Body Dump (14 page)

Why didn’t she listen to me, dammit! If Catina is missing, the same thing happened to her as happened to the others
, Siegrist thought.

He hoped she would turn up alive, but doubted it. He was sure—the towheaded child he had befriended had become another victim. He put the paper aside and began thinking about the task force’s next move. While he was doing that, across town, Francois finished up the premature burial of Catina Newmaster. Like the cop, Francois wondered, too, what his next move would be.

If it were a baseball game, the score would be “Killer nine, Police and Public, nothing.” Despite what TV network programmers might think, the public is not a group of morons. They watch TV, read papers and magazines. The women were missed. And mourned, especially by their relatives, who believed that they were dead.

The relatives of the missing women had been after the cops to make a concerted effort to find them on the off chance that some might still be alive. Who knew? Maybe the bad guy was like the serial killer “Buffalo Bill” in
The Silence of the Lambs
. “Bill” kept his victims alive until he was ready to skin them and, while the latter was not something to think about, the former was.

The relatives, and the portion of the public that cared, believed that the police had not taken their pleas seriously. The cops, they thought, saw the missing women as a lower order of life because of their profession and drug problems. If the missing women were middle class, you’d see how fast the cops would get the killer, they thought. As a result, the police weren’t putting their best effort forward. Of course, nothing was further from the truth.

Siegrist and his brethren wanted to catch the killer in the worst way. They were doing everything they could. All they could hope for was a break, a little piece of luck. And if luck is defined as preparedness meets opportunity, the cops were certainly prepared. Siegrist called up his FBI contact Charley Dorsey to discuss what to do next.

“What do you think, Charley?” Siegrist asked.

They had spoken about the case many times before and the lieutenant valued the G-man’s opinion.

“What the fuck can you tell me?” Siegrist asked in obvious exasperation.

“Set up a roadblock on Main Street,” Dorsey advised.

A roadblock? That was the kind of ham-fisted policing that did nothing but get motorists angry and rarely yielded results. What killer in his right mind would think to even be in a car traveling through a police checkpoint? Hell, if you just walked on the sidewalk, they wouldn’t notice you and you could be on your merry way.

No, Siegrist had precious little to hope for from the Feds, not if you looked back at how ineffectual they had been in the whole investigation. Still, maybe Dorsey’s suggestion was worth a try.

Ten

August 26, 1998

The task force’s existence was finally made public. The press and, in turn, the public, was let in on the secret. There were now five cops working full-time, representing three police agencies, to track the killer down.

Commenting in the local press, one former director of the FBI’s “elite behavioral sciences unit” maintained that the disappearance of the women was not coincidental. He stated the obvious when he said, “Prostitutes make easy targets.” Another former FBI profiler quoted in the same article said essentially the same thing. For the public reading such statements, it sounded like the Federal agents really knew what they were talking about.

They didn’t.

The FBI first decided to take a proactive stance against serial killers in 1978. Dr. Maurice Godwin in
Hunting Serial Predators
, his revolutionary text on the subject, writes, “The impetus for the project was to conduct personal interviews with serial murderers about their crimes in order to find out how they were successful at avoiding capture.”

According to Godwin, the idea was “to use interviews with convicted killers as the basis for constructing future classifications, which then could be used to aid police investigations.” What followed were a series of interviews with 36 convicted offenders, “of whom 25 were defined as serial murderers (i.e., the killing of three or more individuals over time).” Those interviews took place between 1979 and 1983.

The FBI serial murder project was given added attention in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980’s due to public outcry over the murder of a six-year-old boy in Florida by a serial murderer. According to Godwin, due to public pressure, the FBI serial murder project was brought to the forefront and given the necessary U.S. government funding, which eventually led to a unit being established in Quantico, Virginia, called the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU).

“The primary purpose of the serial murder project was to use interviews with convicted killers as a basis for constructing future classifications, which then could be used to aid police investigations,” wrote Godwin. But the project was founded on a house of cards.

Before questioning, information on each offender and their crimes was obtained through the usual police channels—physical evidence, court transcripts, crime-scene photos, autopsy reports, victim reports, psychiatric reports and prison records. Questions were then put together in an unstructured checklist.

What made all of this essentially a house of cards with little or no validity was that according to Godwin, “no detailed analysis of this material has ever been presented. Instead, a simple dichotomy was claimed to emerge from the project by which offenders were classified as either organized or disorganized. The assignment of the offenders to either the organized or disorganized category was based on the appearance of the victim’s attire or nudity, the exposure of the victim’s sexual parts, the insertion of foreign objects in body cavities, or evidence of sexual intercourse.”

The idea, according to the FBI, was to create a major subcategory of serial murderers—sex-related murders
where motive was often lacking
. Therefore, where the murderer was emotional and seemingly disorganized, interpreted from his actions at the crime scene, there was no motive.

“Because of the apparent lack of motive, FBI profilers decided to look for evidence of planning, irrationality or some form of discord at the crime scene in order to determine whether the offender was organized or disorganized. The organized and disorganized typology is then used to classify the murderer’s personality, depending on which category the crime scene falls into,” wrote Godwin.

In their own literature, the FBI failed to explain the differences between the organized and disorganized serial murderer. Instead, the FBI classification seems to more fully describe the killer’s relative level of aggression when committing murder.

The actual differences between the organized and disorganized crime scenes are explained away by the assailants’ psychodynamic drives, which fall into two categories, revenge and sadism. The FBI posits that these drives find then form in “lasting urges” that stem from early childhood experiences. And the latter have been organized around conflict, including defenses, conscience and reality, which butts up against these insatiable drives.

Unfortunately, as early as 1986, researchers specializing in the study of serial murder refuted the FBI classification model. K. A. Busch and J. L. Cavanaugh, writing in the
Journal of Interpersonal Violence
in 1986, stated that the FBI classification model produced statements that were unfounded and not supported by data collection. The FBI case reports on serial murder did not take into consideration contributory factors outside of those already advanced.

In other words, the FBI’s theory of serial murder was made to fit each case, regardless of facts. Any police officers asking for help in catching a serial killer in their jurisdiction would get a cookie-cutter profile from the FBI, putting the suspected serial killer into one of these two categories!—organized or disorganized.

In terms of specific information that would help the police catch one of these monsters, there was none. In fact, according to Maurice Godwin, there is no example where an FBI profile of a serial killer actually helped in catching one. Worst of all, the two researchers, Busch and Cavanaugh, also concluded that the initial sampling was flawed. Its inherent smallness introduced an element of bias that made all of it inherently unreliable. Why then, with so much valid criticism directed against it, did the FBI have this reputation of tracking down serial killers?

Thomas Harris’s 1986 novel about the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit,
Red Dragon
, first introduced the character of the droll serial killer “Hannibal the Cannibal.” It was made into a film in 1987 by director Michael Mann, and retitled
Manhunter
, Brian Cox played the part of “Hannibal.”

The serial killer did not receive legendary pop-culture status until Harris’s sequel,
The Silence of the Lambs
, was made into the film with the same title in 1991. When Anthony Hopkins took over the “Hannibal” role and won an Oscar for his amazing performance, suddenly serial killers were the bad guys the public wanted to know about. The intrepid FBI agents who could “profile” them and get inside their minds, like Jodie Foster’s “Clarice Starling,” influenced the public’s perception of the bureau and its role in successfully tracking down these fiends. Unfortunately, like so much in popular culture, it had no basis in reality.

By 1995, the bureau had restructured and combined BSU with the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The new unit was called the Critical Incident Response Group (CSIG). The CSIG bases its profiles more upon hunches than science. There are no statistical models to go by. It is, essentially, imitating the dysfunction and lack of validation of its predecessor agency. There was still no empirical research to support the FBI’s profiles. That only made Bill Siegrist’s job that much harder.

Siegrist, who had turned to the FBI for help in tracking down the Poughkeepsie Serial Killer, was forced to rely on the old organized/disorganized serial killer models. In doing so, he was relying on what amounted to government voodoo.

Maybe the killer was someplace sticking pins into dolls of his victims; Siegrist didn’t know. And it didn’t matter. He had reports from the FBI that were of no practical value and a killer who had gone to ground and no leads to his identity or whereabouts.

By the morning he talked to Charlie Dorsey again, he was out of options, almost out of hope. That was when Dorsey made his succinct suggestion.

“Set up a roadblock on Main Street,” Dorsey said.

Hand out fliers with the girls’ pictures on them, suggested Dorsey. They’d be able to look in the cars and see if anyone was being abducted. It might slow “the guy” up. Hopefully, if they cast their net wide enough, they might catch their fish.

Siegrist figured it was worth a try.

September 2, 1998

The Poughkeepsie Police got out on Main Street early, in time to stop the early morning business traffic. As cars traversed Main Street where it intersected with Church, cops in both lanes stopped traffic. They looked in cars and handed out the fliers with the missing women’s pictures on them.

Skip Mannain and Bob McCready from the task force were assigned to street duty. They did a canvass, of the shops on Main Street, asking the storekeepers and passersby if they had seen any of the women.

On the sidewalk, back in the shadows, the hookers watched solemnly. They knew only too well that they could have been on those fliers. It was a strong enough realization to almost sober them up.

Kendall Francois pumped hard inside Diane Franco. She shivered from the force, the pure anger of his stroke. She might have shivered even more if she knew Francois was HIV positive. In addition to everything else, he was a carrier of the deadly disease, which he had probably gotten through the promiscuous sex he engaged in with the prostitutes.

Francois never let any of the women know he was infected. That was their problem. After all, to him they were just whores.

Franco began to feel uncomfortable. He stunk to high heaven. Why didn’t the guy take a shower? She couldn’t, though, complain very much.

That morning at about eight
A.M.
, Diane Franco had strolled over to a run-down Dunkin’ Donuts on Main Street. The sign on the place was broken, but inside the horseshoe counter was active with people getting their morning fill of caffeine and sugar. Before she had even gotten a chance to go inside and get her fix of both, Kendall Francois had pulled to the curb beside her and rolled down the passenger-side window of his white Toyota Camry.

“Want a ride?”

Franco knew Francois from at least one other sexual encounter. She’d been to his house before.

“Sure,” she said and got in.

He paid for sex with her. It was all a matter of money, simply a business arrangement. But there was something about Kendall, something Franco just couldn’t put her finger on.

Francois drove down Main Street, past the Top Tomato luncheonette and a spanking-new Eckerd’s drugstore. It was brilliant marketing—the johns who cruised the area could stop in for some condoms before they picked up the women who cruised the street at all hours of the day and night.

So far, things were going along like clockwork. Franco figured to get through with him, then go back out on Main Street and find some more business. Unlike many of her clients, who preferred cars, Francois had chosen to do it in his house. Actually on the second floor of the house. Looking up at it, Franco thought the place looked kind of old.

Francois and Franco strolled from the garage in the yard in the back of the house, to the side entrance in the alley that separated the house from the one next door. Canvassed later by detectives, all the neighbors told the same story: they saw nothing, they heard nothing.

Inside, Franco wrinkled up her nose at the smell. She couldn’t figure out what it was. But why should she be any different? His family still believed that the awful smell was from a family of raccoons that had gotten into the attic where they died. He just hadn’t got around to moving all the carcasses yet.