Body Dump

by Fred Rosen

  Serial killers might not be the Times’ cup of tea, but there was no question it helped sell newspapers. The Times, though, seemed to drop the ball. No mention was made in the article of whether or not Annan had filed a complaint against Francois, without which the police were powerless to do anything. But not to be outdone by their tabloid rival the Daily News, which the previous day had a story on Francois with a headline that screamed SERIAL SLAYER EYED, the Times article continued with charges against the police.

  The Times cited a story similar to Annan’s that was told by a “one-time prostitute … interviewed on tape by Irene Cornell of WCBS Radio. The woman said that she told police that Mr. Francois had tried to strangle her in November 1996, a month after the first disappearance in the case. She remembered that during the assault Mr. Francois suddenly stopped himself from choking her and said, ‘Oh my God, I almost did it again.’”

  This was inconsistent with what all of the other women who had had close encounters had reported. Francois had mentioned nothing about this during his confession. It is highly doubtful that had he said such a thing, implicating himself in the murders, and police were aware he said it, that they wouldn’t have followed it up instead of spending two frustrating years trying to put a case together against the psychopath.

  What the radio report really implied was that because the victims were prostitutes, the cops didn’t pursue the case as aggressively as they would have if the victims had been respectable civilians.

  “All the complaints that came to us were handled in a proper manner and we have done everything we can to solve this crime,” Siegrist said in the article. No less a participant than Patricia Barone, Gina Barone’s mother, came to the defense of the police.

  “They absolutely did their job. They picked up on it the day I reported her missing and took it from there,” said Barone.

  Barone maintained her calm.

  “In my head, I’d come to terms with it,” she explained. “I had a feeling she was gone all this time. I always felt when the good Lord thought I was ready to hear it, I’d hear it.”

  For his part, District Attorney Grady remained closemouthed. He had learned from a previous high-profile case to treat the press very gingerly. Grady declined to enumerate details of the task force’s investigation, but he did admit that other women had come forward with stories of having rough sex with Francois.

  “Just because incidents took place doesn’t mean arrests can happen,” he accurately pointed out. “You need probable cause, sufficient evidence,” which the Times failed to inform its reading public.

  The article concluded with a quote from Giovanna Vellone, seventeen, who attended Arlington Middle School at the time Francis was a hall monitor there.

  “He gave out lots of detentions for everything,” Vellone said, though what that had to do with Kendall Francois being a serial killer was unclear, not to mention confusing.

  The recriminations continued, with speculation in the Poughkeepsie Record about why Francois had been able to get his school jobs despite his arrest and conviction on a sexual charge.

  “A guy who had bodies in his house was working in their middle school,” said Assemblyman John Guerin, a Republican conservative who served in the state legislature as a representative from Ulster County across the river. Guerin also felt that Democratic Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver should bear some of the blame for Francois’s ability to commit his crimes while still an employee of the school district.

  “For over twenty years, New York City schoolchildren have been protected by a law that requires criminal background checks on all school employees. Silver has not permitted that to become law for the rest of New York’s schoolchildren,” said Guerin.

  Politicians like Guerin, and the pontificating TV reporters looked at the Francois case as one giant morality play. There had to be good and evil and most important, someone to blame for the killer’s very existence and his ability to commit his crimes in secret.

  That Kendall Francois was not only intelligent but also clever; that he was physically strong enough to subdue his victims without any outcry so that no one heard him as he killed; none of those things counted as much as laying blame. The “other guy’s” shoulders were as good a place as any.

  “If a school district had any reason to not believe someone, we would investigate their background. School districts take people at their word,” said Education Department spokesman Bill Hirschen in the story.

  Added Arlington School Superintendent Donald Rothman: “If there was a violation for solicitation, we would have fired him. I would have said, ‘You’re outta here.’”

  No one bothered to mention that it’s awfully hard to catch a guy like Francois, who acts as normal as the next guy and yet is practicing his serial-killing craft in the shadows. People needed good guys and bad guys, and even though the truth lay somewhere in between, that just wouldn’t do.

  The public expected all the principals in the case to be tied up with a neat bow and fitted into either one of those categories. The alternative was even worse: despite being suspected by the police, a serial killer was free to continue his killing without fear of punishment or reprisal. These kinds of opinions received as much ink as the reactions from the families of the deceased.

  In the wake of the big man’s arrest, nothing was more poignant than the printed comments from the grieving families. Marguerite Marsh recalled that in the fall of 1996, her daughter Catherine Marsh had wanted to come home. She figured she had her drug addiction beat.

  “She was a very good student, basketball player and a lovely little girl with everything going for her until that cocaine got her,” said Marsh. “I want everyone to know the good side. She was a beautiful girl.”

  After years of being addicted to drugs, she had entered and was completing a rehabilitation program in Dutchess County. She called home to tell her mother, Marguerite, of her progress. Not only was she completing her rehab, she wanted to get custody again of her two children and maybe even get a college degree. But her mother wasn’t so sure.

  “I was afraid if she came up here, she was going to continue with her habit. But she kept calling and calling and finally I said, ‘Okay, come.’ That was the last I ever heard from her.”

  Heidi Cramer, the daughter of Sandra French, said, “I have mixed feelings. In a way, I hope they don’t find her because then she could be still alive. But in a way, it would be closure and this whole thing has been horrible.

  “As for Francois, I would like to put him in the electric chair. I think he should be put in the chair and let each of us have a turn at pulling that handle down. Let’s do it over and over until he’s dead.”

  Christopher Briggs, Catina Newmaster’s boyfriend, recalled her as a mother of five who loved flowers and dreamed of the ocean.

  “She wanted to straighten out her life and be with her kids. But Catina had a very bad drug problem. She cried on my shoulder about it a lot. People in Dutchess County have said the cops shouldn’t have even bothered looking for these women, that it was just one less crack-head or prostitute on the street. But these people all had families, and they shouldn’t be forgotten.”

  Perhaps it was Patricia Barone who had the best handle on the fallout from the murders. Barone, who had already been caring for her daughter’s daughter at the time of the junior Barone’s disappearance, said, “In the beginning, you know, it was ‘Where’s my mommy?’ And I’d tell her, ‘Your mommy doesn’t feel well. Mommy went away for a while.’ Then we’d say, ‘We’re looking for your mommy and can’t find her.’ Now it’s going to be, ‘Your mommy’s not coming home.’”

  The Francois family was heard from, too. While father, Nat, mother, Paulette, and sisters Raquelle and Kierstyn refused steadfastly to comment in the press, their cousin, MonRay Francois, took over as the unofficial family spokesman.

  MonRay Francois did not go looking for the very public limelight that he had been thrust into. It fell to him because he was the only Fran
cois with a listed phone number in the general area. Thus he was the one who received the anonymous calls.

  “They say things like, ‘I suggest you watch your back,’” Francois told the Poughkeepsie Journal. “I think they want to lash out. I’m sorry for their loss, but you can’t pick your family members.”

  Despite no evidence to the contrary, he seemed to be assuming that the threatening phone calls came from the families of his cousin’s victims. Francois maintained that in the days after the bodies were discovered, he had been in contact with Kendall Francois’s siblings, who said that they were paying more attention to their mother’s health as she dealt with the shock.

  “She’s a beautiful person and a sweet lady,” said MonRay Francois.

  Francois revealed that the father, whom he called “Nat,” was mild mannered, very quiet, but fun to be around, “a lot like Kendall.”

  That was a first in American criminal jurisprudence. No one had ever described a serial killer as fun to be around.

  Reporters flocked to ask MonRay Francois about his cousin’s early background. Francois thought there was nothing back there, in his past that could even remotely explain Kendall Francois’s actions.

  “I don’t know what made him tick. We’ll have to wait for the movie,” he said.

  In fact, MonRay Francois was a bit perturbed that reporters kept asking him questions, as though he were some sort of expert on his cousin, which clearly he was not.

  “People expect me to answer questions, thinking everybody’s so tight,” he said. “I’m sure everybody has family members they just say, ‘Hi, what’s up?’ and ‘’bye’ to, without having deep personal conversations.”

  For MonRay, the whole experience was more than a bit confusing.

  “I have so many questions and there’s only four people who can answer them—the people that lived in that house. And some of the questions, I’m not really sure I want the answers. For all this stuff that happened, that’s not the mild-mannered Kendall I know.”

  A mild-mannered Kendall Francois was not the man the Poughkeepsie street women were familiar with. It sounded as though MonRay Francois really didn’t know his cousin very well. He also did not have an answer as to how the family lived with the stench of the rotting bodies except the one that Kendall had supplied—the odor came from a family of dead raccoons in the attic.

  MonRay Francois claimed to know Catina Newmaster and Michelle Eason. How, he didn’t say. He also suspected that Kendall might have known some of the women from high school. But that was all it was, a suspicion, with no basis in fact. As for the rest of the family, MonRay said that he went out dancing with the sisters Kierstyn and Raquelle. Kendall, however, was not one of his buddies.

  Commenting on the women his cousin Kendall chose as victims, Francois continued, “No matter what their lifestyle was, I don’t think they deserve that [being murdered].”

  In between all the media coverage, Tommy Martin and the forensic crew continued in their work. On September 4, they positively identified Audrey Pugliese as one of the women they had taken from the attic. Identifying her through medical records, the cops also had her driver’s license, which Kendall Francois had saved as a souvenir. It was pretty damning evidence.

  Tommy Martin remembered something that would aid in the identification of the victims. Martin wanted to get a crack at the one body that had the peeling skin on its fingertip. He went up to Albany and found the body he was looking for on the cold autopsy table in the antiseptic examination room. Using forceps, scalpel and tweezers, Martin removed the skin that remained on the one corpse’s pinky finger.

  Once he had it, he placed it on a glass slide and lightly covered it with fingerprint ink. Then he pressed a second slide on top of the first, sandwiching the dyed skin in between. When placed under a microscope, what showed up on the skin were the ridge details of the victim’s fingerprint. It was photographed using a digital camera.

  If the victim was, as suspected, a prostitute, she should have a record. The photograph of the fingerprint was scanned into a computer, which then processed it through the state’s fingerprint database of women suspected and convicted of crimes. Almost immediately, they got a hit.

  The woman’s name was Wendy Meyers. It would be the third victim identified. She had been the first to disappear. A thirty-year-old known prostitute and drug user, her favorite place to pick up johns had been Poughkeepsie’s Main Street, not too far from Kendall Francois’s home.

  Notified of her death, Meyers’s relatives remembered a bright, young girl who had become addicted to a substance as deadly as Francois’s strong hands.

  The attempts at identification of the other victims continued. While Wolf did her autopsies as best she could with what was left of the victims, Poughkeepsie detectives subpoenaed the medical and dental records of all the missing prostitutes. The medical records would be useful if any of the women had had broken bones that had been set.

  A forensic dentist was called in to match the dental records to the teeth in the bodies. Because teeth survive bodily decomposition, they present the best chance for a matching identification.

  September 5, 1998

  Back in Poughkeepsie, the police continued their search of the Francois home. The residents on Fulton Avenue began to adjust to the fact that they had had a serial killer in their midst and never knew about it. When reporters did man-on-the-street interviews with them and the question was inevitably asked, “Did you suspect anything,” the answer was always the same.

  No one had seen anything suspicious, like Francois strangling girls in his car in the backyard in broad daylight, or escorting some of the live ones into his house, also in broad daylight, never to return. It was just that strange smell.

  As the investigation progressed into the next week, the Francois home became a tourist attraction. Tourists had the luxury of being able to look at the home of a killer and not think anything good about him. They had the luxury of looking at the true face of evil, which, of course, wasn’t very dramatic.

  The fact was, most homicides involved people who knew each other. They were human beings who made mistakes. They might be vile humans, but they were human nevertheless. A serial killer was different. His mere kill total meant he could be looked at without extenuating circumstances.

  To answer the question—What does the face of evil look like?—one merely had to look at the banal visage of Kendall Francois. Want to know what a murder house looks like? Easy. Come to Fulton Avenue in Poughkeepsie. And that’s exactly what people did.

  It became a big carnival. People from the city and town, from surrounding towns, from all over three counties, came to Fulton Avenue to look at the home of a serial killer. The media christened it “Poughkeepsie’s House of Horrors.”

  People gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house and watched the Tyvek-clad technicians ply their trade. They saw the crime-scene specialists take hundreds and hundreds of bags of evidence out of the house. They gaped at the news vans that staked the place out as though they still expected something dramatic to come from the investigation.

  The great film director Billy Wilder, who died in 2002, had once directed a film called The Big Carnival, which was about a man trapped in a mine cave-in, the reporter who secretly hampers rescue efforts to “hype” the story, and the carnival that forms outside the cave as rescue workers try to get him out. It was a cynical work, even for the usually cynical Wilder. But if hot dog stands and rides had been added to the carnival outside the Francois home, life would have definitely been doing a perfect imitation of art.

  One neighbor, Gary Eckstein, had gotten so sick and tired of the spectacle and the roadblocks on Fulton Avenue that he had to negotiate every day since the discovery, and the smell that still emanated from the house, that he had moved out until the whole thing was over.

  “I couldn’t understand why people stood out there for hours and just stared. They were there with their kids in strollers,” said Eckstein in a local
paper.

  It was the same kind of mentality that makes some drivers slow down when they approach an accident on the other side of the road. There’s a vicarious thrill in seeing human tragedy that isn’t part of you and yours. Sometimes, people who didn’t even know them, have a need to recognize the dead.

  The tree on Eckstein’s property closest to the street had become a shrine to the dead women. It was filled with cards, ribbons, roses and flowers placed there to honor the victims.

  “The first day there was just a bouquet of roses in front of the tree. The next day it was covered with the stuff,” Eckstein recalled.

  But his real concern was that when the police finally completed their investigation and left, what would happen then? Who would be there to keep the morbid and the curious out of his yard and the yards of other houses that afforded a bird’s-eye view of the lair of the serial killer?

  For the Francois family, who were also displaced, the questions were much more far reaching.

  What do you do when your son/brother is a suspected serial killer? How do you feel, knowing, knowing that your flesh and blood is suspected of being a modern-day Jack the Ripper? Does it send shivers up your spine, or do you just face it with the inevitability of having known what was really going on and turning, for your own reasons, a blind eye to it?

  No one would ever know. The Francois family got a lawyer, Marco Caviglia, to speak for them. Aside from expressing the family’s sympathy to the victims and their families, he said nothing about the crimes, their son and brother, nothing that would shed any light on the reasons for such wholesale murder.

  Kendall Francois’s parents and sister would not speculate publicly about why their son and brother was a serial killer.

  PART THREE

  A Matter of Life or Death

  Fourteen

  The tortoise had won the race. The tortoise in this case was the City of Poughkeepsie Police Department. The hare was Kendall Francois. For two years, the hare had led until finally the tortoise caught up.