by Fred Rosen
There was no telling how long she was unconscious, but when she came to, Francois was looming above her, a tall, towering, menacing creature with a meaty paw going for her throat. Degaudio reached out with her hands and they sank into the Pillsbury Doughboy fat that covered his body. Degaudio got a good grip and, with a mighty heave born from desperation that she could never again muster in a million years, she pushed him off her.
Kendall came right back for more.
“Help, help!” she screamed. “Someone help me!”
“You stupid, little, fucking whore! Keep your big mouth shut, you cunt!”
“Help, help, get me out of here!”
Degaudio was still pushing at him, struggling, when suddenly, the big man went limp. Francois had quickly figured out that this one was not going easily and that if he continued, her screaming would attract the kind of attention he could not afford, not if he expected to remain free to continue. He had already had one run-in with the law this year. He was not about to make it two.
Francois took a few steps and jerked the garage door open. Sunlight flooded the confined space. To Degaudio, it was literally a ray of hope. If she survived, she knew she was being redeemed from the brink. Then, she did a stupid thing.
She told Francois she needed a lift back.
The man had just tried to kill her and she was hustling a lift from him because she didn’t want to walk home. He could still hurt her, even in the car. But she was exhausted and didn’t feel like walking. She didn’t figure he’d hurt her in broad daylight.
The car door was opened and she got in. Francois slammed it behind her so hard, it felt like it could come right off its hinges. Francois got in behind the wheel, slammed his door just as hard and then pulled out. He stopped long enough to close the garage door, got back in, backed out and headed down toward Vassar.
At the corner, he took the left and headed back to Main Street. She wanted to go to her apartment, which Francois had been to before for “business” purposes. Instead, Francois decided to drop her down on Main Street where he’d found her. He figured the bitch could find her own way home. And that was what he did. Wordlessly, she got out and walked home.
About six hours later, she got a call at home.
“This is Kendall,” he said.
“Yes?” she replied apprehensively.
“If you don’t keep your mouth shut, you’re going to be the victim of a crime,” he told her.
The next day, which was Monday, Francois called again.
“I’m busy, Kendall.”
Not more than fifteen minutes later, Francois was outside her window. Degaudio’s secondfloor apartment was in an old building on Main Street.
“Lucy, Lucy,” he called up.
Degaudio went to her window. She was surprised, and not a little apprehensive, when she saw Francois on the sidewalk calling up to her.
“Come on down and go shopping with me,” Francois called, trying hard to be polite and easygoing. “I need a woman’s touch,” he continued, smiling. “It’s for my mom. I want to get her an antique table.”
Degaudio didn’t have to think twice.
“I’m busy, Kendall. I told you that on the phone,” she shouted down.
She noticed his eyes. They were faraway, distant, as though he were a different person. He seemed unsure of himself, wanting to do something, but not sure how to go about it. He tried pleading again, but to no avail.
Degaudio had felt sore ever since she had gotten home the day before. Her chin where he’d punched her ached. Her vagina felt like someone had tried to tear it up.
Francois knew that his powers of persuasion were not enough to overcome the woman’s resistance. He got back into his car and drove away. Degaudio closed the window and retreated into her apartment. Soon after, Lucy Degaudio went back to her life on the street, smoking crack when she got depressed to take the edge off. She went back to anonymous men with money who paid for her crack, which she bought from her dealers.
Degaudio would later wonder why she had not let the police know of her encounter with Francois. Maybe she thought she wouldn’t be believed. Maybe she didn’t want to be known as a “rat,” though why anyone would want to protect Francois was unfathomable, unless she thought that by coming forward, she would be arrested for prostitution. Common sense would have told her that the police didn’t care about her; it was the man responsible for the missing women that they wanted.
Ultimately, she didn’t come forward because it had been so traumatic. The man had come this close to killing her. She could just as easily have awakened in heaven or someplace else, instead of this world after Francois had knocked her out. She had almost died.
For weeks after their encounter, Degaudio had nightmares about Francois. In them, he came back to finish the job. Who knew what would happen if she spoke out against him?
Suppose the cops couldn’t make a case against him for assaulting her? He could come after her. Who would protect her? She was a prostitute, after all. Who cared about her? Certainly not the public, who treated her like dirt. The cops? They tolerated her only because they had to. They would just as soon sweep her off the street like some common criminal.
So Lucy Degaudio said nothing. Later, much later, she, like Siegrist, would wonder about what might have been and the lives she might have saved.
Nine
August 12, 1998
Senior Investigator Jimmy Ayling remembers the day well.
“I was asked to go down to Poughkeepsie and aid in the formation of a combined task force to catch the Poughkeepsie serial killer,” he recalls.
In Ayling’s job, helping to run the state’s ViCAP program, such cooperation was not out of the ordinary. That was the idea of ViCAP—to put one segment of law enforcement in touch with another toward the same goal of catching the “bad guy.”
One of the primary things Ayling was prepared to offer as his end of the deal was access to ViCAP’s powerful computer databases, including their Abduction/Molestation File. The latter could be programmed to correlate case-specific data relating to stranger abductions. Perhaps more important to the case at hand, ViCAP could provide time lines for potential or suspected serial predators.
This was cutting-edge police technology that made a cop’s job easier and the public safer. What was unusual about the task force Ayling had been asked to join was it was being kept a secret from the public.
Ayling got on the New York State Thruway at Exit 23. He took his ticket from the tollbooth attendant, placed it on the seat beside him and headed to the left, down the ramp that said NEW YORK CITY—SOUTH. It took an hour and fifteen minutes before he got to Exit 18 in New Paltz. He got off, paid the toll and took a hard right, passing a diner. About two miles down, the road dead-ended and he took a right onto Route 9W. He passed a sign that said HIGHLAND. He remembered it as the place Wendy Meyers had come from.
A little farther on, he took the right exit, which twisted around, and he came to another tollbooth. Lord, he thought, we sure pay a lot of tolls in this state. This time it was only a dollar and then he drove out onto the Mid Hudson Bridge. On the other side, in Poughkeepsie, he drove down Church Street, took a left and went to the district attorney’s office. He parked across the street, went into the building on time and was shown to the prearranged room.
Already there were Bill Siegrist and Skip Mannain from the city police and Detectives Bob McCready and Arthur Boyko from the town police. Ayling represented the state police. The idea of the task force was to pool all the resources from these various branches of local and state law enforcement toward the common goal of bringing the killer to ground. At the meeting, arrangements were made to formalize sharing of information and how the group would work together.
The final member of what would be the combined task force, whose sole job was to track down the serial killer preying on the area’s prostitutes, was Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady. It was Grady who had decided not to make the task force’s ex
istence public for a week, giving them time to set their communications systems up and also to let the killer think he could still take advantage of the seeming disorganization that had existed before.
Let the killer be a little overconfident; maybe he would do something in the next week to trip himself up and then they would be right there to catch him!
Siegrist drove home that night, confident that things were moving forward. When he saw Catina Newmaster again, working Main Street, he stopped and got out of the car. Newmaster was a slight blonde in her late twenties. She looked like a fondly remembered girlfriend, not some drug addict feeding her addiction through prostituting herself. She looked as though the debasement had not gotten to her, at least not yet. One more warning couldn’t hurt.
“Catina, are you being careful?” Siegrist asked.
“Sure am, Bill,” she said, nodding.
And she had been. Still, as Siegrist drove home, he felt apprehensive. Not just about Catina, but the whole operation. Law enforcement had cut across normal bureaucratic lines to agree to cooperate fully for the greater good. It was a formal agreement to develop and share information. And that was good.
Maybe someone would develop a lead, or examine an old one that would lead to the guy. More likely, though, the break would come through dogged, deliberate police work, the kind that doesn’t make headlines. It could be like the “Son of Sam” case in the 1970’s.
Serial killer David Berkowitz had terrorized New York City, killing people throughout the boroughs, until he was traced through a random parking ticket, which led to his capture. Or maybe it would be something as simple as stopping the bad guy for a moving violation and finding bodies in his truck. That was how police on Long Island had captured serial killer Joel Rifkin in the 1980’s.
Maybe they wouldn’t capture the guy at all. At that time, Washington State’s Green River Killer was still at large. So was the Vancouver Serial Killer, who, like Poughkeepsie’s, preyed on prostitutes. Siegrist knew that no matter how many men they put in the field, the guy was going to continue to kill until they stopped him.
How long that would take, he wasn’t prepared to say.
The state had now deployed its officers and its full technological resources behind capturing the man behind the disappearance of the six Poughkeepsie women. The city and town of Poughkeepsie were also part of the task force. While the surrounding rural police departments were not, at least formally, they, too, would be contributing information that seemed relevant. All of this, the time and the money, was dedicated to tracking down one unknown man.
The FBI profile supplied to Siegrist of the man they were tracking was the same generic profile the bureau supplied in any case involving a serial killer. The killer was white, late twenties to thirties, had difficulty with romantic attachments, couldn’t hold a job, was from the middle to lower-middle class and had probably tortured animals in his youth. In other words, it was of absolutely no value.
Not only did much of that profile fit half of the single men in America, 99.9 percent of whom were not serial killers, it did not apply to African Americans. It was reverse racism: the bureau theorized that few black serial killers existed and the model was adjusted accordingly. It was no secret within law enforcement that FBI profiles were invariably the same. Cops knew they were of no practical value. It was just on the off chance the FBI might get something right that they were contacted.
Regardless of the paperwork they supplied, the bureau did not speculate on where any individual killer might be found. And without that information, it was back to the proverbial “needle in a haystack” scenario.
At the very moment the task force was scrambling to find him, the man they were desperately seeking, Kendall Francois, continued to cultivate an unassuming, middle-class exterior while continuing to live his real life in the shadows.
What was reality to him, what gave him pleasure, was flushing out the city’s prostitutes for his next victim. Like Jack the Ripper a century before him, he had not only a taste for the street women and a desire to possess them, he had an overwhelming passion to extinguish their lives. Francois didn’t know it, but if he killed two more, he would surpass the Ripper’s total.
But unknown to the hunter, others were attempting to put him in their sights. If they could do that, his reign of terror would end. If they didn’t, he would continue killing again and again and again.
He met her on that hot August morning on Noxon Street, near Soldier’s Fountain in the city. She was thirty-three years old. She hailed from Yonkers, a city downstate. Her name was Audrey Pugliese.
“Hi, Audrey,” he said brightly on that hot morning.
“Hey, Kendall,” she had replied.
They had been together before. She knew the routine.
After negotiating the price for the sex, Francois tooled the car down Main and over to Fulton, taking the left and parking in the garage behind his house. This time, though, they didn’t go to the second-floor bedroom as they had before. He took her to the basement instead.
They got undressed and began. In the middle of “making love,” Francois flipped. Not flipped over, just flipped his lid. The anger had been building. It was now ready to be unleashed. Strong hands lashed out and the blows found their target on Pugliese’s face. She was stunned for a few moments; then she fought back.
Pugliese struggled to get free. She pulled away from him, making for the door. Just when she thought she was out, she got pulled back in. He pulled her around to face him. He punched her, beating her mercilessly around the face and head.
Like some punch-drunk fighter trapped in the corner of the ring, Pugliese must have, involuntarily, covered up. She would have tried to push him off her, struggling, struggling … and then she fell to the dirty, cold floor. Francois’s foot lashed out like a piston. He stomped her face into a bloody pulp. Shattering ribs, the foot crashed home into her rib cage and stomach. And still, despite the terrible and brutal beating, Audrey Pugliese tried to rise, tried to escape. Her survival sense was in full mode.
If only, if only …
His hands clamped down on her neck. She couldn’t see them because of the blood in her eyes, but she would have felt him choking the life out of her. She would have been conscious for at least part of the time that she was being killed. How long is hard to tell. Francois had already beaten Pugliese severely; it’s doubtful she could have lasted very long.
At last, he heard the throat bone crack. He let her drop like the sack of garbage he considered her to be.
She struggled more than any of the others, he thought, breathing hard.
Francois picked up her limp form and carried her over to the crawl space. He put her on the ledge, then climbed up. Bending down, he pulled her in, depositing her body on top of French’s. Then he climbed down and went outside.
It was a nice day. A very nice day.
August 25, 1998
It was the kind of late summer day that locals said was so hot, you could fry eggs on the sidewalk. It was the sidewalk the streetwalker trod day after day.
At only twenty-five years of age, Catina Newmaster was a mother of five. Despite that, despite the responsibilities she had to her children, she continued her self-destructive lifestyle. She really wanted to straighten out her life and be with her kids, but the drugs made that an impossibility.
Catina told her boyfriend, Christopher Briggs, how helpless she was against the drugs. She wanted to kick, but just couldn’t. Poughkeepsie was a long way from the ocean that Catina adored and dreamed about being close to. It was a long way from the beautiful flowers she loved to look at, instead of the fat man who drove up to her on that early morning in his white car.
Catina Newmaster and Kendall Francois knew each other from past sexual encounters. They were old friends, or rather he was an old john of hers. He supplied her with money for her addiction. It was a straight business transaction.
They didn’t have to beat around the bush. He told her what he wanted. She
told him the price. He agreed. She went around to the passenger-side door and got in. She could smell him. She’d just have to ignore the odor because she needed the money.
For some reason, Kendall didn’t like doing it in the car like so many of her other johns. He had to go back to his house. They lost time that way. After all, she was a working girl and on the clock. But he was the client and he made the choice of where to do it. Besides, she needed the money.
Francois drove the few blocks off Main, making the left on Fulton, then down and a left into the alley behind his house. Francois got out and opened the garage door, got back in and drove the car inside. He turned the motor off, then turned to Newmaster and grabbed her.
Newmaster would have felt the fat man’s heavy hands on her clothing, pawing, pulling. He pulled her onto him and her panties down. He opened his pants and took his penis out and started pumping it inside her. They kept going at it, like before. They were getting toward his climax, when Kendall looked up at her with a ferocity she had probably never seen before. His fingers, which before had been playing with her body, albeit roughly, now slid upward to her thin neck.
She ripped me off before, he thought.
He’d felt betrayed then. Now those feelings found their way into his strong hands. He squeezed.
That first moment of panic was probably the worst. Newmaster knew it was more than rough sex. She couldn’t breathe and it got worse. His hands kept squeezing her throat and the pain was excruciating. Her hands flailed out, trying to find purchase and failing as her strength ebbed. She collapsed into unconsciousness.
Francois was by now an experienced killer. He kept squeezing until he heard the snap of the hyoid bone. When he let go, finally, she collapsed. Looking down at her body on the seat, Francois could see the red imprint of his fingers around her throat.
She was dead. But now, what to do with the body? He decided to carry her inside the house for now. The attic had long been filled up. He would bury her, instead, in the crawl space. Not now, though.