States of Mind: The death of Ethen Cunningham — Part 6

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sometimes it seems as though the resolution of a criminal investigation, the resulting hearings or trials, and the conviction of the accused individual signifies a complete ending. In truth, these actions comprise only a chapter, as survivors are forced to move on and the families of those serving prison time are relegated to lives unquestionably transformed. Such was the case in January 1948 when William Henry Franke admitted to shooting Ethen Cunningham dead in Kenai. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. But the story was far from over.

After William Franke gunned down Ethen Cunningham and left him dead in the snow by the trail to Cunningham’s log cabin near Kenai, he dropped his rifle near a trailside tree and headed home. He testified in court that he remembered nothing until he arrived at his own family’s cabin.

“I remember going in the house and shouting for my wife,” said Franke, “and, well, it took just a minute to see that she wasn’t there.”

Nancy Franke had taken their young daughter, Gale, and had run to a neighbor’s house.

After her husband, rifle in hand, had left that night to “pay a visit” on Cunningham, Nancy had bundled up Gale and run to the home of Charles A. “Windy” Wagner. She worriedly related her fears about what William might do, and after a few minutes, Wagner stepped out into the night to assess the situation.

After the shooting and upon finding no one home at his own place, William Franke went back into the night and headed for Wagner’s place. Wagner returned home shortly after William arrived. Together, he and Wagner retrieved Franke’s rifle, and then Wagner kept a watch on Franke as Wagner’s friend, Jimmy Minano, raced down the trail toward Kenai to find the marshal.

At his sentencing hearing in district court in Anchorage on March 5, 1948 — less than two months after the killing — Franke told Judge Anthony J. Dimond, “I don’t know just what did get into me down there that particular day, but I was pretty well wrought up over this for all that month (January), and it kept preying on my mind, and then (I was) worrying about my wife…. I am very sorry that this regrettable incident happened.”

Before Franke’s prison sentence was read to the court, the judge, one of the investigators for the FBI, and the defense and prosecuting attorneys all expressed empathy with Franke without excusing his actions.

J. Earl Cooper, for the prosecution, concluded his final remarks by saying, “I don’t think that this man is the type of man we ordinarily find in this type of case. I don’t think Mr. Franke is the criminal type of individual at all. His background that has been brought out here today indicates that he is a man from a good family. However, I don’t think that that fact alone is any excuse for his actions. He has committed this crime, and he has admitted it.”

Defense attorney William Renfrew added that Franke “expects to take his medicine. His family realizes it, and although it is a bitter pill to take … it is a thing they all know they must do.”

Before assigning Franke to an 18-year term in prison, Judge Dimond told the defendant, “After listening to what all of these various persons, including yourself, have to say, it seems incredible to me that you did do what you did. Knowing the effect of alcohol on some persons, I am strongly persuaded that this is another case where the devil that lurks in alcohol for some people animated you when you did this awful thing.”

Life for the Frankes

Later that spring, William Henry Franke was sent to federal prison on the East Coast so that family members in Massachusetts could visit him more easily. His prison term technically began in March at the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island in Washington, and shortly thereafter he was bused across country.

U.S. Census records for 1950 show Franke as what appears to be inmate #17551 in Pennsylvania’s Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, known widely as the “Big House,” home over the years to Alger Hiss, John Gotti, Whitey Bulger, Leon Peltier and even Anchorage serial killer Robert “Butcher Baker” Hansen.

Sometime during the months after the murder, Nancy Franke and their 2-year-old daughter traveled from the Kenai Peninsula back to Nancy’s home state of Massachusetts. They moved in with Nancy’s parents on Martha’s Vineyard, and she later began working as a clerk for a national bank.

In August 1948, Nancy gave birth to her second child, a son she named William Swift Franke. The registry of births for Dukes County (consisting mostly of Martha’s Vineyard and other nearby islands off the Massachusetts coast) listed young William’s father as a homesteader named William Henry Franke.

On April 20, 1953, the office of Alaska’s territorial governor informed Judge Dimond that Lewisburg inmate William Franke had applied for executive clemency. Franke was hoping to have his original prison term reduced from 18 to 15 years, believing that a shorter overall term would make him eligible sooner for parole.

Judge Dimond responded quickly. He favored the idea of commuting a portion of Franke’s original sentence, with one caveat — that Franke first be subjected to a psychological evaluation to assure that he was mentally sound.

Franke got his wish and became a parolee, perhaps as early as 1954.

Nancy and William reunited. In succeeding years, they produced four more sons — Eric, Alexander, and the twins Conrad and Dean Franke. It appears that all six Franke children were born in Massachusetts.

Of this brood, the most successful was arguably the first-born son, William, who, after serving in Vietnam, married, produced two daughters, and made his life as a fly-fishing entrepreneur. He designed and built fly rods and reels and sold them to big sporting-goods companies, such as L.L. Bean. He also designed and built custom replacement parts for Pflueger reels.

He was also the first of the Franke children to die, succumbing in 2012 to cancer in his mid-60s.

Gale, first-born and the only daughter, married an Iranian-born physician, Dr. Parviz Forootan Rad. They had children and were married for more than 40 years.

William Henry Franke himself lived to age 68, dying from heart disease and renal failure at his home in Wolcott, Vermont, in 1990. According to his death certificate, he was a divorced municipal laborer who had been suffering from ill health for at least two years.

When 75-year-old Nancy Franke died nine years later in Medfield, Massachusetts, her brief obituary in the Boston Globe stated that she, like William, was survived by all six of her children. The obit also referred to her as “wife of the late William H. Franke.”

Back in Kenai, the 40-acre homestead parcel on which William Franke had filed in 1946 had been relinquished because the proving-up process had never been completed. In April 1948, just three months after the shooting, Waldo Coyle bought the Franke cabin and then filed on the relinquished land, along with an adjoining 79.69 acres. Coyle received patent to his homestead in August 1949.

And thus, except for fading headlines, the Franke name all but disappeared from the annals of Kenai Peninsula history.

Not so for the Cunninghams.

Life for Martha Cunningham

It is difficult to ascertain why Martha Cunningham was not called upon to testify at the sentencing hearing for William Franke. Court records do not indicate whether she was even in attendance. No witness statements from her have yet been produced.

With her husband Ethen dead and in the ground in his home state of Wyoming, Martha had adjustments of her own to make. She began sometime during 1948 by moving out of her cabin on the Kenai Peninsula and into Anchorage.

Only about a year after her move, she was granted Ethen’s patent to the 100-acre Kenai River homestead on which he had filed in 1941.

In Anchorage, Martha went to work in the personnel division of the Alaska Railroad and began teaching Sunday school at a local Lutheran church. In about 1959, she started working in the finance office of the U.S. Army at Fort Richardson and remained there until she finally departed Alaska about a dozen years later.

She also married again, briefly. According to the Anchorage Daily Times, she tied the knot on May 8, 1951, at Central Lutheran Church with Merle Aldous, a former employee of the Civil Aeronautics Administration who was then working as an employee of the Pepsi-Cola Company. They honeymooned on the beach near Kasilof.

Kasilof historian Brent Johnson’s mother, Ruth, had been a guest at the wedding; based on his mother’s information, Brent wrote in a yet-unpublished memoir that the marriage “could have been a happy turn of events (for Martha), but it wasn’t. The new husband abused Martha, and they soon divorced.” Martha Aldous became Martha Cunningham once again.

The church in Anchorage remained a central component of Martha’s life until she left in 1971. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and moved back to her hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to live with her sister Louise.

Before she left Alaska, she sold her Kenai home and some property to Waldo Coyle. After disposing of nearly all the rest of her homestead, she set aside a small parcel for a special purpose.

On Aug. 4, 1971, she offered to donate a 2-acre tract on the Kenai River to be used as a public space and to be named Cunningham Memorial Park. The Kenai City Council on that date voted unanimously to accept the gift.

Martha (Sievers) Cunningham died Feb. 25, 1973, and it appears that the actual transfer of land from her estate to the city occurred the following month, as stipulated in Cunningham’s will. By the mid-1970s, a boat ramp had been installed and a sign for the new park had been erected.