by Fred Rosen
It was generally agreed that this rivalry was keeping them from pooling resources. While they twiddled their thumbs, women died. And why didn’t the state come in? They had a killer on their hands who was killing with impunity.
No one was pacified by the elemental fact that the state had no jurisdiction to come into a murder investigation. The rationale was since the locals weren’t doing anything, they should turn it over to the state, which could be done, and let them use their vast resources to solve the case.
“Pride goeth before the fall,” and that was what was happening, residents believed. Neither the city nor town police departments would admit they were overwhelmed in the investigation. So the killings continued.
Bill Siegrist knew what people were thinking. He rode the streets of the city daily in his unmarked car. He stopped at Top Tomato on Main for coffee, at sandwich shops for submarine sandwiches. In over thirty years as a cop, he knew that was the best way to take the public pulse.
If the truth be known, Bill Siegrist was frustrated and feeling, not so much guilty that he couldn’t do anything about the situation, but rather impatient. He wanted things to move. What he got was another missing girl. Strangely enough, this time the report came through the police directly.
In October, Mary Healey Giaccone’s mother died. Mary’s father, a retired New York State corrections officer, personally came to the police to ask for help in locating his missing daughter. He had reported her missing on November 13, 1997. Her parents had not spoken with her in months. Siegrist soon discovered that the girl had actually been missing since February.
He checked around. No one had seen Giaccone. No one knew where she was. She had vanished without a trace. Siegrist looked at the description of the missing girl and saw that it matched the rest. That made five. If Eason was added to the mix, six.
Winter had come early to the Hudson Valley. The temperature hovered in the low thirties. And still the girls worked. Siegrist saw them on his way home to Pleasant Valley. They were out on Main Street plying their wares, selling their bodies for the money to feed their addiction. He shivered and it wasn’t from the weather.
December 14, 1997
Finally, finally, the Poughkeepsie Journal published its first story about the missing women under the headline IS THERE A SERIAL KILLER LOOSE?
“She’s my daughter … my baby. I don’t think she’s ever coming back,” Barone’s mother, Patricia, was quoted in the piece.
The article listed all the missing women: Wendy Meyers, Catherine Marsh, Gina Barone, Kathleen Hurley, Mary Healey Giaccone and Michelle Eason. Also mentioned was the lack of “public outcry” when prostitutes are murdered. The Nathaniel White case was cited to prove the point.
“I fear the worst,” Siegrist was quoted in the article. “We have no bodies, no crime scenes, but we have six missing women. I can’t say we have somebody out hunting women. I don’t know what happened.”
That was true. Also quoted in the piece was Gregg McCary, identified as “former director of the FBI’s elite behavioral sciences unit.”
“This is, I mean, more than suspicious,” said McCary with classic understatement.
More understanding came from a “woman on the street” comment.
“We are all human, and no one deserves to get treated the way they’re [prostitutes] treated, the way they’re spoken about. If that were my child, I would love my child no matter what. Because it’s my child,” said Julia Simpson, a lifelong Poughkeepsie resident.
“Look what happened there,” Simpson continued, referring to serial killer Nathaniel White. “I can’t believe these girls just disappeared; I’m sorry.”
The case then went national. The Associated Press (AP) picked up the story and ran it on its national wire on November 21. The most intriguing paragraph of the story said, “Police are asking the FBI for help solving the cases of the women, who disappeared from the Poughkeepsie area from October 1996 to this month.”
What the story was alluding to, which had not been made public, was that the Poughkeepsie Police Department had asked the FBI for a profile of the “bad guy.” In turn, at a special December meeting with the FBI, Siegrist promised to keep them abreast of developments. But for the next month and a half, there were none.
In early January 1998, Bill Siegrist reported to work. The holidays were over and he had some paperwork to catch up on.
Sitting down at his desk, he began to look over reports that his detectives had filed. The detectives had narrowed down the list of possible killers. Besides Francois, there was another suspect. His name was Mark King, a sexual predator. He liked getting rough with prostitutes. They’d have to look a little harder at him.
Siegrist then came across a report filed by Detective Skip Mannain. In it, Mannain said that in the course of his routine interviewing of the area’s prostitutes, Kendall Francois’s name had come up yet again. The big man was up to his old tricks, Siegrist realized.
Francois had had sex with a girl where he squeezed her throat just a little too hard. It had not only hurt; the girl had thought she was being killed. Then for some reason, he stopped, packed her up and brought her back to Main Street. Siegrist looked up, thought a minute, and then summoned Mannain into his office.
“Kendall Francois,” said Siegrist. Siegrist then explained that he had read Mannain’s report. “What’s his pattern? During the day, I mean.”
Mannain thought for a moment.
“He gets up, drops his mom off at work at the psych institute, where his mother works as a psych nurse.”
Perfect. She’d had an in-house patient.
“What are you thinking, Lieutenant?”
PART TWO
The Cop
Six
January 18, 1998
Paulette Francois and her son Kendall exited their house through the side door into the alley. They tramped through the snow to the rear garage where Kendall opened the wooden door. Watching from across the street in a late-model, unmarked green Ford Taurus, Siegrist saw the big man hold open the car door for his mother.
Francois put his bulk behind the wheel of the midsize Toyota Camry. The car seemed barely able to contain him. He turned the key, the engine came to life and he immediately shifted gears and backed the car down the driveway. He executed a neat turn into the middle of the street, straightened his wheels, shifted again and gunned the motor. The car shot forward.
Siegrist made sure that Mannain, who was driving, stayed back at least one car length so the suspect would not get suspicious. They followed him to the Hudson Psychiatric Institute, watching as he pulled up the long, sloping driveway, and let his mother off at the top. Traveling back down, Siegrist and Mannain continued to follow as Francois made his left turn back toward town. They were just a few blocks away from the police station in one direction, and Main Street in the other. Knowing Francois’s predilection for prostitutes, they knew he was headed for Main.
“Pull up behind him,” Siegrist told Mannain.
A few minutes later, they were lounging at a light, ready for it to turn green. Slowly, methodically, Bill Siegrist uncorked his big frame from his car and walked up slowly to Francois’s window. It was already rolled down. Siegrist leaned in. The first thing Francois eyed was the shiny lieutenant’s badge in Siegrist’s hand.
“Hi, Kendall. My name is Lieutenant Siegrist.”
“Hello.”
The cop ignored the greeting, but remained polite.
“Would you mind following me into headquarters? There’s some questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Not a problem, Lieutenant,” Francois answered politely.
“Just follow me in,” said Siegrist as he walked back to his car. He found it curious that Francois never once asked why.
For his part, Francois had to be wondering why he was being asked to come into the police station. What kinds of questions were the cops interested in asking? What answers were they looking for? Was he accused of having committed a crime?
Francois never let on what he was thinking. He just said nothing and allowed himself to be brought in. It was a curious reaction: meek, compliant, from a man suspected of serial murder.
Dutifully, Francois followed the unmarked car down Main Street, until they were finally at the police station. Siegrist pulled around back to the police lot on the south side of the building. He parked in one of the open spaces near what looked like a loading dock. Francois did the same.
Siegrist got out, and with Mannain on one side and him on the other, escorted Francois into the station. Since the man wasn’t any more so a suspect in the disappearances than anyone else, he was not handcuffed. Since he had not yet been asked any questions about the women, he was not given his Miranda warning. That would come later; no sense in scaring the guy, but from the looks of how calm Francois was, it didn’t look like much affected him. The guy acted like he had ice water in his veins.
Had Siegrist been more aware of the patterns of serial killers, he would have known that some act almost meekly at times. That is, until their killing instincts take over and they become insatiable in their desire to shed a victim’s blood.
It had taken a while, over a year, but the cops finally had Kendall Francois in the conference room at police headquarters. Ordinarily, a suspect being interrogated was brought to one of the precinct’s drab, gray interview rooms. Siegrist, though, had a specific reason for using the conference room.
“After you,” said Siegrist, holding open the door for Francois, who walked in with a preternatural calm for somebody about to be interrogated about a series of disappearances. Nothing had been said about them yet. Francois looked around the room. He did not know it, but it had been specially decorated just for him.
Siegrist had gotten to headquarters early that morning and gone to work. He had pictures of the victims placed on one wall. On the other was a picture of Francois’s Fulton Street house. A number of pictures, in fact, so Francois would know the cops had been shadowing him. As he stepped farther into the room and took a seat in a straight-backed chair that Siegrist offered, Francois’s dark eyes picked out the photo of him from his high school yearbook. Then, he noticed the filing cabinets in the corner.
There was nothing special in those cabinets. But on the front of one drawer was a sign in block letters that said KENDALL FRANCOIS’S HIGH SCHOOL RECORDS. Another drawer was labeled KENDALL FRANCOIS’S COLLEGE RECORDS. The other two drawers in that four-drawer cabinet had labels in large block letters, too.
KENDALL FRANCOIS’S WORK RECORDS, said one.
KENDALL FRANCOIS’S BACKGROUND, said the other.
“We dummied it up,” Siegrist would later recall. “There was nothing in them. And they were locked.”
It was a giant bluff to get Francois to admit he was the Poughkeepsie serial killer. The cops figured they had a good fish on the line and hoped he would bite.
“We’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” said Siegrist, closing the door and leaving Francois alone in the room. He wanted him to stew awhile in his own juices.
Let the fat man think the cops had been concentrating on him and him alone. Let him think they had him and maybe, just maybe, he’d cave. Siegrist and Mannain retired to the lieutenant’s office, where they killed a few minutes that they hoped would tick away like an eternity for Francois and make him crack. Finally, Siegrist wordlessly led the way back to the conference room and opened the door.
“Kendall,” Siegrist began, as the two cops came in and took seats on either side of the big man, “we’d like to talk to you about the women that are missing.”
“The missing women,” Francois repeated, almost dumbly.
“We know you’ve had rough sex with a few of the girls on Main Street,” said Mannain.
“I did?”
“We thought, well, maybe you had heard something,” Siegrist continued.
“Like what?”
“Like who might have abducted these women.”
Francois shook his head and said that he didn’t know anything about that.
“We thought, since you hang out on Main Street, you might know the women.”
“Like who?”
“Gina Barone. Wendy Meyers. Michelle Eason. Kathleen Hurley. Catherine Marsh. Mary Healey Giaccone.”
Francois said none of the names rang any bells. He also did not admit to having sex with prostitutes.
“He admitted to nothing,” Siegrist says. “He wouldn’t go for anything.”
Behind Francois’s placid, emotionless facade, his mind was churning. He wasn’t stupid; he was a college student. He knew the cops wouldn’t have brought him in unless they really suspected him. But he also knew that they had nothing. Otherwise, they would have charged him. It gave Francois a feeling of power.
For his part, Siegrist knew he wasn’t getting anywhere. If Francois was the guy, he was a stone-cold killer. Only one gambit was left.
“Kendall, we really appreciate you coming in today to answer our questions,” said Siegrist. “But you know, cops, we like to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.”
Francois just looked at him.
“What would really help us, and you, would be if you took a polygraph.”
“You mean a lie detector test?”
Siegrist nodded. Francois didn’t even think about it.
“Sure,” he answered.
Siegrist found that to be an interesting reply. Either the guy really was innocent or he thought he could beat the machine.
Cops have implicit confidence in the machine’s ability to root out the guilty and considered the machine’s failure to be a rarity, something not even worth considering. Cops don’t like to talk about the real truth: it isn’t unprecedented for a guilty suspect to beat a lie detector.
Had they delved farther into the reasons why a guilty man could beat the machine, they would have had to acknowledge that it wasn’t a foolproof method for discerning the truth. Not only would they lose confidence in the machine, criminals thinking they could get away with their crimes might think there was a way for them to control their physical responses. If they could do that, they could lie to a lie detector.
But such thoughts were just that—thoughts—nothing more, nothing less. Aberrations happened, but rarely. That’s why they were aberrations; nothing to worry about.
Most small-town police departments like Poughkeepsie’s do not have a separate unit devoted to polygraphing. It requires too much manpower and expertise, both of which would cost the taxpayers more money. In those circumstances, when a polygraph is needed, the city police apply to the state police for help.
The state police have barracks conveniently located throughout the state’s counties. Some have polygraph units at their disposal. The nearest state police barracks with a polygraph, Troop K Barracks, is east of the city in the rural town of Millbrook. Siegrist quickly explained to Francois that they would transport him there.
It was a crucial moment. If Francois thought that there was any chance he would fail the test, he could say, “No.” No one could compel him to take the test. Even if he were charged with six counts of murder one, with the death penalty staring him in the face, he didn’t have to take the test. The Constitution gives the individual the right not to convict himself with his own admission of guilt. The smart suspect realizes that and agrees to nothing.
Francois said he had no problem going out to Troop K. His only condition was that they stop at his house on the way to pick up some things. Siegrist allowed him, escorted by Mannain, to make the stop.
Ordinarily, a cop can’t just walk into a suspect’s house unless he’s there for an arrest. The suspect has to invite him in. Once inside, the cop is constitutionally free to roam anywhere he is allowed to. But if the suspect tells him to confine his movements to a specific space, the cop has no choice but to acquiesce. Otherwise, anything found as a result of such unauthorized probing is unusable in court because the suspect’s rights were violated by an unlawful search. Only a court-o
rdered search of the premises could prevent this from happening. A court-ordered search would allow Mannain to look through Francois’s home, but only for specific things enumerated in the warrant. Searches, to put it mildly, were a slippery constitutional slope that every good cop, and Mannain was one, is aware of.
“Skip, why don’t you take Kendall out to his house and then over to Barracks K,” Siegrist instructed him.
Skip Mannain nodded. He told Kendall Francois to follow him. They went through the station house. Francois noticed the close-packed desks, the way cops’ eyes were averted as he went by. He didn’t really care. He wasn’t afraid. What was there to be afraid of? A machine?
Mannain took Francois out back and sat him down in the backseat of his unmarked police cruiser. He could also have put him in the front seat since he was not officially a suspect and hadn’t been advised of his rights. Francois was going with him totally voluntarily. If he so much as indicated that he wanted the interview to cease and he wanted a lawyer, that would be the end of it.
Mannain knew he was on shaky ground. He had to give the guy a little leeway. He had to; otherwise, he’d clam up. A few minutes later, Mannain pulled the car in front of the house on Fulton Avenue. Francois led the way down the alley to the side door. As soon as he opened it, the stench hit Mannain like a knife in the gut. It was a combination of urine, feces, stale sweat and strange cooking odors. Lord, the place stunk to high heaven. And it was a mess. There seemed to be garbage strewn everywhere. Mannain wanted to walk farther into the house, but Francois insisted, “Only up to my bedroom.”
Mannain climbed the filth-encrusted stairwell. At the top, he followed Francois into his room. Francois made it clear again that Mannain was not to wander around.
“Skip Mannain is a clean freak,” says Bill Siegrist. “He’s a bachelor who lives by himself and he’s always cleaning up after himself.”