Body Dump Read online

  Orange County District Attorney Frank D. Phillips was quoted as saying he didn’t feel badly about White’s recent parole. When someone asked him why, the DA responded with what could be any district attorney’s epitaph:

  “Because I’m only the district attorney; I’m not God.”

  On April 14, 1993, White was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to a total of 150 years in prison. His legacy, if it could be called one, was a call to revise the state’s missing person’s procedures.

  Three of the victims with similar descriptions were actually reported missing in July. But because two were from Dutchess County across the river and the other was from Orange County, police were not able to connect the cases for a week. There came a call for a sharing of information.

  Police were reasonably certain that if this sharing of information policy were followed, there would be no more Nathaniel Whites slipping through their dragnet. But the police championing this methodology were the state police. The state police in New York are among the most highly trained and well-educated law enforcement professionals in the country. They are trained at a state-of-the-art law police academy in Albany.

  In contrast, local police themselves have to pay for law enforcement training at a private police academy. Their hope is to catch on with a small-town force, like Poughkeepsie’s, then go to a more urban area like New York or Hartford, to earn a better salary and more extensive benefits.

  A cop got some experience in a small town setting, then took that and enlisted on the force of a larger town where his experience would get him some advancement. With Upstate New York unemployment higher than that in New York City, the small town could always find replacements.

  Essentially, it was a pay as you go, learn as you go type of deal. Unfortunately, this arrangement played right into the hands of serial killers. They counted on police bureaucracy enabling them to continue in their killing careers.

  When Kendall Francois was discharged from the service in 1994, he came back to Poughkeepsie and found a job as a substitute custodial worker for the Arlington School District. He worked in that position from May 1994 to April 1996. Then, he received a promotion.

  From April 1996 to January 1997, he was a hall and detention monitor at his alma mater, the Arlington Middle School. His job was to make sure the kids were not unruly in the halls and the cafeteria. Because of his personal lack of hygiene, the kids began to call him “Stinky” behind his back.

  Francois’s tenure at Arlington Middle School was uneventful. But school official Ginny Jones would remember that many teachers complained that Francois behaved improperly with some girls, hugging them, playing with their hair, following them in the hall or making off-color jokes.

  “I thought he was kind of inappropriate in his appearance, in his demeanor,” said Jones.

  Francois liked to wrestle with the kids.

  “He would always want to wrestle and play around,” said Violet Reynolds, a student at Arlington during Francois’s tenure there. “I never thought he was a threat.”

  She looked at Francois as a friendly face, someone dependable, and someone who could give her a ride home from high school wrestling matches when she needed a lift. Lori Johnson, a teaching assistant who worked with Francois at Arlington Middle School, remembered that he showed students wrestling holds he claimed to have learned in high school. Still, Francois was careful—there were no reports that he made inappropriate sexual contact with anyone there.

  “He was a mild-mannered type of person. Quiet,” recalled Donald Rothman, the school superintendent in an interview.

  As much as Francois liked the work, the money wasn’t very good, six dollars an hour or about forty-two dollars for a school day, but he lived at home and it was enough to cover his expenses. When he left in 1997, he went to work for the Andersen School. He only worked there for a short while before he was fired for some unknown reason.

  Bill Siegrist’s cops continued to work the street. The girls who had complained about Francois said he was big and dirty and liked to manhandle them. He was exceptionally strong and liked to show it. They said he liked it rough and he liked to dish it out, too. It was a lead worth further investigation.

  Siegrist had his detectives maintain a periodic surveillance of the Francois home on Fulton Avenue. Nothing unusual happened. The cops then managed to get a street prostitute named Nancy Miles to allow them to wire her up to see if they could get Francois to, unknowingly, make some damaging admissions.

  Miles was under orders that she was not, under any circumstances, to get into the car with the big man. When she did manage to talk with him on several occasions, standing outside while he sat behind the wheel, the microphone picked up nothing of value.

  Stakeouts, surveillance, these activities cost police departments a lot of money, and police departments, like any public entity, have budgets. Unless they had something solid on Francois, the cops couldn’t afford to follow him so closely. As for the missing women, it wasn’t a priority. It couldn’t be. There were no bodies, no crime scene. And while it would be nice to believe that every serial killer gets captured, that is just not the case.

  According to Dr. Maurice Godwin, an investigative psychologist who works with police departments in developing “profiles” on serial killers, at any one time there are forty to fifty serial killers at large in the United States. Police don’t like to talk about it lest the public panic, but it is a fact—not all serial killers are captured. Many continue to kill again and again.

  In Washington State, the Green River Serial Killer was still at large after almost twenty years. He is believed to be responsible for the murder of forty-nine women, mostly drug-addicted prostitutes, between 1982 and 1984. The case was so cold only one detective was still on it full-time when DNA testing finally found a match in December 2001.

  In Vancouver, British Columbia, twenty-one prostitutes were missing off the streets of the east side of the city. Like in Poughkeepsie, they had simply disappeared, leaving no crime scene. Which didn’t mean they weren’t dead. Of course, everyone really believed they were, but couldn’t say it.

  “We were agonizing what to do with the public,” Siegrist recalls. “Do we go public and create a scare or keep going with the investigation without [letting the public know]? I have been a cop long enough to know you don’t have all the answers.”

  There was no really good answer. If they went public, it would also be telling the killer they were now on his trail. That might cause him to go to ground and make getting him even tougher. On the other hand, maybe there was a way to turn such a public admission into an asset. Television’s America’s Most Wanted had shown how, done judiciously, the public’s participation in apprehending a bad guy could be invaluable.

  No one person, of course, could make that decision. Poughkeepsie is a small town after all and the decisions you make today will come back to haunt you tomorrow. Everyone is your neighbor. It isn’t a good idea to anger them, especially the voters.

  Anyone who lived in the town and city of Poughkeepsie got to vote for the Dutchess County Sheriff and District Attorney. City and town residents voted for their respective mayors. Catching a serial killer now, rather than later, would not only save lives, it might guarantee politicians’ reelections.

  In the end, the saner, practical heads won out. Siegrist and others involved in the case were allowed to speak on the record to the Poughkeepsie Beat, the weekly newspaper. The Beat was an upscale, local paper that featured hard news reporting in the front, and entertainment, lifestyle and sports articles farther back in its pages.

  The article that appeared in April 1997 talked about the missing women and the possibility they had met their fate at the hands of a serial killer. What was curious was not the much-anticipated public reaction; the public didn’t seem to care and no one panicked. What was more interesting was how the media reacted to the story.

  The media reaction to the story was zero. No one seemed t
o care. The one daily paper in town, the Poughkeepsie Journal, didn’t even pick up on the story. In a town with upscale pretensions, the murders of prostitutes hardly merited any ink. The media were not hounding the cops for a solution either, another break for Kendall Francois. Poughkeepsie’s in-between geographic status had worked to the killer’s advantage.

  Poughkeepsie is too far from either New York or Albany to be included in their daily TV coverage. Only a Poughkeepsie murder or murders covered on the Associated Press National Wire would break through onto the television news assignment editors’ desks for further coverage.

  The Poughkeepsie Beat got what amounted to an exclusive because no one cared to take it any further. As for the public reaction to the story, leads did come in to the cops. There were various kinds of weirdos, kinkos, deviants and other miscreants who were informed on by their neighbors. That made no difference either.

  Throughout the first three-quarters of 1997, the investigation bogged down because of a lack of real suspects and real clues. For some reason, their killer had gone to ground. Maybe the Beat article had one reader who had taken it to heart. Maybe the killer had stopped because he was afraid of further news coverage.

  Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Kendall Francois had taken his respite from killing because he had a problem. A storage problem to be exact. By March 1997, Kendall Francois had a kill total of five women. Five corpses were rotting away in his attic. No one but Kendall knew they were there. His family would later claim they knew nothing about it, though Francois did become concerned that they might find out.

  While the winter had slowed down the decomposition of the five bodies in the attic, they still smelled terribly. The odor of death permeated the house on Fulton Avenue. It leached out to every corner of the house.

  “What is that smell?” McKinley Francois asked.

  “Oh, that’s just a family of dead raccoons in the attic,” Francois replied.

  He had gotten rid of them, he said, and was working on clearing out the smell. His mother, father and sister bought his explanation. Whether they really turned a “deaf” nose to the impossible smell is hard to say. If they did, they kept it to themselves. Apparently, they never complained again.

  Until the odor diminished, Kendall Francois went about his business of picking up prostitutes, having sex with them, but not killing them. It was a personally turbulent time for Francois. It was in January 1997 that he had left his job at the Arlington Middle School and went to work at the Andersen School. Not long after, he was fired. He didn’t give in to the murderous impulses raging inside him. He had to wait until the bodies didn’t smell as much. Finally, in late October, the odor had begun to abate.

  By then, the decomposition of the bodies was well along. Found at that stage, identification would have been difficult. But Gina Barone, Wendy Meyers, Cathy Marsh, Mary Healey Giaccone and Kathleen Hurley were a long way from being completely decomposed. They still had a lot of skin on their bodies. Kendall, though, didn’t care about any of that. Who they were as people didn’t matter.

  He wasn’t up nights having nightmares about them.

  People who know their victims commit over seventy percent of murders. Out of the remaining thirty percent, serial murderers are a fraction of that percentage. Some serial murderers actually express remorse or regret for their actions.

  The point is that purely evil men who kill with no heart or soul happens rarely. When it does, the killer is often possessed of an acute animal cunning that makes him able to escape detection until, and only until, luck plays a role in his capture.

  Sociopaths like Francois who do not feel guilt exhibit a rare psychiatric disorder. Such individuals are not listed in the DSM. While sociopathy is acknowledged among psychiatrists as a legitimate mental condition, such individuals come under the “Antisocial Behavior” diagnosis in the DSM.

  According to the DSM, the essential feature of Antisocial Personality Disorder is violating the rights of others. It is a condition that begins in childhood or early in adolescence and progresses into adulthood. The DSM does point out that this pattern of behavior is often referred to by other names, including “psychopathy” and “sociopathy.” Deceit and manipulation are considered characteristics of this diagnosis.

  People who exhibit this kind of behavior do not conform to social norms; far from it. They may exhibit unlawful behavior. Repeatedly, they may perform illegal acts, including property destruction. Harassment of individuals, robbery and illegal occupations are also characteristic. Frequently, they lie and cheat to get what they want, especially sex or power. They may act impulsively and fail to plan ahead.

  Thus, when Francois killed the women in his house, he may have failed to plan in advance about what to do with the bodies. Seeing no other recourse except exposure, he secreted them in the attic, where they stank the place up.

  People who exhibit this diagnosis may also have a high risk of unprotected sex with prostitutes. Francois was doing that, but so far he was lucky enough not to have contracted any debilitating diseases. Most important, sociopaths do not feel empathy. They are unfeeling, callous individuals who are contemptuous of the feelings and sufferings of others.

  If ever a description was written that fit Kendall Francois, this was it. He could kill and would continue to kill without thinking twice about it. No thoughts of guilt, just survival. Kendall Francois cared nothing for his victims or the families they left behind. He cared nothing for the way they suffered and the lack of a decent burial. All Kendall Francois cared about was Kendall Francois.

  The DSM further points out that Antisocial Personality Disorder tends to be exhibited in bleak, urban settings, where the individual exhibiting such a disorder is far down the economic ladder. Francois also seemed to fit these descriptions. Not only did he make little money at his jobs, he was picking on women in an urban setting. Yet it would have been literally impossible for any of Francois’s teachers in his childhood and adolescence to diagnose him.

  The DSM says that community samplings show that only three percent of men and one percent of women fall into this category. The diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder itself cannot occur before the individual is eighteen years old. Thus, while Francois might have exhibited in childhood and adolescence certain signs of this disorder, like the fight he had in high school, the best anyone could have done was bring him to a psychiatrist for treatment. Even then, such treatment would probably have been ineffective. The DSM is clear that Antisocial Personality Disorder is a chronic illness, though its symptoms may lessen with age, particularly by age forty.

  In 1997, Kendall Francois was only twenty-seven years old. His symptoms showed no signs of abating. He had displayed enough aggressive behavior with prostitutes to be one of the many suspects Siegrist had on his list. Yet nothing pointed to the big man directly. Without a “smoking gun,” there was no point dragging him in for questioning.

  September 1997

  It didn’t make the papers. It was just another prostitute missing and this one was black.

  Newspapers and the rest of the media might say that everyone was given equal treatment—black, white, it didn’t make any difference. Dead was dead, missing was missing and it was all fodder for the news machine. It was also a lot of garbage.

  Newspapers give very little ink to missing women when they happen to be prostitutes. And black. Witness Michelle Eason. Eason was black, 5’2” and 115 pounds. Except for her skin color, she matched the general description of the other missing women. Eason had disappeared off Poughkeepsie’s streets. No one could find her. Michelle Eason was subsequently reported missing on October 9. Like the others, her disappearance caused nary a ripple and failed to make the papers.

  On the same day Eason disappeared, town police received a complaint that a 1984 two-door red Subaru was illegally parked at a medical office in the town. A quick computer search showed that the car was registered to Kendall L. Francois.

  The Francois home wa
s contacted and the family was asked to move the car. They did. Police later found it in a no-parking zone on Fulton Avenue. Tickets were issued on October 28, 29 and 30. The car was impounded on October 30 for failure to move it.

  Police did not search it because there was no evidence the car had been used for anything other than simple transportation. Had they done so, they would probably have come up with microscopic traces of the people who had traveled in it, including loose hairs from the missing women. That would tie Francois forensically to the crime.

  Francois was no dope. He wouldn’t let that happen.

  Police records show that Kendall L. Francois retrieved his car from the town of Poughkeepsie impound lot on October 31. He knew, then, that he needed to get rid of it, but he decided not to sell it.

  Selling the car would be stupid. The cops could track it down to the new owner. Instead, he abandoned it where the police would never find it. He got rid of the plates, too. It was a disappearing act that a professional magician might envy. But he still needed transportation. Otherwise, he couldn’t continue in his work.

  As a human being, Francois was a slob. But as a killer, he was terribly neat and efficient in covering his tracks. He had become a real professional in his death work. If that was to continue, Francois needed a set of wheels, so he bought a new car, a late-model, white Toyota Camry. It was time to begin again.

  November 1, 1997

  It had been just over a year that the serial killer had been spreading his quiet terror through the Poughkeepsie community. People knew what was going on.

  In the small coffee shop on Main Street called the Top Tomato, people sat at the counter and between gulps of bitter hot coffee, they discussed the missing women and what the hell the police were doing to bring the killer in. Talk turned to how the rival police departments from the town and the city were handling the investigation.