Body Dump

by Fred Rosen

  “New York State ViCAP serves as a central contact point and resources for all law enforcement agencies to assist in the investigation of violent crimes,” explained Ayling.

  Having the information to catch the bad guys is dependent on all police agencies in the state providing ViCAP with information on crimes, especially the ones that are unsolved. That means someone actually has to sit down and enter that information into the database.

  The program itself provides the following:

  • Searches for case similarities to link or match cases and/or offenders submitted by different agencies;

  • Cross-searches for similarities between cases in different categories, e.g., missing persons and homicide;

  • Comparisons and searches of the Abduction/Molestation File for similarities;

  • Time lines for potential or suspected serial predators.

  Ayling’s second-floor office is cluttered and the clutter makes it look smaller than it is. On the walls are quotations he has saved over the years, poems and commentary about the policeman’s lot. There is no missing the huge, twenty-one-inch computer screen that dominates the room.

  Every day, Ayling comes in and quickly scans the New York State Police Management Information Network (MIN) Missing Persons File for anything unusual. When he saw that Wendy Meyers’s name had just been added, he didn’t pay any more attention to it than any other name. Or any less.

  No one knew that a serial killer was swimming around like a shark in their midst. Like that predator, the serial killer lurks and waits to pounce, many times at the weakest link in the chain, on the edges of the circle. And that’s exactly what prostitutes were, street people who existed on the edges. But not in Poughkeepsie.

  As much as the city protested, it was not one at all. Poughkeepsie was really a small town posing as a city. Everyone knew everyone else, and that included the prostitutes. They would be missed.

  If someone requested his help, Ayling could be helpful. But before beginning a ViCAP investigation, there has to be a crime. Simply being missing is not a crime, unless there is hard evidence of foul play. More important, for a homicide to be investigated, a body is usually needed. Someone has to be dead in a way that is not consistent with natural causes. Minus that, all the computers, manpower and brain-power in the world are powerless. Someone has to initially put together that a number of missing people could be the result of an unknown party killing them.

  Considering the good odds that most missing persons turn up intact and well, the criminal perpetrator who decides to commit serial murder, and hide the bodies, gets a tremendous edge. He may continue to kill until such time, if at all, that his crimes are detected. Sometimes, serial killers actually get away with it. Jack the Ripper is the prime example.

  November 29, 1996

  Twenty-eight years old, Gina Barone was born in Yonkers, New York. Her parents moved to Poughkeepsie when she was a child.

  “I went to school with Gina Barone,” said Mike Grimley, a construction worker. He was speaking in the Eveready Diner. The Eveready is right on Route 9 in Hyde Park, less than a mile from the city of Poughkeepsie.

  “Gina was a nice girl,” Mike remembered. “I spent many an hour with her, just laughing and having a good time.”

  That was before Barone turned to drugs and then to the street to support her habit. Over the years, Gina had had one child, Nicole Renee. Barone’s drug habit had become the most defining relationship in her life. The only way to support it was to take to the streets and reel in as many johns as she could. It was during that second part of her life, when she became a street person, that she made the acquaintance of Kendall Francois. Kendall Francois and Gina Barone had “dated” on more than one occasion. He was one of her cash-paying customers.

  Gina Barone had a nice smile, even in the mug shot taken after being arrested on a prostitution charge. She was the kind of girl Francois liked—white, with a full head of brown hair and a petite body. Like many in her generation, she found tattoos attractive. She’d had an eagle tattooed on her lower back. More noticeable was the “tat” on her right arm, the letters “POP.”

  The night of November 29, Gina Barone had an argument with her boyfriend, Byron Kenilworth. He left her in the area of Academy and Church streets. She had on a pair of jeans and a close-fitting shirt meant to show off her slim figure. Barone decided to pick up some money by “working” Academy Street. Shortly after she began displaying her body for business, a familiar two-door 1984 red Subaru pulled over to the curb near where she was walking.

  It was up to the customer to say what he wanted. For her to do so in advance was to invite an arrest on a prostitution warrant. It was never clear who might be a police informer, so it was always a good idea to let the john name what he wanted. Make the customer do all the talking. If the suggestion came from the customer, there was no crime until a price was negotiated. By that time, most girls had had enough of a chance to smell out the john and make sure he wasn’t a cop.

  In Kendall Francois’s case, that was probably impossible, considering he stank to high heaven. Unless he was paying, no woman would want to be in the same room with him, let alone have him put his “johnson” up her “jackson.” They negotiated a price for straight “69.” From past experience, Barone would have known that was Francois’s favorite.

  Gina Barone suggested a place off Route 9 to do it. Francois must have agreed that was a good place because that was exactly where he drove. For some reason, he wasn’t anxious to get home. Maybe he was contemplating what to do, or maybe he just wanted a change of venue. Whatever the reason, it was eleven P.M. by Francois’s reckoning as they drove through the city’s deserted streets. There was a chill in the air; winter was coming very soon. The town just hoped it wouldn’t get hit with a cold winter, which would be made even worse by wind whipping in across the Hudson River.

  From where they parked the car on a side street off Route 9, they could see the river, all black and silent, its current flowing south toward New York City. Barone might have glanced out the window at the river, or the deserted highway, but she was a good businesswoman—she most definitely would ask him for money before they did anything. Then it would have been time to face what all the girls knew about Kendall.

  Two

  The girls had talked about it over and over. None of them enjoyed sex with Kendall Francois; he was just too damn large. But he paid, and that was all that was important to an addict: getting enough green to buy the drug of choice, then move on to the next customer, a never-ending cycle of physical and financial abuse.

  After the sex, Francois would later say Gina Barone asked him for her money. He would remember thinking, I’ve been ripped off. It must have been hard for Barone to understand what he was pissed about. The guy just seemed to suddenly fly off the handle because he didn’t think he’d gotten his money’s worth. Could he have misunderstood that he was to pay one hundred dollars for sex and thought it’d be less?

  Francois continued to complain to her that she had not given him the sex he was paying hard cash for. Gina Barone must have been perplexed. They had had sex; it didn’t make any sense. Suddenly, a strong pair of hands wrapped themselves around Barone’s throat. She might have reached up to try to fight him off, but that would have been futile. What could she do? She was an out-of-shape 110 pounds to his stocky, powerful 380.

  Her strength would have begun to fade in direct correlation to the oxygen being deprived to her brain. Soon, her hands would have fallen limply to her sides, her eyes gazing out on the world for the last time and then, finally closing.

  They were still in the car parked on a side road. It was quiet, the clock approaching eleven-thirty P.M. Looking out, Francois saw nothing—no stranger, no car, no cop, no street person, no anything. Nothing unusual happened in the area where he had just killed Gina Barone that would make police take notice. Francois had just done what every bad guy aspires to: he had committed the perfect crime. He had killed a prostitute who h
e figured wouldn’t be missed with nary a witness in sight to ID him or his car. The only problem, of course, was getting rid of the body.

  Pushing her down under the seat so she wouldn’t be seen, Francois drove his car the few miles back to his house and parked it in the garage in back. When he got out, he looked around to make sure no one was out and about in the neighborhood. He needn’t have worried; no one ever was. If anyone ever looked out back to see what he was doing, they kept their presence quiet.

  Francois reached back into the car and pulled the limp form of Gina Barone out and into his arms. It was dark outside, not much light, and he didn’t feel like stumbling around in the dark with a body. If he should trip on anything and the body fell, then he would have to collect her up again, and that was a quick way to be seen. Such an eventuality was best avoided.

  Francois decided to leave her in the garage. The next morning, when no one was around, he’d move Barone up to the attic. The dead woman was placed on the cold concrete floor of the garage for temporary storage. Then Francois went into the house and up to bed, where he slept soundly.

  In the morning, when Francois came out, Barone was still there. Not that he expected she would be gone. He knew she was as dead as a doornail, but it was good to have it confirmed one more time. Reaching down, he picked her up. She was as light as a feather. Taking careful looks at the houses next door and all around him, he saw that no one was out at this early hour. He couldn’t see behind closed curtains, but he assumed no one was there watching.

  Carrying her in his arms, he smuggled the body into the house. Then it was up the stairs, and up farther still to the attic. He put down Barone’s body and placed it in a large, black plastic bag. Trash bag. That was what she was to him—trash. Something to stuff into a bag and get rid of.

  Francois pulled the ends of the bag together and tied them loosely. He had to admire the construction; the bag hadn’t even ripped. Then he pushed her back into the attic into a prone position. He looked down at the trash bag, making sure it was where he wanted it. Satisfied, he climbed down the attic stairs.

  At the bottom, he pushed the door closed. Just a door like any other door. Nothing suspicious about it. He went back downstairs in time for breakfast as though nothing unusual had happened. As far as he was concerned, things were normal, including the bodies he was storing in the attic.

  Cathy Marsh was all of four pounds when she was born on a cold winter morning, in the Upstate New York town of Schenectady. It was a really bleak place then, before the Capital Region’s buildup in the 1970’s. The Capital Region encompassed Albany, New York’s state capital, and the surrounding cities of Rensselaer and Schenectady.

  After her birth, Cathy’s parents, Marguerite and James Marsh, watched as their youngest daughter was put into an incubator that was necessary for her survival. Her survival was by no means certain.

  “She was a very small child, very tiny,” said Jordan Baker, a family friend. But Cathy survived. “Cathy had a little pixie haircut back in those days, a real short haircut. When she went to the store, they used to think she was a little boy,” continued Baker. “Cathy developed into a feisty kid. She set [people] straight.”

  Like any kid, Cathy sometimes got in over her head. There was the time she was only a few years old and she was playing. She tripped and broke her leg. It was a compound fracture and the doctor made a cast for her from the toes to the waist. Cathy survived this accident and continued to grow and get strong.

  A few years later, tragedy struck when Cathy’s father, James, principal of the John Bigsbee Elementary School in the Mohonasen School District, died when she was eight. But she still had her mother, her older sister, Ruth, and older brother, Robert.

  By the time she got to high school, she had matured into an athlete, with a short, stocky frame. Her dark blond hair trailing after her, she would race down the wooden floor of the gymnasium at Mohonasen High School, calling the plays as one of the school basketball team’s two guards, the shortest positions on a basketball team.

  At other times of the year, she played on the girls’ softball team. She had a deft, determined way of running the bases, and surprising power from someone so small. Intellectually, her teachers thought she had the promise of a college career in front of her.

  Her family happily snapped pictures of her at graduation. Then, after graduation, there was that day in 1986, when she, her sister, Ruth, and her brother, Robert, and some friends hit the road to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to celebrate their freedom from the confines of adolescence. Everything was in front of them. They were now adults with a boundless future.

  Many kids in such small communities wind up going to local community colleges. Some take required liberal arts courses before transferring to a four-year school. Others decide on the two-year associate’s degree and take practical courses in subjects like criminal justice. They become cops or prison guards. Others opt for an easier way to make money, taking courses like “Computer Information Systems,” frequently a way to get hired by IBM.

  Contrast that with a kid who shows some promise and opts for, and is accepted into, a state university. With its high academic requirements, the four-year SUNY College at Binghamton is the crown jewel in the statewide system of four-year colleges. But there are other four-year state schools to attend if you don’t have the grades.

  Cathy Marsh did not have the grades to attend Binghamton. Nevertheless, her grade point average and SAT scores were high enough to meet the SAT and GPA cutoffs at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Marsh got to Geneseo by going west on the New York State Thruway. She passed through farmland that was rich looking and fertile in the late summer sun, arriving in Geneseo, in the far western part of the state, in late August 1986, for the beginning of the fall 1986 semester.

  According to the New York Times, Geneseo has become “one of the country’s most highly regarded public colleges.” The school has been consistently ranked among the nation’s top colleges in annual guides published by U.S. News & World Report, Time and Money magazines. The school’s on-line catalogue breaks down its information in the following way: Academics; Access Opportunity Program; Applying to Geneseo; Visiting Geneseo; Orientation; Campus Map; Tuition/Fees; Financial Aid; Scholarships; College Offices; About Geneseo; Life on Campus; Athletics; Campus News; Calendar of Events; and Technology Resources.

  While universities and colleges must, by federal statute, make public crimes that are committed on their campuses, they are under no obligation to indicate to students if there are any problems with drugs. The schools are trying to attract students or their parents, who are usually paying all or part of their expenses, by emphasizing the positive aspects of campus life.

  It was during her first year at Geneseo that Cathy Marsh began using cocaine on a regular basis. How much she had done before, if any, is open to conjecture. What isn’t, according to later published reports, is that Cathy Marsh became a cocaine addict sometime during the 1986–1987 academic year. Her sister, Ruth, would later write:

  “Cocaine took your life before this day/always hanging on when you tried to get away.”

  For Catherine Marsh, the 1980’s would flee into the 1990’s like some long, wet, humid night. It eventually ended, for a while, when she left college and came home to Schenectady. The grit Cathy had brought with her into life, that helped her survive her sickly birth, that was responsible for her athletic triumphs, she brought to her struggle with drug addiction.

  This time, she lost.

  According to police records, Catherine Marsh was arrested on misdemeanor prostitution and drug charges in Syracuse, on a number of occasions. She had probably picked Syracuse, as opposed to Schenectady, as the place to prostitute herself for her habit because Syracuse is fifty miles from Schenectady and no one knew her there.

  In New York’s small, upstate towns, people talk. They gossip. Neighbors that seem at first blush to be friendly are actually the types who traffic in other people’s problems. B
y traveling to another city to exercise her criminal career, Cathy was saving herself the derision of her hometown.

  Somewhere in the middle of her headlong gallop to throw her life down the drain, Cathy had time for some brief relationships with men. From those relationships came two daughters, Erin and Grace. And still, despite their love, and her family’s support, Cathy drifted further and further down into the drug culture.

  In 1995, Cathy managed with one last, desperate effort to take control of her life and tried to salvage what was left. Making the greatest sacrifice any woman can make, she allowed her children to be adopted. In so doing, she acknowledged that another woman would make a better mother than she was. Cathy then traveled south to Poughkeepsie, where she entered a drug clinic. She hoped the therapy she received there would save her life.

  Addicts during rehab regularly attend twelve-step meetings, where they acknowledge their powerlessness over their substance abuse and come to believe that a power greater than themselves can restore them to wholeness. Essentially, they are accepting their addiction and realizing they have no control over it. Recovery requires a series of progressive steps where the addicted individual agrees to make amends to those he has harmed because of his addiction, all the while leading a sober life.

  Catherine worked her program of recovery diligently. She had a sponsor to support her. She began keeping a diary of her feelings, which is always recommended to recovering addicts. In it, she wrote how, at times, she was disappointed in herself for failing her friends, including occasionally missing her regular twelve-step recovery meetings.