NY NY - KENDALL FRANCOISE, Poughkeepsie, 1996-98

Hi,

I'm fairly new here (reading for awhile though!) and I searched a few different things and didn't get any hits in this forum. I was just wondering if this site ever had threads on Kendall Francoise. I was very young when he was arrested, but we lived very close to him at the time so I've always had idle curiosity in reading what's out there. I'm sorry to ask this, but I did try searching and found nothing so wanted to double check. I guess knowing I was his neighbor at the time kind of hits close to home, in a literal sense.

TIA!

We do now.

By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: September 03, 1998


Police investigators wearing face masks and white jump suits found the bodies of two women and the decaying remains of others yesterday in a ramshackle green house a block from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

They charged Kendall Francois, a 27-year-old unemployed school aide who lived in the house, with strangling one of the women to death and said they thought he was responsible for killing seven others, most of them prostitutes, who have been missing for as long as two years.


The first woman reported missing was Wendy Meyers, 30, who was last seen on Oct. 24, 1996, at a motel in nearby Highland. Her disappearance was followed by that of Gina Barone, 29, on Dec. 9, 1996; Catherine A. Marsh, 29, who was pregnant, on Nov. 12, 1996; Ms. Hurley on Jan. 12, 1997; Michelle Eason, 27, on Oct. 9, 1997; Mary Healey Giaccone, 29, on Nov. 13, 1997; Sandra Jean French, 51, on June 11, 1998, and Ms. Newmaster.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/03/n...ngs-of-eight-women.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

article continued at the link

In early January, 1998, Poughkeepsie Police made a decision to interview Francois about the missing women. They staked out the Francois home at 99 Fulton Avenue and soon discovered that Francois had a routine that he often followed. In the morning he would take the family car, drive his mother to work at a nearby psychiatric center where she was a nurse, drop her off and then return to downtown Poughkeepsie where he would cruise the streets.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/predators/francois/disappeared_1.html

http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc 405/serial killers/Francois, Kendall.pdf

I just saw this. Thank you! You should have been in my hometown when the movie "The Poughkeepsie Tapes" was made. First everyone thought it was about Kendall and went bonkers. Then everyone actually saw it and REALLY freaked.

http://www.wral.com/ny-man-who-strangled-8-prostitutes-dies-in-prison/13978311/

A former school monitor who admitted strangling eight prostitutes and stashing their corpses in his home in the 1990s has died at a prison in western New York.

Prison officials said Kendall Francois, who was 43, died Thursday evening from apparent natural causes. He was an inmate at the maximum-security Wende Correctional Facility in Alden...

Francois had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. The Erie County medical examiner's office said Friday it had issued an official finding about the cause of Francois' death but declined to disclose it publicly.

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Claudia Rowe's new book explores her relationship with serial killer, Kendall Francois, who confessed to murdering eight women and stashing them in his Poughkeepsie family home.

After Kendall Francois murdered a woman, he’d stash her body in the attic of his Poughkeepsie family home to let it rot. One after another, until there were eight.

The murders went on from 1996 to 1998, terrorizing the upstate city and befuddling investigators who failed to piece together clues linking the killings to Francois.
It was only after one of his victims escaped his clutches that Francois was brought in for police questioning. He ultimately confessed to the rape and killing of eight prostitutes.


Journalist Claudia Rowe revisits her tortured relationship with Francois in a new book, “The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder.”

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How a serial killer taught a reporter the complicated meaning of evil

She says the relationship became an addiction for her. And the two engaged a dance of mutual manipulation.

"I imagined that he would provide for me kind of a map of cruelty or a diagram of the mechanism behind it," Rowe tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.

"That is not in any way what I got. But what I did get was a sense of the complexity of evil — the texture of a person who is so torn up." she adds.

"What I did get was an answer about the misery within cruelty. He was a miserable person."

Rowe says that despite his heinous crimes, she could identify some humanity in the killer. And when he died in 2014, she says she was filled with complicated emotions.

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* April 2011:
In Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Kendall L. Francois admitted strangling and murdering eight prostitutes from 1996 to 1998, and storing their bodies in the home he shared with his family.

After her daughter went missing in late 1996, Patricia Barone, 67, tried to get news media outlets in Poughkeepsie to cover the story. Most declined. The body of her daughter, Gina Barone, 29, was discovered nearly two years later, in September 1998, in Mr. Francois’ ramshackle house a block from Vassar College.

Patricia Barone is raising her daughter’s child, who turns 17 next month. Gina Barone is buried in Poughkeepsie. The priest who baptized her in 1968 is the one who offered her funeral Mass in 1998.

“If one Vassar College girl was missing, we would have had cops all over the place,” Patricia Barone said. “Every one of these women is somebody’s child, and people don’t kind of get that. Your children are your children no matter what they do out there.”