Body Dump (6 page)

In the end, the decision was made to quietly continue the investigation, but with more manpower. The public, however, would know nothing about it. Despite the fact that the disappearances of all four women was a matter of public record—Missing Person’s reports are public documents—the local paper, the
Poughkeepsie Journal
, did not pick up on the story. It was really just a country paper with big-city pretensions. The other newspapers that served the city, the
Middletown Herald Record
, the
Daily Freeman
and the weekly
Poughkeepsie Beat
, all failed, too, to see the emerging pattern.

To Kendall Francois, it was all a mystery. He didn’t realize he had killed five women. When he looked in his attic, he was surprised to see five bodies instead of four. How had the fifth gotten there? He remembered Giaccone, but not Hurley.

Someplace, deep down in his mind, he had a dim recollection of strangling Hurley. Who she was and how he had come to pick her up, he just didn’t remember. But it didn’t make a difference. It was just one more body to decompose in the silent graves he had given them all in the attic.

Bill Siegrist sat in his car down by the water. He looked out at the Hudson River. He came down to the deserted waterfront park many times in the course of the week just to think.

He lived only eight miles out of the city in a town called Pleasant Valley. And it really was that, a direct bucolic counterpart to Poughkeepsie’s urban chaos. Just miles away was the twenty-six-year-old house he lived in with his wife and kids. It was a nice house, a beautiful house, but there was a problem.

The roof was getting old. It really needed to be replaced. There were other improvements on the home that he also wanted to make, but he was too busy to do any of them. He never seemed to have the time. Time and again, he’d been home doing something of importance for his family when he got a page to come in. If a major case was breaking, he had to go—heck, he
wanted
to go. Still, what a pain it sometimes was being a cop.

Siegrist munched on his sandwich. He drank his coffee. He became aware of the silence, broken only by the police scanner on the floor that he kept perpetually on, in case he was called. He looked out at the gulls flying over the bridge. He tried to play out a “what if” scenario—what if the women had been killed? The killer would probably have dumped their bodies.

Siegrist had had his detectives search some of the more remote wooded sections of town. All they found was snow and, under that, just the frozen ground of the Hudson Valley. Siegrist then sent Mannain out again on the street to interview the streetwalkers with a different question.

“Who’s weird?” Mannain asked the women.

The girls, knowing they had a killer preying on them, finally opened up. They named the weird johns. Those names were added to the previous list of the abusive ones. The cops were constantly busy checking out all the leads.

Siegrist took a bite out of his sandwich and slugged it down with hot coffee. He turned the defroster on to clear his window of the fog. As it worked its magic and the windshield became clear, Siegrist looked up at the majestic river materializing in the autumn sunshine. Siegrist pulled out a copy of a report Mannain had filed. In it, the detective had detailed his findings. The prostitutes said there was this guy.

“What guy?” Mannain had asked.

“A fat guy,” they said. “A big guy.”

“What about him?”

“He liked to choke some of the girls.”

“This big fat guy have a name?” asked Mannain.

“Francois,” the women answered. “Kendall Francois.”

Siegrist started up his car and drove up the hill and back to his office, parking in the lot behind the station reserved for police officers. He strode purposefully into the building, passing the old police globe and the newly restored letters spelling out the constabulary’s formal name.

Once he was in his office, Siegrist looked up Francois in the computer. Maybe the guy had some sort of record involving force or even sexual crimes. That would make him a suspect worth looking at further. He got a hit almost immediately.

Earlier in the year, Francois had solicited sex from an undercover cop. He was arrested. Francois had pleaded guilty to criminal solicitation, a misdemeanor, received a fine and no time.

What Siegrist did not know was that in the course of his employment applications with both the Arlington Middle School and the Andersen School, Francois had filled out forms that asked him if he had ever been convicted of a crime. In each case, he had checked the box that said “no.”

Neither school checked to make sure he was telling the truth. If the Andersen School had, since Francois had started there after his conviction, it would have discovered his record. That a man convicted of a crime involving sex could teach, or be around children, was unconscionable, but the truth was no one had violated the law.

For over twenty years, a state law that required criminal background checks of all employees had protected New York City schoolchildren. Poughkeepsie had no such law. Many in the community wanted it, but for various political reasons, it had never been put on the books.

Siegrist knew that lots of guys solicit sex and most of them are definitely nothing more than lonely guys who can’t get a woman unless they pay for her. Except for that one conviction, which was pleaded out, Kendall Francois didn’t have so much else as a parking ticket. There certainly was no record of brutality. In some quarters, he might be viewed as a model citizen.

Model citizen. Somewhere on his desk, Siegrist found it, Cathy Marsh’s Missing Person’s file. He began rifling through it. He kept turning pages until he found it, the one item that had struck him when he looked at it before. It was under “Background.”

Before she disappeared, Cathy Marsh had gone for some prenatal counseling. The missing woman was pregnant with her third child when the fiend, whoever he was, had killed her.

Five

Bill Siegrist had managed to maintain a low profile for most of his career. He wasn’t a flashy cop who grabbed headlines, and was more prone to giving the credit to the guys who worked under him. He was very happy when Skip Mannain got the story about his involvement in the case of the Mexican immigrant in the
Reader’s Digest
. In the early part of his career, Siegrist had managed to make it into the national press, too.

It was during the Tawana Brawley case, when the Reverend Al Sharpton came up to Poughkeepsie to stage a demonstration against what Sharpton perceived was the police force’s “racism.” One of the demonstrators got unruly enough that Siegrist had to put a chokehold on the guy to contain him. A photographer took the shot, which went out over the wires. Soon, Siegrist was being held up in the national media as an example of the Poughkeepsie cops’ racism.

Siegrist had, in fact, done nothing wrong. He had acted well within his authority as a peace officer to quell a potential riot situation. After Sharpton left to take up some other cause, Siegrist’s notoriety faded. As it did, he began to climb the police force’s corporate ladder. As his fortunes rose, the city’s continued to fade.

By the early 1990’s, IBM had hit a dry spell. A combination of declining sales, subsequent layoffs and reassignment of personnel to other plants shortened the revenue stream. That left the town dependent on the monies brought in by students for a revenue source.

Vassar College is located in the town of Poughkeepsie, Marist College in the city of Poughkeepsie. Both are four-year schools and students continue to come and spend their money in the town. Still, the combined enrollment of both schools is 20,000, hardly enough to keep the local economy flourishing.

The city and the town overlap and in most instances, it makes no difference where you are—same diners, same mall, same gas stations. But the police forces are different, which makes it easier to commit a crime and get lost in the bureaucratic confusion.

Every day on his way to work, Kendall L. Francois made a right turn onto Route 9 in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie is a city in the middle. Ninety miles south is New York City; seventy-five miles north is the state capital of Albany. Locals like to describe themselves as living in the Lower Hudson Valley.

As he tooled his two-door red 1984 Subaru up the suburban highway, on his left Francois passed Marist College. The coeds at Marist came from the rural towns of New York, New Jersey and New England where the biggest urban problem was winter snow removal.

Marist had originally been founded by the Marist Brothers order and while it no longer was under church control, it still maintained close enough affiliation with the church that many concerned parents felt it safe to send their sheltered children to the school. Some coeds had been educated at strict Catholic schools where the Catholic Church’s edict was the rule of law, none being more important than the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Once in a while in their hometown, there might be a murder, the type of thing where some woman gets liquored up, then catches hubby with another woman. Or another man. Or maybe the sexes were reversed. No matter. It all fell under “crimes of passion.” Such things did not happen to “good” girls.

Murder happened to the other girl, the one who hadn’t kept her nose clean, who went out with the exciting boy from the other side of the thruway. The thruway was the region’s major traffic artery, the route most of the women traveled to Marist.

When they got to Poughkeepsie, there was a lack of realization that they were in an urban environment with a high crime rate. Some women forgot to lock their doors. The Marist women were incredibly naive. For Kendall Francois, they were potential prey.

Located on Route 9 in the town of Staatsburg, a short, twenty-minute ride north of Poughkeepsie, is another institution of learning. Called the Andersen School, it is a private facility for the mentally retarded and other developmentally disabled children. The mission of the Andersen School, as stated on its Web site, is “To always put the student first, and to provide functional and educational opportunities to achieve quality of life outcomes for children and adults with autism or other developmental disabilities.”

The core values of the school are to enhance the quality of life educational opportunities, to treat their children and adults with dignity and to demonstrate respect for the interests, abilities, values and needs of their people.

Evidently, Kendall Francois reflected these values because the school had hired him. A man who clearly appreciated education, Francois both worked as a professional in an educational environment and took classes. In 1994, Kendall Francois enrolled at Dutchess County Community College, where he loved to play cards, usually Spades.

“I played cards with Kendall a lot,” said Marion Ross. “He never liked to lose, but if he lost, he was okay with it. He was the nicest guy.”

His government studies professor at Dutchess was Richard Reitano.

“He was a good student, not a great student,” Reitano would later say in a local paper. “He participated in class, had a good relationship with me and the other students and seemed to really get something out of the classes. He had an appropriate sense of humor, a good understanding of government, and he spoke very eloquently at times on the rights of African Americans. He was a picture of normalcy.”

His house definitely was not. With its scabrous, decaying appearance, the place looked eerie even to those who didn’t believe in bogeymen.

The first mention of the house in official records was October 1, 1869. On that date, the deed changed hands between the original owner, William H. Worrall, who had died, and Peter N. Howard, who bought it.

By January 20, 1975, when Kendall Francois’s parents, McKinley H. Francois and Paulette R. Francois, bought it, the house had changed hands a total of only three times in the previous 106 years. It still stood in a stable, solidly middle-class area. Except for the new, paved road, the neighborhood had changed little in the intervening years except, perhaps, for one thing: the Vassar Garden Apartments.

They were decidedly lower-class garden apartments at the end of the block. To move from there into one of the block’s one-family houses would be to “arrive.” That was exactly what the Francois family did in 1975, when they bought William H. Worrall’s house on Fulton Avenue.

The place needed a lot of work. Beams on the lower level were exposed. The paint was chipped, the beautiful Victorian details of the house, in the molding and on the walls, in the woodwork of the banisters, floors and doors, all had been lost over the years to layers of paint and plaster and apathy.

The Francois family probably did their best to keep up the house and it really shouldn’t have been a hard job. The whole house measured less than fifteen hundred square feet. Paulette and McKinley were full-time working parents, with four kids to raise and support. Over the years, the maintenance of the house and the grounds, a little yard out back and a porch with a small sloping lawn to the street out front, had gone by the wayside. Walking by it and looking up, the house looked as though it was decaying.

By 1996, Kierstyn, the youngest, was still at home. Francois’s older sister, Raquelle, lived someplace else in Poughkeepsie. His kid brother Aubrey also did not live at home.

Kendall Francois was born in Poughkeepsie on a hot summer day, July 26, 1971. The New York State Department of Health does not allow public access to birth certificates, so it’s unclear how big a baby Francois was at birth. But even as a child, his girth began to be noticed by the other kids in the Vassar Garden Apartments.

Neighborhood children used to taunt the fat, black child about his weight in that “Nah nah nah nah nahhhh nah” singsong children’s cadence. And he wasn’t happy about it. Mark Gehringer, a fellow who knew him as a child, said that the neighborhood kids “would yell out to him ‘How now, brown cow?’ and he used to get upset.”

“He kept to himself,” growing up, another friend from his childhood recalled. “The people around here keep to themselves.”