Body Dump (2 page)

When he was satisfied that she was clean enough, he took her out, dried her off and then placed her on his shoulder. On the second-floor landing, he opened a door set into the wall. A stairway led upward to the attic.

Francois carried the body up the stairs and into the attic. He placed it in a black, plastic garbage bag that he’d brought with him, the super-duper size normally used to haul leaves. Then he closed the bag over her head and placed the sack deep into the large, stuffy room. If his parents or sister or anyone came up to look, all they would see was a big bag filled with … whatever.

His work finished, Kendall Francois walked down the stairs. It was still the middle of the day and he had plenty of things to do.

October 26, 1996

After two days, Wendy Meyers’s boyfriend reported her missing to the Town of Lloyd police. Highland was in the town of Lloyd and since that was where she was last seen, they had venue.

Immediately, the town and city of Poughkeepsie police departments were notified that a Missing Person’s report on a Highland resident, Wendy Meyers had been filed.

“Her boyfriend was a suspect,” Bill Siegrist recalled. “[They were] hot on him.”

But after Meyers’s boyfriend submitted to a polygraph and passed, he was crossed off the list. As for the involvement of City of Poughkeepsie detectives, it wasn’t their investigation. When a person is reported missing to the police department of Highland, there is not much Poughkeepsie, despite its close proximity, can do. If Poughkeepsie got a lead that the missing person was somewhere within its borders, they could move in. Until then, the investigation lay with the town across the river.

Police entered Wendy Meyers’s name in the computer. It was actually not a bad place to be for a missing person. The New York State Police maintains a central database that every police department in the state has access to. The New York State Police Management Information Network (MIN) Missing Persons File lists every missing person for whom a report has been filed.

Every year, 35,000 people are reported missing. And every year about 31,000 show up, a phenomenal recovery rate of 85 percent. The other 4,000, or 15 percent, are still listed as “missing.”

Among other fields that data entry clerks fill in are the circumstances surrounding the person’s disappearance and the location where he was last seen. Those two factors are all important in solving a single homicide, let alone a string of them. But prostitutes are different from “normal” civilians. The assumption the police made was that Wendy Meyers was a street person and subject to a street person’s vagaries of life.

Prostitutes lead dangerous, unstable, dysfunctional lives. Meyers was not some middle-class housewife with regular habits. Her disappearance was most probably due to someone who was keeping her. Maybe she’d gone to Florida without telling her boyfriend. Who knew?

Or maybe she had gone down to New York City to go shopping. She’d probably turn up like most of the other 35,000. There was no reason to suspect she had been abducted or, worse, murdered. Maybe it would have helped if the cops could have seen Meyers differently, as a girl who started out with real dreams that were thwarted by a drug habit she had to feed and a life of prostitution to pay for it.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

While the cops hoped Wendy Meyers would soon turn up, she lay in her makeshift, last resting place. She was inside a middle-class house on a tree-lined street, just waiting for somebody to figure out where she was.

Albany, New York

For twenty-seven years, Senior Investigator James “Jimmy” Ayling had been a New York state trooper. He began his career in central New York, where he eventually rose to the rank of sergeant. Modeled along military lines, with ranks from trooper through colonel, the state police was a great place for an enterprising young guy like Ayling. After a few years on the force, he became station commander in the Oneonta barracks. While he was climbing the ladder, Jimmy Ayling had time to get his Bachelor of Science in criminal justice.

Ayling doesn’t look like a cop. With a shocking head of carefully combed, thick, gray hair, he seems more like a corporate executive. In a sense, that is one of the roles of his job, making sense out of and leading a corporate hierarchy. But the one he leads is not charged with ruthless business dealings, but with saving lives.

Tall and well built, though thickening a little with middle age, Jimmy Ayling is the senior investigator in the New York State Violent Crime Analysis Unit (ViCAP). Previously known as Homicide Assessment and Lead Tracking (HALT), ViCAP was created to help police officers around the state identify and apprehend serial killers, rapists and other violent offenders.

Under the State of New York Executive Law, 221-B, “Every law enforcement agency which received a report of an actual or attempted abduction or molestation shall notify the New York State Violent Crime Analysis Program (ViCAP) via the requirements of the New York Statewide police information network of such report. Such program shall make comparisons of data in its files and report to the law enforcement agency making an initial report any similarities to other reports received by such program. The Violent Crime Analysis Program shall also notify the unit of law enforcement agency which investigates homicides when a report reveals similarities, patterns or modus operandi which appear in reports of homicides.”

“New York State ViCAP serves as a central contact point and resources for all law enforcement agencies to assist in the investigation of violent crimes,” explained Ayling.

Having the information to catch the bad guys is dependent on all police agencies in the state providing ViCAP with information on crimes, especially the ones that are unsolved. That means someone actually has to sit down and enter that information into the database.

The program itself provides the following:

• Searches for case similarities to link or match cases and/or offenders submitted by different agencies;

• Cross-searches for similarities between cases in different categories, e.g., missing persons and homicide;

• Comparisons and searches of the Abduction/Molestation File for similarities;

• Time lines for potential or suspected serial predators.

Ayling’s second-floor office is cluttered and the clutter makes it look smaller than it is. On the walls are quotations he has saved over the years, poems and commentary about the policeman’s lot. There is no missing the huge, twenty-one-inch computer screen that dominates the room.

Every day, Ayling comes in and quickly scans the New York State Police Management Information Network (MIN) Missing Persons File for anything unusual. When he saw that Wendy Meyers’s name had just been added, he didn’t pay any more attention to it than any other name. Or any less.

No one knew that a serial killer was swimming around like a shark in their midst. Like that predator, the serial killer lurks and waits to pounce, many times at the weakest link in the chain, on the edges of the circle. And that’s exactly what prostitutes were, street people who existed on the edges. But not in Poughkeepsie.

As much as the city protested, it was not one at all. Poughkeepsie was really a small town posing as a city. Everyone knew everyone else, and that included the prostitutes. They would be missed.

If someone requested his help, Ayling could be helpful. But before beginning a ViCAP investigation, there has to be a crime. Simply being missing is not a crime, unless there is hard evidence of foul play. More important, for a homicide to be investigated, a body is usually needed. Someone has to be dead in a way that is not consistent with natural causes. Minus that, all the computers, manpower and brain-power in the world are powerless. Someone has to initially put together that a number of missing people could be the result of an unknown party killing them.

Considering the good odds that most missing persons turn up intact and well, the criminal perpetrator who decides to commit serial murder, and hide the bodies, gets a tremendous edge. He may continue to kill until such time, if at all, that his crimes are detected. Sometimes, serial killers actually get away with it. Jack the Ripper is the prime example.

November 29, 1996

Twenty-eight years old, Gina Barone was born in Yonkers, New York. Her parents moved to Poughkeepsie when she was a child.

“I went to school with Gina Barone,” said Mike Grimley, a construction worker. He was speaking in the Eveready Diner. The Eveready is right on Route 9 in Hyde Park, less than a mile from the city of Poughkeepsie.

“Gina was a nice girl,” Mike remembered. “I spent many an hour with her, just laughing and having a good time.”

That was before Barone turned to drugs and then to the street to support her habit. Over the years, Gina had had one child, Nicole Renee. Barone’s drug habit had become the most defining relationship in her life. The only way to support it was to take to the streets and reel in as many johns as she could. It was during that second part of her life, when she became a street person, that she made the acquaintance of Kendall Francois. Kendall Francois and Gina Barone had “dated” on more than one occasion. He was one of her cash-paying customers.

Gina Barone had a nice smile, even in the mug shot taken after being arrested on a prostitution charge. She was the kind of girl Francois liked—white, with a full head of brown hair and a petite body. Like many in her generation, she found tattoos attractive. She’d had an eagle tattooed on her lower back. More noticeable was the “tat” on her right arm, the letters “POP.”

The night of November 29, Gina Barone had an argument with her boyfriend, Byron Kenilworth. He left her in the area of Academy and Church streets. She had on a pair of jeans and a close-fitting shirt meant to show off her slim figure. Barone decided to pick up some money by “working” Academy Street. Shortly after she began displaying her body for business, a familiar two-door 1984 red Subaru pulled over to the curb near where she was walking.

It was up to the customer to say what he wanted. For her to do so in advance was to invite an arrest on a prostitution warrant. It was never clear who might be a police informer, so it was always a good idea to let the john name what he wanted. Make the customer do all the talking. If the suggestion came from the customer, there was no crime until a price was negotiated. By that time, most girls had had enough of a chance to smell out the john and make sure he wasn’t a cop.

In Kendall Francois’s case, that was probably impossible, considering he stank to high heaven. Unless he was paying, no woman would want to be in the same room with him, let alone have him put his “johnson” up her “jackson.” They negotiated a price for straight “69.” From past experience, Barone would have known that was Francois’s favorite.

Gina Barone suggested a place off Route 9 to do it. Francois must have agreed that was a good place because that was exactly where he drove. For some reason, he wasn’t anxious to get home. Maybe he was contemplating what to do, or maybe he just wanted a change of venue. Whatever the reason, it was eleven
P.M.
by Francois’s reckoning as they drove through the city’s deserted streets. There was a chill in the air; winter was coming very soon. The town just hoped it wouldn’t get hit with a cold winter, which would be made even worse by wind whipping in across the Hudson River.

From where they parked the car on a side street off Route 9, they could see the river, all black and silent, its current flowing south toward New York City. Barone might have glanced out the window at the river, or the deserted highway, but she was a good businesswoman—she most definitely would ask him for money before they did anything. Then it would have been time to face what all the girls knew about Kendall.

Two

The girls had talked about it over and over. None of them enjoyed sex with Kendall Francois; he was just too damn large. But he paid, and that was all that was important to an addict: getting enough green to buy the drug of choice, then move on to the next customer, a never-ending cycle of physical and financial abuse.

After the sex, Francois would later say Gina Barone asked him for her money. He would remember thinking,
I’ve been ripped off
. It must have been hard for Barone to understand what he was pissed about. The guy just seemed to suddenly fly off the handle because he didn’t think he’d gotten his money’s worth. Could he have misunderstood that he was to pay one hundred dollars for sex and thought it’d be less?

Francois continued to complain to her that she had not given him the sex he was paying hard cash for. Gina Barone must have been perplexed. They had had sex; it didn’t make any sense. Suddenly, a strong pair of hands wrapped themselves around Barone’s throat. She might have reached up to try to fight him off, but that would have been futile. What could she do? She was an out-of-shape 110 pounds to his stocky, powerful 380.

Her strength would have begun to fade in direct correlation to the oxygen being deprived to her brain. Soon, her hands would have fallen limply to her sides, her eyes gazing out on the world for the last time and then, finally closing.

They were still in the car parked on a side road. It was quiet, the clock approaching eleven-thirty
P.M.
Looking out, Francois saw nothing—no stranger, no car, no cop, no street person, no anything. Nothing unusual happened in the area where he had just killed Gina Barone that would make police take notice. Francois had just done what every bad guy aspires to: he had committed the perfect crime. He had killed a prostitute who he figured wouldn’t be missed with nary a witness in sight to ID him or his car. The only problem, of course, was getting rid of the body.

Pushing her down under the seat so she wouldn’t be seen, Francois drove his car the few miles back to his house and parked it in the garage in back. When he got out, he looked around to make sure no one was out and about in the neighborhood. He needn’t have worried; no one ever was. If anyone ever looked out back to see what he was doing, they kept their presence quiet.