Body Dump

by Fred Rosen

  Bill Siegrist always wore distinguished-looking gray suits that made him look more like a banker than a cop. The tip-off to who he was, besides the gun he wore clipped to his belt that was hidden by his suit jacket, was the way he walked. Siegrist still maintained the quick gait of the beat cop he would always be in his soul. New times, though, demanded new methods.

  Siegrist had a computer to build his databases. He could access it at any time to get background information on any suspect. Still, he had come up the old way and preferred more of the old-fashioned methods.

  Back in 1993, he and another detective had gone down to Baltimore on a case. They spent some time with the homicide squad profiled in Paul Attanasio’s book Homicide, which became the basis for a critically acclaimed television series. It was while he was visiting Baltimore Homicide that Siegrist noticed the board on the squadroom wall. Reproduced on the television show, it lists homicides according to the following criteria: “victim”; “detective assigned to the case”; “prosecuting DA”; and “case number.”

  Siegrist liked that way of cataloguing homicides so much, he imported it to his new assignment with the detective division. The Poughkeepsie board, like that in Baltimore, listed all homicides in the city with the names of all cleared or solved cases in black, while unsolved cases were in blue. His group of twenty detectives handled all the felony investigations in the city of 24,000.

  Neither Wendy Meyers nor Gina Barone was on the board. They were officially classified as “Missing persons.” Siegrist knew that most missing persons turned up alive. No one had yet reported Catherine Marsh missing.

  “Prostitutes are picked on like garbage,” says Siegrist. “They are the hidden society on our streets, the hidden victims. Nobody pays attention to her. If a prostitute’s missing, nobody can give you an accurate date and time that they were missing because they move around so much. Conversely, people who engage in a lifestyle of drugs and prostitution have no sense of time. Their whole life is built around their next fix.”

  Which was a more detailed explanation as to why the missing women were not on the homicide board. Maybe they had gone someplace else, some other city to get money for their next fix. Maybe they had decided, hopefully, to get out of the racket. Maybe they had kicked their habit.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. The bottom line was the police knew they were missing, but without a crime or a crime scene, without a body, what could they do except file the report in their computers and hope for the best?

  Wendy Meyers’s boyfriend suspected foul play and decided to act on his suspicions. He came to the Poughkeepsie Police Department to ask for their help in tracking down his girlfriend.

  “He’d been in trouble before,” Siegrist recalled, “and knew all the guys in the detective division at the time. And everyone knew Wendy, too.”

  Siegrist turned to Detective Skip Mannain for help.

  Karl “Skip” Mannain was the grandson of Irish immigrants. His father had been a firefighter. Mannain could recall a fire that burned the belongings of a family with ten children. His dad had collected clothing and furnishings to help the family out. Mannain himself had followed through on that caring tradition.

  A Mexican immigrant named Jaime Gil had died in a hit-and-run accident. After apprehending the driver, Mannain had searched Gil’s room for information on his next of kin. He found a stack of letters from the man’s family back in Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, Mexico.

  With no money to ship the body back home, Mannain took up a collection. When he was finished, he not only had enough to send the man home and have him buried, but there was money left over to help out his widow and children. The disappearances of the Poughkeepsie prostitutes appeared to be, at least on the surface, a lot more complicated.

  “What’s going on with Gina and Wendy?” Siegrist asked Mannain.

  “Wendy’s boyfriend is asking us for help in finding her,” Mannain answered.

  “There’s a million places she could be. Gina, too.”

  Siegrist went back and checked the Missing Person’s report on Meyers. He had Mannain canvass the streetwalkers. They had absolutely no idea of the whereabouts of the missing women.

  “I say to have one person missing from a location for an extended period of time is unusual,” regardless of their occupation. “To have two, especially two who live the same life, that is a very unusual event. Both women had gone through Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. They had not contacted their family or friends. It was the beginning of a new year and there was no trace of them,” said Siegrist.

  He felt something was not right.

  “Right from the very beginning, I had a deep concern about what happened to these women. In my heart, I know people come to Poughkeepsie to buy prostitutes and drugs.”

  That means the city attracts some pretty unsavory characters, characters who think nothing of committing violence in pursuit of their goals.

  “It’s pretty elementary stuff. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out,” Siegrist said matter-of-factly.

  Siegrist was being polite. What he really meant to say was that there was a load of scumbags, liars, cutthroats, cheats and murderers working Poughkeepsie’s streets. Any one of them could have killed the missing women.

  Four

  January 13, 1997

  It was cold, too cold really to be a hooker on the streets of Poughkeepsie. With the wind chill factored in, the temperature hovered around zero for many days. Inside his Subaru, Francois never felt the cold. He kept the heater on; he was comfortable. But not the women. His women.

  Prostitutes advertised their wares, their bodies. It wouldn’t do if the johns couldn’t at least get a limited view of what they were paying for. Thus, in the middle of winter, women with short skirts and wearing high heels could occasionally be seen on Main Street. As long as the snow did not overwhelm the sidewalk, they were there. As were the johns.

  The johns cruised up and down the street, carefully looking at the women. Not all men, of course, were cruising for women. Some even failed to actually see the women. For these men, not attracted to the seamy underside, it was almost as though the prostitutes blended into the landscape, however garish or unusual their dress. This was, after all, New York State, where the unusual was not considered out of the norm.

  The women who plied their trade in the shadows of Main Street knew something was wrong. They talked amongst themselves about it, careful to share any information about abusive johns. They tried not to get into cars with men they did not know, but that was impossible a lot of the time. When they needed a fix, they needed a fix; only money would do. Still, they talked.

  What had happened to Gina, Wendy, Catherine and now Kathleen?

  Kathleen was Kathleen Hurley. As of yesterday, she, too, was missing. She was nowhere to be found—not in her apartment, not on the street, not anywhere. Like the others, she had just disappeared.

  The women on the street expected the worst. How could they not? They knew that some john was preying on them. Why else had the girls just suddenly disappeared? Maybe the cops bought the “I’m moving on to a better place” scenario; the girls knew better.

  They were dead. In any empty lot or maybe dumped in one of the area’s many lakes. The girls depended on the cops to catch the guy. But despite the danger they were obviously in, they couldn’t help law enforcement. There was a natural antagonism between the two groups.

  Cops arrested prostitutes for what amounted to a victimless crime, then forced them to hire attorneys with their hard-earned money. That was the reason they sold their bodies—the money. And to have to spend it on anything other than creature comforts, like to pay some lawyer to keep them out of jail for soliciting, well, that was just too much. Besides, the prostitutes figured the cops didn’t care about them. That was why nothing had really been done, they felt, to find the missing girls.

  Detectives from Siegrist’s detective squad, led by Skip Mannain, hit the streets to try to get the girls to talk
with them. At first, they were reluctant to say anything. They also didn’t want to be seen by their clients as stool pigeons. If any of the more violent johns found out they’d been informed on, they’d beat the shit out of them. Or worse. And hang what the cops said about protection. A girl’s got to make a living, right? And she can’t do it in protective custody, right?

  Gradually, though, a growing sense of unease, of real foreboding, hit the women. Reality was inevitable. Either they talked and took the chance the cops might actually find someone responsible for the disappearances or they kept their mouths shut and continued to play Russian roulette with every john. Finally, some girls began talking.

  It was just a little at first. Then, more. Siegrist began to get a feel for the street and the dangerous lives these women led. Names began to come out, names of the men who were considered abusive to the women. The cops were able to make a list of the names of the few johns who liked to get rough. The list would be checked out.

  In his office, Siegrist glanced to his right at the big, dry-erase board that listed the names of all murders in Poughkeepsie since 1993. The names Wendy Meyers and Gina Barone were not there. Yet.

  January 15, 1997

  Kathleen Hurley had been gone for three days when her family reported her missing.

  Like the others, Kathleen Hurley was white, had a small build and brown hair. She had a noticeable tattoo on her left bicep, the letters “CJ” imprinted on the skin. Her mug shot, taken on the occasion of an arrest on November 11, 1987, showed a dark-haired woman with wide-set, rheumy-looking eyes, pursed, thin lips and a strong jaw. At the time of her disappearance, her family said in their report, she was forty-seven years old.

  The cops, of course, were the last ones to know she was missing. They always are. First her friends on the street knew she was gone, then her family and then, finally, the police. Siegrist looked at the Missing Person’s report. Siegrist saw that Kathleen Hurley had had lesbian lovers.

  “She’d had a fight with one she was living with. Kathleen had left their apartment and never showed up again. She left all of her stuff and never came back.”

  If she had found a better gig someplace else, didn’t it make sense that she would at least take her personal belongings? The same thing with the other girls: not one of the first two reported missing had taken anything of personal value along with them into the ether. The logical supposition, then, was that Hurley had hit the streets to pay for drugs. But why hadn’t she returned?

  “I was convinced something wasn’t kosher,” Siegrist explained. “That was three girls we knew of who’d disappeared. Something had happened to these girls.”

  He assigned Mannain to do the usual canvass. Mannain went out on the street and asked questions of Hurley’s associates. It was a dead end. No one had seen anything, no one had heard anything, and no one did anything. Mannain, of course, was frustrated. He suspected foul play, but he couldn’t prove it. Once again, no crime scene, no victim, hell, no criminal. The girl had vanished, just like the others, completely eliminated.

  The cops began seriously wondering now. After getting past the obtuse possibility that all four women were now living the Life of Riley on some beach somewhere, they came to the inescapable conclusion that someone had eliminated them. But who? And how? Siegrist began looking for a pattern. The Poughkeepsie Police Department needed the help of their next-door brethren.

  “Skip and I went to the Town of Poughkeepsie Police,” Siegrist recalled. “‘Here’s what we have,’ I told them and gave them the names of the missing women and the circumstances of their disappearances. Maybe some of what happened to these women [foul play] happened in the town of Poughkeepsie.

  “I knew there was a question in their [Town of Poughkeepsie Police] mind, that these guys think I’d just taken command. But they know [from past experience] I’m pretty accurate.”

  The Town of Poughkeepsie Police could add nothing that was helpful in finding the missing women. Siegrist was once again left to conduct the investigation on his own.

  February 1997

  Francois drove slowly down the street in his red Subaru, looking for his next victim. Then he saw her. She was white, 5’4” and weighed 110. When he pulled over to the curb next to her and rolled down the window, the girl looked in. She had brown eyes and brown hair and something else—a one-inch scar on her left cheek. How she had gotten it, Francois didn’t know. It was obvious from her profession that she didn’t have the money to pay for plastic surgery, unless she started charging a thousand a trick, which, of course, she would never get.

  The girl, thirty-one years old, was Mary Healey Giaccone. She had previously been convicted of misdemeanor prostitution. She was a “pro.” Francois and the woman stood there on the street for a moment negotiating a price for sex. When they were both satisfied and the bargain was made, Giaccone got in and Francois drove off. It was the last drive Mary Healey Giaccone would ever take. Less than an hour later, she lay with the others.

  March 7, 1997

  After six weeks of not hearing from her, Catherine Marsh was finally reported missing by her mother.

  “When’s the last time you saw Catherine?” Skip Mannain asked her.

  Her mother, Marguerite, replied that the last time she talked to her daughter was November 11. The cop then asked her the usual series of questions cops ask in missing person’s cases: did she have any enemies?; did she know of anyone who would want to hurt her?; any idea where she might be?; any idea who she might be with? The answer to all the questions was a resounding “no.”

  It was damn frustrating! The cops wanted to do their job and find the girl. Revise that: girls. With Marsh, the total of missing women the police knew of was up to four. No one had seen anything; no one knew anything. Mannain tried backtracking Marsh’s movements from the day she disappeared, but it was impossible. So much time had passed, the trail wasn’t cold, it was Arctic. Permafrost covered it.

  “She was involved in drugs?” Siegrist asked.

  “Right,” Mannain agreed. “And prostitution.”

  But if Marsh had found herself and gone into drug rehab, would she then suddenly have left the one thing that was bringing her salvation? If, however, she had found a way to do that with good reason, wouldn’t she have let her mother, to whom she was close, know what was going on? The answer was unfortunately “yes,” which left the idea of foul play a distinct one.

  What Siegrist and Mannain didn’t know, though, of course, now suspected, was that Catherine Marsh had been murdered. There were four missing Poughkeepsie women. They had to admit the possibility, the distinct possibility, that they had a serial killer in their midst. Siegrist agonized about what to do.

  The lieutenant reasoned that they could go public. It was hard to tell how the citizens of Poughkeepsie would react when they found out that four women had disappeared and that police feared the worst. There was a good possibility it would only serve to scare and worry the populace without producing one lead. The other possibility was to keep investigating without warning the public of the suspected killer in their midst.

  In the end, the decision was made to quietly continue the investigation, but with more manpower. The public, however, would know nothing about it. Despite the fact that the disappearances of all four women was a matter of public record—Missing Person’s reports are public documents—the local paper, the Poughkeepsie Journal, did not pick up on the story. It was really just a country paper with big-city pretensions. The other newspapers that served the city, the Middletown Herald Record, the Daily Freeman and the weekly Poughkeepsie Beat, all failed, too, to see the emerging pattern.

  To Kendall Francois, it was all a mystery. He didn’t realize he had killed five women. When he looked in his attic, he was surprised to see five bodies instead of four. How had the fifth gotten there? He remembered Giaccone, but not Hurley.

  Someplace, deep down in his mind, he had a dim recollection of strangling Hurley. Who she was and how he had come to pick he
r up, he just didn’t remember. But it didn’t make a difference. It was just one more body to decompose in the silent graves he had given them all in the attic.

  Bill Siegrist sat in his car down by the water. He looked out at the Hudson River. He came down to the deserted waterfront park many times in the course of the week just to think.

  He lived only eight miles out of the city in a town called Pleasant Valley. And it really was that, a direct bucolic counterpart to Poughkeepsie’s urban chaos. Just miles away was the twenty-six-year-old house he lived in with his wife and kids. It was a nice house, a beautiful house, but there was a problem.

  The roof was getting old. It really needed to be replaced. There were other improvements on the home that he also wanted to make, but he was too busy to do any of them. He never seemed to have the time. Time and again, he’d been home doing something of importance for his family when he got a page to come in. If a major case was breaking, he had to go—heck, he wanted to go. Still, what a pain it sometimes was being a cop.

  Siegrist munched on his sandwich. He drank his coffee. He became aware of the silence, broken only by the police scanner on the floor that he kept perpetually on, in case he was called. He looked out at the gulls flying over the bridge. He tried to play out a “what if” scenario—what if the women had been killed? The killer would probably have dumped their bodies.

  Siegrist had had his detectives search some of the more remote wooded sections of town. All they found was snow and, under that, just the frozen ground of the Hudson Valley. Siegrist then sent Mannain out again on the street to interview the streetwalkers with a different question.

  “Who’s weird?” Mannain asked the women.

  The girls, knowing they had a killer preying on them, finally opened up. They named the weird johns. Those names were added to the previous list of the abusive ones. The cops were constantly busy checking out all the leads.

  Siegrist took a bite out of his sandwich and slugged it down with hot coffee. He turned the defroster on to clear his window of the fog. As it worked its magic and the windshield became clear, Siegrist looked up at the majestic river materializing in the autumn sunshine. Siegrist pulled out a copy of a report Mannain had filed. In it, the detective had detailed his findings. The prostitutes said there was this guy.