by Fred Rosen
“There was a bunch of shit in that basement. It was loaded with crap.”
There was a rusty bicycle that had seen better days. Off to the right was the furnace and, beyond that, a bookshelf. Then there was an overturned chair, its green paint chipping. An old baby stroller stood off to the side. Francois actually had a brother who was a graduate of Syracuse University and another sister, neither of whom lived at home. Maybe one of them had been in that carriage. Or maybe Francois himself, when he was a baby.
Back in the very rear of the basement was a crawl space that looked like a ledge, about five feet above the ground. Under it was a small wooden chair. Martin paused. His colleague Rosa had come up beside him. As one, they had shone their lights up into the crawl space.
What they saw in the harsh light were two objects that were covered with a black plastic bag. Or maybe they were inside the bag. It was hard to be sure. They needed to go in to be certain. But they couldn’t, at least not yet, as much as they wanted to.
“You can’t hop in and pull off the plastic,” Martin explained. “That would destroy evidence.”
Martin shone his light again on the bag. That was when he saw something protruding out of the bag, at the top. At first glance, he had missed it, missed it because “it was abstract, seeing it out of human context.
“It was a knee. Someone’s knee.”
What Martin and Rosa were looking at was a knee, or what had once been one. The skin hung in dark brown ribbons. The tendons had not thoroughly decomposed yet. The skin was just barely there and under it, in all its engineering complexity, was the knee joint, looking bone white in the ghostly light.
Whoever this woman was, she had been there for some time. She didn’t look lonely though. The bag looked as though it contained not one, but two bodies. Spraying his light out farther, Martin saw the second object, closer to him than the first. It, too, looked like it was a giant plastic bag, filled up with bones.
The cops had already established that there were bodies in the basement. They had known to look there because Kendall Francois had told them, hours before in the interrogation room, that the crawl space in the basement was where he had unceremoniously dumped some of them. The attic was next.
Breathing shallowly through their space suits, Martin and Rosa withdrew from the basement and climbed the stairs that led to the main story of the house. Neither man felt any anxiety. This was business as usual to them. They were professionals. In some way, they could close off their brains to the tragedy they were witnessing—the end of people’s lives, people with hopes and dreams like they had.
“We ‘do’ a lot of natural deaths and suicides,” says Martin, “where the cause of death is initially in doubt until we investigate. So when we work a crime scene, we’re used to seeing bodies all the time.”
On the first-floor landing, the specialists went through a doorway and into the kitchen. It was dirty, grungy, and disgusting.
Dirt was everywhere, the ancient linoleum blackened from it. Garbage, plastic bottles, half-eaten food in plates had been dumped everywhere. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes.
Over the filthy stove, someone had placed a rack of store-bought dried spices. Martin couldn’t even imagine, nor did he want to, what culinary masterpieces might have been created in this pigsty.
They would search the rest of the house further later on. It was getting late and they needed to get into the attic. That was where they expected their next major discoveries to be. They walked up the inside stairs and found themselves on a second-floor landing. Martin noticed that the house was in such dilapidated condition that some of the beams were exposed. The house had a rosewood foundation, which under other circumstances could be made to look beautiful.
They opened a small door cut into the wall. Inside, Martin climbed up a flight of stairs that led to the attic. Once at the top, he didn’t step into the room. Again, he needed to take a look around first before he destroyed any evidence. Slowly, methodically, the flashlight beam circled the room, picking up old pieces of furniture and bags, scanning, scanning—
This time, it was more obvious. Lying over there in a corner.
“On the right, near the top, was a clear plastic bag and inside were the skeletal remains, I could see, of at least one person. I couldn’t then tell how many might be inside.”
But they were skeletons and, even from a distance, safe to say human skeletons. Which, of course, meant they had been there for quite some time. Otherwise, decomposition wouldn’t have been so far along.
“The body or bodies were partially in and out of the bag, which he’d put into one of those hard-plastic, kiddy swimming pools,” remembered Martin, who took Polaroids of all the bodies.
It was too early to tell if what they were looking at was the actual crime scene. Maybe Francois had killed them someplace else and transported them here. A forensic analysis of the place would answer that question. But for now, what they had was a scene striking for its lack of drama.
There was no blood. There was no weapon. There were no signs of a struggle. There were no signs of any crime for that matter. Just a dirty crawl space, except for one little thing.
What used to be human beings had been stashed in the attic and crawl space of the Francois home.
By the time, Martin and Rosa left the house, Siegrist was already on the scene and up to speed. Martin showed him the Polaroids of the remains. Siegrist looked at them with seeming dispassion.
“Yes, he did it,” said Martin quietly. He knew the cops had been on the case since almost the beginning and had a huge stake in its outcome.
Siegrist remembers the tension suddenly draining out of his body. It was like a toxin that had polluted his entire system. Once, it was there. Now, finally, after two years, it was gone.
Bill Siegrist felt very, very tired, like somebody who’s just had a great workout. He felt good because now the police had a sense of closure to the case.
While the crime-scene specialists were doing their job, the detectives were doing theirs. They had searched the more obvious regions of the house, including Francois’s second-floor bedroom and come up with some damning evidence, which they had placed in evidence envelopes, which were carefully catalogued. Among the things on the list of items confiscated from the house, Siegrist saw the following:
• Audrey Pugliese’s driver’s license
• A pack of condoms found under a coffee table
• Francois’s Dutchess County Community College identification card
• A list of courses the college was offering for the fall 1998 semester
• A leather necklace
• A box of color film
The most damning piece of evidence, Siegrist knew, was Pugliese’s driver’s license. If Francois didn’t kill her, how did it come to be inside his house? For his part, Mannain, who had also arrived, had something he had to do.
Skip Mannain had been on the case for the full two years, longer than anyone else had. He had seen the investigation through all its highs and lows, mostly lows, until Francois confessed. But the confession, or statement as it’s called in the trade, does not stop the investigation from continuing.
In addition to the investigation by the forensic team headed up by Martin and Rosa, in coming days, detectives would begin interviewing all of Francois’s known acquaintances, backtracking his movements, trying to put together as strong a case as possible. In the event there was a constitutional challenge to his confession, they needed to be prepared with concrete evidence to prosecute him.
But that evening, Mannain had a much grimmer duty than mere investigation. While the women in the attic had not yet been identified, he needed to contact the next of kin of the missing women and tell them what was up before the media swarmed all over the story. It was the only humane thing to do.
Thirteen
At ten P.M., Patricia Barone’s evening was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Mannain, with news of her daughter Gina.
“I told Skip [months ago], once we find one, we’re going to find them all and we’re going to find them right here. Right under our noses,” she later said.
By morning, others in her circle knew what had happened.
“Everybody’s saying, ‘My God, you’re holding up.’ I mourned my daughter for a long time. It’s not like it was yesterday.”
Back at headquarters, Mannain picked up the phone and called Albany to speak with Marguerite Marsh, Cathy Marsh’s mother.
“The authorities there [in Poughkeepsie] called me and told me my daughter may be one of the women they found in his house. They wanted to prepare me, but haven’t positively identified her yet,” she would later tell a local paper. “It’s been hard and the waiting has been very hard, and now we still have to wait to hear and this is even harder.”
What Marsh did not know was that her daughter and Francois had both attended Dutchess County Community College at the same time. At times, they had probably passed each other in the hallways on the way to class, never knowing how they would inevitably be linked.
The arrest of an alleged serial killer always makes the news. Later that morning, the story moved on the National Associated Press Wire with the following headline:
ARREST MADE IN MURDER, MAY BE LINKED TO OTHER MISSING WOMEN
The article reiterated the facts in the case, with the news that the alleged killer, Kendall L. Francois, had been arrested by police and was in custody. The case had gone national and would stay that way.
Bill Siegrist reported to work early the next morning. It was amazing how much more energy he had now that Francois was in custody. Then Mannain walked in. They had both had just a few hours of restless sleep.
Without saying a thing, the two cops walked up to each other and shook hands heartily. They smiled. That was something they hadn’t done at work in a long time. There were tears in their eyes. They had shared a bond that few people would ever know.
They really did look like astronauts in their Tyvek coveralls and masks. There were over eleven crime specialists in all, led by Tommy Martin. They were following the advanced, standard operating procedure the state police used when processing a crime scene where bodies may be buried.
The eleven men and women lined up shoulder to shoulder outside the house. With Rosa supervising, they placed, in even rows, brown, sterile paper about four feet from the house and raked stuff onto it that had fallen onto the grass and weeds. No telling what they might get that could be of value later.
When that job was done, they moved, uniformly, away from the house. They examined the ground, putting evidence flags in the ground next to something that shouldn’t, in the normal course of things, be there.
Inside the house, Martin led four other crime-scene specialists in processing the area in the attic and crawl space where the bodies had been found. Five hundred-watt halogen lights on slim poles were set up to provide illumination. The power supply was a motor home that stood outside, the crime specialists’ home away from home.
Eight bodies in total had shown up inside the house, eight of nine missing women. Where was the ninth?
“We worked hard on the scene,” Martin remembered. “We wanted to document everything.”
To help with that, full videotape was taken of the interior and exterior, both before and after the search.
When the crime scene outside had been completely gone over, and nothing unusual had shown up pending laboratory analysis of some of the more difficult to identify detritus, they brought in ground-penetrating radar. Men carrying what looked like treasure-hunting radar scopes walked slowly over the ground, waiting for the machines’ sirens to go off, which would signal that a body had been found.
The radar picked up any spatial disturbances belowground, that might indicate earth had been dug out, then the hole refilled, with a body or bodies in it. But despite this technology, the ninth body did not turn up.
The investigators next turned to the garage. Through checking records, it was discovered that the concrete floor of the rear garage was new, less than a year old. It could easily have been installed to hide bodies buried underneath by the killer in the house.
Jackhammers were brought in and the neighbors were treated to the racket. The concrete garage floor was completely drilled out. With that done, sequential trenches were dug into the underlying earth. Nothing was found save worms. No evidence of human remains.
Back up in the house, with the crime scene fully processed, Martin and Rosa were now ready to remove the bodies for autopsy and identification. This was a delicate part of the investigation, because there might be evidence under the bodies. Martin and Rosa had the most experience at spotting the unusual.
“When you remove a body,” says Martin, “the first thing you do is open up the covering surrounding it, in this case, the bags, and take photos. I look closely around the bodies. If I see any plastic, I secure it in an evidence envelope and have it checked for prints later.”
Two of the bodies in the crawl space had been placed one on top of the other. They were just a little bit buried.
“We excavate with whisk brooms and clay garden trowels, so no possible evidence can be damaged,” Martin continued.
It was physically difficult work. Both men were six footers working in a crawl space that had a two-foot ceiling. One by one, the skeletons were removed, each placed onto a metal gurney, and a white sheet placed over them. Then the grisly remains were wheeled out in the warm autumn sunshine.
Everyone in the media, from Maine to California, had heard about the case. Flashes went off in the faces of the cops who wheeled the bodies to a waiting van. Harsh TV lights mounted on top of video cameras recorded the proceedings for the local evening news.
It would not be until the third day, September 5, that all the bodies were finally removed pending autopsy by Dr. Barbara Wolf, the state’s forensic pathologist at her Albany office.
“After we got the bodies out, we asked, ‘What else is there?’” says Martin.
What was left was the dirt in the crawl space that might contain evidence that could further tie Francois to the murders. Using five-gallon buckets, the earth was slowly emptied out, sifted, and marked from what part of the crawl space it came from. They followed the same procedure in the attic. Of the five women there in the trash bags, Martin noticed that one of the bodies had a little bit of skin on its fingertip. It was the only one.
Another body had two rings on one hand. They were removed and the ground underneath sifted for evidence. Eventually, when the two crime specialists finished at the Francois house, they headed up to state police headquarters in Albany.
The new state police headquarters was located off the New York State Thruway at exit 24, a little south of downtown Albany. It was the same place where Senior Investigator Jimmy Ayling worked.
The building itself was a low-lying, modernistic, drab-looking cube. On one side of it was an array of antenna and satellite uplink dishes, making it very clear that the building housed state-of-the-art communications systems. Curiously enough, it had not cost the taxpayers a cent.
“The new building was built with money confiscated from drug dealers and other lawbreakers,” Ayling explained.
Those miscreants had kindly financed what on the inside was a surprisingly spacious place, done in white and pale gray, with an open conference center on the bottom floor behind glass doors. Ringed above it on the upper floors were balconies that led to roomy offices. Even the cubicles, where some of the crime specialists sat, looked spacious and neat.
The first floor was honeycombed with examination rooms, shiny and white, filled with all kinds of futuristic-looking scientific apparatus. Some of the rooms were furnished with antiseptic white walls and shiny metal examining tables. It was on these tables, surrounded by closets filled with medical supplies, that the remains of the eight bodie
s would be placed for further examination and autopsy.
Outside, on the rear loading dock, the ambulance containing the women’s remains had just arrived from Poughkeepsie. As Ayling watched, the rear doors were thrown open, the covered bodies taken out on gurneys and rolled into two of the first-floor examination rooms. Dr. Barbara Wolf, assistant chief medical examiner, prepared to do the autopsies.
Using dental records, Wolfe identified a body almost immediately as that of Catina Newmaster. The local police and prosecutor were notified. Wasting no time, Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady filed charges against Kendall L. Francois: the murder in the second degree of Catina Newmaster.
Murder in the second degree is not a capital charge. Until Grady could prove premeditation, he couldn’t file for murder one. But he was confident that, when all the facts came out, he would be able to upgrade the charge to murder one, which meant he could ask for the death penalty.
With the indictment handed down, the recriminations started, beginning at no less a conspicuous place than the front page of the New York Times. The headline on page one of the paper, September 4, 1998, read:
POLICE ARE CRITICIZED AS POUGHKEEPSIE HOUSE YIELDS CORPSES
The article quoted Georgiana Johnson, who was present while the police processed the crime scene. Johnson “said that her daughter Debbie Annan had twice told the police that she barely escaped alive from an encounter with Mr. Francois, who had picked her up on the corner of Academy and Montgomery Streets, took her to his home for paid sex and tried to strangle her.”
Speaking for her daughter, Johnson claimed that Annan “occasionally helped police in undercover drug operations” and “had given detectives Mr. Francois’s name and address.”
Johnson also said the cops ignored her. Annan, she said, was now free of her addiction to crack and was working “double shifts as a cashier at a convenience store” in Ocala, Florida.