Body Dump Read online

  “What guy?” Mannain had asked.

  “A fat guy,” they said. “A big guy.”

  “What about him?”

  “He liked to choke some of the girls.”

  “This big fat guy have a name?” asked Mannain.

  “Francois,” the women answered. “Kendall Francois.”

  Siegrist started up his car and drove up the hill and back to his office, parking in the lot behind the station reserved for police officers. He strode purposefully into the building, passing the old police globe and the newly restored letters spelling out the constabulary’s formal name.

  Once he was in his office, Siegrist looked up Francois in the computer. Maybe the guy had some sort of record involving force or even sexual crimes. That would make him a suspect worth looking at further. He got a hit almost immediately.

  Earlier in the year, Francois had solicited sex from an undercover cop. He was arrested. Francois had pleaded guilty to criminal solicitation, a misdemeanor, received a fine and no time.

  What Siegrist did not know was that in the course of his employment applications with both the Arlington Middle School and the Andersen School, Francois had filled out forms that asked him if he had ever been convicted of a crime. In each case, he had checked the box that said “no.”

  Neither school checked to make sure he was telling the truth. If the Andersen School had, since Francois had started there after his conviction, it would have discovered his record. That a man convicted of a crime involving sex could teach, or be around children, was unconscionable, but the truth was no one had violated the law.

  For over twenty years, a state law that required criminal background checks of all employees had protected New York City schoolchildren. Poughkeepsie had no such law. Many in the community wanted it, but for various political reasons, it had never been put on the books.

  Siegrist knew that lots of guys solicit sex and most of them are definitely nothing more than lonely guys who can’t get a woman unless they pay for her. Except for that one conviction, which was pleaded out, Kendall Francois didn’t have so much else as a parking ticket. There certainly was no record of brutality. In some quarters, he might be viewed as a model citizen.

  Model citizen. Somewhere on his desk, Siegrist found it, Cathy Marsh’s Missing Person’s file. He began rifling through it. He kept turning pages until he found it, the one item that had struck him when he looked at it before. It was under “Background.”

  Before she disappeared, Cathy Marsh had gone for some prenatal counseling. The missing woman was pregnant with her third child when the fiend, whoever he was, had killed her.

  Five

  Bill Siegrist had managed to maintain a low profile for most of his career. He wasn’t a flashy cop who grabbed headlines, and was more prone to giving the credit to the guys who worked under him. He was very happy when Skip Mannain got the story about his involvement in the case of the Mexican immigrant in the Reader’s Digest. In the early part of his career, Siegrist had managed to make it into the national press, too.

  It was during the Tawana Brawley case, when the Reverend Al Sharpton came up to Poughkeepsie to stage a demonstration against what Sharpton perceived was the police force’s “racism.” One of the demonstrators got unruly enough that Siegrist had to put a chokehold on the guy to contain him. A photographer took the shot, which went out over the wires. Soon, Siegrist was being held up in the national media as an example of the Poughkeepsie cops’ racism.

  Siegrist had, in fact, done nothing wrong. He had acted well within his authority as a peace officer to quell a potential riot situation. After Sharpton left to take up some other cause, Siegrist’s notoriety faded. As it did, he began to climb the police force’s corporate ladder. As his fortunes rose, the city’s continued to fade.

  By the early 1990’s, IBM had hit a dry spell. A combination of declining sales, subsequent layoffs and reassignment of personnel to other plants shortened the revenue stream. That left the town dependent on the monies brought in by students for a revenue source.

  Vassar College is located in the town of Poughkeepsie, Marist College in the city of Poughkeepsie. Both are four-year schools and students continue to come and spend their money in the town. Still, the combined enrollment of both schools is 20,000, hardly enough to keep the local economy flourishing.

  The city and the town overlap and in most instances, it makes no difference where you are—same diners, same mall, same gas stations. But the police forces are different, which makes it easier to commit a crime and get lost in the bureaucratic confusion.

  Every day on his way to work, Kendall L. Francois made a right turn onto Route 9 in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie is a city in the middle. Ninety miles south is New York City; seventy-five miles north is the state capital of Albany. Locals like to describe themselves as living in the Lower Hudson Valley.

  As he tooled his two-door red 1984 Subaru up the suburban highway, on his left Francois passed Marist College. The coeds at Marist came from the rural towns of New York, New Jersey and New England where the biggest urban problem was winter snow removal.

  Marist had originally been founded by the Marist Brothers order and while it no longer was under church control, it still maintained close enough affiliation with the church that many concerned parents felt it safe to send their sheltered children to the school. Some coeds had been educated at strict Catholic schools where the Catholic Church’s edict was the rule of law, none being more important than the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”

  Once in a while in their hometown, there might be a murder, the type of thing where some woman gets liquored up, then catches hubby with another woman. Or another man. Or maybe the sexes were reversed. No matter. It all fell under “crimes of passion.” Such things did not happen to “good” girls.

  Murder happened to the other girl, the one who hadn’t kept her nose clean, who went out with the exciting boy from the other side of the thruway. The thruway was the region’s major traffic artery, the route most of the women traveled to Marist.

  When they got to Poughkeepsie, there was a lack of realization that they were in an urban environment with a high crime rate. Some women forgot to lock their doors. The Marist women were incredibly naive. For Kendall Francois, they were potential prey.

  Located on Route 9 in the town of Staatsburg, a short, twenty-minute ride north of Poughkeepsie, is another institution of learning. Called the Andersen School, it is a private facility for the mentally retarded and other developmentally disabled children. The mission of the Andersen School, as stated on its Web site, is “To always put the student first, and to provide functional and educational opportunities to achieve quality of life outcomes for children and adults with autism or other developmental disabilities.”

  The core values of the school are to enhance the quality of life educational opportunities, to treat their children and adults with dignity and to demonstrate respect for the interests, abilities, values and needs of their people.

  Evidently, Kendall Francois reflected these values because the school had hired him. A man who clearly appreciated education, Francois both worked as a professional in an educational environment and took classes. In 1994, Kendall Francois enrolled at Dutchess County Community College, where he loved to play cards, usually Spades.

  “I played cards with Kendall a lot,” said Marion Ross. “He never liked to lose, but if he lost, he was okay with it. He was the nicest guy.”

  His government studies professor at Dutchess was Richard Reitano.

  “He was a good student, not a great student,” Reitano would later say in a local paper. “He participated in class, had a good relationship with me and the other students and seemed to really get something out of the classes. He had an appropriate sense of humor, a good understanding of government, and he spoke very eloquently at times on the rights of African Americans. He was a picture of normalcy.”

  His house definitely was not. With its scabrous, decaying appearan
ce, the place looked eerie even to those who didn’t believe in bogeymen.

  The first mention of the house in official records was October 1, 1869. On that date, the deed changed hands between the original owner, William H. Worrall, who had died, and Peter N. Howard, who bought it.

  By January 20, 1975, when Kendall Francois’s parents, McKinley H. Francois and Paulette R. Francois, bought it, the house had changed hands a total of only three times in the previous 106 years. It still stood in a stable, solidly middle-class area. Except for the new, paved road, the neighborhood had changed little in the intervening years except, perhaps, for one thing: the Vassar Garden Apartments.

  They were decidedly lower-class garden apartments at the end of the block. To move from there into one of the block’s one-family houses would be to “arrive.” That was exactly what the Francois family did in 1975, when they bought William H. Worrall’s house on Fulton Avenue.

  The place needed a lot of work. Beams on the lower level were exposed. The paint was chipped, the beautiful Victorian details of the house, in the molding and on the walls, in the woodwork of the banisters, floors and doors, all had been lost over the years to layers of paint and plaster and apathy.

  The Francois family probably did their best to keep up the house and it really shouldn’t have been a hard job. The whole house measured less than fifteen hundred square feet. Paulette and McKinley were full-time working parents, with four kids to raise and support. Over the years, the maintenance of the house and the grounds, a little yard out back and a porch with a small sloping lawn to the street out front, had gone by the wayside. Walking by it and looking up, the house looked as though it was decaying.

  By 1996, Kierstyn, the youngest, was still at home. Francois’s older sister, Raquelle, lived someplace else in Poughkeepsie. His kid brother Aubrey also did not live at home.

  Kendall Francois was born in Poughkeepsie on a hot summer day, July 26, 1971. The New York State Department of Health does not allow public access to birth certificates, so it’s unclear how big a baby Francois was at birth. But even as a child, his girth began to be noticed by the other kids in the Vassar Garden Apartments.

  Neighborhood children used to taunt the fat, black child about his weight in that “Nah nah nah nah nahhhh nah” singsong children’s cadence. And he wasn’t happy about it. Mark Gehringer, a fellow who knew him as a child, said that the neighborhood kids “would yell out to him ‘How now, brown cow?’ and he used to get upset.”

  “He kept to himself,” growing up, another friend from his childhood recalled. “The people around here keep to themselves.”

  Which was why later, when the house on Fulton Avenue started to smell, the neighbors said and did nothing. Maybe they whispered amongst themselves. Poughkeepsie, though, was a conservative place. What someone did in the sanctity of his or her home was no one else’s business.

  By high school, Selma Darrell remembers, Kendall Francois had become an average student.

  “I was his high school French teacher,” Darrell said. “He seemed to be gentle.”

  A gentle giant. Darrell took a liking to the big kid.

  “He tried to work for me [at school jobs] with limited success.”

  Francois seemed to be one of those students of limited intellectual ability. He sat in the back, hoping he wouldn’t be seen or called on. Darrell, a pro, saw what he was doing and intervened.

  “I actually put him in front of me to help him,” she recalled.

  Maybe by being in front of the teacher he’d absorb more and get his grades up. But it didn’t work. Francois soon realized that there was “safety” in being seen, that the teacher would call on the kids in back who seemed to be hiding instead. In Francois’s case, it worked because, “He did not talk a lot,” nor did Darrell call on him frequently.

  “He was barely an average student,” she remembers.

  It was that “averageness” that hid the terrible rage building up inside.

  Francois’s tenure in Arlington High School lasted from 1984 to 1989. During that time, Darrell recalled, “The black kids in Arlington stuck together. There weren’t many in class.” But there did not appear to be the overt isolationism seen by minorities in other communities. Oliver Mackson, who attended Arlington High School and later became a reporter for the Times Herald Record newspaper, remembers things a little differently.

  “Arlington was a comfortable place for lots of different crowds. Even runty, dorky, mouthy Jewish kids like me got along fine with all kinds of people,” he would later write in his column of June 23, 2000.

  One of Mackson’s friends, he wrote, was Ross Allison, who was a good enough wrestler at Arlington to wrestle in state tournaments. After graduating in 1982, he continued his participation in the sport by refereeing wrestling matches.

  “Sometimes, when I was not refereeing, I would go to a home Arlington match. He’d [Francois] be there with his father; they’d be standing in the corner and I’d go say, ‘Hi,’” Allison recalled.

  Maybe it was a way to get out the aggression that had been building inside him. Or maybe he just wanted to fit in. Whatever it was, Francois decided to use his bulk for his own benefit.

  Kendall tried out for and immediately got on both the football and wrestling teams in his freshman year. He was all of fourteen years old. By the next year, he had physically matured to an almost muscular 6’4” and 250 pounds. But he still had this baby fat that he seemed desperate to get rid of.

  In the team wrestling photo of that year, Francois stands off at the side of the photograph, the last of nine wrestlers, the only one wearing a cut-off jersey, deliberately doing a bodybuilder’s side chest pose. The pose is meant to show off the pectoral and bicep muscles. He still had the fat, but his chest was huge. The expression on his face was one of challenge.

  That same year, “He broke his hand doing something stupid,” Allison remembered.

  Francois had had an argument with another kid and broke his hand. That kept him out of wrestling for the year, but not football. Even with his injury, Kendall Francois still belonged. Being on the football team gave him that. He was not some outsider. He was respected by the other kids. If anyone made fun of him, they didn’t do it to his face. They’d have to be crazy to do that. He was bigger than almost all of them.

  Appearance—with Francois it meant nothing. The fact was he didn’t know what he was. Like most psychopaths, he was trying on identities to see what fit, what he could carry off. He tried a new one on for his graduation photo. It is a stark reminder of how pictures can actually lie.

  Francois strikes a studious pose, hands under his chin, posed in three-quarter style by the photographer. He wears an Afghan sweater, shirt and tie. His Afro hair is carefully cropped, but not too close to his skull. He has a high, brooding forehead. He wears great oversize glasses over languid dark eyes. He has a brush-cut mustache meant to make him look a little older, when it actually makes him look younger.

  That year, every graduating Arlington senior was asked to put in their favorite quote. Under his name, Francois had chosen this quote from Hebrews 11:1:

  “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

  Faith was something his victims’ families would need to get them through the tragedies to come.

  After graduating from Arlington, Francois enlisted in the United States Army. He did his basic training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and then was sent to an army base in Honolulu. When he got there, a serial killer was hard at work.

  In the late 1980’s, Honolulu, Hawaii, had several unsolved homicides of women who had died from strangulation. A serial killer was suspected. There was no clear suspect in sight. While Francois was stationed there, more women were murdered using the same modus operandi (MO) or manner of murder. Ironically, the same problem existed back home. There was a serial killer loose in the Mid Hudson Valley and the police seemed powerless to catch him.

  The first to be murdered was Juliana R. Fra
nk, twenty-nine, of Middletown, New York, across the river in Orange County. She was stabbed and killed on March 25, 1991. Her body was later found on an abandoned railroad bed in Middletown. Then came Larette Huggins Reviere, thirty-four, also of Middletown. She was killed on July 10. Her nude, stabbed body was found in her house.

  Christine M. Klebbe of the nearby town of Goshen was next. She was reported missing on July 1. Her body would later be found, stabbed like the rest. Brenda L. Whiteside, twenty, of Elmsford, was reported missing on July 20. A short time later, her body was found in that same town. She’d been stabbed. Angela Hopkins, Whiteside’s cousin, was also reported missing on July 30 and her body was later found, stabbed, in Goshen.

  Finally there was Adriane M. Hunter of Middletown. She, too, had disappeared and then her nude body was found. Another stabbing.

  The case was finally broken when Poughkeepsie police received an anonymous phone call, a tip. Someone called to say that Nathaniel White, thirty-two, of Middletown, should be looked at for the crimes. White had been paroled that April from state prison, where he’d served two years for robbing three convenience stores in Orange County. He was paroled in November 1989, rearrested on April 17, 1991, for kidnapping and assault. He plea bargained the charges down to unlawful imprisonment and was sentenced to nine months in state prison.

  For violating his previous parole, three more months behind bars were tacked on to the sentence. Quoted in the Albany Times Union newspaper, Division of Parole Spokesman David Ernst said White showed no violent tendencies while serving his latest sentence.

  Parole officials brought White in for questioning. Local and state police questioned him about the unsolved strangulation murders. In the opinion of law enforcement, he was not forthcoming in his responses to their questions. Put another way, he was lying. White eventually confessed, giving police the information that led to the recovery of the bodies of Klebbe, Whiteside and Hopkins. The others came later. White had killed all the women by repeatedly stabbing them. Some had also been raped.