Two Charged With Making Bomb Threats Then-Gov. Lowry, Other Officials Were Targets

Tue., June 9, 1998

By John Craig johnc@spokesman.com

A Tonasket, Wash., woman and her mother face arraignment Monday in connection with a 1996 bomb hoax and threats against then-Gov. Mike Lowry and other public officials.

Laura A. Frank, 34, and her mother, Margaret A. Roggow, 67, also of Tonasket, each are charged in U.S. District Court in Spokane with three counts of mailing a threat and one count of conspiracy.

The Republic, Wash., post office was closed for a day in September 1996 after three suspicious packages were found in the lobby. An Army bomb squad from Yakima removed the packages, which contained fertilizer-filled tennis balls attached to powerful firecrackers.

The packages were addressed to Lowry, Ferry County Sheriff Pete Warner and former Ferry County Community Services counselor Loren Peterson, who had been assigned to one of Frank’s sons.

“You need to die,” said the letter addressed to Peterson.

According to court documents, another letter warned Lowry that “accidents have a way of happening to even people in powerful places.” A third letter suggested Warner wouldn’t be in office much longer because he would be in “too many tiny pieces to put him back together again.”

All of the letters contained references that authorities believe are connected to a child custody dispute involving Frank.

She is now serving a six-year sentence in the Washington State Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor. She was locked up in April 1996 for violating terms of a court order to stay away from her children while she appealed convictions for first-degree child molestation and witness tampering.

An Okanogan County jury convicted Frank and her husband, Curtis Frank, 32, of repeatedly molesting her 9-year-old son from a previous marriage during his weekend visits to their home in Tonasket.

At the time of her arrest for violating the no-contact order, Laura Frank told The Spokesman-Review she wrote letters to Lowry, Warner and Peterson, but she denied threatening them with bombs.

Court documents say authorities found a letter in Roggow’s home, where Frank was living, that matched one of those found at the post office.

A recent federal indictment says Frank and Roggow got another woman to take them to Republic so they could deposit the threatening packages in the post office.

The new charges against Frank and Roggow each carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

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