by Fred Rosen
After two years of work, Bill Siegrist and Skip Mannain and their ally Jimmy Ayling at the state police had finished their active involvement in the case. They would come in and out as the following weeks and months would lead to what for all was an unknown outcome.
Would Francois be convicted of murder one and sentenced to death? Or, would he be convicted of or plead to a lesser charge, thereby avoiding death? It could all be up to Bill Grady. It was Grady who now took center stage in the still unfolding drama of the serial killer’s life.
William “Bill” Vincent Grady was a local. Fifty-six years old, he had been born in Beacon, just a few miles south of Poughkeepsie. He had grown up in Dutchess County. It was his luck to be born into a prominent family.
Grady’s father, Vincent, had been the county’s district attorney in the 1940’s. Like many politicians who don the district attorney’s suit, he wished for higher office and got it. Eventually, Dutchess County District Attorney Vincent Grady became Justice Grady of the New York State Supreme Court.
In most states, the supreme court is the highest court in the state, but not in cockeyed New York. The Empire State reserve that honor for the court of appeals. No, Vincent Grady spent his time as a judge presiding over the matters the supreme court had the jurisdiction of—trials for murder, robbery, kidnapping and other felonies.
Bill Grady aspired to the bar and to follow in his father’s footsteps. Fate had other plans. During the height of the Vietnam War in the tumultuous 1960’s, Bill Grady served his country as a captain in an armored unit in the most contentious war in United States history. Vietnam is a small country on an Asian continent far away from his bucolic home in Dutchess County. In combat, he acquitted himself admirably: he won the Bronze Star for bravery under fire.
Returning home, he attended and graduated from New York Law School. In 1971, he went to Poughkeepsie, the county seat, and became an assistant district attorney. In the courtroom or out, Grady did not cut a dashing figure. He was slight of build and height, bespectacled, with a tight, bland face, hardly the image conjured up of “the fighting DA” of fiction and film. Plus, the county’s newest ADA had neither the oratory nor charisma of the state’s most famous prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, who put Lucky Luciano away and later used that as a platform to run for president.
Grady also did not have the brilliant legal mind of some in his profession. Instead, Bill Grady’s technique was slow and steady. Not too much flash and dash, but he got the job done. After working in the district attorney’s office as an assistant prosecutor for a couple of years, he was promoted to chief assistant prosecutor.
The politics in Dutchess County are from the old school. The dominating Republican political machine controls political patronage. That, combined with blatant nepotism, is how the county runs to this day. It functions within a system that especially abhors outsiders’ criticisms. Running on the Republican ticket, Bill Grady lost his first bid to become district attorney in 1975. Never one to give up, he ran again in 1985.
Grady was a man of the people, a guy like any other on the street. Like the average citizen, he was concerned about the high rate of crime and the cost to the county’s families and resources. His rhetoric about crime and drugs and their insidious effect on the county resonated with voters.
Bill Grady won election to the office his father had once occupied. Since then, most observers have felt that Grady did his job and did it well; the voters liked him and the Republican political machine in the county was happy with his performance.
By 1988, Grady had been a prosecutor for almost twenty years. Killers, thieves, con men, robbers, rapists, he had prosecuted them all. He was experienced and professional. His reputation inside the county was established. Outside the county, few, except political insiders, knew who he was. That was fine; he did his job.
And then along came Tawana Brawley.
It happened in the fall of 1988. A fifteen-year-old girl named Tawana Brawley was discovered in a green plastic garbage bag on the site of an apartment complex in Wappinger Falls, the city directly south of Poughkeepsie. The venue was still Dutchess County. That meant that Grady as the DA directed all investigations.
Sheriff’s deputies arrived and took in the scene. The girl, who appeared unconscious, had no obvious injuries. There was no blood, no bruising, nothing. Upon further physical examination, they discovered that “KKK” had been written across the top of the girl’s chest. On her stomach, someone had written the word “Nigger.” Feces were smeared on her arms and legs and it was the feces that provided the “ink” for the aforementioned epithets.
It was, to put it mildly, perplexing. What had happened? Had she been raped and then smeared with excrement by racists? The girl wouldn’t say. She kept her eyes closed. They tried talking to her. Except for a fluttering of her eyelids, there was no response. The cops called an ambulance and the girl was whisked to nearby St. Francois Hospital, where she was examined.
There was no sign of rape. The girl appeared physically fine, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. The ID in her wallet gave them her name. Her mother, Glenda Brawley, was called and she came to the hospital.
Tawana Brawley’s method of communication consisted of nods and shakes of her head, shrugging shoulders and scrawling in the cop’s notebook. After a few hours of talking to her like this, Brawley charged in grunts, groans and pictures that it was a group of white men, including at least one white cop, who had raped the girl over a period of four days. Her family brought in Alton H. Maddox, Jr., a black lawyer who specialized in civil rights cases to represent her. Brawley’s legal team would later include another black lawyer familiar with civil rights cases, C. Vernon Mason. The Reverend Al Sharpton came on board as the third “family adviser.”
Primarily an administrator, Grady initially assigned the case to two of his assistant district attorneys, including Marjorie Smith, the same Marjorie Smith who would later take Kendall Francois’s statement. As the Brawley family advisers and the Brawley family made claims of racial bias in the investigation, as well as the crime, Grady got actively involved.
In an effort to ferret out the truth, Grady and a black assistant personally went to the Brawleys’ apartment in Wappinger Falls. He practically begged Glenda Brawley to allow the teenager and her family to cooperate in the investigation.
Glenda Brawley was uncooperative and noncommittal. Brawley’s stepfather, Ralph King, broke up the meeting. He burst in the door, shouting obscenities highlighted by, “What the fuck is going on here?”
The prosecutors’ jaws dropped. After some more verbal haranguing, they left. Meanwhile, the media had taken hold of the story. Well into 1989, the media hung on every word from the Brawley family and their advisers. Bowing to their pressure, Governor Mario Cuomo appointed Attorney General Bob Abrams as special prosecutor. Grady was effectively out of it.
After almost a yearlong investigation, on October 6, 1988, a grand jury Abrams had called issued a 170-page report. It consisted of 6,000 pages of testimony from 108 witnesses and 250 exhibits. The report concluded:
Based upon all the evidence that has been presented to the grand jury, we concluded that Tawana Brawley was not the victim of a forcible sexual assault by multiple assailants over a four-day period. There is no evidence that any sexual assault occurred. The grand jury further concludes there is nothing in regard to Tawana Brawley’s appearance on November 28 [the day she was found in the garbage bag] that is inconsistent with this condition having been self-inflicted.
In other words, the whole thing was a hoax. Brawley had manufactured the whole thing. Why, was open to conjecture. Regardless of the reason, for Grady, the conclusion could not come soon enough.
It had been a bad experience for the DA, not one he wanted to repeat. Despite the subsequent discrediting of Tawana Brawley’s story, Grady’s office had seemed incompetent in handling the case, and the press had gone along with the view.
Since 1988, Grady had run and been reelected twice.
There had been nothing that even came close to the attention he and his office received in the Tawana Brawley affair. His next reelection bid was in 1999. His constituents would be watching closely to see how he handled the prosecution of Kendall Francois.
There was never any question that Grady would seek the death penalty against the alleged serial killer. Ironically, a recently introduced death penalty law was so unclear in the way it was written that, even if Grady got a conviction, there was no guarantee Francois would be executed for his crimes. In a sense, the very nature of his crimes might guarantee him immunity.
On March 7, 1995, Governor George E. Pataki had signed a bill reinstating the death penalty in New York. After more than thirty years without it, New York, with its infamous electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, had the death penalty once again.
Both houses of the New York State legislature, the senate, and the assembly had previously passed the bill, by votes of thirty-eight to nineteen, and ninety-four to fifty-two, respectively. There had been eighteen previous attempts by the senate and assembly to reintroduce the death penalty since 1977, but all the previous bills had been vetoed by former Democratic governors Cary and Cuomo. Those men believed that the death penalty was not only inhuman, but it was not a deterrent to capital crime.
In contrast, Governor Pataki, a Republican, had run on a platform that made the reinstatement of the death penalty the centerpiece of his future administration. His 1994 election as governor had moved the issue forward and guaranteed that he would sign the legislation. Upon his ascendancy, the death penalty bill had been the first major piece of legislation to be signed into law.
In reaction to the signing of the death penalty bill, former Governor Cuomo stated: “This is a step back in what should be a march constantly toward a higher level of civility and intelligence. The argument that the death penalty will deter and reduce crimes has been abandoned almost everywhere.”
The way the legislators had written the statute, the new law allowed for death sentences to be imposed for approximately ten offenses. They included the following: intentional murder committed during the course of a rape, robbery or kidnapping; contract killings; the murder of prison wardens, police officers or other law enforcement officials; and murder involving torture. The law excluded those under eighteen years of age at the time of the offense, pregnant women and the mentally retarded from execution. The determination of mental retardation would be made by the trial court.
Under the death penalty statute, capital murder trials would have two phases. The first phase would determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Upon conviction of first-degree murder, the court would hold a second hearing known as the penalty phase. The penalty phase would determine whether a sentence of death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole was to be imposed.
The decision on sentencing rested with the original trial jury that would be reimpaneled during the sentencing phase. The jury would be required to determine whether the mitigating facts pertaining to the defendant and the crime outweighed the aggravating factors. Mitigating factors included the defendant’s lack of prior criminal record; whether the defendant suffered from mental retardation or impaired mental capacity at the time of the crime; and that the defendant was under duress or the domination of another person at the time of the offense. Aggravating factors included previous convictions for violent offenses, or that the crime was considered an act of terrorism.
A unanimous decision by the jury was required for either of the available sentences. In the event of the jury being unable to reach a unanimous decision, the defendant would be sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty years.
Detailed research, both in the United States and other countries, has produced no evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than any other punishment. In many nondeath-penalty countries, the homicide rate has decreased after the abolition of capital punishment. For example, in Canada the death penalty was abolished in 1976. From the date of its abolition until the end of 1993, the rate of homicides per 100,000 population has dropped by twenty-seven percent.
Figures from other countries made no difference, though. Governor Pataki cited prevention of violent crime as his major justification for reintroducing capital punishment. He knew that if the public did not want its revenge, the death penalty would not exist.
No politician in his right mind who expected to be reelected in a conservative county, which Grady served in, could advocate against the death penalty, let alone not impose it in the worst case of serial murder in New York State history. Electrocution had once been the method of execution. The new law made execution more humane. The killer convicted of murder one would see his life ended by lethal injection. Old Sparky at Sing Sing would remain inactive.
An act was also passed making a provision of eleven million dollars, “or so much thereof as may be necessary,” to cover the increased prosecution and defense costs involved in administering death penalty laws. This included the establishment of the Capital Defender Office, a state body charged with defending those who were being prosecuted under the new death penalty statute.
At the bill-signing ceremony in 1995, Pataki used two pens that had previously belonged to murdered police officers. The relatives of homicide victims surrounded him. Governor Pataki was quoted as stating, “Justice will now be served.… It is a solemn moment because this is something aimed at preventing tragedy, and we’ve seen too many tragedies in the past.”
Solemn moment or not, Pataki’s death penalty bill was terribly flawed. Serial killing did not necessarily warrant the death penalty and in the case of Kendall Francois, even less so.
Francois could claim that he had strangled the women during a business transaction—sex for money, usually known as prostitution. That certainly did not qualify as rape under the law, which meant Francois had not intentionally killed while committing another felony.
Nor had he planned the killings. They seemed to happen at the moment. Only if a murder was planned in advance could the prosecution justify a capital murder one charge.
As for the serial aspect of the crimes, the statute says that murder punishable by death falls under the death penalty law if “the defendant intentionally caused the death of two or more … persons within the state in separate criminal transactions within a period of twenty-four hours when committed in a similar fashion or pursuant to a common scheme or plan.”
In other words, the statute defined serial killing as two or more murders committed within the state, on separate occasions, “within a period of twenty-four hours.” Under the state’s own definition of serial killing, Kendall Francois did not fall into that category.
If Francois opted for diminished capacity, commonly known as the insanity defense, Grady would have to prove that Francois was sane at the time of the crimes. That might be difficult. What sane man commits serial murder?
Francois’s very crimes might be the actual defense that kept him from being strapped to a gurney and having poison injected into his blood. It was like he had a “get out of death free” card. And, if the jury didn’t vote for death, what then? It was entirely possible that the worst he could be sentenced to was life behind bars without parole. But who knew if that really meant life?
Somewhere along the line, some reformers would change the law. Lifers like Francois could be given paroles. Even Nathan Leopold, who, along with his friend Richard Loeb, was convicted of the most famous thrill killing in United States history and received a life sentence in the 1920’s, was later given parole during the 1950’s.
Life didn’t necessarily mean life. But sentencing was a long way off. In order to prosecute an individual successfully, the state needs to know his or her official background. It helps in establishing a time line, especially in cases of serial killing. Plus there might actually be something in the individual’s background that could further assist the state in its prosecution.
Fifteen
Siegr
ist and company zeroed in on Kendall Francois’s military service. Could he have committed serial murder while he was in the army stationed in Hawaii? A check of the records showed that there was, indeed, a serial killer operating in Hawaii while Francois was stationed there. The Poughkeepsie Police Department immediately contacted the Honolulu Police Department.
“We had focused on a suspect [who wasn’t Francois] but there wasn’t enough to bring him to trial,” said Honolulu Police Lieutenant Allan Napoleon. Napoleon headed up the city’s homicide squad.
Napoleon pointed out that unlike the Poughkeepsie case, in Hawaii the victims were all blondes and their bodies dumped near the ocean and streams. Since the victims’ descriptions didn’t match Poughkeepsie’s, the connection was discounted.
Plus, Napoleon said, when their suspect left the area, “It [the killings] stopped.”
That seemed to pretty much rule out Francois. The police did not follow up on Francois’s time during basic training at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, to see if there were any unsolved murders there. Reading about all this in the newspapers, which covered every detail of the official investigation, the Francois family couldn’t help but be interested, but not interested enough to make any public comment. Speaking for them, their lawyer, Marco Caviglia, told how the Francoises were forced to leave their daughter’s apartment, where they’d been staying since the night of their dispossession.
“The Francois family is still homeless,” attorney Caviglia told the media. “Because of the allegations of unkemptness at the former family residence … they have been denied the right to rent.”
The Francoises had no choice but to rent, since their house was literally still in police custody. It was doubtful, too, if they would go back there to live; it wouldn’t be safe. The public perception was that there were too many people Francois had allegedly harmed who would, in turn, want revenge.