Body Dump (11 page)

As he walked out of county jail, Kendall Francois realized what a good day it was. It was sunny and nice. The free air felt good. There were no more charges pending against him. He had served his time. The relentless police scrutiny of his activities that he had had to endure in the preceding months had been curbed. The odor in the attic was abating.

It was time to kill again.

Getting to Dover Plains was not easy. Situated in the eastern section of Dutchess County, the only way to get there from Poughkeepsie was to take Route 55 east out of town. There was no other road that would go that far east.

Ten miles outside of Poughkeepsie, the surroundings changed from suburban to rural. Farms dotted the landscape. Apple orchards crowded together, ripe for the fall harvest. Just before Tymore Park, Route 55 came to a crossroads. The fork on the left was East Noxon, a county road made out of old tar and cement dust.

Taking a left onto it, East Noxon ambled for a few miles until it became Burugzal Road. Changing its name as it wound east through isolated towns with populations that barely reached a thousand, the road, actually listed as County Road 20 on the map, finally met up with State Route 6, less than ten miles from the Connecticut border. The area was so rural that a few miles north, the Appalachian Trail cut through the countryside.

Going north on 22, the town of Dover came up in the distance. Before getting there, you passed the Valley Psychiatric Center. Then just a few more miles north, the road finally came into the town of Dover Plains. It was the kind of place people leave from, not go to.

There was really no hope in Dover Plains. When Sandra French grew up there in the 1950’s, there was no industry, just a few stores, a library, a city hall and that was about it. By the 1960’s, when she was in high school, things were still the same. That was the trouble with Dover Plains—things were always the same there. Time stood still. Things never changed. That included the kids.

Sandra Jean French’s 1965 senior high school yearbook photo shows a mature young woman who looks ready to take on the world. The black-and-white picture shows a dark-haired girl with striking dark eyes, a nice nose and full lips, wearing a chic, black-knit turtleneck.

“Sandi,” as her friends knew her, had been a popular girl in Dover Plains High School. In her yearbook, she gave her likes as “1957 Chevys, horses, parties” and dislikes as “snotty people, Monday morning, and hangovers.” Her future plans included attending air stewardess school and marriage. She’d enjoyed many of the school activities and was proud to have chorus; library council; intramurals; future nurses’ club; and pep club as accomplishments.

All in all, French sounded like any young girl of her time. Active in school activities, like many women who were brought up in the 1950’s, she had decided to follow the traditional role of wife and mother. But Sandi was different: before she did any of that, she yearned to try out the glamorous life of an airline stewardess.

As a stewardess, she would get to travel all over the world. For free. She would meet all kinds of interesting people. Maybe, just maybe, one of those interesting people would be her Prince Charming. It was a grand fantasy, for that’s what it was, fantasy pure and simple. The most insightful entry in her yearbook listing was not her future ambitions, but rather the way she dealt with her present. Didn’t anyone at the time think to wonder why a young girl of nineteen’s “dislikes” included “hangovers”?

At the time, the legal drinking age in New York was twenty-one. Most kids, who lived in upstate New York, as Sandra French did, violated that because of curiosity about alcohol. And it was hard not to be curious. Alcohol, and its abuse, was a distinct part of the area’s culture. If you didn’t drink, you weren’t a regular type of person. For the women, trapped by babies and husbands in low-paying jobs, drinking was an easy escape.

Yet how many young girls like Sandra French had become so familiar with alcohol and its effects that by the age of nineteen, they abhorred hangovers? It did not augur well for French’s future that she was so familiar with the effects of liquor. The mention of alcohol and its effects in her yearbook listing was a clear tip-off to Sandra French’s future substance-abuse problems. Unfortunately, nobody saw that. Even if they had, what could they have done, except counsel her to drink in moderation?

Horse farms dotted the landscape of Dutchess County and after graduation, French, an avowed horse lover, became a horse attendant on some of them. Mucking out stables was not an alien thing to her. Neither was being stoned.

From alcohol, she turned to harder drugs, eventually becoming an addict, turning to the streets to support her habit. She would spend much of the next thirty years going in and out of jail for drug and prostitution arrests. In between, she found time to have three kids, one of whom was Heidi Cramer, who in 1998 was twenty-nine years old. Cramer recalled that her mom never tried to hide her drug addiction and prostitution.

“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 it 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.