James Michael Francke (/ˈfræŋki/; October 2, 1946 – January 17, 1989) was an American judge from New Mexico and director of the state's Corrections Department, the governmental bureau which manages prisons, inmates, and parolees.

He was later appointed by then-Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt to oversee a plan to double the state's inmate capacity as director of Oregon's Department of Corrections.

[3] Francke, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, attended New Mexico Highlands University on a football scholarship, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in a combined major of political science, economics, German, and French.

Two senior staff leaving the Dome Building approximately 40 minutes later discovered his car parked in its designated spot outside the front entryway with the driver's door open.

Security was notified at the nearby Communications Center, and the staffers left the Dome Building at approximately 8:05 p.m. Two other senior staffers, Richard Peterson, head of Institutions, and David Caulley, head of Planning and Budget, arrived at approximately 8:35 p.m. and conducted what they described as a meticulous search of the Dome Building, but found nothing amiss.

A local teen runaway named Jodie Swearingen testified before a grand jury that she had witnessed the murder; police reports indicate that she had identified Gable as the perpetrator.

[9][10] On April 18, 2019, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Acosta ruled that Frank Gable must be retried or released within 90 days, noting among other trial issues that many witnesses presented have since recanted, and that their testimony was obtained via coercive interrogation tactics and polygraph examinations.

One particular action was the exclusion of the fact that another man had repeatedly confessed to the murder of Francke in John Crouse, a Salem resident and parolee at the time.

In May 2023, Gable was granted a full release, with his indictment being dismissed with prejudice that meant the county would be barred from re-arresting or re-indicting him for the murder, with the conviction being expunged from his record.

[13][14] Former state treasurer Jim Hill does not accept the official verdict, believing either that Gable is altogether innocent of the crime, or that he, or another perpetrator was a hired hit man rather than a chance car burglar.

[2] Another individual who has been named is Scott McAlister, who had been the assistant attorney general for the state of Oregon until he resigned shortly before Francke's death.

[6] The McAlister theory gained credence in October 1991, when one of the private investigators who had worked on the Gable defense team, H. Wayne Holm, was killed by a Multnomah County Sheriff's deputy, Brian Martinek (now an assistant chief of the Portland Police Bureau), allegedly during a "reverse sting" drug operation.

Holm had offered the theory that the primary motivation for Francke's murder was that he had discovered a plot by McAlister to "sell" paroles to inmates.

Adding to the mix was the fact that the person who had been appointed to fill Francke's office after his death in 1997[citation needed] had been Fred Pierce, the longtime Sheriff of Multnomah County, and the man who had originally hired Martinek.

[22] Stanford has written extensively on the case, and wrote the screenplay for a film based on the Francke murder, Without Evidence (1995), featuring a young Angelina Jolie, in one of her first major roles, as Jodie Swearingen.