More than 1,500 motorcycles rode into Estes Park Saturday morning to raise money for Realities for Children, a Northern Colorado nonprofit based in Larimer County that benefits children who have been victims of trauma or sexual abuse.
This year’s motorcycle ride, billed as the world’s largest poker run and rally, began at 9:30 a.m. at Grimm Brothers Brewing in Loveland. One group of riders circled into Estes Park a little after 11 a.m. via Berthoud and Lyons then proceeded to Masonville and back to Loveland. The other group came into town from Loveland and traveled the 80-mile route in reverse.
This year was the 23rd year of the ride and the first Estes Park was on the route.
Participants in a poker run ride are required to visit several checkpoints along the prescribed route to pick up playing cards. The object is to have the best poker hand at the end of the route for a chance to win cash prizes and gift cards provided by event sponsors.
A most interesting bike and biker
Bikers and their rides are a treasure trove of stories, but one custom built motorcycle stood out for its unusual nautical themed paint job depicting a blue-ringed octopus, a prison ship, broken shackles, a mermaid, and a quote from Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-apartheid activist who served as the first president of South Africa after being incarcerated for 27 years: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
The bike’s owner, Frank O’Connell of Windsor, spent 27 years and four months in prison in California on a murder conviction before his 25-years-to-life sentence was vacated by a federal judge on March 29, 2012.
O’Connell always maintained his innocence in the Jan. 5, 1984, shooting death of Jay French in South Pasadena, CA.
No physical evidence was found and despite an alibi—O’Connell’s two roommates testified that O’Connell, who was 27-years old, was at their home in La Verne, 25 miles from the scene of the crime at the time of the killing—he was convicted a year after the murder, on Jan. 15, 1985.
Years after O’Connell’s conviction, Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit organization based in Princeton, NJ that helps get innocent people released from prison, began to investigate his case, and brought exculpatory evidence to light that had not been revealed to O’Connell’s defense attorneys, including evidence that pointed to other suspects.
In 2011, the prosecutor’s key witness, Daniel Druecker, recanted testimony he had given years earlier at trial, admitting that he had only had a fleeting, 2-second view of the killing and had felt pressure to provide a false ID to the detectives.
One significant piece of evidence that had been withheld from the defense was that French’s ex-wife, Jeannie Lyon, had paid a man to have him murdered five years earlier. At the time of the murder, the former couple was embroiled in a custody battle. O’Connell had a brief affair the summer before the murder with Lyon who implicated O’Connell in the crime.
Centurion Ministries also discovered an individual had confessed to committing the murder to five different people on separate occasions. The individual reportedly told people an innocent man had been convicted and was serving time.
When evidence about police and prosecutor misconduct was brought up on appeal, O’Connell’s conviction was overturned on March 29, 2012, and a new trial was ordered.
O’Connell was released on bond the following month and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges.
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O’Connell filed a federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in March 2013. In November 2017 he was awarded $15 million in one of the largest legal settlements of its kind at the time.1
The National Registry of Exonerations has recorded 3,582 exonerations in the United States from 1989 through August 25, 2024.
The Innocence Project, which was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, began to track exoneration based on DNA evidence in 1989. While it is impossible to know how many people have been wrongfully convicted, Innocence Network organizations across the country have worked to help get wrongful convictions overturned in homicide, sexual assault, violent and non-violent crimes and misdemeanor cases based on official misconduct of police and prosecutors, mistaken witness identification, false confessions, perjury or false accusation, false or misleading forensic evidence, and ineffective assistance of counsel.
What’s with the octopus?
After being released from prison O’Connell dated a woman whose young son found a dead octopus that had washed up on the shore of Grand Lake.
An aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife was stumped because the saltwater creature was not native to a fresh-water mountain lake. Sky-Hi News in Grand County ran the quirky story that got picked up by other news outlets across the county.
O’Connell decided to use nautical imagery to visually tell his story of incarceration and exoneration. On a road trip to Key West during COVID, O’Connell ran into some people from Colorado at a café one morning. The waitress overheard them talking about being from Colorado and she noticed his bike and she asked if he had heard the story of the octopus that had been found in Grand Lake.
At first, O’Connell thought the waitress was kidding, but then she explained that her mom’s best friend lived in Grand Lake and was planning to make calamari as part of a Thanksgiving feast. The menu plans, however, changed, and the woman put the large mollusc in a plastic bin and stuck it in her freezer where it remained for a long time. Then one day, the woman and her daughter decided to get rid of it by tossing in into Grand Lake where it eventually washed up on the public beach before being discovered by O’Connell’s girlfriend’s son.
O’Connell was gobsmacked to unravel the mysterious origins of the Grand Lake octopus whose image adorns his motorcycle while he was more than 2,300 miles from Colorado.
Since his exoneration, O’Connell has used his custom bike as a vehicle to bring awareness of wrongful convictions. The stunning custom paint job on his bike invites fellow bikers and onlookers to ask, “what’s with the octopus?”
- Earlier this year, Ronnie Long, was awarded $25 million for being imprisoned on a wrongful conviction for more than four decades in North Carolina. ↩︎
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