Body Dump

by Fred Rosen

  NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH AREA another sign emphasized. That one should have amused Francois.

  The Neighborhood Watch was a community-policing program in which residents kept a sharp eye out for anything out of the ordinary. If anything did happen that shouldn’t, if anyone saw something suspicious, the idea was to report it to the police immediately. Yet, not one call had come into the police about Francois.

  Not one.

  The sign to the contrary, it was not unlike other insular neighborhoods in the country that try mightily to keep out those who might intrude on the residents’ privacy, yet never consider that the menace could come from within.

  Vassar College was two more blocks down, but Francois swung the car to the left at the corner and headed back to Main Street. It was just two more blocks, Franco realized.

  They had just passed Top Tomato. She looked at the car door. She hadn’t locked it. Then she looked over at the big black man behind the wheel who, moments before, had almost strangled her to death and thought about what could still happen.

  “How about over there?” said Diane Franco to Kendall Francois.

  She pointed to the left, to a Sunoco station on the corner of Main and Grand. Dutifully, Francois pulled off to the left. The Camry’s fourteen-inch wheels had just climbed the curb when Franco broke for freedom.

  Franco threw open the passenger-side door and ran. Unless he wanted to attract a crowd, which surely he did not, Francois had to let her go. He watched her run away as he turned and drove back in the opposite direction.

  “There’s Kendall,” said Mannain to McCready.

  Mannain had been investigating the disappearance of the Poughkeepsie street women since the first one was reported on October 24, 1996. Another month and it would be the two-year anniversary, two years without a suspect’s arrest, two years of killing after killing. Skip Mannain was the only member of the task force who had been on the case since the beginning. It seemed like ages ago.

  They were still handing out fliers when they saw the big man’s white Camry coming off the gas station lot on Grand and Main, proceeding in the opposite direction. Mannain waved and Francois, returning the friendly gesture with a wave of his own, drove on by and disappeared around the corner.

  “Let’s pull in,” Mannain suggested.

  He drove his car into the same gas station Francois had just come from. After pulling in, they heard a man screaming. It was Jim Meadows, an employee of the Sunoco gas station.

  Calmly, Mannain reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open. Inside on the left flap was an identification card. On the right was a shiny badge that said DETECTIVE, CITY OF POUGHKEEPSIE.

  “A woman just ran in the station claiming she’d been raped,” said the gas jockey, sticking his head in the front passenger window.

  “What’s her name?” Mannain asked.

  “Her name’s Diane Franco.”

  “Where is she?”

  Meadows looked around. After a moment, he spotted Franco, about a half block distant, walking slowly.

  “There.” He pointed.

  Mannain tooled the car off the curb and drove quickly down Main Street, easily overtaking Franco. He turned in and parked a few feet in front of her. Car doors slammed and the cops were instantly on the curb. They flashed their badges.

  “I’m Detective Mannain of the city police,” said Mannain, and then he introduced his partner. “We just heard from a man at the gas station that you were assaulted.”

  Franco was hesitant. After a moment, she said there was nothing she wanted to report. Mannain was perplexed. She’d just been attacked and didn’t want to report it?

  “She thought there was a warrant out for her,” Siegrist would later explain. “That’s why she didn’t want to report the rape and assault.”

  Mannain wouldn’t let her say “No.”

  “You have to come with us,” Mannain told her. “Come on, if someone hurt you, you can’t let them get away with it. They might do it to somebody else. You know what’s going on out here.”

  Franco certainly did. After a few moments, she acquiesced and agreed to come on in and talk. Since the alleged assault had occurred in Francois’s house, which was in the town of Poughkeepsie, a mere three feet from the imaginary border that separated it from the city of Poughkeepsie, Franco was brought to the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Headquarters.

  McCready found a vacant interview room. They made her as comfortable as they could and reassured her that they were only interested in the man who had assaulted her. Once they had gained her trust, they interviewed her.

  Prostitutes don’t generally like to charge customers with being too rough. It’s a matter of business. Do that and they’d never come back. But Francois was different; it was like he meant it. Besides, the cops seemed sincere in their desire to bring the big guy in.

  “Do you know who did it?” Mannain asked.

  “Yeah, Kendall Francois.”

  Mannain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. It was the kind of feeling that a good cop gets when he knows he is at the end of a long hunt. But they had been down this road before with Francois—he already had two misdemeanor convictions for activities relating to solicitation. They needed to go by the book.

  Mannain wanted her to file a complaint against Francois. Without that, their hands would be tied and they’d be right back where they were, except it was two years later and still no one in custody.

  A short while later, the phone rang in Siegrist’s office. He picked it up off the cradle.

  “Lieutenant Siegrist.”

  “Bill, it’s Skip.”

  The junior man sounded excited. He quickly explained what had happened.

  It’s Kendall again, thought Siegrist.

  “And you got the girl to file a complaint?” Siegrist asked.

  “Yes,” Mannain answered. “The town’s picking him up now.”

  “Keep me informed,” said Siegrist.

  Siegrist went back to work. They had been down this road before. Only if they got a search warrant to search the house did he expect anything to appreciably change.

  Eleven

  Once again, jurisdiction was important.

  The Francois house was located in the town of Poughkeepsie, not the city of Poughkeepsie. It was in the town where the alleged assault against Franco had occurred. Accordingly, it was Detective Sergeant Daniel Lundgren and Detective Jon Wagner of the town police who drove over to Fulton Avenue to make the arrest.

  The doors of the unmarked police car slammed in the early afternoon sunshine. The cops could hear the birds in the trees chirping as they climbed the rickety wooden steps. At the top, they found themselves on a weathered wooden porch strewn with garbage.

  Francois heard the knock. After a moment, Francois answered and came out to talk with them. The time, Lundgren would later note, was three P.M.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Daniel Lundgren and this is my partner, Detective Jon Wagner, of the town police,” said Lundgren, flashing his badge. “Would you come to the police department with us please?”

  Francois looked at the two men emotionlessly.

  “Sure,” he said easily.

  Without arguing or struggling, Francois readily agreed. He got into the police car and was driven downtown for their little chat.

  Once they arrived at police headquarters, they showed Kendall Francois to Room 112, an interview room not unlike any other in the building—a medium-size rectangle with a desk in the middle and a group of chairs around it. The walls were painted institutional green. The place smelled from stale coffee, cigarettes, sweat and desperation.

  At four P.M., McCready and Mannain came in to talk to Francois. The first thing they did was advise him of his Miranda rights.

  “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed by the cou
rt. Do you understand these rights?”

  Francois said that he did.

  “Do you wish to speak with us without an attorney being present?”

  That was the crucial question. If Francois said no and invoked his constitutional right to have an attorney present, the interview was over.

  “No, I’ll speak to you without an attorney,” Francois said.

  Surely, Francois had seen any number of cop shows on television where the Miranda warning was recited. He knew that talking would only lead to further incarceration. Implicating himself in Franco’s assault or something even more serious, like murder, was a stupid thing to do. But no one ever said that criminals were smarter than most people. If they were, they would never be caught.

  Mannain knew they had gotten a break. The last time when they’d questioned Francois, he’d lawyered up. There’d be plenty of time to wonder why he hadn’t this time. For a change, the cops had the opportunity for a little chat.

  “Okay, Kendall,” said McCready, “we want to speak with you about a person you were with earlier this morning.”

  “Diane Franco,” said Mannain casually.

  “Allegedly, you assaulted her during a sexual encounter at your home,” McCready continued.

  “Well, I paid to have sex with her,” Francois admitted. “I didn’t sexually assault her in any manner.”

  “Ms. Franco was very detailed in her complaint. And I noticed she had marks around her neck, like someone had tried to strangle her,” said McCready.

  “Okay, I choked her, but,” he tried to explain, “we were having sex—”

  “Intercourse?” asked Mannain.

  “Yes,” said Francois.

  “Where were you?”

  “In my car inside the garage at my house. We were having sex in my car inside the garage at my house when we got into an argument.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I got angry and grabbed her by the throat. We continued having sex. And I began choking her with my hands.”

  There was silence in the room. They still didn’t have enough. What they had was a coincidence. They needed to make it stick. They really needed the bodies to charge him. Without a corpse, convicting a man of murder is almost impossible. It rarely happens.

  “Did you calm down?” McCready asked, knowing full well that he had.

  Francois nodded.

  “So what happened after you calmed down?” McCready continued.

  “After I calmed down, well, I, uh, we continued having sex.”

  “What happened when you were finished?”

  “I drove her to a gas station on Main Street and dropped her off.”

  The cops knew that once a suspect was given his Miranda warning, and continued to talk without a lawyer present, the more he talked to police, the better chance more details would come out to pin him to the crime being investigated. In most cases, it was through circumstantial evidence and physical evidence, like DNA found at the crime scene, that was then matched to the suspect that ultimately led to a conviction.

  In rare instances, the suspect actually confessed. That could also be thrown out later on various constitutional grounds, which was why it was always useful to have the physical evidence.

  Bearing that in mind, Franco had filed charges against Francois. She was then taken to a local hospital where a rape kit was used. A piece of her hair was carefully snipped and placed in an evidence bag. Likewise, swabs from inside her vagina. Those swabs held the semen from her assailant and in turn, the semen held the malefactor’s DNA code.

  The police were hopeful that Francois might say something so incriminating that they could use it to get a court order demanding that Francois turn over samples of his saliva, hair and blood. Lab specialists would then crack his DNA code from those samples and attempt to match it up to the DNA code from the semen taken from Franco’s vagina.

  A match would confirm Franco’s story. That, coupled with the bruises on her neck, which police were certain matched Francois’s hands, could lead to a rape conviction and, perhaps, a search warrant to search the house for further evidence. Of course, there would be no guarantee of conviction, even with hard evidence.

  Most people looked at prostitutes as being a lower order of life, not subject to the same protection given to most. At trial, the jury might figure the woman really consented and things got out of control. In that case, they could convict on a lesser charge than rape, maybe even find Francois not guilty, in which case he would walk.

  They continued to talk. There was a lot to talk about.

  Back in his office, Bill Siegrist looked at his watch. Five o’clock. He had an appointment and didn’t want to be late.

  Siegrist had been planning on putting a new roof on his twenty-six-year-old house for the past two years. Although it was only early September, he knew from years past that winter comes fast to the Hudson Valley. One day it could be fall, with the air sharp, cool and comfortable, and the next, literally overnight, winter could set in. There were years with frosts in late September.

  So he needed to get the roof done once and for all and while he was at it, it was also time to get some changes made to the house’s structure. To do all that, he had hired local architect Doug Hughes.

  Siegrist drove out of town, going east on the side streets. He wanted to avoid the inevitable Church Street traffic until he was farther out of the city, into the township. Then he turned back onto Church, technically Route 55, and continued heading east. He passed a few strip malls and then scattered sections of rolling farmland.

  Siegrist made his home with his wife, Liz, and his children eight miles outside of town in Pleasant Valley. It was as bucolic as the name implied—a stark contrast to the urban chaos of the cop’s working environment.

  When Siegrist got home, he found Liz waiting for him in the backyard. They chatted for a bit, gazing up at the roof and noting its poor condition. It really did need replacing. Just then the doorbell rang. The couple made their way through the house’s interior, out to the front door.

  “Hi, Doug,” said Siegrist as he opened the door.

  It was the architect Hughes, come to get final approval on his plans.

  “Let’s go into the dining room,” said Siegrist, leading the way.

  After exchanging small talk, Hughes laid his blueprints down on the dining room table. Carefully, he unrolled them. The Siegrists gazed at the blueprints. They were very satisfied with what they saw. They liked Hughes’s work. He understood exactly what needed to be done. Nodding, Siegrist reached up and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Then he pulled at his tie, lowering it a little.

  With pen in hand, he reached down to initial the plans. It would be the final go-ahead for construction. Then, just before his pen touched the paper, the phone rang. Siegrist was annoyed.

  “I’ll get it,” Siegrist said to his wife. He strode back up to the kitchen, where he picked the receiver off the wall.

  In some localities, it is standard practice to take down the first interview longhand, the second on tape. The town of Poughkeepsie was such a locality.

  A little before 4:38 P.M., Francois was once again advised of his Miranda rights. Once again, he waived them. Mannain was tense.

  When Francois began talking a second time, a tape recorder, which had been brought into the room, was turned on to record his every word. McCready and Mannain then asked him to repeat the details of his day, how he happened to meet Diane Franco and to tell them again what happened.

  “This morning at about eight-thirty A.M.,” he began, “I was downtown.”

  “Where?” McCready asked.

  “In the vicinity of Pershing Avenue,” Francois answered and the cops knew that was part of the neighborhood where prostitutes hung out on the street waiting for johns to pick them up.

  “I was driving alone in my car.”

  “The Camry?”

  “Yes. I stopped and spoke with Diane Franco. I knew her.”

  It seemed that
Franco and Francois had transacted business on a few prior occasions.

  “She agreed to have sex with me for money.”

  Franco got into the Camry and Francois drove over to his house. He didn’t have an automatic garage-door opener. He got out and, by hand, opened the door, painted with old gray paint that was chipped and faded.

  “I drove the car into the garage, got out and closed it [the door].”

  When he got back in, he gave Franco, in advance, money to have sexual intercourse with him. They did it on the front seat of the car. After a while of his pounding into her, of his massive weight bearing down on the slight prostitute’s body, she said, “I want to stop.”

  Francois wouldn’t. He’d paid and he was going to get everything that was his entitlement. They had a disagreement. Franco wasn’t going to give it up. They argued. Francois blew his top.

  “I got angry and grabbed her around the neck, started to choke her with my hands.”

  Somehow he managed to calm down before he did any permanent physical damage. They went on to have sex again. The tape recorder was turned off.

  The brief tape-recorded questioning had produced a little more in the way of detail. Most detectives would have continued questioning him, because they clearly did not have enough to charge him with anything other than rape. That was a minor charge compared to nine counts of murder.

  Maybe the cops were psychic and figured there was no need to press. Maybe they were so intuitive they knew what would happen next. Or maybe it was just blind luck. What happened was that after the questioning Francois was left alone in Interview Room 112. After a while, he called out that he wanted to see the two officers who had been in the room with him. Mannain and McCready went in.