Nightcrawler

by Mark Gado

  “We had to break off after a time and try a different strategy,” said Lt. Siegrist. An extensive background check was conducted on Francois, examining every facet of his life. They retrieved and scrutinized every parking ticket he ever received, every contact with police, and all his Army and school records. There was nothing to indicate that he had killed or kidnapped anyone.

  www.crimescape.com

  Chapter 6: Arrest

  “I don’t know nothing.”

  —Kendall Francois when asked about the missing women

  Kendall Francois drove in leisurely circles through the city’s downtown area, by the Civic Center, the Radisson Hotel, around Market Street and back onto the arterial and over to Main Street again. He took the same route he had taken many times before, driving slowly near the curb, where he could eye the women who loitered along the edge of the sidewalks waiting for a potential “john” like him to pull over. He cruised with the windows down, even in cold weather, because he thought he would miss something if he didn’t. As he incessantly ate chocolate candy bars and listened to rap music at the highest volume, Francois made the loop around the city over and over again. After a half-hour of driving, he spotted a woman he had been with before, but had not seen in quite a while. He tried to get her into his car several times, but someone else always beat him to it. On this particular night, he saw her standing alone in front of a deli on Main Street and he immediately pulled to the curb.

  “Hey girl!” he called out. “What’s up with you?”

  The woman looked over and saw Francois. Her first reaction was to ignore him, but business was slow and she needed cash.

  “Hey, K-man!” she replied. “What’s with you? That’s the question.”

  Her name was Juliet McMann, a 23-year-old ex-dancer from nearby New Windsor. She had been arrested on several occasions for various offenses and was a known crack addict. Though she had been with Francois before, she did not find him attractive and couldn’t stand his body odor. She steeled herself for the possibility of having sex with him again because she needed the cash. Crack was the overwhelming need in her life, and she, like many of the other women on the street, made a decision a long time ago that she would do anything for it—even have sex with someone like Francois.

  They agreed on a price of $40. Juliet got into the car and they drove over to his home, which was less than a five-minute ride from Main Street. As they pulled into the driveway, Juliet noticed that the lights were on in the front room of the house which was where the family watched television. Francois parked the car in the rear of the property. Using the back entrance, they walked up to the second floor and into a bedroom which Francois said was his brother’s old room.

  “You got the money?” said McMann.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  Francois reached into his pocket and handed her two $20 bills. Juliet stripped and got onto the bed. Francois, without saying a word, purposefully worked his hands onto Juliet’s throat and began to choke her. She grabbed his hands and tried to push them off, but was shocked at his strength. She kicked him with her knees and pushed as hard as she could while Francois pressed even harder. This woman was tough; she realized that she had to win, or die. She grabbed both his hands and yanked with all her power. His hands slipped off just enough so that she could slide underneath him and fall off the bed.

  “What are you doing, Kendall?” She was crying and scared. As she spoke, she kept her presence of mind and quickly got dressed.

  “I… I don’t know,” he stammered and seemed to be in some sort of daze. “I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “Why don’t you just take me home?” she said. “We’ll do it some other time. You can have your money back, too.” She struggled to keep her composure and not panic. The last thing she wanted was for him to attack her again. She knew she couldn’t get away from him twice.

  They walked down the steps together and got back into his white Toyota. Francois drove back to where he had picked her up and let her out of the car.

  “Take care, girl,” he said, as if nothing had happened.

  “Yeah, you too, Kendall,” Juliet replied.

  She was terrified. As soon as he drove away, she broke down into tears and told her friends what happened. One friend called the police, and soon, a detective tracked down McMann and persuaded her to file a complaint against Francois. When Siegrist heard about the assault, he realized that it could be the basis for a search warrant of the Francois home. But Juliet was not totally convinced that she should follow through with a complaint. She was afraid of what her friends in the street would think and fearful that Francois would take some sort of revenge.

  “She was very indecisive,” Siegrist said. “I tried my best to convince her. So did my detectives. She left the police station that night without signing the statement and there was nothing we could do about it.” In reality, without a signed complaint, it was much more difficult to take any official action. But the situation was not hopeless. The police could still investigate, even if there was no arrest.

  Detectives soon located Francois near his home and asked him to come in for an interview regarding the alleged assault. Siegrist described him as cooperative and friendly. “No problem, Lieutenant,” Francois said when he was asked to drive over to the police department. Detective Mannain told Francois that Juliet said he pulled a knife on her. Francois denied it and said it was only a nail clipper that he displayed. Mannain then asked if they could go to his house to retrieve the nail clipper, which would prove she was lying. Francois agreed, and police accompanied him to the Fulton Avenue home.

  “When we got there, we entered through the back door near the driveway,” said Mannain. “He only wanted me to go in and no one else. I was trying to build a friendship with him. I felt he kind of liked me a little. I tried the friendly approach at first. When I walked into the home, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was truly a horror. In the kitchen was a 55-gallon drum that is typically used outdoors filled with old garbage. There was trash all over the floors and countertops. The cabinets had no doors and dishes were piled up everywhere in the kitchen. I went into the living room which was disgusting. There were old, soiled clothes everywhere. Francois insisted that I could only go into his bedroom, which was covered in maybe 2 feet of garbage on the floor. I looked around as best I could but there was just filth everywhere.”

  As he examined the bedroom, Mannain looked for anything whatsoever that could belong to the missing women, such as clothes, identification, handbags, anything at all. An ex-military man and self-described neatness fanatic, Mannain was repulsed by what he saw. “The truth is, I was appalled by the condition of the house. The water didn’t flow in the bathroom and the sink was filled with trash. I got a brief glimpse into the basement as we were leaving, but all I could see was debris at the bottom of the steps. He grabbed me by my collar and said we couldn’t go down there.” Mannain and Francois left the Fulton Avenue home and drove over to the police department.

  Kitchen in Francois’ Home

  Photo Courtesy of Tom Martin

  Unlike before, Francois agreed to take a lie-detector test. A certified polygraph operator was notified and Francois, along with police detectives, responded to the State Police barracks nearby. Francois appeared normal and did not seem nervous as he sat down for the examination. “He was calm, nonchalant,” Mannain said. He was asked numerous questions about each of the missing women to which he denied any knowledge.

  “Did you have anything at all to do with the disappearance of Wendy Meyers?”

  “No,” he said clearly.

  “Do you know anything about the missing girls?”

  “No,” François said. “Nothing.”

  Over and over again, the examiner asked questions about the known details of the women. Each time, Francois said he didn’t know anything. When it was over, Francois passed the test with flying colors. There was no indication of deception. He had apparently told the truth. Once agai
n, he was a free man.

  The police, however, were not convinced. For weeks, they tried to find Juliet McMann, who seemed to do everything to avoid them. Almost a month later, they found her and she signed the complaint. By then, it was too late. Though the arrest could still take place, a legal search of the Francois home would not be authorized by the courts. Too much time had passed between the offense and the filing of the complaint. As a result, no judge would sign off on such a warrant.

  Francois was quickly located and arrested. He was brought into the police department, charged with misdemeanor assault and released on bail. He had retained a lawyer and made no statements to the police. Several months later, in May 1998, Francois pleaded guilty in town court and was sentenced to time served, which amounted to a total of eight days. He left the court that day, full of himself, smug that he had defeated the police once again and lamented that he was only trying to live his life as best he could.

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  Chapter 7: Summertime

  “The perpetrator in question is a white male… very structured, very organized individual, with an acute visual sense.”

  —A criminal profile offered by the System to Apprehend Lethal Killers (Stalk)

  When Francois passed the polygraph test, it was a strategic blow to investigators. Although polygraph exams are not permitted at trial and cannot be used by the prosecution, police sometimes use them as an investigative procedure to strengthen a case against a suspect. Although the primary suspect had been cleared by polygraph, Francois was not totally eliminated. Polygraphs can be manipulated. Guilty suspects have passed these examinations before, and Lt. Siegrist knew it. Francois was not a stupid man. He was an Army veteran, a college student and had been arrested before. He was no stranger to police procedures, nor was he easily intimidated. Police theorized that Francois could be one of those people who could successfully deceive a polygraph test, but they weren’t positive. There was always the chance that he was totally innocent.

  Less than a week after taking the polygraph, Francois was back cruising the streets for women. He had met the police face-to-face and conquered the enemy so he probably felt safe once again. The need for sex was dominant in his life and had taken hold of him once again. To him, the compulsion was impossible to resist.

  In the summer of 1998, a private organization that specialized in analyzing crimes and the people who commit them contacted the city police department. The group was called System to Apprehend Lethal Killers (STALK). “The Chief of Detectives Frank Adamson in Kings County in the state of Washington, who was in charge of the Green River killings during the 1980s, called me,” said Siegrist. “He said I should try to use STALK as just another tool in the investigation.” Criminal profiling was a relatively unproven law enforcement tool in the 1990s and had limited success, though the public had a different perception. Hollywood films like The Silence of the Lambs had publicized the terrifying reality of serial killers to a wide audience and suddenly criminal profiling seemed to be the answer to identify these special criminals.

  The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in Quantico, Virginia, pioneered the field in the 1970s, when Agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler led the way in this new method of criminal investigation. Using data gathered from hundreds of multiple-death cases across the country, Douglas and Ressler, who firmly believed that human psychology played a role in serial killings, began to experiment with the idea that by examining murder scenes, physical evidence and condition of the victim, they might be able to predict what kind of a person might commit such a crime. Veteran investigators, who had little confidence in psychological theories, initially viewed the work of the BSU with skepticism. Douglas writes, “Much of the FBI at that time, as well as the law enforcement world in general, considered psychology and behavioral science as they applied to criminology to be so much worthless bullshit.”

  John Douglas

  Portrait

  Over the years, as the FBI put together a vast database concerning serial killers and analysts became more experienced in their predictions, the idea of criminal profiling and the painstaking work of BSU gained respect among police agencies. A psychological profile, though it was still an inexact science, might be helpful in the investigation, but the bureau was only able to supply a generic profile that was of no practical use. That was because the case was lacking one of the prime components for an accurate profile: a crime scene.

  After some debate, STALK assembled a profile on a possible suspect in the case. Representatives responded to Poughkeepsie, where they were given some access to the details of the investigation and escorted around town to assess the environment. “I pointed out several locations where the prostitutes walk, various locations where the prostitutes lived, and showed him how easy it is to get around the city,” said Siegrist, “but I did not supply information that was not publicly released in the newspapers.” A few weeks later, STALK submitted a profile of the possible killer:

  The perpetrator in question is a white male, between the ages of 28 to 50 years. He is [a] very structured, very organized individual, with an acute visual sense. His occupation is one that would utilize these particular attributes, such as a computer technician, contractor or landscaper… As a child, this perpetrator was very shy… he may very well have been involved in peeping in windows also… His legal history consists of DWIs and physical or sexual offenses targeted at women. He is a loner who lives by himself or with his mother… he drives obsessively around the particular area where the girls are missing. He very likely drives an extremely clean van or truck.

  In early June 1998, another woman disappeared. The family of Sandra French reported her missing after she left her home in Dover, a small town approximately 20 miles from Poughkeepsie, and never returned. Her car was later recovered not far from the downtown area. “Sandra Jean French apparently left her home about 6 AM Thursday to go to work in Pawling,” reported one newspaper. “She was driving her boyfriend’s car that day according to her daughter… but French never showed up for work. And on Monday her daughter found the car her mother had been driving near the Arlington Bar on Main Street.” Sandra, who was a small woman—only 5 feet tall and 120 pounds—had an arrest record, and some of the patrol officers who worked the downtown sector were accustomed to seeing her on the street. She was added to the list of missing woman as number seven.

  The investigation dragged on into the summer of 1998. Police had amassed thousands of pages of information on the case. They had background checks on dozens of suspects, including Francois. “He was still on my mind and was still considered a suspect,” said Siegrist. “In fact, he never left the list.” Pressures were building and the public developed a sense that not much was being accomplished in the case. The District Attorney’s Office decided that a special task force, consisting of investigators from three departments, would be formed to focus exclusively on the missing women.

  “Too many names on the list,” said an editorial in the Poughkeepsie Journal. “Too many similarities. Too many unanswered questions… The police task force that has been formed should be able to concentrate efforts so these cases don’t continue to be unresolved. For too long families of these women and residents of this area have been left up in the air as police have tried to track down information.”

  Although the press reported that police tended to lessen their investigative efforts when the victims were prostitutes, it didn’t seem that way to the detectives who worked the case. Although there was no evidence that the missing women were dead, police had treated the case as if it were a homicide from the very beginning. During the course of the investigation, hundreds of tips poured into the police department. “The amount of information was staggering, and each one, each communication whether it was a phone call, a letter or a conversation in the street, was given a serial number so that we could keep track of progress,” said Siegrist. “It was overwhelming at times.” Rumors intensified that the police were not doing enough because
the victims were prostitutes and therefore, not deserving of police protection. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Siegrist. “I heard the comments made that we would have done more if the missing were from Vassar College. It just isn’t true. We had no crime scene. No real evidence. Look, what cop wouldn’t want to solve a case like this? What else more could we have done?”

  Lt. Bill Siegrist

  Photo Courtesy of Author

  Though the task force was formed in July, officials waited several weeks to announce it to the public. They needed time to get the team up to speed, gather all the files together at one location, set up computers and establish the parameters of responsibility. It seemed repetitive to some of the investigators because the agencies involved had already been working on the case together from the start, but they also understood that a formal task force would heighten public awareness and perhaps free up additional resources. On August 26, 2003, Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady called for a press conference to make the announcement. “So far as I know,” said Grady, “this task force is the only one of its kind in the country that was created without having any evidence of criminality relating to the disappearance of these women.” He told reporters that the police were committed to finding the missing women and that no stone was being left unturned. A task force would raise the level of the investigation to a higher level and enable detectives to devote all their time and efforts to the case. “To not do anything further would be totally unacceptable to me and to the law enforcement community,” he said.