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Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008

Jurors learn more about Frank Craig

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OAKDALE -- It was the kind of story the jurors didn't get to hear in court.

In the summer of 1978, Hickman rancher Frank E. Craig borrowed an 8-foot camper from friend Jim Bennett and they chained it to the back of his GMC flatbed pickup.

Craig planned to take his great-nephew, then-teenager Tom Gibbons, with him to Alaska, and wasn't about to spring for motels along the way.

Before they left, though, Craig had one last chore.

"He said, 'I've got to go home and cut the bumper off,' " Bennett said, laughing.

"It was 6 inches too long for the ferry."

Over the next three weeks, Craig and Gibbons drove more than 8,000 miles.

"We just drove and drove and drove," said Gibbons, 46, of Sacramento.

They stopped only to sleep briefly and to eat. Restaurants? Not a chance.

"He bought a case of peaches and a case of tomatoes," Gibbons said.

"He brought some canned hams. For every meal, we'd have sliced ham and peaches or sliced ham and tomatoes. We did that until we ran out of ham or it turned green."

Yes, Frank Craig was eccentric. Yes, he was a man for whom the Great Depression, in theory and often in practice, never really ended. Yes, he could be a gruff and spew profanity.

But, his relatives and friends said, he had a heart of gold and certainly deserved better than the fate he encountered in dealing with Doug Porter, the former Hickman Community Church pastor convicted Aug. 4 of murdering Craig after spending Craig's sizable fortune.

Too often in criminal trials, the victim is trivialized as the defendant attempts to justify his actions. But victims are real people with real families and friends, and it's not uncommon for jurors to want to know more about them. That's why Jo Ann "Joey" Bruce -- Juror No. 5 in the Porter trial -- invited her fellow jurors to meet with Craig's friends and family members Saturday afternoon at her ranch near Oakdale.

"Frank Craig will not be forgotten," she said.

That so many who knew him attended the gathering was not lost on a woman who would identify herself only as Juror No. 12.

"I see here tons of family and friends," No. 12 said. "He did have a lot of support."

"(The defense) made it sound like he was not even liked, that he was estranged from his family," Bruce said. "That was not very evident here today."

The 50 or so people who attended included five jurors and an alternate. It included seven of Craig's nieces and nephews, a great-nephew and their spouses. Several of Craig's friends, including some who testified for the prosecution, joined them, as did some who once attended Hickman Community Church but long ago had changed their minds about their former pastor.

They talked about the trial, but mostly about Craig, the 85-year-old who dreamed of building an agriculture museum but died when a pickup driven by Porter plunged into a Turlock Irrigation District canal April 22, 2004.

It was the second of two crashes in which Porter drove and Craig was his passenger. The first wreck nearly killed Craig. The second did.

Saturday was a time to laugh and remember the man. For some, such as niece Marilyn Whitney and her husband, Bud, it was a time to vent. In 2005, they filed a civil lawsuit challenging the revocable trust that Craig had changed in 1999. He'd made the church the beneficiary, expecting his $2 million-plus would be used to build the museum. First to me for a 2005 column and again in court, Porter claimed the museum project stalled in part because of the family's civil lawsuit.

Whitney fumed at Porter's spin, citing how Porter gained control of the trust in 1999 and had gone through much of the money before the first "murder attempt," as Whitney called it, in March 2002.