Kendall Francois admitted strangling eight women in Poughkeepsie, New York, over about 22 months between 1996 and 1998. The women had all been reported missing from the Poughkeepsie area. The case came to light on September 1, 1998, when a woman escaped from him and called police, and that month the remains of the women were found at his home in Poughkeepsie, which he shared with his parents and his younger sister. His family was not implicated.
He was indicted in October 1998 on capital murder charges, and for the next year and a half his case turned on a legal question: could a man facing the death penalty in New York plead guilty to every count before the district attorney had decided whether to seek his execution? The state's highest court answered no in May 2000. Francois later pleaded guilty anyway, in a plea that the Associated Press said spared him the death penalty then in force, and he was sentenced in 2000 to life in prison without parole. He died in prison in September 2014, at 43.
Little has been published about Kendall Francois's early life. The Associated Press described him as a former hall monitor at a middle school. He lived in the city with his parents and his younger sister, the AP reported in 2014. A 2017 review in The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, described the household as his mother and two younger siblings.
The reporter Claudia Rowe, who corresponded with him for years after his arrest, later described him in an interview with The Stranger as swinging between what she called "towering narcissism" and a "deeply abject sense of himself." She said he was afraid to look honestly at himself.
The women Francois killed lived and worked in Poughkeepsie, in Dutchess County, New York. Nine women had been reported missing from the Poughkeepsie area by the time of his arrest, the Associated Press reported in 2014; eight were identified among the remains found at his home, with the help of forensic specialists.
The Associated Press described the eight as sex workers. Rowe, who lived in Poughkeepsie through those years, told The Stranger in 2017 that the city's denial about the women working on its Main Street was one of the reasons she wrote her book about the case. KUOW, the Seattle public radio station, reported that the women began disappearing in 1996.
One of the eight was Sandra French. She was 51. Her daughter came to court when Francois was sentenced in 2000 and spoke to him directly, the Associated Press reported.
On September 1, 1998, a woman escaped from Francois and called police. Her report led officers to his home. There, that month, investigators recovered the remains of the eight women. The Associated Press reported that forensic specialists later did the work that allowed each woman to be identified.
Francois told police that he had strangled the women. The woman who escaped survived. He was later convicted of attempted assault for what he did to her.
His parents and his sister, who lived in the house, were not implicated in the killings, the AP reported.
On October 8, 1998, a Dutchess County grand jury indicted Francois on seventeen counts, according to the opinion of the New York Court of Appeals in his case. Eight were counts of murder in the first degree under the death penalty statute that New York had enacted in 1995. Eight were counts of murder in the second degree. The last was a count of attempted assault in the second degree.
At his arraignment Francois pleaded not guilty. Under New York's capital sentencing law, the arraignment started a 120-day period in which the district attorney of Dutchess County, William V. Grady, could file a notice of intent to seek the death penalty. In November 1998, the court's opinion records, the district attorney invited the defense to submit information in mitigation for him to weigh in making that decision. Francois was represented by lawyers from the state's Capital Defender Office in Albany.
On December 22, 1998, while the district attorney was still deciding, the Court of Appeals decided a separate case, Matter of Hynes v. Tomei. That decision struck down the provisions of the 1995 law that had allowed a capital defendant to plead guilty to first degree murder and so avoid a death sentence. The Court of Appeals had also read the statute not to let a defendant plead guilty to murder in the first degree while a notice of intent to seek death was pending.
The next day, December 23, 1998, Francois made an unscheduled appearance in the Dutchess County Court and offered to plead guilty to the entire indictment. No death notice had yet been filed. The district attorney opposed the plea. On December 24, 1998, he filed his notice of intent to seek the death penalty.
The County Court, whose judge, Thomas J. Dolan, was later named as the respondent in Francois's appeal, reserved decision and then refused to accept the plea. Francois went to the Appellate Division with a petition under Article 78 of the state's civil practice law, asking for an order directing the County Court to consider his plea. The Appellate Division dismissed the petition, finding that he had not shown a clear legal right to what he asked.
The Court of Appeals heard argument on March 29, 2000, and decided the case on May 18, 2000. Barry Fisher, Lisabeth Harrison and Mark Harris of the Capital Defender Office appeared for Francois; Bridget Rahilly Steller of the district attorney's office appeared for the prosecution.
The court, in an opinion by Judge Levine joined by Chief Judge Kaye and every other member of the court, affirmed the dismissal. It held that a capital defendant does not have an unqualified right to plead guilty to the entire indictment until the period the statute gives the prosecutor to decide on the death penalty has run its course. The specific provision giving the district attorney that time, the court said, controls over the general rules that let a defendant plead guilty to an indictment. The court described the prosecutor's choice as a "fully deliberative decision" that the statute protected, and it said that a contrary rule would set off "an unseemly race to the courthouse" between the defense and the prosecution. Because Francois had no clear right to have his plea accepted, mandamus, the order he had sought, was not available.
The decision is reported at 95 N.Y.2d 33.
Francois did plead guilty in the end. The Associated Press, reporting his death in 2014, said he pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty that New York then had in effect. He was sentenced in 2000 to life in prison without parole. He was also convicted of attempted assault on the woman who escaped from him.
At his sentencing Francois did not speak. His lawyer told the court that he was deeply sorry for what he had done but did not want to make a statement that the families of the women might misunderstand. The woman who had escaped addressed him in court and told him she hoped he would be killed in prison. Sandra French's daughter told him that she would like to see him die eight times over.
Claudia Rowe had been hired as a reporter by a Poughkeepsie newspaper in 1994 and left after 22 months, but she stayed in the area, WBUR's Here and Now reported in 2017. In 1998 she was working in Poughkeepsie as a stringer for The New York Times, and she began covering the killings. After hearing of the arrest she went to the house, she later told KUOW, and sitting outside she became sure the story would change her life.
She wrote the first letter to Francois herself. The correspondence that followed went on for years, by letter and by telephone, and included visits to him in prison. In one letter he told her that he wanted to know everything about her. He proposed a trade: for every ten typed pages she sent him about her own life, he would answer any four of her questions, WBUR reported. Rowe said the relationship troubled her, and that working through the story helped her settle her own problems and move on.
Rowe began writing a book about Francois in 2000 but decided, she told The Stranger, that she needed more experience of life and of journalism before she could finish it. By 2017 she was an education reporter at The Seattle Times. Her book, The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder, was published in January 2017. She described it as close to her subject in a way that Janet Malcolm's study The Journalist and the Murderer was not.
The book was not universally admired. A review for NPR found that it said more about its author than about the eight women, who, the reviewer wrote, were given few pages and treated as local color rather than as people. The review also reported Rowe's account that some women she interviewed in Poughkeepsie said Francois had assaulted them, and that he tried to discuss Macbeth, a Shakespeare play he loved, during her visits.
Francois served his sentence in New York state prisons. At the end of his life he was held at Wende Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Alden, in western New York. He died there on a Thursday evening in September 2014, prison officials said, from what they called apparent natural causes. He was 43. The New York television news site CNY Central (WSTM) reported the death on Friday, September 12, 2014, and the Associated Press carried the story the next day.
The Erie County medical examiner's office said that it had issued an official finding on the cause of his death but would not make it public, the AP reported.
The number of missing women. The Associated Press reported in 2014 that nine women had been reported missing from the Poughkeepsie area and that eight were identified among the remains at his home. Francois was charged with eight killings and pleaded guilty to eight. What became of the ninth woman was not reported, and Francois was never charged in her case.
How many women he assaulted. KUOW reported in 2017 that each of the women had reported Francois to police for assault before she disappeared. The claim was not reported elsewhere or in the court records, and it remains unconfirmed.
The household. The AP account has him living with his parents and younger sister; a 2017 review in The Stranger described his mother and two younger siblings.
1994: Claudia Rowe is hired as a reporter by a Poughkeepsie newspaper (WBUR).
1996: Women begin disappearing in Poughkeepsie (KUOW).
1996 to 1998: Francois kills eight women over about 22 months, by his own account to police (AP).
September 1, 1998: A woman escapes from him and calls police; the remains of the eight women are found at his home in Poughkeepsie that month.
October 8, 1998: A Dutchess County grand jury indicts him on eight counts of first degree murder, eight counts of second degree murder and one count of attempted second degree assault.
November 1998: The district attorney invites the defense to submit mitigation information.
December 22, 1998: The Court of Appeals decides Matter of Hynes v. Tomei.
December 23, 1998: Francois offers to plead guilty to the whole indictment; the district attorney opposes.
December 24, 1998: The district attorney files notice of intent to seek the death penalty. The County Court later refuses the plea; the Appellate Division dismisses his petition.
March 29, 2000: The Court of Appeals hears argument.
May 18, 2000: The Court of Appeals unanimously affirms, holding that he had no unqualified right to plead guilty before the prosecutor's decision period ended.
2000: Francois pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison without parole; he is also convicted of attempted assault on the woman who escaped.
2000: Claudia Rowe begins writing a book on the case (The Stranger).
September 2014: Francois dies at Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York, at 43.
January 2017: The Spider and the Fly is published.