Body Dump (22 page)

“We find ourselves plagued by unimaginable circumstance,” said the statement. “Our youngest son is suspected of committing grave offenses from which his life hangs in the balance. We have virtually lost everything, been dispossessed of our home and cast into the street.”

Better than cast into the attic or crawl space.

“We are without access to funds, lodging, food or valuable personal papers.”

As part of the investigation, the police had seized all their personal papers and looked into their bank accounts. It was actually standard operating procedure. Police always look for a link between the victim and murderer, such as money or letters changing hands. The more that link can be shown, the easier it is to convict.

“The family requests that under these extraordinary circumstances, the public and media respect the only two items we have now, our privacy and personal rights.”

September 15, 1998

New York is not Texas. The Lone Star State has been accused of providing inadequate legal representation in capital murder cases. That’s one reason why Texas has the highest rate of executions in this country—some of the public defenders that represent indigent murderers are not up to the task.

New York is different.

When Governor Pataki reinstated the death penalty, there was no one then practicing in the state that had actually worked a death penalty case. The last murder that involved a sentence of death was back in the 1960’s.

New York’s legislators, in passing the governor’s death penalty law, realized they had to level the playing field. State-sanctioned revenge was nothing to trifle with. So as part of the 1995 death penalty statute, the Capital Defender Office (CDO) was created with public funding.

The CDO was given the mandate to provide “legal, investigative and expert witness services to indigent defendants who are charged, or could potentially be charged, with first-degree murder.” It didn’t need a legal expert to figure out that Kendall Francois could potentially be charged with capital murder. If he wasn’t, that would have been a surprise.

One of the first things that happened after he was taken into custody was a call going out to the Capital Defender Office in Albany. Randolph Treece, a lawyer with the office, was appointed as Francois’s counsel. The murderer would also have the assistance, as circumstances required, of any resources the office had to offer.

And who was paying for all of this? Why, the good people of New York State. Every year, almost fifteen million dollars of tax money was allocated by the state legislature to fund the activities of the Capital Defender Office, this after the executive branch of the state government requested the actual appropriation. Therein lay the irony.

The office of the governor headed up the executive branch. While the governor advocated the death penalty, he also had to agree, as part of the death penalty law, to allocate significant monies to the death penalty opponents that occupied the Capital Defender Office.

Kendall Francois would be convicted of murder. That was practically a certainty. The only real defense he had was diminished capacity and that was almost impossible to prove. As in many cases involving the death penalty, the real drama was not over conviction, but conviction on what charge?

If it were murder one with life imprisonment, that would be a significant victory for the CDO. If the conviction also included death as the penalty, not only would that be a legal defeat, a man would lose his life. Despite his crimes, the death penalty opponents in the CDO thought it wrong to institute state-sanctioned death and revenge.

The CDO’s first challenge was curtailing the adverse publicity. Newspapers had named Francois the “Poughkeepsie Serial Killer.” He was being compared to the worst serial killers of all time. That had to stop because of the jury pool.

Everyone reading an article about him, seeing a news report about him, was a potential juror. They would form an opinion. Invariably, it would be negative. At trial, during the penalty phase, that negativity could mean a vote for death. The idea for the CDO was not to present a favorable portrait of the murderer. In this case, there really was none, but they could work to at least control the hemorrhaging.

In court papers submitted to Thomas Dolan, the presiding judge assigned to the Francois case, Treece claimed that Grady had “trampled” on his client’s right to a fair trial by sharing information on the case with the press. What Treece objected to specifically was a statement Grady made in which he said that Francois had talked with police about the bodies inside his house. Treece wanted to have the court record of Francois’s statements to police sealed from the public.

Responding to Treece’s entreaty that Francois was being denied a fair trial, Chief Assistant District Attorney William O’Neill said Grady had the right and the obligation as an elected official to share certain facts about the case with the public.

“The Capital Defender’s Office properly indicates that as officers of the court, attorneys share a legal and ethical responsibility to ensure the right to a fair trial,” said O’Neill in papers submitted to Dolan. “Yet [the Capital Defender] ignores the duties and responsibilities that an elected official has in assuring the public that the investigation of criminal cases will not be conducted under a shroud of secrecy.”

O’Neill was trying to tell the court that the DA was playing fair, by the rules, and simply informing his public what was what. Treece then asked Judge Thomas Dolan for a court order allowing his own forensic experts to perform their own autopsies on the bodies. While some of the families publicly groused that they couldn’t bury their dead, Treece’s motion was well intentioned.

A spokeswoman for the state’s Capital Defender Office, said, “It’s not unusual for the defense to have access to the autopsies when they’re being performed.… That didn’t happen here.”

Treece publicly stated his sympathy for the families, but he still had a job to do.

“I think people assume that the district attorney’s office is going to share with us what they ascertain from their autopsy,” he said. “We need to know some vital information that would verify or differ from what they’ve found.”

Of course, during discovery, the phase of trial where each side shares the evidence they plan to present to the jury, the DA is supposed to follow through on this legal obligation. While Grady played by the rules, there were other DAs in other localities who didn’t.

Using some of the more than fourteen million dollars the governor and legislature had allocated to the CDO, Treece brought in a pathologist and an anthropologist. Both forensic experts, it was their job to assist in gathering evidence that might be helpful to the defense.

Like some of the other victims’ relatives, Patricia Barone had already started making funeral plans. She had to stop until the defense experts finished with the bodies.

“If you bang your head against the wall,” she said to the papers, “all you do is make yourself frustrated. I’ve waited a long time for my Gina.”

The French family had planned on burying Sandra sooner rather than later. Even before her body was released, hers was the first obituary to appear in the
Poughkeepsie Journal
with a dateline of September 15.

“Sandra Jean French, 51, a lifelong resident of Dover Plains, was pronounced dead September 2 in Poughkeepsie.”

The obituary did not list cause or method of death. No mention was made of Kendall Francois. Her family had arranged for calling hours at the Hufcut Funeral Home in Dover Plains. Because of the delay, the obituary concluded, “Burial will be private at the convenience of the family.”

It actually didn’t take long. Within days, the defense had finished with the remains. One by one, they were released to Dutchess County Medical Examiner Joseph Ross, who contacted the families to claim them. The women in death had told them all they could. It was time to allow them their final rest. The next three obituaries appeared on September 18 in the
Poughkeepsie Journal
.

“Gina Marie Barone, 29, a longtime Poughkeepsie resident, was found dead September 3 in Poughkeepsie.”

“Wendy Meyers, 30, a 10-year Dutchess County resident who had been missing since October 26, 1996, was found dead Feb. 2 [sic] in Poughkeepsie. She was a homemaker.”

Describing Meyers as a homemaker might have been bending political correctness a little too much. She had a misdemeanor prostitution conviction on her record.

“Mary E. Healey Giaccone, 31, was found dead September 2 in Poughkeepsie. A nurse’s aid at Fishkill Health Center in Beacon, she was a parishioner of St. Joachim’s Church in Beacon.”

That was news. Giaccone had held a regular job. The health center she worked at in Beacon, though, refused to comment on how she did and why she left. That wasn’t surprising.

Those who knew the women were being sought out by the media. Anxious for a quote or sound bite, they’d take anyone who knew the women. Most, though, refused comment. They didn’t want to be associated with a prostitute who had been killed by a serial killer. That they had an opportunity to humanize the women in the press, a press that regularly referred to their profession in a thinly veiled derogatory way, escaped them.

Its parishioners regularly called St. Joachim Church “St. Joey’s.” Located on Leonard Street in Beacon, it was a simple stone church that looked like it belonged in the quaint nineteenth century, not the bustling twentieth.

Inside, it was ornate and simple at the same time, the wooden benches long since smoothed out by generations and generations of seated parishioners. In the back was the small font of holy water, and on the side were the votive candles lit by parishioners praying for something to happen in their lives that they wanted very much.

Mary Healey Giaccone, that bright-eyed teenager who had somehow gone down the wrong road, was a regular in this place. She could find the peace and serenity at St. Joey’s that no other place on earth afforded her.

By ten
A.M.
, the church was filled to capacity with relatives and friends of Healey Giaccone. The priest conducting the service celebrated a Mass of Christian Burial. Then it was time for one last ride. The pallbearers lifted and shouldered the casket, walking solemnly out the front doors into the light. They loaded the casket into the waiting hearse.

The funeral cortege crawled up Leonard Street to the Forestal School. It passed the Central Hudson substation and made a right onto Stone Street. Suddenly, there was a rushing stream on the left, achingly beautiful in the autumn sun. Then at the corner, a left at the new guardrails and up a ways to St. Joey’s Cemetery.

The church’s private cemetery is on a hill, with one of the Catskills peaks looming above it in the distance. It is a small cemetery, with veterans having special plaques on their stones singling them out for their service. The rest of the graves are nondescript. As Healey Giaccone’s casket was being lowered into the ground, mourners cried and shuffled their feet in the awkward posture of the grieving. Then, after a while, they descended the hill to the waiting automobiles.

Mary Healey Giaccone was in her grave. It was a place that more and more in die community wanted to see Kendall Francois—six feet under.

September 29, 1998

“Let’s close it down,” Tommy Martin said.

Kevin Rosa nodded.

It was over. After twenty-seven long days of digging, sifting, prodding, poking, searching, the police were satisfied they had gotten all they could out of the crime scene at the Francois home.

Martin and Rosa removed the crime-scene tape that they had originally strung up almost a month before. They tossed it into the van and got ready to go. Martin took one long, last look up at the house.

We did a good job
, he thought,
a good job
.

There was, however, one woman they did not find in the house. Michelle Eason was still missing. Reporters had tracked down Michelle Eason’s brother Jerry Eason and he had commented on his sister’s disappearance.

“She called me and we had a long talk,” before she disappeared, said Eason. “When she called me again, she said she’d gotten herself together. She sounded much better. I could hear that in her voice. But that was that.”

Francois had never mentioned Eason as one of the women he had killed. The cops still suspected he had done it. Without a body, or a burial location, there wasn’t much they could do except keep the case active in their files. Homicides stay active indefinitely, until the case is closed. Unlike other crimes, there is no statute of limitation on homicides.

Martin closed the door to their van.

“We got another call,” said Rosa, and he drove off to the next crime scene they had been called in to process.

September 30, 1998

Her journey to Poughkeepsie and sobriety unsuccessful, Catherine Marsh finally came home.

Forty people who had known Marsh gathered at the Boger House on North Hamilton Street in Rensselaer. The place had been decorated with dozens of photographs showing Marsh in better times, playing basketball and on family trips.

“Catherine Marsh: I am a woman of worth and integrity,” the gathering was called. It was an opportunity for closure and good-byes. Many had come.

Cathy’s mother, Marguerite, was there. So were her friends from the residential drug and alcohol facility that she had been staying at before her murder. Skip Mannain had also come to read her diary to all those assembled who were paying their respects.

Her diary mentioned many of the same people who were there for the gathering. Mannain said that in certain places in that book, she had written of her disappointment in failing her family and friends. She even chastised herself for missing a recovery meeting.

At the end of the service, Cathy Marsh’s friends sang a lullaby they had written especially for her. In coming days, there would be more burials, more tears, more heartache.

October 13, 1998

Bill Grady moved forward with his case. He impaneled a grand jury to bring down indictments against Francois. Without much prodding, they did exactly that.