Body Dump (3 page)

Francois reached back into the car and pulled the limp form of Gina Barone out and into his arms. It was dark outside, not much light, and he didn’t feel like stumbling around in the dark with a body. If he should trip on anything and the body fell, then he would have to collect her up again, and that was a quick way to be seen. Such an eventuality was best avoided.

Francois decided to leave her in the garage. The next morning, when no one was around, he’d move Barone up to the attic. The dead woman was placed on the cold concrete floor of the garage for temporary storage. Then Francois went into the house and up to bed, where he slept soundly.

In the morning, when Francois came out, Barone was still there. Not that he expected she would be gone. He knew she was as dead as a doornail, but it was good to have it confirmed one more time. Reaching down, he picked her up. She was as light as a feather. Taking careful looks at the houses next door and all around him, he saw that no one was out at this early hour. He couldn’t see behind closed curtains, but he assumed no one was there watching.

Carrying her in his arms, he smuggled the body into the house. Then it was up the stairs, and up farther still to the attic. He put down Barone’s body and placed it in a large, black plastic bag. Trash bag. That was what she was to him—trash. Something to stuff into a bag and get rid of.

Francois pulled the ends of the bag together and tied them loosely. He had to admire the construction; the bag hadn’t even ripped. Then he pushed her back into the attic into a prone position. He looked down at the trash bag, making sure it was where he wanted it. Satisfied, he climbed down the attic stairs.

At the bottom, he pushed the door closed. Just a door like any other door. Nothing suspicious about it. He went back downstairs in time for breakfast as though nothing unusual had happened. As far as he was concerned, things were normal, including the bodies he was storing in the attic.

Cathy Marsh was all of four pounds when she was born on a cold winter morning, in the Upstate New York town of Schenectady. It was a really bleak place then, before the Capital Region’s buildup in the 1970’s. The Capital Region encompassed Albany, New York’s state capital, and the surrounding cities of Rensselaer and Schenectady.

After her birth, Cathy’s parents, Marguerite and James Marsh, watched as their youngest daughter was put into an incubator that was necessary for her survival. Her survival was by no means certain.

“She was a very small child, very tiny,” said Jordan Baker, a family friend. But Cathy survived. “Cathy had a little pixie haircut back in those days, a real short haircut. When she went to the store, they used to think she was a little boy,” continued Baker. “Cathy developed into a feisty kid. She set [people] straight.”

Like any kid, Cathy sometimes got in over her head. There was the time she was only a few years old and she was playing. She tripped and broke her leg. It was a compound fracture and the doctor made a cast for her from the toes to the waist. Cathy survived this accident and continued to grow and get strong.

A few years later, tragedy struck when Cathy’s father, James, principal of the John Bigsbee Elementary School in the Mohonasen School District, died when she was eight. But she still had her mother, her older sister, Ruth, and older brother, Robert.

By the time she got to high school, she had matured into an athlete, with a short, stocky frame. Her dark blond hair trailing after her, she would race down the wooden floor of the gymnasium at Mohonasen High School, calling the plays as one of the school basketball team’s two guards, the shortest positions on a basketball team.

At other times of the year, she played on the girls’ softball team. She had a deft, determined way of running the bases, and surprising power from someone so small. Intellectually, her teachers thought she had the promise of a college career in front of her.

Her family happily snapped pictures of her at graduation. Then, after graduation, there was that day in 1986, when she, her sister, Ruth, and her brother, Robert, and some friends hit the road to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to celebrate their freedom from the confines of adolescence. Everything was in front of them. They were now adults with a boundless future.

Many kids in such small communities wind up going to local community colleges. Some take required liberal arts courses before transferring to a four-year school. Others decide on the two-year associate’s degree and take practical courses in subjects like criminal justice. They become cops or prison guards. Others opt for an easier way to make money, taking courses like “Computer Information Systems,” frequently a way to get hired by IBM.

Contrast that with a kid who shows some promise and opts for, and is accepted into, a state university. With its high academic requirements, the four-year SUNY College at Binghamton is the crown jewel in the statewide system of four-year colleges. But there are other four-year state schools to attend if you don’t have the grades.

Cathy Marsh did not have the grades to attend Binghamton. Nevertheless, her grade point average and SAT scores were high enough to meet the SAT and GPA cutoffs at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Marsh got to Geneseo by going west on the New York State Thruway. She passed through farmland that was rich looking and fertile in the late summer sun, arriving in Geneseo, in the far western part of the state, in late August 1986, for the beginning of the fall 1986 semester.

According to the
New York Times
, Geneseo has become “one of the country’s most highly regarded public colleges.” The school has been consistently ranked among the nation’s top colleges in annual guides published by
U.S. News & World Report, Time
and
Money
magazines. The school’s on-line catalogue breaks down its information in the following way: Academics; Access Opportunity Program; Applying to Geneseo; Visiting Geneseo; Orientation; Campus Map; Tuition/Fees; Financial Aid; Scholarships; College Offices; About Geneseo; Life on Campus; Athletics; Campus News; Calendar of Events; and Technology Resources.

While universities and colleges must, by federal statute, make public crimes that are committed on their campuses, they are under no obligation to indicate to students if there are any problems with drugs. The schools are trying to attract students or their parents, who are usually paying all or part of their expenses, by emphasizing the positive aspects of campus life.

It was during her first year at Geneseo that Cathy Marsh began using cocaine on a regular basis. How much she had done before, if any, is open to conjecture. What isn’t, according to later published reports, is that Cathy Marsh became a cocaine addict sometime during the 1986–1987 academic year. Her sister, Ruth, would later write:

“Cocaine took your life before this day/always hanging on when you tried to get away.”

For Catherine Marsh, the 1980’s would flee into the 1990’s like some long, wet, humid night. It eventually ended, for a while, when she left college and came home to Schenectady. The grit Cathy had brought with her into life, that helped her survive her sickly birth, that was responsible for her athletic triumphs, she brought to her struggle with drug addiction.

This time, she lost.

According to police records, Catherine Marsh was arrested on misdemeanor prostitution and drug charges in Syracuse, on a number of occasions. She had probably picked Syracuse, as opposed to Schenectady, as the place to prostitute herself for her habit because Syracuse is fifty miles from Schenectady and no one knew her there.

In New York’s small, upstate towns, people talk. They gossip. Neighbors that seem at first blush to be friendly are actually the types who traffic in other people’s problems. By traveling to another city to exercise her criminal career, Cathy was saving herself the derision of her hometown.

Somewhere in the middle of her headlong gallop to throw her life down the drain, Cathy had time for some brief relationships with men. From those relationships came two daughters, Erin and Grace. And still, despite their love, and her family’s support, Cathy drifted further and further down into the drug culture.

In 1995, Cathy managed with one last, desperate effort to take control of her life and tried to salvage what was left. Making the greatest sacrifice any woman can make, she allowed her children to be adopted. In so doing, she acknowledged that another woman would make a better mother than she was. Cathy then traveled south to Poughkeepsie, where she entered a drug clinic. She hoped the therapy she received there would save her life.

Addicts during rehab regularly attend twelve-step meetings, where they acknowledge their powerlessness over their substance abuse and come to believe that a power greater than themselves can restore them to wholeness. Essentially, they are accepting their addiction and realizing they have no control over it. Recovery requires a series of progressive steps where the addicted individual agrees to make amends to those he has harmed because of his addiction, all the while leading a sober life.

Catherine worked her program of recovery diligently. She had a sponsor to support her. She began keeping a diary of her feelings, which is always recommended to recovering addicts. In it, she wrote how, at times, she was disappointed in herself for failing her friends, including occasionally missing her regular twelve-step recovery meetings.

She began taking classes at Dutchess County Community College. Her identification picture from there shows a chubby-faced woman with a long jaw leading up to a prominent nose, close-set blue eyes and a carelessly chopped pageboy haircut. She is smiling. It was a good pose, a sober pose. But her addiction was always there, lurking in the background, very sly, just waiting to take hold again.

When addicts falls off the wagon, the time they have in rehabilitation does not mean they start the addiction phase from scratch. They return to the addict’s life at the point where they were before they got into rehab. If, before rehab, you were looking over an abyss ready to jump, you go back to that hell.

Despite her best efforts to work her program, Cathy felt she needed coke to survive. She was desperate to plug up this hole inside herself and the drug could do that, at least temporarily, from fix to fix. Only the drug would do. What pushed Cathy off the wagon is unclear, but fall she did. The inevitable question confronted Cathy again: how to pay for the addiction? Cathy had no money. She could go to her family. But what could she say if she did?

“Hi, Mom, please give me some money to buy the drug that’s killing me.”

That wasn’t realistic. The alternative was clear. She turned to the streets again to support her habit. Again and again, when she needed a fix, she went to the street to pick up guys. There was one charge for giving head, another for a full “69.” Men liked her; she had no problem getting business.

Kendall Francois was a repeat customer.

November 31, 1996

How many men who were the picture of normalcy drove north on Route 9 on their way to work and gazed to the left at Marist College, evaluating the school’s security? Actually, the place had no security to speak of. The campus gates had no guard posts. Anyone could get in at any hour.

Fronting Route 9, not more than a few hundred feet from the road, but still on campus, were garden apartments where some of the coeds lived. Francois could see the kids going to and from class in front of these dorms. The place looked, and was, almost all white. There were a few people of color. If he went on campus, he would easily be taken for an older student, or a laborer. The girls were certainly pretty.

They had young, taut, white bodies. He could fuck them like they’d never had it and then bring his hands up around their necks and squeeze. He’d feel the adrenaline rush as he crushed their necks in his hands, bare of gloves, wires, or any sort of strangling implement.

He liked the feel of skin on skin. It gave him sexual power. But that was all dependent on the girls being his type. Sadly, the Marist coeds—well, they were attractive, he wanted them, but not enough to “do” it. Then he thought about the women at the end of his block.

The block he lived on was Fulton Avenue. It might have been an avenue in the last century, but now it was just a narrow street. Walking out the front door of his house and turning left, a few hundred yards down at the end of his block was another campus. This one was full of even snootier white girls, but no less pretty. The place was called Vassar College. Formerly an all-girls’ school, it had long since become coed. Still, the place was known for the refined beauty of its female population.

Francois liked looking at the girls. But “doing” it to them? It was sexual power that he craved, power and control. Something inside, that instinct for survival that the best jungle animals have, that told them which were the weak ones in the herd to pick on and which were the strong ones, told him that the coeds were too strong.

Besides, they weren’t street people. Their relatives and friends would know they were missing and come looking for them. He needed women who were more … anonymous, compliant, controllable, who would do what he wanted. But definitely white girls.

In matters of lust, Kendall Francois shunned his own race. Kendall Francois just loved white girls. They had to have a particular body type—small of frame, with thin, sometimes emaciated bodies. And they had to be impure; women of low self-esteem, desperate women who didn’t mind his body odor and sold their bodies to the highest bidder in order to get money for a fix.

The women Francois craved most were white prostitutes. Like his English predecessor that the press had named “Saucy Jack,” forever more known by his more popular name, “Jack the Ripper,” he was attracted to prostitutes. There were a few girls in town who met his criteria. They weren’t expensive to have. What he liked to do was have them over to his house. When his mother wasn’t there.

Kendall looked over at his mother beside him on the car seat. Like the dutiful son he was, Kendall Francois was driving her to work at the Hudson River Psychiatric Hospital, located on Route 9, right at the edge of the city’s boundary. A series of low-lying, institutional-looking, brick buildings scattered on carefully manicured grounds, it was there that Francois’s mother, Paulette, worked as a psychiatric nurse.