Authors: Fred Rosen
Which was why later, when the house on Fulton Avenue started to smell, the neighbors said and did nothing. Maybe they whispered amongst themselves. Poughkeepsie, though, was a conservative place. What someone did in the sanctity of his or her home was no one else’s business.
By high school, Selma Darrell remembers, Kendall Francois had become an average student.
“I was his high school French teacher,” Darrell said. “He seemed to be gentle.”
A gentle giant. Darrell took a liking to the big kid.
“He tried to work for me [at school jobs] with limited success.”
Francois seemed to be one of those students of limited intellectual ability. He sat in the back, hoping he wouldn’t be seen or called on. Darrell, a pro, saw what he was doing and intervened.
“I actually put him in front of me to help him,” she recalled.
Maybe by being in front of the teacher he’d absorb more and get his grades up. But it didn’t work. Francois soon realized that there was “safety” in being seen, that the teacher would call on the kids in back who seemed to be hiding instead. In Francois’s case, it worked because, “He did not talk a lot,” nor did Darrell call on him frequently.
“He was barely an average student,” she remembers.
It was that “averageness” that hid the terrible rage building up inside.
Francois’s tenure in Arlington High School lasted from 1984 to 1989. During that time, Darrell recalled, “The black kids in Arlington stuck together. There weren’t many in class.” But there did not appear to be the overt isolationism seen by minorities in other communities. Oliver Mackson, who attended Arlington High School and later became a reporter for the
Times Herald Record
newspaper, remembers things a little differently.
“Arlington was a comfortable place for lots of different crowds. Even runty, dorky, mouthy Jewish kids like me got along fine with all kinds of people,” he would later write in his column of June 23, 2000.
One of Mackson’s friends, he wrote, was Ross Allison, who was a good enough wrestler at Arlington to wrestle in state tournaments. After graduating in 1982, he continued his participation in the sport by refereeing wrestling matches.
“Sometimes, when I was not refereeing, I would go to a home Arlington match. He’d [Francois] be there with his father; they’d be standing in the corner and I’d go say, ‘Hi,’” Allison recalled.
Maybe it was a way to get out the aggression that had been building inside him. Or maybe he just wanted to fit in. Whatever it was, Francois decided to use his bulk for his own benefit.
Kendall tried out for and immediately got on both the football and wrestling teams in his freshman year. He was all of fourteen years old. By the next year, he had physically matured to an almost muscular 6’4” and 250 pounds. But he still had this baby fat that he seemed desperate to get rid of.
In the team wrestling photo of that year, Francois stands off at the side of the photograph, the last of nine wrestlers, the only one wearing a cut-off jersey, deliberately doing a bodybuilder’s side chest pose. The pose is meant to show off the pectoral and bicep muscles. He still had the fat, but his chest was huge. The expression on his face was one of challenge.
That same year, “He broke his hand doing something stupid,” Allison remembered.
Francois had had an argument with another kid and broke his hand. That kept him out of wrestling for the year, but not football. Even with his injury, Kendall Francois still belonged. Being on the football team gave him that. He was not some outsider. He was respected by the other kids. If anyone made fun of him, they didn’t do it to his face. They’d have to be crazy to do that. He was bigger than almost all of them.
Appearance—with Francois it meant nothing. The fact was he didn’t know what he was. Like most psychopaths, he was trying on identities to see what fit, what he could carry off. He tried a new one on for his graduation photo. It is a stark reminder of how pictures can actually lie.
Francois strikes a studious pose, hands under his chin, posed in three-quarter style by the photographer. He wears an Afghan sweater, shirt and tie. His Afro hair is carefully cropped, but not too close to his skull. He has a high, brooding forehead. He wears great oversize glasses over languid dark eyes. He has a brush-cut mustache meant to make him look a little older, when it actually makes him look younger.
That year, every graduating Arlington senior was asked to put in their favorite quote. Under his name, Francois had chosen this quote from Hebrews 11:1:
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Faith was something his victims’ families would need to get them through the tragedies to come.
After graduating from Arlington, Francois enlisted in the United States Army. He did his basic training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and then was sent to an army base in Honolulu. When he got there, a serial killer was hard at work.
In the late 1980’s, Honolulu, Hawaii, had several unsolved homicides of women who had died from strangulation. A serial killer was suspected. There was no clear suspect in sight. While Francois was stationed there, more women were murdered using the same modus operandi (MO) or manner of murder. Ironically, the same problem existed back home. There was a serial killer loose in the Mid Hudson Valley and the police seemed powerless to catch him.
The first to be murdered was Juliana R. Frank, twenty-nine, of Middletown, New York, across the river in Orange County. She was stabbed and killed on March 25, 1991. Her body was later found on an abandoned railroad bed in Middletown. Then came Larette Huggins Reviere, thirty-four, also of Middletown. She was killed on July 10. Her nude, stabbed body was found in her house.
Christine M. Klebbe of the nearby town of Goshen was next. She was reported missing on July 1. Her body would later be found, stabbed like the rest. Brenda L. Whiteside, twenty, of Elmsford, was reported missing on July 20. A short time later, her body was found in that same town. She’d been stabbed. Angela Hopkins, Whiteside’s cousin, was also reported missing on July 30 and her body was later found, stabbed, in Goshen.
Finally there was Adriane M. Hunter of Middletown. She, too, had disappeared and then her nude body was found. Another stabbing.
The case was finally broken when Poughkeepsie police received an anonymous phone call, a tip. Someone called to say that Nathaniel White, thirty-two, of Middletown, should be looked at for the crimes. White had been paroled that April from state prison, where he’d served two years for robbing three convenience stores in Orange County. He was paroled in November 1989, rearrested on April 17, 1991, for kidnapping and assault. He plea bargained the charges down to unlawful imprisonment and was sentenced to nine months in state prison.
For violating his previous parole, three more months behind bars were tacked on to the sentence. Quoted in the
Albany Times Union
newspaper, Division of Parole Spokesman David Ernst said White showed no violent tendencies while serving his latest sentence.
Parole officials brought White in for questioning. Local and state police questioned him about the unsolved strangulation murders. In the opinion of law enforcement, he was not forthcoming in his responses to their questions. Put another way, he was lying. White eventually confessed, giving police the information that led to the recovery of the bodies of Klebbe, Whiteside and Hopkins. The others came later. White had killed all the women by repeatedly stabbing them. Some had also been raped.
Orange County District Attorney Frank D. Phillips was quoted as saying he didn’t feel badly about White’s recent parole. When someone asked him why, the DA responded with what could be any district attorney’s epitaph:
“Because I’m only the district attorney; I’m not God.”
On April 14, 1993, White was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to a total of 150 years in prison. His legacy, if it could be called one, was a call to revise the state’s missing person’s procedures.
Three of the victims with similar descriptions were actually reported missing in July. But because two were from Dutchess County across the river and the other was from Orange County, police were not able to connect the cases for a week. There came a call for a sharing of information.
Police were reasonably certain that if this sharing of information policy were followed, there would be no more Nathaniel Whites slipping through their dragnet. But the police championing this methodology were the state police. The state police in New York are among the most highly trained and well-educated law enforcement professionals in the country. They are trained at a state-of-the-art law police academy in Albany.
In contrast, local police themselves have to pay for law enforcement training at a private police academy. Their hope is to catch on with a small-town force, like Poughkeepsie’s, then go to a more urban area like New York or Hartford, to earn a better salary and more extensive benefits.
A cop got some experience in a small town setting, then took that and enlisted on the force of a larger town where his experience would get him some advancement. With Upstate New York unemployment higher than that in New York City, the small town could always find replacements.
Essentially, it was a pay as you go, learn as you go type of deal. Unfortunately, this arrangement played right into the hands of serial killers. They counted on police bureaucracy enabling them to continue in their killing careers.
When Kendall Francois was discharged from the service in 1994, he came back to Poughkeepsie and found a job as a substitute custodial worker for the Arlington School District. He worked in that position from May 1994 to April 1996. Then, he received a promotion.
From April 1996 to January 1997, he was a hall and detention monitor at his alma mater, the Arlington Middle School. His job was to make sure the kids were not unruly in the halls and the cafeteria. Because of his personal lack of hygiene, the kids began to call him “Stinky” behind his back.
Francois’s tenure at Arlington Middle School was uneventful. But school official Ginny Jones would remember that many teachers complained that Francois behaved improperly with some girls, hugging them, playing with their hair, following them in the hall or making off-color jokes.
“I thought he was kind of inappropriate in his appearance, in his demeanor,” said Jones.
Francois liked to wrestle with the kids.
“He would always want to wrestle and play around,” said Violet Reynolds, a student at Arlington during Francois’s tenure there. “I never thought he was a threat.”
She looked at Francois as a friendly face, someone dependable, and someone who could give her a ride home from high school wrestling matches when she needed a lift. Lori Johnson, a teaching assistant who worked with Francois at Arlington Middle School, remembered that he showed students wrestling holds he claimed to have learned in high school. Still, Francois was careful—there were no reports that he made inappropriate sexual contact with anyone there.
“He was a mild-mannered type of person. Quiet,” recalled Donald Rothman, the school superintendent in an interview.
As much as Francois liked the work, the money wasn’t very good, six dollars an hour or about forty-two dollars for a school day, but he lived at home and it was enough to cover his expenses. When he left in 1997, he went to work for the Andersen School. He only worked there for a short while before he was fired for some unknown reason.
Bill Siegrist’s cops continued to work the street. The girls who had complained about Francois said he was big and dirty and liked to manhandle them. He was exceptionally strong and liked to show it. They said he liked it rough and he liked to dish it out, too. It was a lead worth further investigation.
Siegrist had his detectives maintain a periodic surveillance of the Francois home on Fulton Avenue. Nothing unusual happened. The cops then managed to get a street prostitute named Nancy Miles to allow them to wire her up to see if they could get Francois to, unknowingly, make some damaging admissions.
Miles was under orders that she was not, under any circumstances, to get into the car with the big man. When she did manage to talk with him on several occasions, standing outside while he sat behind the wheel, the microphone picked up nothing of value.
Stakeouts, surveillance, these activities cost police departments a lot of money, and police departments, like any public entity, have budgets. Unless they had something solid on Francois, the cops couldn’t afford to follow him so closely. As for the missing women, it wasn’t a priority. It couldn’t be. There were no bodies, no crime scene. And while it would be nice to believe that every serial killer gets captured, that is just not the case.
According to Dr. Maurice Godwin, an investigative psychologist who works with police departments in developing “profiles” on serial killers, at any one time there are forty to fifty serial killers at large in the United States. Police don’t like to talk about it lest the public panic, but it is a fact—not all serial killers are captured. Many continue to kill again and again.
In Washington State, the Green River Serial Killer was still at large after almost twenty years. He is believed to be responsible for the murder of forty-nine women, mostly drug-addicted prostitutes, between 1982 and 1984. The case was so cold only one detective was still on it full-time when DNA testing finally found a match in December 2001.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, twenty-one prostitutes were missing off the streets of the east side of the city. Like in Poughkeepsie, they had simply disappeared, leaving no crime scene. Which didn’t mean they weren’t dead. Of course, everyone really believed they were, but couldn’t say it.
“We were agonizing what to do with the public,” Siegrist recalls. “Do we go public and create a scare or keep going with the investigation without [letting the public know]? I have been a cop long enough to know you don’t have all the answers.”
There was no really good answer. If they went public, it would also be telling the killer they were now on his trail. That might cause him to go to ground and make getting him even tougher. On the other hand, maybe there was a way to turn such a public admission into an asset. Television’s
America’s Most Wanted
had shown how, done judiciously, the public’s participation in apprehending a bad guy could be invaluable.