Body Dump (17 page)

Late on the evening of September 2, as Kendall Francois was concluding his statement to police, Tommy Martin was relaxing in his home, in a town just a few minutes from Troop K in Millbrook. It was sometime around midnight when the phone rang. His wife, used to such nocturnal summonses, simply turned over in bed as Tommy picked up the receiver.

On the other end was Kevin Rosa, Tom’s forty-year-old partner. He had come on the unit in 1995, and held the rank of investigator. It was his first day back from a wonderful late summer vacation and he had decided to stay late that night to catch up on paperwork. He was looking at some slides of a crime scene he had helped process not too long before when a call came in from the Town of Poughkeepsie Police.

“Guess what, they got the guy,” Rosa told a still-sleepy Martin.

“What?”

“I said they got the guy, Tommy. The Poughkeepsie Police. They got the guy that strangled those girls. He gave a statement.”

“What?”

Tommy Martin didn’t believe his partner. Rosa was a clever practical joker.

“I don’t believe you,” Martin continued. “I’m staying right here.”

“This is for real,” Rosa answered.

Holy moley
, Martin thought.
Even Kevin wouldn’t take a joke this far
.

“They want us at the town [police headquarters].”

“Meet you over there,” said Martin.

He hung up the phone.

The case may have been unusual, but the call wasn’t. In the Hudson Valley, when local police needed a forensic specialist, the call always went out to Tommy Martin.

Tommy, as everyone who knew him called him, had started out as a road trooper. His primary job had been to keep the roads safe and, of course, give out tickets for speeding. But none of that was satisfying. He began volunteering his services as an extra set of eyes and hands and, most importantly, brains to process crime scenes. While his broad shoulders and blond hair made him look like the archetype of the stupid college jock, appearance, as it so often is, was deceiving.

Martin might have looked like a fullback, but he had the mind of a college professor. He also doubled as one at night at Columbia Greene Community College up in Greene County. Martin had taken his criminology degree at Albany State College, where he received a B.S. in criminal justice. During the day, he processed crime scenes.

Seeing his potential when he first started on the force, his superiors had decided to allow him to put his inquisitive mind to good use. He began with simple burglaries, working his way up to fatal car accidents. Whenever the forensic investigators needed help beyond their staff allotment of personnel, the call went out for Tommy and he was only too glad to answer it. Eventually, he was promoted out of uniform and became a full-time forensics investigator in 1992.

Since that time, forensic science had made many advances, not the least of which was the now common practice of identifying a suspect through his genetic fingerprint, DNA. But no matter how far science had come, there was still a human being out there physically gathering the evidence to analyze.

Sometimes, Tommy was called in on cases that really weren’t crimes. It could be some sort of car accident where it wasn’t clear how the accident was caused. It might be a man who died from carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in his car in his garage and whose wife found him with the motor running.

Was it suicide or murder?

Tommy Martin had the luxury of being called in when there was a crime scene to process. His whole contribution lay in his ability to interpret hard and fast things one could touch, like guns and knives, sinews and blood, skin and bone. Tommy didn’t have to worry about tracking down the “bad guy.” Tommy didn’t have to worry about talking to the victims’ families. Tommy didn’t even have to deal directly with scumbag murderers. What he did was give the district attorney the palpable evidence to convict felons.

In other words, Tommy Martin didn’t discriminate. He was a scientist with a conscience. He was a modern version of the Old West tracker. Like his Old West counterpart, Martin tracked outlaws, except he did it scientifically by processing crime scenes.

Tommy had done a lot of crime scenes. He couldn’t remember how many. Thousands, probably. It seemed like he was always busy. Since Troop K serviced four of the largest counties in the state, he was just as apt to be called in on a case in wealthy Westchester County or in the more rural Dutchess County, which was where he got the call on the Francois case.

Despite all his experience, the Francois case would be unusual for Martin. His hard work on it would eventually lead to the most dramatic scene in the history of New York jurisprudence, stretching back over two hundred years to the dawn of the republic.

Less than a half hour after getting the call to get to work, Tommy Martin strolled into the lobby of the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Headquarters. Martin had been through this routine many times before. He knew the procedure before they could get into a suspect’s house. The idea was to stage your troops before going into battle.

Martin said, “We applied for warrants to search the house. The idea is to wait for your ducks to line up,” so that no court could ever throw out evidence seized in an unconstitutional search.

By one
A.M.
, the assistant district attorney had found a judge to sign a search warrant. They now had a legal right to enter Kendall Francois’s home and search for evidence of murder. Martin and Rosa piled into their unmarked 1995 Chevy van and began the short drive to Fulton Avenue. By the time they got to the Francois home, the city and town cops were already there.

“The first thing you do is set up the crime-scene tape,” Martin explained. “You establish a perimeter around the crime scene, in this case the Francois house.”

The two state forensic specialists began that process, stringing the tape directly around the house from the curb and all the way around into the yard and back again. While they were doing that, the detectives knocked on the door of the house.

“Yes?” asked the man who answered the door. His name was McKinley Francois. A factory worker, he was Kendall’s father.

“Mr. Francois, we’re detectives,” they said, flashing their badges, “and we’ve got a warrant to search the premises.”

McKinley Francois had no time to be confused. The police hustled him and his wife, Paulette, and their grown daughter Kierstyn out of the house. This was a situation where the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. The constitutional right of the state to search the premises for evidence of murder far outweighed the privacy rights that the Francois family were entitled to.

It was nothing personal. Where the family would go, what they would do, was not the state’s problem. Besides, they wouldn’t be out on the street. Family and friends could take them in. There was probably some provision in their homeowner’s insurance policy that would pay for shelter. If not, the county could always find something for them.

What it came down to was this: once the police verified there were bodies in the house, through Francois’s statements, which they felt to be true, access to the house was restricted. It had to be, in order for Tommy Martin to do his job. The evidence had to be as pristine as possible so the state could get a conviction.

As for the Francois family, they had to face a basic question: where could they now go? The police had legally kicked them out of their house, the house Paulette and Nat
owned
, in the middle of the night.

After the police dispossessed them, Nat, Paulette and Kierstyn decided to stay with Raquelle, the family’s oldest daughter, who had her own place in another part of the city. And as Kendall Francois’s loved ones tried to absorb the enormity of what was happening, the sun came up and the detectives continued their work.

Too many homicide cases in the United States have been compromised because of shoddy crime-scene management. In the worst-case scenarios, this shoddy police work allows the guilty to go free. The innocent can wind up being punished.

The most important thing in a homicide investigation is restricting access to the crime scene. Period. If done really professionally, that means that only crime-scene specialists will process the crime scene. At the Francois house that’s exactly what happened.

“The first piece of crime-scene tape surrounds the property,” Tommy explained. “Then we rope off the middle of the block” to further restrict access. “What we are doing is establishing an inside perimeter and outside perimeter to the house.”

The police officers manning the perimeters wore different uniforms. Because the outside perimeter was in the city of Poughkeepsie, that was the uniform those cops wore. Their counterparts, on the inside perimeter where the house was, wore the blues of the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Department.

What no one dared talk about was that conflict might have compromised the investigation. It had taken a long time to establish the joint task force, too long, many both in and outside government felt. Finding the bodies, bringing closure to the affected families, would go a long way toward resolution.

Tommy Martin looked up at the Victorian house. It looked ominous in the darkness. But he had a job to do. They were going to find the bodies inside and make the case against the son of a bitch.

It’s the perfect time of year, not too hot, not too cold
, thought Tommy Martin as he changed into his suit.

The neighbors, who had already been roused by the intense police presence outside, flocked to their windows. Scattered lights went on all through the block. Neighbors came out on their stoops and began talking to the uniforms.

“What’s going on?”

The cops, taciturn at first, not sure what they could say, just said it was an investigation. But soon, it became evident. The cops were there to look at the house of the guy they suspected had killed nine prostitutes.

“It’s the Francoises’ house.”

“Yeah, that place smelled bad!”

You could hear the comments up and down the street. The police, meanwhile, spoke amongst themselves in quiet, almost reverential tones. They knew the grim business in front of them and had respect for it.

The crowd hushed when they saw what happened next. The cowardly ones peering out from behind closed shades, the more courageous out on the street, saw the doors to the unmarked Ford Chevy van open. Out came two men dressed in Tyvek space suits. Inside those suits were Tommy Martin and Kevin Rosa.

The suits the forensic specialists wore did resemble space suits. They were white and fit from head to toe, with helmets. Full, knee-length boots completed the otherworld effect.

“They’re actually Tyvek Coveralls,” Martin explained, “sterile suits that keep biohazards from getting on us. See, it’s easy to contaminate a crime scene. Like, you bend over to cut out a swatch of carpet that you think has blood on it and your head drips sweat onto it. Even saliva. We all spray a little when we talk.”

That wouldn’t do. The specialists’ fluids contaminating the scene could lead to evidence being compromised and ultimately, an innocent verdict. Martin walked slowly up the driveway, gauging his surroundings. As he got closer to the side door of the house, the odor almost overpowered him.

“I could smell death, walking up that driveway,” he said.

The crime-scene specialist took out his flashlight and thumbed it on. The powerful beam struck out, illuminating the darkness. As Martin entered the side door of the house, going into the basement, he noticed a battered clothes dryer on his right.

“There was a bunch of shit in that basement. It was loaded with crap.”

There was a rusty bicycle that had seen better days. Off to the right was the furnace and, beyond that, a bookshelf. Then there was an overturned chair, its green paint chipping. An old baby stroller stood off to the side. Francois actually had a brother who was a graduate of Syracuse University and another sister, neither of whom lived at home. Maybe one of them had been in that carriage. Or maybe Francois himself, when he was a baby.

Back in the very rear of the basement was a crawl space that looked like a ledge, about five feet above the ground. Under it was a small wooden chair. Martin paused. His colleague Rosa had come up beside him. As one, they had shone their lights up into the crawl space.

What they saw in the harsh light were two objects that were covered with a black plastic bag. Or maybe they were inside the bag. It was hard to be sure. They needed to go in to be certain. But they couldn’t, at least not yet, as much as they wanted to.

“You can’t hop in and pull off the plastic,” Martin explained. “That would destroy evidence.”

Martin shone his light again on the bag. That was when he saw something protruding out of the bag, at the top. At first glance, he had missed it, missed it because “it was abstract, seeing it out of human context.

“It was a knee. Someone’s knee.”

What Martin and Rosa were looking at was a knee, or what had once been one. The skin hung in dark brown ribbons. The tendons had not thoroughly decomposed yet. The skin was just barely there and under it, in all its engineering complexity, was the knee joint, looking bone white in the ghostly light.

Whoever this woman was, she had been there for some time. She didn’t look lonely though. The bag looked as though it contained not one, but two bodies. Spraying his light out farther, Martin saw the second object, closer to him than the first. It, too, looked like it was a giant plastic bag, filled up with bones.

The cops had already established that there were bodies in the basement. They had known to look there because Kendall Francois had told them, hours before in the interrogation room, that the crawl space in the basement was where he had unceremoniously dumped some of them. The attic was next.

Breathing shallowly through their space suits, Martin and Rosa withdrew from the basement and climbed the stairs that led to the main story of the house. Neither man felt any anxiety. This was business as usual to them. They were professionals. In some way, they could close off their brains to the tragedy they were witnessing—the end of people’s lives, people with hopes and dreams like they had.