be served.”
The bipartisan request for assistance states they are unaware of any active investigation from any law enforcement agency.
“Thirty-six years later, we still do not know who killed Michael Francke or why they killed him,” Bowman and Drazen state. “The people of Oregon have a compelling interest in knowing the answers to these questions.”
A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment.
Typically, federal law enforcement only gets involved in cases where there is either a federal law broken, or a formal request for assistance from local or state officials. Murder is most often a crime dealt with under state law.
In 1991, Frank Gable was wrongfully convicted for Francke’s murder, despite no physical evidence connecting him to the crime. A federal magistrate granted Gable’s petition in 2019, which challenged his imprisonment. A federal appeals court ultimately agreed.
“What we now know, and the jury did not, is that the testimony of the State’s main witness was irreversibly tainted by coercive investigative techniques, and that another man gave compelling confessions on multiple occasions,” a federal appeals court concluded Feb. 22, 2023.
In May 2023, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Acosta granted Gable his release, ruled he could not be retried for Francke’s murder and expunged the case from Gable’s record.
The Oregon Department of Justice has offered $2 million to settle a wrongful conviction lawsuit Gable has filed against the state.
