States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 4

AUTHOR’S NOTE: During the evening of Jan. 19, 1948, in Kenai, William Franke shot dead Ethen Cunningham near Cunningham’s home along the lower Kenai River. Franke surrendered peacefully and confessed to the killing, but the motive for the crime remained in doubt.

Confrontation

At William Franke’s sentencing on March 5, 1948, Franke’s wife Nancy provided Anchorage district court Judge Anthony J. Dimond with an initial description of the conflict between her husband and their neighbor, Ethen Cunningham. It was a conflict that had culminated on Jan. 19 with Cunningham lying dead in the snow and William confessing to the crime.

Now William was about to be sentenced to prison for second-degree murder, and Nancy was being asked by defense counsel to set the record straight concerning the bad blood between the two men.

While they built their own new cabin on a homestead parcel adjacent to properties owned by Ethen and Martha Cunningham and Charles “Windy” Wagner, the Frankes had been renting a small, old cabin from the Cunninghams.

William Franke had made considerable improvements to the old cabin, to enlarge it and make it warmer and more comfortable for his wife and their infant daughter, Gale. By early December 1947, he had also nearly completed a two-story log cabin of his own. The downstairs was still unfinished, however, and he had not yet constructed a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

During 1947, Franke had cleared a house site and had purchased a horse to help him haul house logs to his homestead. He had cut and hewed the logs and done the building mostly by himself, stopping only during the summer to fish commercially for extra cash.

One early December morning in the old cabin, the Frankes were having breakfast when Cunningham stormed over. “He came down … screaming at us,” Nancy Franke testified. “Knocked on the door and he started in screaming right away at Bill. Bill told him we were having breakfast, and he said, well, he didn’t care, and started calling Bill terrible names and swearing and yelling his head off. And then he accused Bill of poisoning his dogs and said [Bill] was trying to kill [them] and said he knew Bill had been trying to do it.”

At this point, according to FBI investigator Wallace F. Estill, Cunningham challenged Franke to a fight, but Franke expressed no desire to fight.

“(Cunningham was) saying some crazy things,” Nancy Franke continued, “and he ended up by telling us to get out of the house…. I was terrified, and I told Bill I wouldn’t stay there another minute…. I got dressed, and within a half an hour we were out of the house and down to Charlie Wagner’s.” She said she and her daughter stayed with Windy all of that day.

William, meanwhile, borrowed a sled from Wagner and began loading their possessions and hauling them from the Cunningham rental to their own, unfinished cabin. It took him three full days to complete the move. They began sleeping in the upstairs portion of their new home that first night, even though Wagner had offered to let them stay at his place.

William Franke, during his own testimony at the March 5 sentencing, said that he saw Cunningham “three or four times” during the three days he spent moving his family’s belongings. Each encounter, he said, was unsettling, but the most unnerving occurred while Franke was preparing another load at the old cabin.

“While I was in the house,” said Franke, “I heard him come up and step on the doorstep, and (he) came in the house with a hammer in his hand — a regular claw hammer — and then he accused me again right there of poisoning his dogs, and he said he was going to get me. He was going to get me right if one of his dogs ever got sick (again).”

Crazy Talk

When Windy Wagner was called to testify, he added his perspective on the poisoning accusation.

Cunningham, he said, had come to him to tell him what he believed Franke had done to his dogs. Wagner was hardly sympathetic.

“I told him, ‘You’re crazy! That ain’t nothing!’ You see, the horse (that Franke had purchased to help him haul house logs) died. Bill chopped the horse up and threw it on the river bank.” Likely, Franke did this to make the meat more readily available to scavenging birds and mammals. “Cunningham’s dogs went and ate this raw horse meat, and they got sick, and he thought they was poisoned.”

Wagner proffered this information to Cunningham, but Cunningham disagreed. “’Oh,’ he says, ‘I know dogs, and the dogs have been poisoned.’ So that’s the way this dog-poisoning question came up…. I kept telling (Cunningham) not to carry on like that. That’s foolish.”

Wagner had offered the Frankes a place to stay after Cunningham had ordered them out because he “didn’t think it was right, putting people out, a man and a wife and his family, getting them out in dirty, miserable weather like that.”

Of Franke, Wagner said, “I have never seen the man utter a cross word or anything to anyone.” Of Cunningham, Wagner was considerably less charitable. “He was picking quarrels and carrying tales all the time, trying to stir up trouble.”

Wagner had known Cunningham since the early 1940s when they first became neighbors. “This man Cunningham,” he testified, “used to come around my place pretty regular, and … I don’t think over two or three times I went up to his house because I didn’t want to mix with him at no time.”

He then cast a dark shadow on Cunningham’s mental state: “I have seen a few people with their minds out of whack, and the first time I met this man Cunningham, I says, ‘That feller’s nuts.’ And I don’t believe in giving a man that’s crazy too much rope. I keep my distance from him if I can, and I never did get real buddified with him, although he used to come and aggravate me and ask me to do something for him, and then I’d start and he’d take it out of my hands and make a botch of it.”

For two months prior to evicting the Frankes, Cunningham had been living alone while his wife, Martha, visited family back in her home state of Wisconsin. She had returned only a day or two before Ethen accused William Franke of poisoning his dogs.

Wagner believed that Cunningham’s mental state had deteriorated during his wife’s absence. “After she was gone about two weeks, he commenced,” said Wagner. “Anyone could see that his mind was not right. Of course, he told me that he had spent quite a time in an insane asylum.”

Defense attorney William Renfrew interrupted Wagner’s testimony at this point: “Cunningham told you that himself?”

“Oh, yes,” Wagner replied. “He told me about it. Of course, that’s on record. He was in the Army when they put him in the insane asylum.”

Prosecutor J. Earl Cooper, in cross-examination, queried, “Did you ever see the discharge that Mr. Cunningham had from the Army?”

“No, sir,” said Wagner. “I never did see it, but he told me about it. And there’s a gentleman around here … from the Land Office, and he told me that Cunningham had showed it to him. (He) said it was a ‘mentally unfit’ discharge.”

Cooper later asked William Franke whether Cunningham had ever spoken to him about his mental condition during his time in the U.S. Army. “He at one time said something to me about it that led me to understand that was the reason that he got out,” Franke said. “He used to talk quite a bit about how they treated him, and that was in the first fall (1946) I came up here … and that’s when I realized for the first time that he was a little off.

“He would make it sound as though it was a big joke, how he had tried to fool them in the Army,” Franke continued, “and I didn’t say much. I was just listening to him. Once it was brought up, he did all the talking…. I gathered from everything he said that he got out of the Army because of a mental ailment.”

Both Franke and Wagner admitted that they had each considered taking their concerns about Cunningham’s mental state to the U.S. deputy marshal, Allan Petersen. Unfortunately, neither of them followed through.

TO BE CONTINUED….