Body Dump

by Fred Rosen

“I’d like to talk to a prosecutor,” said Kendall Francois. “I want to look at the photos of prostitutes missing since 1993.”

  1993? The cops had only been concerned with the women missing since 1996. Were there more? And why did Francois want to discuss the missing women, unless he knew something?

  In police work, it’s best not to jump to conclusions. Without further analysis, a call was placed to the on-call prosecutor, Dutchess County Assistant District Attorney Marjorie J. Smith. Her job, during her shift, in addition to her regular work, was to assist cops in putting together cases. She was summoned from her office on Main Street. So was task force member Arthur Boyko of the state police.

  Francois was shown a series of Web-site photos of women whose pictures appeared on official Missing Person’s reports. Methodically, Francois flipped through the papers and carefully separated them out. He placed four photos in one pile. Mannain looked down at the pictures.

  In one pile, Francois had placed pictures of Wendy Meyers, Gina Barone, Catherine Marsh and Sandra French.

  “I killed them,” said Kendall Francois.

  Mannain looked up sharply.

  “What?”

  “I killed them.”

  Holy shit!

  The last thing he expected was for the guy to cop to the murders. The big man placed photos of Michelle Eason and Kathleen Hurley aside.

  “I don’t know about them.”

  He looked at the Web-site photo of Mary Healey Giaccone.

  “I’m not sure about her either.”

  Kendall Francois then continued with his statement.

  At the Siegrist house, the phone rang. Annoyed, Siegrist picked it up.

  “Hello?” said the lieutenant of detectives.

  “Bill, get over here!” It was Skip Mannain and he sounded excited. “Get your fucking ass over here!”

  “Skip, what—”

  “He’s going for it.”

  “He’s what?”

  “He’s going for it,” Mannain repeated. “He’s drawing maps!”

  Siegrist gripped the phone harder. “Oh, my God.”

  “Get your fucking ass over here!”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Quickly, Siegrist slung the receiver back in the cradle and, in almost the same motion, pivoted and strode quickly out into the dining area. Liz and Doug looked at him expectantly.

  “I gotta go,” he said to his wife, kissing her quickly on the cheek.

  Liz was used to this behavior, but the architect wasn’t. He watched quizzically as the cop went out the front door. Before he left, Siegrist pushed his tie up and buttoned his shirt.

  Outside, Siegrist was in his unmarked car in a flash. He reached down under his seat and brought up a domed light, which he attached to the roof of the Taurus. He gunned the motor to life, then spun around hard and out the driveway. Hitting Route 55 going west, he turned on his siren. Suddenly, traffic parted like the Red Sea. Siegrist didn’t really notice any of that. When one’s mind is extremely active, it can perform two tasks at the same time—for instance, driving and thinking about a murder case.

  Siegrist could see how and where he was going, but his mind projected forward four miles, to the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Station. It was there, in an interview room, that Kendall Francois was talking. Finally.

  Be careful what you wish for, you might get it, goes the old proverb. Siegrist and company had wanted to know what had happened to the missing women. Now, maybe, that was finally happening.

  Holy shit, thought Siegrist, hands swiftly negotiating the wheel. If he’s drawing maps, we may be up in the woods all night. The detective lieutenant expected that Francois was confessing that he’d killed the women and buried them somewhere in the woods outside town. To Siegrist, that made sense.

  Nice remote location, maybe nobody finds them. Had to be something like that. Where else could he put that many people?

  Siegrist was very excited and few things did that for him. His son’s graduation from college was one. But this case, the agony over it and to see it come to a satisfactory conclusion … As he drove, Siegrist continued to turn the case over in his mind.

  Siegrist figured that Francois had finally decided to confess “because the jig was up.” With a warrant to get into the house, all would become clear very soon. It was actually a practical matter to confess. Perhaps he could hope for some sort of leniency with his cooperation.

  The last thing Siegrist or anyone else close to the case figured Francois for was a conscience. If he had one, he wouldn’t have racked up a kill total greater than Jack the Ripper’s.

  Serial murder is actually a very rare crime. You have as much of a chance of being a victim of a serial murderer as winning the lottery. It is a metaphor that would not comfort any of the women, but it is true nevertheless.

  For those in law enforcement, the opportunity, therefore, to be involved in a serial murder investigation is rare. Some of the assembled cops and the prosecutor had been involved on the periphery of the White serial murder case many years before. None of the cops, though, had been the primary officers involved in such a case.

  Once Francois had started talking, he kept going. With little prompting, the big guy began to tell the cops exactly where to look. It was late, of course, too late to help the women who had been his victims. Closure, though, was possible for their families. Discovering and identifying their bodies would do exactly that. Then there was one more job they had to do.

  Death. Everyone hoped for one more death out of the case. New York State had the death penalty, recently reinstated by the state legislature and Governor Pataki. The idea now was to put as strong a case together as possible so the prosecutor could seek the death penalty against Kendall Francois. The more he talked, the more he plunged the executioner’s needle loaded with poison into his arm.

  Everyone in the room knew that. It was doubtful any of them wanted the big man to stop.

  Twelve

  Route 44 winds its way out of Poughkeepsie, stretching all the way to the New York—Connecticut border thirty miles away. But you don’t have to travel that far to get to Troop K of the New York State Troopers.

  Troop K’s headquarters is a low-lying, oblong building that sits on an unprepossessing lot in the suburban town of Millbrook. Millbrook and its surrounding towns are like what Long Island is to New York City—a stretch of suburban towns from which the workers that man Poughkeepsie’s offices commute every day. What makes Troop K unique, though, is that it serves four of the surrounding counties, as far south as Westchester. That’s a lot of area to cover.

  For Tommy Martin, autumn, and the days leading up to it, was the perfect time for business. It was cool and generally dry, perfect weather for processing crime scenes. Tommy was the senior investigator in Troop K’s Forensic Identification Unit. Only thirty-one, he had been there for ten years.

  Late on the evening of September 2, as Kendall Francois was concluding his statement to police, Tommy Martin was relaxing in his home, in a town just a few minutes from Troop K in Millbrook. It was sometime around midnight when the phone rang. His wife, used to such nocturnal summonses, simply turned over in bed as Tommy picked up the receiver.

  On the other end was Kevin Rosa, Tom’s forty-year-old partner. He had come on the unit in 1995, and held the rank of investigator. It was his first day back from a wonderful late summer vacation and he had decided to stay late that night to catch up on paperwork. He was looking at some slides of a crime scene he had helped process not too long before when a call came in from the Town of Poughkeepsie Police.

  “Guess what, they got the guy,” Rosa told a still-sleepy Martin.

  “What?”

  “I said they got the guy, Tommy. The Poughkeepsie Police. They got the guy that strangled those girls. He gave a statement.”

  “What?”

  Tommy Martin didn’t believe his partner. Rosa was a clever practical joker.

  “I don’t believe you,” Martin continued. “I
’m staying right here.”

  “This is for real,” Rosa answered.

  Holy moley, Martin thought. Even Kevin wouldn’t take a joke this far.

  “They want us at the town [police headquarters].”

  “Meet you over there,” said Martin.

  He hung up the phone.

  The case may have been unusual, but the call wasn’t. In the Hudson Valley, when local police needed a forensic specialist, the call always went out to Tommy Martin.

  Tommy, as everyone who knew him called him, had started out as a road trooper. His primary job had been to keep the roads safe and, of course, give out tickets for speeding. But none of that was satisfying. He began volunteering his services as an extra set of eyes and hands and, most importantly, brains to process crime scenes. While his broad shoulders and blond hair made him look like the archetype of the stupid college jock, appearance, as it so often is, was deceiving.

  Martin might have looked like a fullback, but he had the mind of a college professor. He also doubled as one at night at Columbia Greene Community College up in Greene County. Martin had taken his criminology degree at Albany State College, where he received a B.S. in criminal justice. During the day, he processed crime scenes.

  Seeing his potential when he first started on the force, his superiors had decided to allow him to put his inquisitive mind to good use. He began with simple burglaries, working his way up to fatal car accidents. Whenever the forensic investigators needed help beyond their staff allotment of personnel, the call went out for Tommy and he was only too glad to answer it. Eventually, he was promoted out of uniform and became a full-time forensics investigator in 1992.

  Since that time, forensic science had made many advances, not the least of which was the now common practice of identifying a suspect through his genetic fingerprint, DNA. But no matter how far science had come, there was still a human being out there physically gathering the evidence to analyze.

  Sometimes, Tommy was called in on cases that really weren’t crimes. It could be some sort of car accident where it wasn’t clear how the accident was caused. It might be a man who died from carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in his car in his garage and whose wife found him with the motor running.

  Was it suicide or murder?

  Tommy Martin had the luxury of being called in when there was a crime scene to process. His whole contribution lay in his ability to interpret hard and fast things one could touch, like guns and knives, sinews and blood, skin and bone. Tommy didn’t have to worry about tracking down the “bad guy.” Tommy didn’t have to worry about talking to the victims’ families. Tommy didn’t even have to deal directly with scumbag murderers. What he did was give the district attorney the palpable evidence to convict felons.

  In other words, Tommy Martin didn’t discriminate. He was a scientist with a conscience. He was a modern version of the Old West tracker. Like his Old West counterpart, Martin tracked outlaws, except he did it scientifically by processing crime scenes.

  Tommy had done a lot of crime scenes. He couldn’t remember how many. Thousands, probably. It seemed like he was always busy. Since Troop K serviced four of the largest counties in the state, he was just as apt to be called in on a case in wealthy Westchester County or in the more rural Dutchess County, which was where he got the call on the Francois case.

  Despite all his experience, the Francois case would be unusual for Martin. His hard work on it would eventually lead to the most dramatic scene in the history of New York jurisprudence, stretching back over two hundred years to the dawn of the republic.

  Less than a half hour after getting the call to get to work, Tommy Martin strolled into the lobby of the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Headquarters. Martin had been through this routine many times before. He knew the procedure before they could get into a suspect’s house. The idea was to stage your troops before going into battle.

  Martin said, “We applied for warrants to search the house. The idea is to wait for your ducks to line up,” so that no court could ever throw out evidence seized in an unconstitutional search.

  By one A.M., the assistant district attorney had found a judge to sign a search warrant. They now had a legal right to enter Kendall Francois’s home and search for evidence of murder. Martin and Rosa piled into their unmarked 1995 Chevy van and began the short drive to Fulton Avenue. By the time they got to the Francois home, the city and town cops were already there.

  “The first thing you do is set up the crime-scene tape,” Martin explained. “You establish a perimeter around the crime scene, in this case the Francois house.”

  The two state forensic specialists began that process, stringing the tape directly around the house from the curb and all the way around into the yard and back again. While they were doing that, the detectives knocked on the door of the house.

  “Yes?” asked the man who answered the door. His name was McKinley Francois. A factory worker, he was Kendall’s father.

  “Mr. Francois, we’re detectives,” they said, flashing their badges, “and we’ve got a warrant to search the premises.”

  McKinley Francois had no time to be confused. The police hustled him and his wife, Paulette, and their grown daughter Kierstyn out of the house. This was a situation where the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. The constitutional right of the state to search the premises for evidence of murder far outweighed the privacy rights that the Francois family were entitled to.

  It was nothing personal. Where the family would go, what they would do, was not the state’s problem. Besides, they wouldn’t be out on the street. Family and friends could take them in. There was probably some provision in their homeowner’s insurance policy that would pay for shelter. If not, the county could always find something for them.

  What it came down to was this: once the police verified there were bodies in the house, through Francois’s statements, which they felt to be true, access to the house was restricted. It had to be, in order for Tommy Martin to do his job. The evidence had to be as pristine as possible so the state could get a conviction.

  As for the Francois family, they had to face a basic question: where could they now go? The police had legally kicked them out of their house, the house Paulette and Nat owned, in the middle of the night.

  After the police dispossessed them, Nat, Paulette and Kierstyn decided to stay with Raquelle, the family’s oldest daughter, who had her own place in another part of the city. And as Kendall Francois’s loved ones tried to absorb the enormity of what was happening, the sun came up and the detectives continued their work.

  Too many homicide cases in the United States have been compromised because of shoddy crime-scene management. In the worst-case scenarios, this shoddy police work allows the guilty to go free. The innocent can wind up being punished.

  The most important thing in a homicide investigation is restricting access to the crime scene. Period. If done really professionally, that means that only crime-scene specialists will process the crime scene. At the Francois house that’s exactly what happened.

  “The first piece of crime-scene tape surrounds the property,” Tommy explained. “Then we rope off the middle of the block” to further restrict access. “What we are doing is establishing an inside perimeter and outside perimeter to the house.”

  The police officers manning the perimeters wore different uniforms. Because the outside perimeter was in the city of Poughkeepsie, that was the uniform those cops wore. Their counterparts, on the inside perimeter where the house was, wore the blues of the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Department.

  What no one dared talk about was that conflict might have compromised the investigation. It had taken a long time to establish the joint task force, too long, many both in and outside government felt. Finding the bodies, bringing closure to the affected families, would go a long way toward resolution.

  Tommy Martin looked up at the Victorian house. It looked ominous in the darkness. But he had a job to do. They were going
to find the bodies inside and make the case against the son of a bitch.

  It’s the perfect time of year, not too hot, not too cold, thought Tommy Martin as he changed into his suit.

  The neighbors, who had already been roused by the intense police presence outside, flocked to their windows. Scattered lights went on all through the block. Neighbors came out on their stoops and began talking to the uniforms.

  “What’s going on?”

  The cops, taciturn at first, not sure what they could say, just said it was an investigation. But soon, it became evident. The cops were there to look at the house of the guy they suspected had killed nine prostitutes.

  “It’s the Francoises’ house.”

  “Yeah, that place smelled bad!”

  You could hear the comments up and down the street. The police, meanwhile, spoke amongst themselves in quiet, almost reverential tones. They knew the grim business in front of them and had respect for it.

  The crowd hushed when they saw what happened next. The cowardly ones peering out from behind closed shades, the more courageous out on the street, saw the doors to the unmarked Ford Chevy van open. Out came two men dressed in Tyvek space suits. Inside those suits were Tommy Martin and Kevin Rosa.

  The suits the forensic specialists wore did resemble space suits. They were white and fit from head to toe, with helmets. Full, knee-length boots completed the otherworld effect.

  “They’re actually Tyvek Coveralls,” Martin explained, “sterile suits that keep biohazards from getting on us. See, it’s easy to contaminate a crime scene. Like, you bend over to cut out a swatch of carpet that you think has blood on it and your head drips sweat onto it. Even saliva. We all spray a little when we talk.”

  That wouldn’t do. The specialists’ fluids contaminating the scene could lead to evidence being compromised and ultimately, an innocent verdict. Martin walked slowly up the driveway, gauging his surroundings. As he got closer to the side door of the house, the odor almost overpowered him.

  “I could smell death, walking up that driveway,” he said.

  The crime-scene specialist took out his flashlight and thumbed it on. The powerful beam struck out, illuminating the darkness. As Martin entered the side door of the house, going into the basement, he noticed a battered clothes dryer on his right.