Who Killed Michael Francke

Michael Francke was a ranking law enforcement official-a good and decent man, former prosecutor and judge, just 42 years of age, recently appointed head of the Oregon Corrections Department. He was stabbed to death the night before he was scheduled to appear before the Oregon State Senate Judiciary Committee to expose a rats' nest of corruption he'd discovered within his own department.

Yet, almost from the moment of his death, virtually every public official involved in the case would deny that Francke was investigating anything of the sort. The official line: His death was the result of a bungled car burglary. The investigation was little more than a cover-up. The trial was a farce.

Frank Gable, a 29-year-old petty thief and small-time drug dealer, was convicted with fabricated evidence and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. He spent more than three decades in jail before being exonerated by two Federal Appeals courts.

But what makes this more than just another tale of justice gone terribly wrong is that after the murder, Michael Francke's younger brother, Kevin, who never bought the official line, would leave behind his life as a contractor in Florida and enter into Salem, Oregon's underworld to find his brother's killers-pitting himself against the dirty cops and corrections officials who seemed to be behind the killing, and also the governor himself, who had his own dark secret to hide.