Body Dump Page 9

  “That’s what made her [who she was],” Cramer would later tell a local paper.

  They lived, not in Dover Plains, but in the nearby community of Oniontown, which Cramer described as a rural New York version of the Ozarks, “almost like a hillbilly community.” But what made French’s life a little bit more out of the ordinary than her lifestyle and arrests was an incident that occurred when her daughter, Heidi, was twelve years old.

  In 1981, Sandi French shot a man. The man lived but, ironically, it was Heidi who was branded. For the next few years in her neighborhood, Heidi became known as the “daughter of the shooter.” It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

  Sandra Jean French had not become a nurse, or a stewardess, or any other kind of professional. She had become a jailbird, a drug-addicted prostitute. Life had not happened the way it was supposed to all those years before in Dover Plains High School.

  On June 11, 1998, French returned one more time to Dover Plains to visit friends. Afterward, she said good-bye and drove away. Four days later, on June 15, police found her car abandoned in the Arlington area of Poughkeepsie, within a few blocks of the Arlington Middle School where Kendall Francois used to work.

  Heidi Cramer reported her mother missing. The detectives looked into it. Siegrist and his men were stymied. They could find no trace of French. The lieutenant suspected that their serial killer was at work again.

  June 12, 1998

  Prostitutes have lives off the street, too. Take Sandi French.

  Cramer was expecting and French was about to become a grandmother. French was just as excited as her daughter Heidi Cramer was. French called her daughter at least three times a day to make sure she was okay and brought meals over. Sometimes, French shopped the Poughkeepsie mall, buying clothes for the baby about to make its way into the world. All in all, it was one of the most exciting and fulfilling times in French’s life. But, she still had to make a living to support her habit.

  The day French met Francois again, it had been a hot morning. Her feet felt hot through her shoes as she walked the steaming pavement of Main Street looking for a john. That was when the fat man came along.

  It was hard not to think of Kendall Francois in any other way. He didn’t give off the air of solidity that some big men did; he seemed like a big, round, soft, black version of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Sandi knew Kendall from other liaisons.

  Francois picked her up in his white Camry. They quickly negotiated the price for sex and then he drove back to his house. As he got out of the car, he looked around for a moment. No one was there. No one was watching. If they were, they were behind curtains and did not make their presence known. And if they were watching and knew something, they must have been afraid, because they never said anything.

  French marched to her doom up the rear stairs of the Francois home. Though, of course, she didn’t know that. She had had sex with Francois before so the absolute filth of his home would have come as no surprise, nor the odors of shit, stale sweat, old urine, rancid grease and something else French wasn’t able to place. You really needed a gas mask to breathe easily in the place.

  Francois himself was no better. When French had sex with him a few minutes later, she would have realized he stank worse than a dead skunk in the road. But Sandra French was beyond expectation or disappointment

  Heidi Cramer had thought that her mother was honest when she talked about her arrests for drug addiction and prostitution. She wasn’t, because Sandra French couldn’t admit to herself that she had screwed up her life. She could not deal with how her drug addiction had cost her precious years with her children, how her self-destructive life led her to commit violence. French only took responsibility for the moment and that was mostly to feed her addiction. To do so meant prostituting herself. Which was how she happened to be with this smelly john. Betraying the quick hands that had helped him turn the tables on unwitting wrestling opponents in high school, Francois’s fingers grabbed French’s throat like a vise. Startled, she grabbed for them and struggled to remove them.

  She struggled all right, all 5’0” and 120 pounds of her against the bulky 6’4” ex-wrestler. Francois squeezed harder. He was determined to choke the life out of her. Francois twisted around and brought her body down to the bed, still holding hard to her throat. The woman was beginning to struggle less now, her eyes bulging out, her tongue flopping outside her mouth. The next moment, when her hyoid, or throat bone, cracked, all that Sandra French was and all she would ever be was eliminated as she descended into death. For Francois, though, death was not the end.

  He took the body into the bathroom. He gently placed French’s corpse in the tub, turned on the water and bathed her. When he was satisfied that she was clean enough, he took the body out, and dried it with a towel. He had to do that; otherwise, there’d be a trail of water to the woman’s final resting place. No way did he want to be discovered.

  Francois picked up the body and slung it over his shoulder. Hands free, he ascended to the attic and dumped it with the other bodies. He could see that things were beginning to get a little crowded. The next day, when no one was around, he went back up to the attic and got French’s body. Then he went down to the first floor, and down farther to the basement. The basement was as much of a dark mess as the upstairs. It looked like the burial ground of lost and broken household objects.

  The crawl space was in the rear of the basement, sort of a shelf that ran right under the house. He propped the body up against the top of it, raised himself up and, making sure he didn’t knock his head against the low ceiling, climbed into the crawl space. It was a field of dirt that stretched the length of the house. Then he reached back and pulled French up. It was easy for the big man; she hardly weighed anything at all.

  Stooping low, he placed the body about five feet back from the lip of the crawl space. He dug a shallow pit and then pushed French’s body into it. He began piling dirt on top of her until most of French’s body was covered. Afterward, looking down at the shallow grave, he had to smile. It was a good job. Nice. Neat. Satisfying. And the best part was, it wasn’t over, not by a long shot.

  A few days later, Heidi Cramer gave birth to a healthy child. Had she lived, it would have been Sandra French’s first grandchild.

  Eight

  Siegrist was anxious. He wanted to get the son of a bitch already. It was a man, no doubt, because no one knew of a case where a woman went around disposing of prostitutes, unless it was some cheesy TV movie that bore no relationship to reality. Sitting beside the Hudson River again, eating a sandwich and gazing out at the waterway named after the famous Dutch explorer, Siegrist thought about the case and the suspects.

  “From past experience, I reminded myself to be open-minded. Many times, you fail to solve a crime because you don’t have the right pool of suspects at the beginning and you don’t trust your own instincts.”

  Bill Siegrist’s instincts had caused him to zero in on two men.

  “I felt Kendall Francois was a [strong] suspect.”

  But there was another who also fit the profile of the man they decided they were looking for. He was Mark King and his name had come up in a computer search of sexual felons. Same as Francois, he was in his twenties and had a history of getting rough with prostitutes.

  King had to be looked at seriously. He lived in a remote, terribly rural area of the county. He could dispose of a hundred bodies if he wanted and no one would be the wiser. Again, there was no direct evidence to indict, but the county was willing to spend the funds to search the area surrounding King’s land. To do the job, Siegrist called in the Ramapo Search and Rescue Dogs.

  The scent of death tends to be a morbid subject. Most people don’t like to consider that the smell of a body is so distinctive that someone, human or animal, can be trained to smell it.

  While humans might have some experience in discerning the smell on the basis of past experience, it was Bill and Jean Syrotuck who refined the concept of the air-scenting search dog and adapted i
t to wilderness situations. In 1972, they formed the American Rescue Dogs Association (ARDA).

  Since that time, the Syrotucks’ organization, ARDA, had established certified chapters around the country. These chapters were actually composed of dog trainers and their charges; the latter were trained in all kinds of search and rescue situations. They could smell people alive or dead in avalanches, earthquake-ravaged buildings, water and, of course, out in the wilderness or woods.

  ARDA innovations included the development of standards and training for air-scenting dogs. This included the first work done on scent behavior under different terrain and weather conditions and the development of a national evaluation system for ARDA units, wherein each ARDA unit must periodically pass a rigorous field examination by ARDA evaluators. In addition, Bill and Jean Syrotuck developed the sector search method, using multiple dog/handler teams simultaneously, and they compiled the first study of victim behavior, now used in search management courses nationwide.

  One of the many honors the organization would gather was in 1977, when the Ramapo Search and Rescue Dogs Unit, based in Chester, New York, became the first of its kind to be used in a major disaster, the Johnstown floods. Since that time, the Ramapo squad had gone on to greater fame in similar rescue situations.

  Siegrist knew that a search of the area around King’s cabin required these specially trained dogs, which some in law enforcement sometimes called “cadaver dogs.” That was why he called the Ramapo Search and Rescue Dogs for assistance. Headed up by Tim and Penny Sullivan, the Ramapo group promised to help.

  “It was a Saturday, in June 1998, when the Ramapo dogs came up,” Siegrist recalled. “They are all volunteers.”

  Which was why he couldn’t say much when some of the dog handlers and their charges came a bit late. It was understandable, though. The search was in a remote section of the county and just getting there was difficult. Once there, the party went to work. The dogs were loosed over a twenty-mile-square area. Besides densely wooded brush, they would have to scent along a nearby railroad track. There are many instances in the annals of criminal justice where killers dumped their bodies near railroad tracks; every inch of ground needed to be covered.

  The dogs sniffed and howled their way through the cool June day. They followed trail after trail, dug their noses into brush and bark, around pines and oaks, evergreens and poplars. Leaves fallen from autumns past had dried out over time and crunched under the dogs’ paws, toughened by outdoor work to the consistency of sandpaper. Siegrist watched them do their work, amazed at how well the dogs handled, hopeful they’d turn up something.

  They didn’t. As afternoon wore into evening, Siegrist could see that the search was hopeless. If King was their man, he had hidden the bodies pretty well. Siegrist’s thoughts drifted back to Kendall Francois.

  Maybe I should bring the dogs over to his house, Siegrist thought.

  While the law would not allow a search of the Francois home without due cause, there was nothing to stop Siegrist from having a Ramapo dog sniff around the Francois home. As long as he stayed on town property—the house’s frontage—he was legally okay. Probably.

  Probably. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he’d had enough experience going in and out of court over the years for hearings on suspects he had arrested that he knew something about the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure and what the courts forbade a cop to do without proper cause.

  Should he bring them over to Francois’s home and have them sniff around outside? If he did, would their keen noses pick up the unique odor of death?

  In the end, he decided against it.

  “I hadn’t wanted to ask too much of the volunteers,” Siegrist says. “They are, after all, volunteers.”

  After the dogs left, Siegrist drove home to Pleasant Valley through the cool night air. Though it was hard to believe, frost was still possible in June in the Hudson Valley. Under tree-shrouded canopies, Siegrist drove into and out of little pools of light cast by a combination of sources—the full moon, the few passing headlights, a street lamp—as he passed through small towns.

  “Could we have saved some lives if we did?” Siegrist would later ask himself. “If I had told them to search, would the dogs hit on it [the smell of the corpses] and what would it have meant to the case? Could we have saved more lives?”

  Those questions would haunt Siegrist for years to come.

  Lucy Degaudio, short, petite and twenty-nine, had known Kendall Francois for a while. She did him favors.

  Kendall, as she referred to him, would give her rides when she needed them. That, of course, was a prelude to their business transactions: Degaudio pimped for him.

  Francois would pull to the curb where Degaudio was standing on Main Street. He’d get out and come up to her, his heavy feet crunching on the glass that littered the street. The glass was from empty crack vials and soda bottles. Francois would offer Degaudio money for women. If she wanted the money, which she did, she would get some of her “associates” to perform sex acts for the stinking, fat man.

  There wasn’t anything unusual about the practice; other guys did it. But Francois was known to be a bit rough with the women. Yet they came back for more. They continued to go with him to the house on Fulton Avenue, to inhale the stink because they needed the money to feed their drug habits.

  Sometimes, when Kendall was in the mood, he wanted Degaudio. On those occasions, she would be chauffeured by the man to his house, taken up to the second-floor bedroom and would have sex with him. It was pretty disgusting, what with the guy’s girth—he was so heavy he had “bitch tits.” Coupled with the odor, it was truly disgusting, but, hey, a buck’s a buck.

  Sometimes when Lucy was with the man that she called Kendall, she would be fucking him and her mind would drift off to her niece Robin, whom she loved to play with. Then, after he had come and pushed her around a bit, he would take her back to Main Street and drop her off, just like the rest of the Main Street women who went with him.

  August 5, 1998

  It was a hot day in the Hudson Valley, perfect for dipping in the river, a backyard pool, a lake, whatever was wet and handy. For the women on Main Street, though, it was business as usual.

  Lucy Degaudio was streetwalking, looking to pick up a john when she saw the white Toyota pull over to the curb. Kendall was inside. She couldn’t believe that for such a big, imposing guy, he had such a sweet-looking face.

  “Oh, hi, Kendall,” said Degaudio, sticking her head through the open passenger-side window and flashing her almost perfect, white teeth.

  Her teeth were a great asset. Most of the girls in her profession had not taken care of theirs. They were cracked, discolored and, in some cases, black. But hers were pearly white and she could use them.

  “Hi, Lucy,” he answered in a flat tone. “Get in.”

  Degaudio got in.

  “We’ll go back to my house,” he said simply.

  It was clear—if she wanted to get his money, she had to go back with him. That wasn’t the best scenario. It would take time. Easier to do it around the corner in a deserted lot.

  Whatever. It was hot. Best to get a move on so she could finish up and get back out there. Time was money in her profession.

  Francois drove slowly over to the house, making sure to obey all speed limits and traffic rules. He wasn’t going to get caught like that idiot on Long Island, the serial killer Joel Rifkin, who was finally captured after he was stopped for a moving violation.

  No, sir! Kendall Francois was a lot smarter than that.

  At the house, Francois pulled up the driveway between the house and stopped the car. He got out, opened the garage door, got back inside and drove the car into the space. In the garage, next to the car, was a soiled mattress. The windows were open and Lucy could smell new construction, that unique, sweetish odor of pine boards and concrete. The garage had a recently poured concrete floor.

  “Let’s have some privacy,” said Francois, lower
ing the garage door.

  For some reason, Degaudio was apprehensive.

  “Why don’t you leave it open a crack, why don’tcha?”

  “What do you think, I’m going to hurt you?”

  She hoped not. Degaudio had a daughter and she was hoping to get the money for her birthday present by having sex with Francois. They agreed on a price of twenty dollars. They got down on all fours on the mattress like rutting dogs. Quickly, Francois mounted her. She turned onto her back.

  It felt like a heavy stone had been laid across her chest; she could hardly breathe. The guy looked like he weighed over 300 pounds. If he wasn’t the biggest trick she had ever had, he was probably close to it. Looking up, she saw Francois’s contorted face as he pumped. The sweat poured down his face as he pushed, the liquid dripping onto her. She became aware of something else—her vagina was hurting.

  The guy was just too damn big. He wasn’t just filling her up; he was stretching her. Her vagina hurt. To Degaudio, it seemed like the session went on for an eternity. It was actually only about twenty-five minutes, when she asked him to stop.

  “Kendall, just please get off me.”

  “Shut up! Shut up! My sister’s asleep,” he hissed.

  Degaudio began to cry. Something was really wrong. She wanted out. Fast. And she didn’t care who heard. She screamed for him to get off her. His eyes were bulging, his breath coming in short, hard gasps.

  “You fucking whore! You bitch! You cocksucker!” he screamed at her.

  Why had he gotten so angry? Maybe he thought she was pushing him and he didn’t like that. Degaudio was, since prostitutes are on the clock. They got paid for their time. And this guy just wasn’t doing his business.

  Francois’s anger and rage boiled up. She never saw it coming.

  The punch caught her flush on the chin. Just like a boxer in the ring, her brain responded to the brute force of the blow by hitting against the side of her skull on the inside. It seemed as though she were falling into a black hole. Then, there was nothing and she blacked out.