Spokane police detectives hunting for body possibly buried in Liberty Park

Spokane police detectives are apparently on the hunt for a body that could have been buried at Liberty Park, near the Ben Burr Trail, a few months back.

Scott Franklin, 45, an inmate in the Spokane County Jail, told detectives Saturday that an acquaintance showed him a dead body in the trunk of his car around mid-June. The body was a short, white man in his mid-30s, with light brown hair and a slight mustache, dressed in a dark shirt, blue jeans and white tennis shoes, court records say.

Franklin told police the body had “two holes in the chest area that appeared to be bullet holes” and “a bullet hole on the right side of victim’s head/temple area,” records say. He said there was a “significant amount of blood on the body,” records show.

“He was laying in a fetal position, and his chest was facing the sky, his legs were bent,” Franklin said Friday from jail. “I saw him wrap him under the armpits and pull him out.”

According to court documents, Franklin watched as his acquaintance retrieved clear plastic wrap from his four-door silver 2005 Ford Taurus and proceeded to wrap the dead man. He then dug a 4-foot-deep hole south of the softball field in Liberty Park with a folding shovel and buried the body, court records say.

“He buried him right in front of me,” Franklin said Friday. “He just buried him right there.”

On Sunday, Franklin led detectives to a newly graded area of dirt and gravel about 15 to 20 feet north of the new Ben Burr Trail in the park. There, police proceeded to dig foot-deep holes in 18 locations and had police dogs work the area, documents show. The three dogs didn’t find a body, but they did “change behavior” in a few locations, leading detectives to believe a body could have been buried but subsequently moved, records say.

Franklin said the body was buried close to a tree, but when he went back with detectives on Sunday, the whole place was bulldozed.

“I don’t know if he came before and took the body,” he said. “He could have.”

Police located the vehicle Franklin described on Wednesday; they were able to identify the vehicle by a missing rear window, which Franklin confirmed.

Spokane police spokesman Officer Shane Phillips said Friday a search of the car didn’t bring back “anything of evidential value.”

“They didn’t find anything at all,” he said.

Franklin, who claims to have told detectives the location of the body because he believed the “family of the victim deserved closure,” made headlines in 2013 for threatening to bomb the federal courthouse. He spent nearly three years in jail and was released for about a month before getting nabbed by U.S. marshals on a federal probation warrant for skipping out on inpatient chemical treatment, he said.