Body Dump (23 page)

The grand jury handed down eight murder-one indictments, accusing Kendall L. Francois of intentionally strangling eight women. The law also allowed eight separate counts of second-degree murder. Almost as an afterthought, he was also charged with second-degree attempted assault for trying to strangle Diane Franco.

Grady’s next decision was whether or not to seek the death penalty. By law, the district attorney has 120 days from the date of arraignment to make that decision. Grady anticipated a decision by January. First, though, was the formal arraignment.

October 14, 1998

The State Supreme Court was in an old building on Church Street, across the street from the Bardovan Theater where the Paper Bag Players were performing for the area’s children. Inside, on the third floor of the building was Judge Dolan’s courtroom. It was old-fashioned, the type seen in old Hollywood movies.

The place was paneled in burnished oak and mahogany, spacious with three sections for observers. There was the slatted wooden rail at the front separating the observers’ section from the well of the courtroom where the court officers sat. On the left, looking toward the front, sat the DA; on the right sat counsel for the defense and the defendant.

Directly in front of them was the raised platform on which the court clerk and stenographer sat. Right above, high off the ground was the judge’s bench, looking high and mighty in the morning sunshine streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far side of the courtroom.

Never before had an entire section of a courtroom been taken up with the relatives of the victims. Most homicide cases involved one person. This one had eight—eight known. It was filled to capacity with the friends and relatives of Kathleen Hurley, Gina Barone, Cathy Marsh, Mary Giaccone, Catina Newmaster, Wendy Meyers, Audrey Pugliese and Dover Plains’ own Sandra French. Mothers, daughters, cousins, uncles, they were all there to see that justice was done.

A hushed courtroom suddenly erupted. There was electricity in the air as the door to the right of the bench opened. The man who had prompted that day’s proceeding began to shuffle in. Kendall Francois had to shuffle because he was shackled from hand to ankle. The people watched anxiously as the man they thought of as a monster entered the court and took his place by his attorney, Randolph Treece’s, side.

For a man facing death, Francois looked well fed and cared for, clean and satisfied. He wore an orange prison jumpsuit. Kendall Francois had been in jail over a month and the county was treating him well, almost like a prize goose being fattened up for the slaughter.

“Murderer!” one of the relatives shouted.

“Animal,” chimed in another.

A few moments later, the judge walked in, his black robes flowing around him. Dolan mounted the bench and took his seat. The court clerk called the court to order.

“Proceed,” said Judge Dolan to his clerk.

It was a formal arraignment, a proceeding where the exact charges against the defendant were read and the defendant offered his plea.

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Sandra French, how do you plead?” asked the clerk.

“Not guilty,” said Francois in a monotone.

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Wendy Meyers, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Kathleen Hurley, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Catina Newmaster, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Gina Barone, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Audrey Pugliese, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Catherine Marsh, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“On the charge of murder in the first degree of Mary Giaccone, how do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

And so it went until the rest of the charges were read and pleaded to. At the prosecution’s table, Assistant District Attorney William O’Neill remained impassive. Grady wasn’t prosecuting the case, but O’Neill, the DA’s good right hand, was implementing Grady’s prosecution strategy.

Grady wasn’t tipping his hand. Yet. No one knew if he would seek death. He had 120 days from the day of the arraignment, until the middle of February 1999, to make that decision.

With the charges read and answered, the proceeding was over. But as Francois was being led out of the courtroom, the relatives began taunting him again. Francois threw his head back, smiled and chuckled to himself. It was a strange reaction from a man facing death.

Francois had refused all requests for interviews. It was hard to know what was going on inside his warped head. But as he shuffled out of the courtroom, more than one observer could be heard muttering something to the effect of not wanting to ever encounter the big fellow in a dark alley. That dark alleys were not part of his MO made no difference.

In his brief appearance in court, Kendall Francois had managed to live up to his billing. He actually looked like what the media had portrayed him to be—big, powerful, unyielding, with a derisive ghostly laugh that left the final, lasting impression that this was indeed the bogeyman of nightmares.

Sixteen

December 23, 1998

It was time to cut bait.

Treece knew the DA had him over a barrel. Despite public pronouncements, Francois’s guilt was immutable, his conviction on murder one almost assured. Rather than take the chance of a jury giving him death, Treece contacted Grady and tried to work out a deal.

He’d save the state the cost of a trial and an execution. Francois would plead guilty. In return, his sentence would be life in prison without parole. Treece went into court and tried pleading guilty on behalf of his client, in return for a life sentence. Grady quickly rejected the deal. Treece said he would appeal. It was an interesting case.

Intellectually, observers had to wonder whether the state had to take the plea. Or were they free to continue and seek the death penalty? A lot depended on the pulse of the community that Grady served.

Many times, prosecutors want to shoot the moon while their constituents just want closure. In the Francois case, it was pretty evenly divided, not just by the voting public, but by the people closest to the case, the families of the dead women. Some wanted the case disposed of as soon as possible; life in prison was enough for the bastard. Others clung to a burning hope that the state would shoot poison into his veins and Francois would die in agony.

Christmas Eve, 1998

He was Santa Claus. It would come as a tremendous shock to Tawana Brawley and the many people Grady had associated with professionally over the years that the prosecutor would have been looked at this way.

“I called him [Grady] this morning and said I wanted an early Christmas present. I think I got it They called me back and said, ‘Merry Christmas, you are getting your Christmas gift,’” said Heidi Cramer, to a local paper.

“It really surprised me. The day before Christmas. Never in a million years,” said Treece.

“This is the first Christmas without my mother and by next Christmas I want him dead. I know it may sound cold and heartless; I know Christmastime you’re supposed to be forgiving, but guess what? I ain’t,” Cramer continued. “There is a Santa Claus and today his name is William Grady.”

Their “present” was Grady’s surprise announcement on Christmas Eve. At two
P.M.
, Bill Grady announced that he would seek the death penalty against Kendall Francois. Had it been any other day of the year, no death penalty opponent, of which there were many in the state, would have thought of Grady as a modern-day Pontius Pilate, the Roman prelate who had condemned Jesus to the cross. But being that it was Christmas Eve, the historical metaphor was inescapable.

Francois, though, was no savior, and Grady was certainly not an evil person like Pilate. In the end, it came down to a cold, hard, political reality. If the DA could get a jury to unanimously agree, Kendall Francois was going to the death chamber. The popular perception was that Treece’s aggressiveness in representing his client had forced Grady’s hand, a charge Treece rejected.

“We represent our client and that’s what we are going to do. We are going to give him zealous representation,” he said. “By representing our client we forced this? I don’t think so,” said Treece in the
Times Herald Record
.

Patricia Barone, though, wasn’t convinced.

“The timing stinks, but what are you going to do?” Barone said. “The Capital Defender Office wants to play games around Christmas. They have no conscience as far as I’m concerned.”

Not true. The defense hadn’t forced Grady’s hand, or the law. He still had until February to file for death. Treece’s attempt to plead had provided Grady with the kind of political cover that might even win over death penalty opponents.

“I had two Christmases of wondering where she was, so this Christmas is a little more peaceful. Now he gets to suffer through the holidays knowing that there’s the possibility he’s going to die. Now I’m so happy,” said Heidi Cramer.

Treece was still determined to get the DA to accept a plea. He filed a brief with a county court judge, using as precedent a court of appeals ruling in another death penalty case in which the court opened the door to such pleas in death penalty cases. Treece’s legal argument was promptly rejected. He then filed an expedited brief before the state court of appeals. Maybe they would see things Francois’s way.

In the meantime, it was now his job to travel down from his Albany office to the Poughkeepsie jail and let Francois know that a lethal injection loomed on his horizon.

A year went by and nothing happened, but there is nothing terribly unusual about that. It takes a while for a case before the court of appeals to get a docket number and then be presented and then have the opinion written and published. Back in Poughkeepsie, everyone was on edge waiting to see what would happen. Over on Fulton Avenue, progress was being made. Someone had actually found a way to make a profit out of the whole mess.

The Francois home had been bought by a real estate entrepreneur. The Francois family had been forced to sell because there was no way they could go back there. The worst thing that could happen to the value of your property is that you are the family of a serial killer. That’s a guarantee right there that the price is going to go down.

It didn’t just go down. It plummeted.

The Francois home in the best of markets could easily sell for close to $200,000. Instead, it sold for $15,000. The person who bought it then gutted the interior and completely redid it. Suddenly, the beautiful wood interior of the house was restored to its Victorian glory. Empty, ready for sale, the place looked positively pristine.

The floors inside were waxed and glowing. Attention had been paid to the painting so even the moldings were carefully done. The stairs in the house seemed to lead up to what looked like a very attractive series of upstairs bedrooms. Best of all, the place smelled great. Up in the attic, the only thing you could smell was … an attic. Nothing special. Just the way any attic in America smells.

“I want the house down. It’s just a lousy, lousy feeling for me. I want it down, the land cleared and blessed because the place was truly a tomb for eight women,” Pat Barone, Gina’s mother told the
Poughkeepsie Journal
, in response to news that the place was going to be sold and once again inhabited.

May 19, 2000

By a vote of seven to none, the New York State Court of Appeals rejected Treece’s arguments that the state had to accept Francois’s plea and sided with Grady.

Deciding otherwise would lead to an “unseemly race to the courthouse between defense and prosecution to see whether a guilty plea or notice of intent to seek the death penalty will be filed first,” wrote Appeals Judge Harold Levine. Levine called that the direct opposite of “thorough, fully deliberative decision-making” that the court believed prosecutors should go through when seeking death.

“This decision in essence closes the door with regard to any future attempts by defendants to enter pleas in advance of either the 120-day period running or the district attorney filing his death notice,” said a triumphant Grady.

If nothing else, Grady was making Francois sweat. Grady may not have been a brilliant lawyer, but he was a good one. He knew how to read evidence and state statutes. Sure, he was convinced that under the legal definition of sanity, the ability to know right from wrong, that Francois was sane at the time of the murders.

But the DA also knew from examining Francois’s probation report, which the state did not make and has never made public, that there were certain psychiatric factors in his background that might make it difficult to get a jury to agree to death. Grady knew that the defense could effectively show mitigating factors during the penalty phase of the trial.

Put another way, all the defense had to show was that Francois was psychotic and the jury would have no choice but to spare his life.

Then there was the practical consideration. The trial would be long. So would the appeals process; that could take five years. Grady really didn’t want to make a deal. He really wanted the guy to pay for his crime. He also wanted to be sure of a win and one never knew what a jury would decide.

It has become common practice in today’s world of jurisprudence for the district attorney, regardless of venue, to consult with the victims’ relatives in cutting a deal. The idea is to get the families to sign off on it so that they feel justice is done and at the same time the DA is guaranteed a conviction.

Grady contacted the families of the eight and told them what he had in mind.

June 22, 2000

In Judge Dolan’s courtroom, the same one in which Kendall Francois had been arraigned, there were approximately 150 filling the pews. The place was packed and the majority were friends and relatives of the victims.