On September 1, 1998, a woman Kendall Francois had picked up on Main Street in Poughkeepsie, New York, refused what he wanted from her at his house. He punched her and choked her again and again and told her he would kill her. She talked him into driving her back to Main Street, and just before the car pulled into a Sunoco station she jumped out and ran. Two detectives, Skip Mannain and Bob McCready, happened to be nearby, handing out flyers about Catina Newmaster, a twenty-five-year-old who had vanished from downtown on August 26. A witness walked up to their unmarked car and told them a woman had been attacked.
The detectives found her, she confirmed it, and at the station she filed a complaint. Police went to 99 Fulton Avenue the same day, and Francois agreed to come to headquarters to talk about the assault. Over the next few hours he made one admission after another about the women who had gone missing. He was arrested and charged with a single count of murder, for Newmaster. With a search warrant, detectives, the district attorney, EMS crews and crime scene technicians went into the house, which police reports described as full of garbage, rotting food and broken furniture. The smell was bad enough that they needed anti-putrefaction masks. They recovered eight bodies. One was Audrey Pugliese, thirty-four, whom no one had reported missing.
Francois was born on July 26, 1971, the second of four children of Haitian parents, and wrestled and played football at Arlington High School. After graduating in 1989 he enlisted in the Army, did basic training at Fort Sill, and was discharged four years later for obesity; he was six foot four and weighed 320 pounds. Back in New York he enrolled at Dutchess Community College as a liberal arts major. In 1994 he took a job at Arlington Middle School, first as a part-time custodian and then, from April 1996 to January 1997, as a student monitor. The students called him "Stinky" for his body odor. He told girls sexual jokes, hugged them and touched their hair. When he left, he said he was going to work at the Anderson School, a special education school in nearby Staatsburg, which never confirmed hiring him.
His first three victims were sex workers he had paid before, and they looked alike: white, slightly built, dark-haired. He picked up Wendy Meyers, thirty, at the Valley Rest Motel on October 24, 1996, choked her unconscious during sex and drowned her in a bathtub. On November 29 he killed Gina Barone, twenty-nine, in his car. Days later he killed Catherine Marsh, known as Cathy, who was pregnant. He laid the three bodies side by side in the attic of the house he shared with his parents and his younger sister.
Marsh was not reported missing until March 7, 1997, and by then Kathleen Hurley, forty-seven, and Mary Healey Giaccone, twenty-nine, were dead too. No one reported Giaccone missing until November 13. Detective Bill Siegrist began working the disappearances with the department's narcotics squad, the Neighborhood Recovery Unit, and heard from women on Main Street about a local man who was rough and violent during sex. Detectives watched the house and sent a woman wearing a wire to meet him, and learned little except his routine: each morning he drove his mother, a nurse, to work at a psychiatric center nearby, and then cruised downtown Poughkeepsie.
Police interviewed him about the missing women in early January 1998 and got nothing. Later that month he was arrested for assaulting a sex worker in his room after an argument over money; he punched her in the face, knocked her onto the bed, got on top of her and choked her with his hands. On May 5 he pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and served fifteen days. In June he killed Sandra Jean French, fifty-one, who was reported missing on June 12 in Dover, New York; her car turned up abandoned three blocks from his house. Catina Newmaster disappeared ten weeks later.
Michelle Eason, a twenty-seven-year-old African American woman who also worked downtown, was reported missing on October 9, 1997. Francois admitted knowing her and denied killing her. He was never charged, and her disappearance is unsolved.
On September 9, 1998, he pleaded not guilty before Judge Thomas J. Dolan in Dutchess County Court. On October 13 he was formally charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, eight of second-degree murder and one of attempted assault, pleaded not guilty again, and laughed when the victims' families heckled him. On December 23 his lawyer tried to enter a guilty plea before District Attorney William V. Grady could file notice that he would seek the death penalty. Dolan refused to take it, and the defense went to the New York Court of Appeals, which allowed the plea. Francois showed no emotion in court. He later said that "killing seemed easier than getting into a relationship." On August 7, 2000, having pleaded guilty to all sixteen murder counts, he was sentenced to life without parole, and the plea kept him from a possible death sentence.
He was held at Attica Correctional Facility until shortly before his death, and died at Wende Correctional Facility on September 11, 2014, at forty-three, of an AIDS-related illness; the diagnosis had come out at his trial in 2000. The case is the subject of Fred Rosen's Body Dump (2015) and Claudia Rowe's The Spider and the Fly (2017).