Body Dump (15 page)

Up the paint-chipped stairs, strewn with garbage, Franco and Francois climbed and off the second-floor landing into Francois’s bedroom. Once inside, they got to the matter at hand. It didn’t take too long. After they’d finished having sex, Francois would later recall, Diane Franco asked him for her money. They got into an argument over it. His face twisted into a paroxysm of fury. Those hands, that had once pushed opposing wrestlers like so many fleas, quickly closed around Franco’s throat. Kendall Francois’s powerful hands pressed deep into her flesh. And squeezed.

When he squeezed hard enough, he would break the hyoid bone at the top of her larynx, paralyzing her ability to scream and putting her into shock. That would happen after Francois had squeezed long enough, and hard enough to cut off the oxygen flow to her brain. She’d pass into unconsciousness and from there into death. After that, Francois would then make sure that she was eliminated, that she disappeared like all the rest.

But that day, God was with Diane Franco. How else to explain what happened next?

Franco was a lightweight, all of 5’3” tall and less than 130 pounds soaking wet. She did not work out, she did not eat right and she was known to use drugs. She was not in the best of shape. But she fought with her heart and her soul, with everything she had.

I
will not die
, her brain seemed to shout to her body.

In a superhuman show of strength, the slight woman broke free from the death grip of the killer. She pushed off the bed and managed to gain her footing.

“Look, why don’t we just forget about this?” she said, her head pounding with the blood rushing through it, her legs wobbly from the lack of oxygen to her muscles.

Francois looked at her. Over the next few minutes, Franco made the kind of argument for life that Daniel Webster had made with the Devil. Kendall Francois continued to stare at her, his breath quickening, weighing whether to move in for the kill.

In the end, he decided to let her live. But it wouldn’t do for his reputation to have her just walk out the front door of his house and stroll through the late summer sunshine back to Main Street.

Who knows who would see her? Who knew what she might say or do? No, better to keep control of the situation
.

“I’ll drive you back to Main Street,” he volunteered.

They walked down the refuse-filled hallway, down the dirty, garbage-strewn stairwell, down to the first level of the three-level house. Francois opened the side door of the house that led into the alley that separated it from the adjacent house.

No one saw anything. No one heard anything. Francois led her to the white Camry parked inside the detached garage in the rear of the litter-scattered yard. There was a battered, forlorn child’s desk next to a tree that had some sort of fungus on its bark.

Franco got in on the front passenger side, while Francois fit his immense bulk behind the wheel. Diane’s heart beat wildly. Would she make it back to Main Street alive or would he detour to somewhere else and finish the job? Sure, he said he was going to take her back to Main Street. He might do that, but didn’t he just try to kill her?

Kendall Francois backed his car down the driveway and out onto Fulton Avenue. He passed a red Trans Am parked at the curb across the street.

As he drove slowly down the street, Franco noticed the doctors’ office right next door to Francois’s home, the neat one-family houses that dotted the street. Some were Cape Cods, some Colonials, one or two ranches and, of course, the older Victorians, which is what the Francois house was. Signs warned not to park November 1 through April 1 from twelve to eight
A.M.
No way the residents wanted any of the Main Street scum of prostitution, crime and drugs filtering over in their direction.

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH AREA
another sign emphasized. That one should have amused Francois.

The Neighborhood Watch was a community-policing program in which residents kept a sharp eye out for anything out of the ordinary. If anything did happen that shouldn’t, if anyone saw something suspicious, the idea was to report it to the police immediately. Yet, not one call had come into the police about Francois.

Not one.

The sign to the contrary, it was not unlike other insular neighborhoods in the country that try mightily to keep out those who might intrude on the residents’ privacy, yet never consider that the menace could come from within.

Vassar College was two more blocks down, but Francois swung the car to the left at the corner and headed back to Main Street. It was just two more blocks, Franco realized.

They had just passed Top Tomato. She looked at the car door. She hadn’t locked it. Then she looked over at the big black man behind the wheel who, moments before, had almost strangled her to death and thought about what could still happen.

“How about over there?” said Diane Franco to Kendall Francois.

She pointed to the left, to a Sunoco station on the corner of Main and Grand. Dutifully, Francois pulled off to the left. The Camry’s fourteen-inch wheels had just climbed the curb when Franco broke for freedom.

Franco threw open the passenger-side door and ran. Unless he wanted to attract a crowd, which surely he did not, Francois had to let her go. He watched her run away as he turned and drove back in the opposite direction.

“There’s Kendall,” said Mannain to McCready.

Mannain had been investigating the disappearance of the Poughkeepsie street women since the first one was reported on October 24, 1996. Another month and it would be the two-year anniversary, two years without a suspect’s arrest, two years of killing after killing. Skip Mannain was the only member of the task force who had been on the case since the beginning. It seemed like ages ago.

They were still handing out fliers when they saw the big man’s white Camry coming off the gas station lot on Grand and Main, proceeding in the opposite direction. Mannain waved and Francois, returning the friendly gesture with a wave of his own, drove on by and disappeared around the corner.

“Let’s pull in,” Mannain suggested.

He drove his car into the same gas station Francois had just come from. After pulling in, they heard a man screaming. It was Jim Meadows, an employee of the Sunoco gas station.

Calmly, Mannain reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open. Inside on the left flap was an identification card. On the right was a shiny badge that said
DETECTIVE, CITY OF POUGHKEEPSIE
.

“A woman just ran in the station claiming she’d been raped,” said the gas jockey, sticking his head in the front passenger window.

“What’s her name?” Mannain asked.

“Her name’s Diane Franco.”

“Where is she?”

Meadows looked around. After a moment, he spotted Franco, about a half block distant, walking slowly.

“There.” He pointed.

Mannain tooled the car off the curb and drove quickly down Main Street, easily overtaking Franco. He turned in and parked a few feet in front of her. Car doors slammed and the cops were instantly on the curb. They flashed their badges.

“I’m Detective Mannain of the city police,” said Mannain, and then he introduced his partner. “We just heard from a man at the gas station that you were assaulted.”

Franco was hesitant. After a moment, she said there was nothing she wanted to report. Mannain was perplexed. She’d just been attacked and didn’t want to report it?

“She thought there was a warrant out for her,” Siegrist would later explain. “That’s why she didn’t want to report the rape and assault.”

Mannain wouldn’t let her say “No.”

“You have to come with us,” Mannain told her. “Come on, if someone hurt you, you can’t let them get away with it. They might do it to somebody else. You know what’s going on out here.”

Franco certainly did. After a few moments, she acquiesced and agreed to come on in and talk. Since the alleged assault had occurred in Francois’s house, which was in the town of Poughkeepsie, a mere three feet from the imaginary border that separated it from the city of Poughkeepsie, Franco was brought to the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Headquarters.

McCready found a vacant interview room. They made her as comfortable as they could and reassured her that they were only interested in the man who had assaulted her. Once they had gained her trust, they interviewed her.

Prostitutes don’t generally like to charge customers with being too rough. It’s a matter of business. Do that and they’d never come back. But Francois was different; it was like he
meant
it. Besides, the cops seemed sincere in their desire to bring the big guy in.

“Do you know who did it?” Mannain asked.

“Yeah, Kendall Francois.”

Mannain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. It was the kind of feeling that a good cop gets when he knows he is at the end of a long hunt. But they had been down this road before with Francois—he already had two misdemeanor convictions for activities relating to solicitation. They needed to go by the book.

Mannain wanted her to file a complaint against Francois. Without that, their hands would be tied and they’d be right back where they were, except it was two years later and still no one in custody.

A short while later, the phone rang in Siegrist’s office. He picked it up off the cradle.

“Lieutenant Siegrist.”

“Bill, it’s Skip.”

The junior man sounded excited. He quickly explained what had happened.

It’s Kendall again
, thought Siegrist.

“And you got the girl to file a complaint?” Siegrist asked.

“Yes,” Mannain answered. “The town’s picking him up now.”

“Keep me informed,” said Siegrist.

Siegrist went back to work. They had been down this road before. Only if they got a search warrant to search the house did he expect anything to appreciably change.

Eleven

Once again, jurisdiction was important.

The Francois house was located in the town of Poughkeepsie, not the city of Poughkeepsie. It was in the town where the alleged assault against Franco had occurred. Accordingly, it was Detective Sergeant Daniel Lundgren and Detective Jon Wagner of the town police who drove over to Fulton Avenue to make the arrest.

The doors of the unmarked police car slammed in the early afternoon sunshine. The cops could hear the birds in the trees chirping as they climbed the rickety wooden steps. At the top, they found themselves on a weathered wooden porch strewn with garbage.

Francois heard the knock. After a moment, Francois answered and came out to talk with them. The time, Lundgren would later note, was three
P.M.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Daniel Lundgren and this is my partner, Detective Jon Wagner, of the town police,” said Lundgren, flashing his badge. “Would you come to the police department with us please?”

Francois looked at the two men emotionlessly.

“Sure,” he said easily.

Without arguing or struggling, Francois readily agreed. He got into the police car and was driven downtown for their little chat.

Once they arrived at police headquarters, they showed Kendall Francois to Room 112, an interview room not unlike any other in the building—a medium-size rectangle with a desk in the middle and a group of chairs around it. The walls were painted institutional green. The place smelled from stale coffee, cigarettes, sweat and desperation.

At four
P.M.
, McCready and Mannain came in to talk to Francois. The first thing they did was advise him of his Miranda rights.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed by the court. Do you understand these rights?”

Francois said that he did.

“Do you wish to speak with us without an attorney being present?”

That was the crucial question. If Francois said no and invoked his constitutional right to have an attorney present, the interview was over.

“No, I’ll speak to you without an attorney,” Francois said.

Surely, Francois had seen any number of cop shows on television where the Miranda warning was recited. He knew that talking would only lead to further incarceration. Implicating himself in Franco’s assault or something even more serious, like murder, was a stupid thing to do. But no one ever said that criminals were smarter than most people. If they were, they would never be caught.

Mannain knew they had gotten a break. The last time when they’d questioned Francois, he’d lawyered up. There’d be plenty of time to wonder why he hadn’t this time. For a change, the cops had the opportunity for a little chat.

“Okay, Kendall,” said McCready, “we want to speak with you about a person you were with earlier this morning.”

“Diane Franco,” said Mannain casually.

“Allegedly, you assaulted her during a sexual encounter at your home,” McCready continued.

“Well, I paid to have sex with her,” Francois admitted. “I didn’t sexually assault her in any manner.”

“Ms. Franco was very detailed in her complaint. And I noticed she had marks around her neck, like someone had tried to strangle her,” said McCready.

“Okay, I choked her, but,” he tried to explain, “we were having sex—”

“Intercourse?” asked Mannain.

“Yes,” said Francois.

“Where were you?”

“In my car inside the garage at my house. We were having sex in my car inside the garage at my house when we got into an argument.”

“Then what happened?”

“I got angry and grabbed her by the throat. We continued having sex. And I began choking her with my hands.”

There was silence in the room. They still didn’t have enough. What they had was a coincidence. They needed to make it stick. They really needed the bodies to charge him. Without a corpse, convicting a man of murder is almost impossible. It rarely happens.

“Did you calm down?” McCready asked, knowing full well that he had.

Francois nodded.

“So what happened after you calmed down?” McCready continued.