Body Dump (20 page)

The attempts at identification of the other victims continued. While Wolf did her autopsies as best she could with what was left of the victims, Poughkeepsie detectives subpoenaed the medical and dental records of all the missing prostitutes. The medical records would be useful if any of the women had had broken bones that had been set.

A forensic dentist was called in to match the dental records to the teeth in the bodies. Because teeth survive bodily decomposition, they present the best chance for a matching identification.

September 5, 1998

Back in Poughkeepsie, the police continued their search of the Francois home. The residents on Fulton Avenue began to adjust to the fact that they had had a serial killer in their midst and never knew about it. When reporters did man-on-the-street interviews with them and the question was inevitably asked, “Did you suspect anything,” the answer was always the same.

No one had seen anything suspicious, like Francois strangling girls in his car in the backyard in broad daylight, or escorting some of the live ones into his house, also in broad daylight, never to return. It was just that strange smell.

As the investigation progressed into the next week, the Francois home became a tourist attraction. Tourists had the luxury of being able to look at the home of a killer and not think anything good about him. They had the luxury of looking at the true face of evil, which, of course, wasn’t very dramatic.

The fact was, most homicides involved people who knew each other. They were human beings who made mistakes. They might be vile humans, but they were human nevertheless. A serial killer was different. His mere kill total meant he could be looked at without extenuating circumstances.

To answer the question—What does the face of evil look like?—one merely had to look at the banal visage of Kendall Francois. Want to know what a murder house looks like? Easy. Come to Fulton Avenue in Poughkeepsie. And that’s exactly what people did.

It became a big carnival. People from the city and town, from surrounding towns, from all over three counties, came to Fulton Avenue to look at the home of a serial killer. The media christened it “Poughkeepsie’s House of Horrors.”

People gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house and watched the Tyvek-clad technicians ply their trade. They saw the crime-scene specialists take hundreds and hundreds of bags of evidence out of the house. They gaped at the news vans that staked the place out as though they still expected something dramatic to come from the investigation.

The great film director Billy Wilder, who died in 2002, had once directed a film called
The Big Carnival
, which was about a man trapped in a mine cave-in, the reporter who secretly hampers rescue efforts to “hype” the story, and the carnival that forms outside the cave as rescue workers try to get him out. It was a cynical work, even for the usually cynical Wilder. But if hot dog stands and rides had been added to the carnival outside the Francois home, life would have definitely been doing a perfect imitation of art.

One neighbor, Gary Eckstein, had gotten so sick and tired of the spectacle and the roadblocks on Fulton Avenue that he had to negotiate every day since the discovery, and the smell that still emanated from the house, that he had moved out until the whole thing was over.

“I couldn’t understand why people stood out there for hours and just stared. They were there with their kids in strollers,” said Eckstein in a local paper.

It was the same kind of mentality that makes some drivers slow down when they approach an accident on the other side of the road. There’s a vicarious thrill in seeing human tragedy that isn’t part of you and yours. Sometimes, people who didn’t even know them, have a need to recognize the dead.

The tree on Eckstein’s property closest to the street had become a shrine to the dead women. It was filled with cards, ribbons, roses and flowers placed there to honor the victims.

“The first day there was just a bouquet of roses in front of the tree. The next day it was covered with the stuff,” Eckstein recalled.

But his real concern was that when the police finally completed their investigation and left, what would happen then? Who would be there to keep the morbid and the curious out of his yard and the yards of other houses that afforded a bird’s-eye view of the lair of the serial killer?

For the Francois family, who were also displaced, the questions were much more far reaching.

What do you do when your son/brother is a suspected serial killer? How do you feel, knowing, knowing that your flesh and blood is suspected of being a modern-day Jack the Ripper? Does it send shivers up your spine, or do you just face it with the inevitability of having known what was really going on and turning, for your own reasons, a blind eye to it?

No one would ever know. The Francois family got a lawyer, Marco Caviglia, to speak for them. Aside from expressing the family’s sympathy to the victims and their families, he said nothing about the crimes, their son and brother, nothing that would shed any light on the reasons for such wholesale murder.

Kendall Francois’s parents and sister would not speculate publicly about why their son and brother was a serial killer.

PART THREE

A Matter of Life or Death

Fourteen

The tortoise had won the race. The tortoise in this case was the City of Poughkeepsie Police Department. The hare was Kendall Francois. For two years, the hare had led until finally the tortoise caught up.

After two years of work, Bill Siegrist and Skip Mannain and their ally Jimmy Ayling at the state police had finished their active involvement in the case. They would come in and out as the following weeks and months would lead to what for all was an unknown outcome.

Would Francois be convicted of murder one and sentenced to death? Or, would he be convicted of or plead to a lesser charge, thereby avoiding death? It could all be up to Bill Grady. It was Grady who now took center stage in the still unfolding drama of the serial killer’s life.

William “Bill” Vincent Grady was a local. Fifty-six years old, he had been born in Beacon, just a few miles south of Poughkeepsie. He had grown up in Dutchess County. It was his luck to be born into a prominent family.

Grady’s father, Vincent, had been the county’s district attorney in the 1940’s. Like many politicians who don the district attorney’s suit, he wished for higher office and got it. Eventually, Dutchess County District Attorney Vincent Grady became Justice Grady of the New York State Supreme Court.

In most states, the supreme court is the highest court in the state, but not in cockeyed New York. The Empire State reserve that honor for the court of appeals. No, Vincent Grady spent his time as a judge presiding over the matters the supreme court had the jurisdiction of—trials for murder, robbery, kidnapping and other felonies.

Bill Grady aspired to the bar and to follow in his father’s footsteps. Fate had other plans. During the height of the Vietnam War in the tumultuous 1960’s, Bill Grady served his country as a captain in an armored unit in the most contentious war in United States history. Vietnam is a small country on an Asian continent far away from his bucolic home in Dutchess County. In combat, he acquitted himself admirably: he won the Bronze Star for bravery under fire.

Returning home, he attended and graduated from New York Law School. In 1971, he went to Poughkeepsie, the county seat, and became an assistant district attorney. In the courtroom or out, Grady did not cut a dashing figure. He was slight of build and height, bespectacled, with a tight, bland face, hardly the image conjured up of “the fighting DA” of fiction and film. Plus, the county’s newest ADA had neither the oratory nor charisma of the state’s most famous prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, who put Lucky Luciano away and later used that as a platform to run for president.

Grady also did not have the brilliant legal mind of some in his profession. Instead, Bill Grady’s technique was slow and steady. Not too much flash and dash, but he got the job done. After working in the district attorney’s office as an assistant prosecutor for a couple of years, he was promoted to chief assistant prosecutor.

The politics in Dutchess County are from the old school. The dominating Republican political machine controls political patronage. That, combined with blatant nepotism, is how the county runs to this day. It functions within a system that especially abhors outsiders’ criticisms. Running on the Republican ticket, Bill Grady lost his first bid to become district attorney in 1975. Never one to give up, he ran again in 1985.

Grady was a man of the people, a guy like any other on the street. Like the average citizen, he was concerned about the high rate of crime and the cost to the county’s families and resources. His rhetoric about crime and drugs and their insidious effect on the county resonated with voters.

Bill Grady won election to the office his father had once occupied. Since then, most observers have felt that Grady did his job and did it well; the voters liked him and the Republican political machine in the county was happy with his performance.

By 1988, Grady had been a prosecutor for almost twenty years. Killers, thieves, con men, robbers, rapists, he had prosecuted them all. He was experienced and professional. His reputation inside the county was established. Outside the county, few, except political insiders, knew who he was. That was fine; he did his job.

And then along came Tawana Brawley.

It happened in the fall of 1988. A fifteen-year-old girl named Tawana Brawley was discovered in a green plastic garbage bag on the site of an apartment complex in Wappinger Falls, the city directly south of Poughkeepsie. The venue was still Dutchess County. That meant that Grady as the DA directed all investigations.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived and took in the scene. The girl, who appeared unconscious, had no obvious injuries. There was no blood, no bruising, nothing. Upon further physical examination, they discovered that “KKK” had been written across the top of the girl’s chest. On her stomach, someone had written the word “Nigger.” Feces were smeared on her arms and legs and it was the feces that provided the “ink” for the aforementioned epithets.

It was, to put it mildly, perplexing. What had happened? Had she been raped and then smeared with excrement by racists? The girl wouldn’t say. She kept her eyes closed. They tried talking to her. Except for a fluttering of her eyelids, there was no response. The cops called an ambulance and the girl was whisked to nearby St. Francois Hospital, where she was examined.

There was no sign of rape. The girl appeared physically fine, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. The ID in her wallet gave them her name. Her mother, Glenda Brawley, was called and she came to the hospital.

Tawana Brawley’s method of communication consisted of nods and shakes of her head, shrugging shoulders and scrawling in the cop’s notebook. After a few hours of talking to her like this, Brawley charged in grunts, groans and pictures that it was a group of white men, including at least one white cop, who had raped the girl over a period of four days. Her family brought in Alton H. Maddox, Jr., a black lawyer who specialized in civil rights cases to represent her. Brawley’s legal team would later include another black lawyer familiar with civil rights cases, C. Vernon Mason. The Reverend Al Sharpton came on board as the third “family adviser.”

Primarily an administrator, Grady initially assigned the case to two of his assistant district attorneys, including Marjorie Smith, the same Marjorie Smith who would later take Kendall Francois’s statement. As the Brawley family advisers and the Brawley family made claims of racial bias in the investigation, as well as the crime, Grady got actively involved.

In an effort to ferret out the truth, Grady and a black assistant personally went to the Brawleys’ apartment in Wappinger Falls. He practically begged Glenda Brawley to allow the teenager and her family to cooperate in the investigation.

Glenda Brawley was uncooperative and noncommittal. Brawley’s stepfather, Ralph King, broke up the meeting. He burst in the door, shouting obscenities highlighted by, “What the fuck is going on here?”

The prosecutors’ jaws dropped. After some more verbal haranguing, they left. Meanwhile, the media had taken hold of the story. Well into 1989, the media hung on every word from the Brawley family and their advisers. Bowing to their pressure, Governor Mario Cuomo appointed Attorney General Bob Abrams as special prosecutor. Grady was effectively out of it.

After almost a yearlong investigation, on October 6, 1988, a grand jury Abrams had called issued a 170-page report. It consisted of 6,000 pages of testimony from 108 witnesses and 250 exhibits. The report concluded:

Based upon all the evidence that has been presented to the grand jury, we concluded that Tawana Brawley was not the victim of a forcible sexual assault by multiple assailants over a four-day period. There is no evidence that any sexual assault occurred. The grand jury further concludes there is nothing in regard to Tawana Brawley’s appearance on November 28 [the day she was found in the garbage bag] that is inconsistent with this condition having been self-inflicted.

In other words, the whole thing was a hoax. Brawley had manufactured the whole thing. Why, was open to conjecture. Regardless of the reason, for Grady, the conclusion could not come soon enough.

It had been a bad experience for the DA, not one he wanted to repeat. Despite the subsequent discrediting of Tawana Brawley’s story, Grady’s office had seemed incompetent in handling the case, and the press had gone along with the view.

Since 1988, Grady had run and been reelected twice. There had been nothing that even came close to the attention he and his office received in the Tawana Brawley affair. His next reelection bid was in 1999. His constituents would be watching closely to see how he handled the prosecution of Kendall Francois.

There was never any question that Grady would seek the death penalty against the alleged serial killer. Ironically, a recently introduced death penalty law was so unclear in the way it was written that, even if Grady got a conviction, there was no guarantee Francois would be executed for his crimes. In a sense, the very nature of his crimes might guarantee him immunity.