Body Dump

by Fred Rosen

  The homicide survivors, the friends and relatives of the slain women, had listened in their section of the courtroom. To them, it was like attending a funeral. Some sobbed more quietly than Perry had. Others remained impassive, and still others looked toward the ceiling, as if to heaven, to see the deceased once again, or perhaps to let out a silent prayer that justice was finally being done and they could rest in peace.

  Before the proceedings finished, Mark Harris, of the Capital Defender Office, told the court that Francois was HIV positive. His illegal activities had resulted in his contracting a disease for which there was no known cure.

  After the hearing, Grady told reporters:

  “How the victims’ families felt about the disposition, although not controlling, was an important factor in deciding to accept this plea.… We were absolutely convinced that we could obtain a guilty verdict … but we were of the opinion we could not overcome [the psychiatric issues]. This disposition represents the only realistic way to hold the defendant fully accountable for his heinous crimes and ensure closure for the families.”

  For his part, Capital Defender Harris stated that life imprisonment was “a just resolution” and that while Francois would live, “his life will be spared, but he will answer for his actions.”

  Paulette Francois publicly became the family spokesperson. Through her attorney, Marco Caviglia, she released a statement that said she had the “greatest sympathy” for the families of the victims. “We know their sorrow firsthand as this ordeal has caused us to lose our beloved McKinley, husband and father, whose broken heart finally yielded,” she said in the statement.

  It was … interesting. Paulette Francois was comparing the loss of her husband, by the seemingly natural cause of a broken heart, to families who had lost their loved ones due to her son’s murderous rages.

  One of the homicide victims’ survivors felt for the Francois family. It was Heidi Cramer. Cramer recalled when her mother had shot a man when she was twelve years old. She remembered the stigma involved with that crime that she had to endure. It was the same type of stigma the Francoises would now have to live with as the family of a serial killer.

  August 8, 2000

  Another trend in jurisprudence is victim impact statements. Before a defendant is sentenced, the families of the victims are allowed to address the defendant directly, in open court, and tell the defendant how his actions have affected their lives. That would happen on a summer day, a sweltering one in Judge Dolan’s courtroom.

  The armed officers were there, ten in all, three around Francois. Francois was seated at the defense table, once again shackled and in his orange jail clothing. He wore glasses and his hair was close cropped. Judge Dolan turned the proceedings over to the families. Throughout the testimonies, Francois would keep looking down, never up, never meeting the survivors’ eyes, no matter what they said. He was acting as though he had a conscience.

  One by one, they walked to the lectern directly opposite Francois and were allowed to directly address him. One by one, the victims’ family members came to the lectern. It made no difference who said what. The pain was the same.

  “I never fully understood the impact of wakes until today because she was a skeleton when they found her.”

  “You deserve to die, Kendall. There is no way I believe your family didn’t have something to do with what happened.”

  “Those of you who knew her well surely will agree that he killed her and took her away from us. We will never have the chance to hear her laugh or see her girlish smile. When she was a child, she used to ask, ‘Will the monsters get me?’ What you did to her and the other women was unspeakable and unforgettable. These terrible acts of murder will never be forgiven. I hope he suffers to the last breath. AIDS will certainly kill him if prison doesn’t.”

  “He should be executed eight times, once for each life he took. If anyone must refer to them in any way, refer to them as women,” a clear allusion to the constant dehumanization of the victims in the press, which always referred to them as the “eight prostitutes,” not eight women.

  “At any point, did any of them beg for mercy? It breaks our heart knowing you were the last person she ever saw.”

  The relatives, sitting in eight rows on the side of the courtroom behind the DA, applauded.

  “We know someday you’ll die from this [AIDS]. It seems like poetic justice, isn’t it, Kendall? It will kill the man who killed our mother. You took away a very wonderful woman. Our family hopes you rot in hell.”

  “She was born March 3, 1967. It often felt like she was our only child. She was well adjusted. She was raised in a loving, Christian home. Her father died of a heart attack at the age of ten. She played softball, basketball and started using alcohol and cocaine to numb her feelings. She was at Geneseo for one month [before she started] experimenting with drugs. Her disease raged on [as she] became a cocaine addict.

  “[She] loved her daughters. She entered [a rehab facility] in Saranac Lake and while she was there worked hard for sobriety. [Then] she entered the halfway house in Poughkeepsie. She was attending Dutchess County Community College. She was going to get a degree in human services. But the only housing she could get was in the heart of the drug district.

  “She struggled to attend school. She wanted to get her kids back and then relapsed. She [had] lost her children, her car, clothes. By November 1996, she was back on the street. [Still] she had made plans to come home and go into rehabilitation [again]. She died before her thirtieth birthday.

  “She was the victim of a terrible disease that Mr. Francois preyed on. To you, Mr. Francois, in one brief instance, you snuffed out a life and desecrated her body. You took the life of the child she was carrying within her. I will never again be able to kneel next to her at Mass. I will never again be able to play backgammon or Scrabble with her. There will always be an empty chair, someone missing at dinners. Mr. Francois, you took all that away in one split second.

  “I will not pass judgment on you. ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’”

  When it was over, the judge looked down and addressed the courtroom.

  “All of you have been affected by this tragedy,” he said sympathetically. “Mr. Harris, come forward.”

  Francois and his attorney, Mark Harris, came before the bar for sentencing.

  “Mr. Francois wishes to tell the court that he is deeply sorry and regrets the pain and sorrow he caused,” said Harris.

  “Yes, sir,” Francois added.

  “At the time the plea was entered,” said the judge, “I commended both sides for [seeing] the utter futility of a trial. This result is just.”

  Dolan turned his steely gaze on the serial murderer.

  “Mr. Francois, there is very little I can say here. Their anger and loss is so real. It is felt in this courtroom and community. You and you alone are responsible for this vicious and unspeakable violence. [These] acts recoil through the community in horror and anger.” While Francois killed, the community “didn’t have freedom from fear.” Dolan was hopeful that his sentencing would be a “final resolution to this case.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Audrey Pugliese, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Sandra French, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Mary Giaccone, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Kathleen Hurley, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Catherine Marsh, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Gina Barone, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Wendy Meyers, the sentence is twenty-five years to life.

  “On the charge of murder in the first degree of Catina Newmaster, the sentence is twen
ty-five years to life. The intention of the court is for the sentences to be served consecutively.”

  In other words, Kendall Francois would have to serve a minimum of two hundred years in prison before he could even be considered rehabilitated.

  “On the charge of the attempted second-degree assault of Diane Franco, the sentence is one and a half to three years.”

  That sentence, of course, didn’t matter. It was a simple matter of justice for Franco. However, in any sentencing, even of a serial killer, there is a certain formality to the hearing that requires the judge to ask the defendant several questions.

  “Has the clerk advised you of your right to appeal?”

  “Yes, sir,” Francois answered.

  Francois also acknowledged in court that as part of his plea agreement, he had given up his right to appeal his sentence.

  “Yes, sir,” Francois answered again, though in actuality there was one automatic appeal that had to be sent in. In capital cases, the defense lawyers always file a motion that they themselves did not provide adequate counsel to the defendant, hoping for the long shot that the court of appeals will buy that argument and give them a new trial. That remote possibility could then result in a further lessening of the sentence.

  The court would reject that subsequent appeal. Francois’s sentence would, of course, stand.

  “Mr. Francois, you are remanded to the state correctional system.”

  He was marched away by the deputies, one husky one on each arm. They hustled him out of the well of the courtroom and through a side door. For just a second, while the deputies cleared the path down an interior corridor, Francois stood in the doorway alone.

  His back was massive. The baby fat that covered him was, like everything else about him, deceiving. It was mostly muscle, converted into strength that gave him a cruel weapon against everyone who had ever made fun of him because of his size. The doorway seemed to grow smaller with him standing there.

  At last, the deputies pulled him inside the corridor and Kendall Francois, for the last time, vanished from view.

  EPILOGUE

  Neither police nor prosecutor ever gave a reason for why Kendall L. Francois killed the eight women. They didn’t have to, nor were they obligated to under the law.

  When police have as strong a case as Siegrist and company did against Francois, there is no necessity to probe for motive. They probe for motive when they need it for a conviction, which in this case was never really in doubt.

  As far as the cops are concerned, it’s up to the sociologists and the psychologists to find the reasons why. They really don’t care. If they did, they couldn’t do their jobs. There are too many bad guys out there. Motive is a luxury. Their job is to catch ’em.

  Likewise, the prosecutor does not need to prove motive to get a conviction. While motive, means and opportunity are the triumvirate of the criminal prosecution process, having a confession, bodies and other forensic evidence tying the killer to the victims is usually enough for any jury to convict without having motive.

  But that still doesn’t answer the question burning in the minds of most people who studied this case: why did Kendall Francois kill eight women? What blood lust did he satisfy?

  There were intimations from various sources in the writing of this book that there was a sexual component behind the crimes. That certainly made sense, considering his choice of victims. But what weird sexual urge Francois might have satisfied remains itself a mystery.

  Seeking to resolve these questions, I wrote Kendall Francois at his prison cell in Attica State Prison in upstate New York where he currently resides. He never answered my letters.

  The Francois family have drawn a complete circle of silence around themselves. To date, they have not talked about his motive to the press, or anything else, for that matter. They just want the public to forget the whole thing and let them live in peace. That might be hard.

  Police suspect, and I concur, that Francois committed more murders. Seeking that route, I contacted the Department of the Army, U.S. Army Personnel Command in St. Louis, Missouri. A request was made for access to Francois’s military record under the United States Freedom of Information Act. Every citizen is entitled to look at it. The idea was to see if there was anything in Francois’s service record that might have indicated a predilection for this kind of violence. That could also show that the office of the Judge Advocate General had investigated anything, from some sort of disturbed, erratic behavior to actual allegations of sexual violence. After repeated vague army replies dated January 10 and March 29, 2000, the last one I received, dated June 6, says the following:

  “Every reasonable effort is being made to locate the records needed to reply to your inquiry. Your patience is greatly appreciated.”

  The letter is signed “Peggy Barton, Case Analyst.” That was two years ago! And still they have not responded.

  Might there be something really interesting in Francois’s military record?

  When I began writing true crime books nine years ago, I always probed for motive. I figured the answers always lay in the killers’ background, especially their childhood. In my naïveté, I always assumed a Freudian reason for the crime.

  As I became more experienced as an investigator, I began to realize that it isn’t as cut and dried as all that. For every person abused as a child who becomes a killer, I could show you thousands who go on to lead worthwhile, productive lives.

  Scientists are still trying to figure out if there’s a “murder” gene and who has it. In Francois’s case, I suspect his crimes were rooted in some childhood psychosis, plus a genetic factor. But one intriguing question that can be answered is this:

  Why did Kendall Francois bathe the bodies? For the answer, I turned to investigative psychologist Dr. Maurice Godwin.

  “Another way in which police attempt to deduce what occurred in a series of murders is to record those actions that are unique across the offense series,” he writes in his book Criminal Psychology and Forensic Technology.

  For example, the unique behaviors that serial murderers repeatedly leave at their crime scenes are referred to, in the realms of forensic and criminal investigations, as the killer’s “psychological signature.” These unique patterns of behaviors have been explained by the FBI as traits, and they claim that the person variable repeatedly shows consistency across crimes. However … there lies danger in using the term “trait” as a cause of behavior.

  To say that an offender left the victim nude after the murder explains nothing. Ressler [the famous FBI criminologist] and his colleagues argue that signature actions are revealed due to the offender acting out in fulfillment of his violent fantasies.

  According to Ressler and his colleagues, fantasy may be manifested through particular verbal interaction with the victim, or through committing a series of actions on the victim in a particular order. However, an offender’s M.O. or signature is not always present in every murder due to agencies, such as disturbances during the course of an offense or an unanticipated victim response, or because the body of the victim has decomposed prior to its discovery; therefore the signature aspect has been destroyed.

  But in Francois’s case, his signature behavior, bathing the bodies, is known because he said he did it. No deduction is needed. Godwin goes on to define signature behavior as:

  … types of extraordinary violence similarities.

  For example, the victim was beaten beyond the point needed to kill her, or the killer seemed preoccupied with the victim’s clothing or took some time to pose the victim’s body … in leaving his signature, a killer’s psychodrama is evolving. Although the scene is different, the act contained the same plot, same characters, and same dialogue which came to the same conclusion.

  Francois’s bathing of the bodies was his distinctive signature behavior. Why did he do it? As Godwin cautions, more information would be necessary for a detailed analysis. But one possibility is that by bathing them, he was making the women, whom he clear
ly saw as impure, pure again in death.

  However, determining the underlying structure of offenders’ signature behaviors requires extensive empirical analysis beyond any that is currently in use by police forces. By identifying the combinations of behavioral variables and background characteristics, which accounts for an offender’s individuality, is the most logical way forward in order to facilitate an understanding of consistency and development in offending behavior through time.

  Understanding your quarry, as any hunter will tell you, is essential to the tracking process. Law enforcement’s continued reliance on the outmoded, ineffectual and unproven FBI serial killer organized and disorganized modality does nothing to help in catching these criminals. Had the FBI been able to provide real quality guidance, the kind Godwin is referring to, the investigation might have quickened.

  Godwin also has a few things to say about the way the crime is committed by the serial killer.

  The traditional use of Modus Operandi (M.O.), as a basis for linking offenses, is premised on the investigator’s deductive reasoning that the M.O. is static and uniquely characteristic to a particular offender. For example, traditionally M.O. is defined as distinctive actions, which link crimes together. As evidenced by this definition, many times the investigators confuse the offender’s M.O. with his signature, as if the two were the same.

  In the Francois case, the investigators concentrated on neither. They were just too overwhelmed in catching the guy. Godwin continues:

  An M.O. accounts for the type of crime and property used to commit a crime. The offender’s M.O. includes the victim type, the time and place the crime was committed, the tools or implements used, the way the criminal gained entry or how he approached or subdued his victim, including disguises or uniforms, and ways he represented himself to a victim.

  Clearly, Francois’s M.O. was the type of victim he chose, always consistent; choosing to kill with his hands, always consistent; and where he picked them up, again always consistent. He never deviated, which is why the police’s hope that he was responsible for Eason’s death is just that, hope, and not based on scientific fact.