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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 7: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 7: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 7: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 7: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 4: Good evening. In this superb work of literary true crime,
Speaker 4: a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense, a female
Speaker 4: journalist chronicles unusual connection with a convicted serial killer in
Speaker 4: her search to understand a darkness inside us. Well, well, Claudia,
Speaker 4: can I call you? Claudia. I'll have to give it
Speaker 4: to you. When confronted, at least you're honest, as honest
Speaker 4: as any reporter. You want to go into the depths
Speaker 4: of my mind and into my past. I want to
Speaker 4: peek into yours. It is only fair, isn't it. Kendall
Speaker 4: Francois in September nineteen ninety eight, young reporter Claudia Rowe
Speaker 4: was working as a stringer for the New York Times
Speaker 4: in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies
Speaker 4: of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of
Speaker 4: the small colonial home that Kendall fran Kendel Francois, painfully polite,
Speaker 4: twenty seven year old community college student shared with his
Speaker 4: parents and sister. Growing up amid the safe bourgeois affluence
Speaker 4: of New York City, Roe had always been secretly fascinated
Speaker 4: by the darkness, and soon became obsessed with the story
Speaker 4: and with Francois. She was consumed with the desire to
Speaker 4: understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women,
Speaker 4: and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware,
Speaker 4: in a house with the victim's rotting corpses. She also
Speaker 4: hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could
Speaker 4: maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil. Reaching out
Speaker 4: after Francois was arrested, Roe and the serial killer began
Speaker 4: a dizzying four year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control.
Speaker 4: An unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead to
Speaker 4: her lead her to the Abyss, forcing her to clearly
Speaker 4: see herself and her own past and why she was
Speaker 4: drawn to danger. The book that were profiling this evening
Speaker 4: is The Spider and the Fly Reporter, A Serial Killer
Speaker 4: and the Meaning of Murder, with my special guest, journalist
Speaker 4: and author Claudia row Welcome to the program, and thank
Speaker 4: you very much for this green to this interview. Claudia
Speaker 4: rowe Hi, it's nice to be here. Thank you very
Speaker 4: much for coming on and talking about this incredible book.
Speaker 4: Let's jump right into this and tell us a little
Speaker 4: bit about for those people that don't know for our
Speaker 4: international audience, and tell us where Poughkeepsie is, and a
Speaker 4: little bit about Poughkeepsie. And tell us what you were
Speaker 4: doing in nineteen ninety eight. We alluded to it that
Speaker 4: you were a stringer for the New York Post, So
Speaker 4: tell us a little bit about who you were at
Speaker 4: that time when these crimes were reported, and tell us sure,
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 6: Not a stringer for the New York Post. I was
Speaker 6: a stringer for the New York Times and with a
Speaker 6: very different newspaper, and I was living in Poughkeepsie, New York,
Speaker 6: which is about an hour and a half or two
Speaker 6: hours north of New York City. It was at the
Speaker 6: time a sort of rural community in transition. It had
Speaker 6: previously been very much a sort of rural agrarian com unity,
Speaker 6: but it was transitioning to sort of more of a
Speaker 6: bedroom community. At the time that I was there, I
Speaker 6: had previously been a local reporter for the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Speaker 6: I was an education reporter for the local newspaper. I
Speaker 6: had quit that job, but I stayed in the area.
Speaker 6: There were certain aspects of that small city that really
Speaker 6: kind of gnawed at me, particularly what I had seen
Speaker 6: as a local reporter and what I continued to see
Speaker 6: as its profound denial. I felt that that local journalism
Speaker 6: there was not terribly honest or forthright about the reality
Speaker 6: in the city. Because while the county surrounding Poughkeepsie was
Speaker 6: very beautiful and quite a wealthy county had estates built
Speaker 6: by the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts, and a lot of
Speaker 6: horse country and sort of a lovely rural pastoral view
Speaker 6: along the Hudson River, the city of Poughkeepsie itself was
Speaker 6: not that it is the home to two pretty well
Speaker 6: known colleges, Vassar College is Vassar College and Marist College.
Speaker 6: Both are private, liberal arts institutions. However, they do not
Speaker 6: really sort of inform the reality of the city of Poughkeepsie,
Speaker 6: or they certainly didn't at that time. And city of
Speaker 6: Poughkeepsie was a had very high poverty, a fairly lousy
Speaker 6: education system, and on Main Street, which had once been
Speaker 6: this kind of bustling thoroughfare and bustling shopping area that
Speaker 6: drew people from around the region, Main Street had sort
Speaker 6: of fallen into decrepitude, and it was by the time
Speaker 6: I got there, essentially just a strip for drug dealing
Speaker 6: and prostitution and pawn shops and pizza joints. It was
Speaker 6: a really kind of depressed area that people tended to
Speaker 6: avoid if they came into town at all.
Speaker 4: Now, you talk about this book because what we talked
Speaker 4: about in the opening, it's part memoir, and so you
Speaker 4: are directly involved in the story, Unlike many most of
Speaker 4: the time the journalist is not part of the story,
Speaker 4: and you are an instricable part of this incredible story.
Speaker 4: So tell us, as you do in the book about
Speaker 4: your relationship with Derek, your boyfriend, and how you got
Speaker 4: encouraged to be involved in this story in the first place,
Speaker 4: and also what was happening with in terms of missing
Speaker 4: women and your response and the community's response before we
Speaker 4: talk about your first phone call to Marguerite Marsh Sure.
Speaker 6: Where we are when the story opens, and where I
Speaker 6: was in my life personally. I was stringing for the
Speaker 6: New York Times, but I was kind of at loose ends.
Speaker 6: I had this idea about the city of Poughkeepsie as
Speaker 6: this kind of symbol of denial. And the person I
Speaker 6: called Derek in the book was my boyfriend, and he
Speaker 6: still worked at them at the paper, the local paper,
Speaker 6: which was the Poughkeepsie Journal, and he would come home
Speaker 6: at every night and say, if there was another woman,
Speaker 6: you know who's missing, but the local paper wasn't writing
Speaker 6: anything about it. After the first two women were reported
Speaker 6: missing in nineteen ninety six, there were two, there were
Speaker 6: tiny little briefs in the paper that you know, they're
Speaker 6: just missing woman, maybe maybe four inches long or less,
Speaker 6: very very short, and no follow up. And after that,
Speaker 6: as women continued to be reported missing, and all the
Speaker 6: same kinds of women and all women who walked this straight,
Speaker 6: same stretch of Main Street, this decrepit strip where they
Speaker 6: were all involved with using drugs. Most of them were
Speaker 6: prostitutes to support their crack habits. So these were all
Speaker 6: the same kinds of women who were being reported missing
Speaker 6: within a fairly specific time range, and they were all
Speaker 6: reported missing from the same place. However, the local paper
Speaker 6: didn't seem to want to connect the dots. It wasn't
Speaker 6: as if this was a secret. There were missing person
Speaker 6: flyers up on lampposts and storefronts, and Derek, who was
Speaker 6: not a crime reporter, he knew about it. People knew
Speaker 6: about it, and of course the police knew about it.
Speaker 6: The mayor knew about it. People knew about it. But
Speaker 6: the local paper was not really digging into it. So
Speaker 6: Derek would come home every night and say, you got
Speaker 6: to look at this. You're writing for the New York Times.
Speaker 6: It's your responsibility. You have to tell your editors what's
Speaker 6: going on here. But nobody really was saying what was
Speaker 6: going on. Nobody was saying for sure there was some
Speaker 6: sort of crime afoot because there was no crime scene.
Speaker 6: You know, these women would be reported missing, but the
Speaker 6: police could quite reasonably say we're not sure there's a
Speaker 6: crime here, because it's not as if anybody has ever
Speaker 6: been discovered. So while I later learned that the chief
Speaker 6: of detectives had very strong suspicions, very early on in
Speaker 6: public law enforcement was saying, well, it's yeah, but we
Speaker 6: just don't really know what this is. Anyway, I did
Speaker 6: call my editor at the New York Times and say,
Speaker 6: you know, it's what's going on up there? I said,
Speaker 6: I don't really know. There's these women. They keep being
Speaker 6: reported missing. It's been going on for two years, we're
Speaker 6: now up to seven. But I don't really know if
Speaker 6: this is a story because I just don't know what
Speaker 6: this is. And he said, of course, start making some
Speaker 6: phone calls, get on it. And as I did that,
Speaker 6: very soon afterward, another woman was reported missing. And it's
Speaker 6: not funny. And then within a week after my beginning
Speaker 6: to call the women's families, a man confessed and his
Speaker 6: name was Kendall Francois.
Speaker 4: Now you had called Marguerite Marsh, Catherine Marsh's mother, and
Speaker 4: you spoke to her, and she talked about her daughter's
Speaker 4: life and her diction. And then you, as you write
Speaker 4: in a book, you talk to Pat Barne, which was
Speaker 4: the mother of Gina. And then you talk to James DeSalvo,
Speaker 4: brother of Kathleen Hurley. Now you also talk about just
Speaker 4: a little bit about why you became a reporter in
Speaker 4: the first place, so we can kind of understand how
Speaker 4: this story really did consume you, and this case really
Speaker 4: did consume you. Sure, so tell us a little bit
Speaker 4: about just why you wanted to become a reporter, and
Speaker 4: then what you knew. I actually saw you didn't know
Speaker 4: what the story was when you talked to your editor
Speaker 4: at the Times. But tell us a little bit about that,
Speaker 4: as you do in the book.
Speaker 6: Sure, I had become a reporter, really for two reasons.
Speaker 6: I always wanted to. I always thought I would be
Speaker 6: some sort of writer. I knew that pretty early on.
Speaker 6: But I was not terribly disciplined, and I was unable
Speaker 6: to finish anything. So that was the very sort of
Speaker 6: superficial reason. I knew that becoming a newspaper reporter would
Speaker 6: force me to learn structure, pace, to learn what was
Speaker 6: important and to concentrate on what was real, and to
Speaker 6: turn it into a structure into something that was comprehensible.
Speaker 6: I knew it would sort of teach me the rudiments
Speaker 6: of writing. But more importantly, I had grown up with
Speaker 6: a fair amount of sort of emotional violence in my
Speaker 6: own home and a tremendously frightening, unstable environment at home,
Speaker 6: and it framed my worldview. And I grew up absolutely
Speaker 6: riveted on this idea of cruelty and what is it
Speaker 6: that drives a person toward cruelty? So when I had
Speaker 6: this idea about becoming a reporter would teach me to write,
Speaker 6: what I wanted to write about was cruelty. I really needed,
Speaker 6: for personal reasons to understand what is that drive. I
Speaker 6: was desperate to understand it as a way of feeling
Speaker 6: less controlled by it. I felt like if I could
Speaker 6: break down cruelty and the impulse impulse toward violence, even
Speaker 6: if it's emotional violence or physical violence, if I could
Speaker 6: break that down and kind of understand its components, it
Speaker 6: would seem less mysterious and thus less powerful. It would
Speaker 6: be more comprehensible and less frightening to me. So that
Speaker 6: was kind of my drive early on as a reporter
Speaker 6: covering crime in the bro in New York City, and
Speaker 6: by the time I got to Poughkeepsie, I was covering schools,
Speaker 6: but schools are not exactly immune from violence themselves.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 6: All people start in schools, So schools seem to me
Speaker 6: kind of a logical place to understand where kids' brains
Speaker 6: begin to be formed and what does kind of drive
Speaker 6: you toward one path or another. So it wasn't quite
Speaker 6: as divergent from that original interest as it might seem. However,
Speaker 6: I wasn't really a crime reporter when I got all
Speaker 6: embroiled in this case.
Speaker 4: Now you talk about that, after a week of speaking,
Speaker 4: after a week after speaking the Marguerite Marsh about her daughter,
Speaker 4: you were at the Poughkeepsie Police station and you were
Speaker 4: interviewing the chief of detectives about the missing women mystery,
Speaker 4: and this Lieutenant pygrist Or Secrest walked in and said
Speaker 4: the case was solved.
Speaker 6: So I wasn't actually I wasn't actually interviewing him. I
Speaker 6: was waiting for the interview. And as you say, he said,
Speaker 6: I was waiting for this interview, which was going to
Speaker 6: be what are you doing about these missing women cases?
Speaker 6: You know, I was starting to zero in on a
Speaker 6: story about what the families were saying, which was they
Speaker 6: felt at the time they were saying that they felt
Speaker 6: that the police weren't taking this investigation terribly seriously. They
Speaker 6: didn't see a whole lot of urgency. So that's what
Speaker 6: I was going to interview him about. And he said
Speaker 6: it's done, and he hands me in address, and here
Speaker 6: you go and there and then there I was. That
Speaker 6: address was just a few blocks away. Pickpsie is not
Speaker 6: a huge place, so it took me five minutes to
Speaker 6: drive over there, and it was a block from Vassar College,
Speaker 6: and media from everywhere were by that point descending.
Speaker 4: If you don't mind what's inside, you do incredible job
Speaker 4: of describing this contrast that's there. But the remnants of
Speaker 4: this the crime scene, the home that we talked about.
Speaker 4: The two years, no one noticed the rotting corpses. So
Speaker 4: tell us what was found at that crime scene? What
Speaker 4: did it look like as you describe?
Speaker 6: Sure, So, even though the street that the Francois were
Speaker 6: living on was a very sort of genteel, gracious street,
Speaker 6: as I said, just down just a block from Besser
Speaker 6: College campus, it's a lovely neighborhood. Still, while all the
Speaker 6: homes were kind of colonials with large porches and very
Speaker 6: nice looking, the Francois home was on that street, but
Speaker 6: it was the only house on the block that was
Speaker 6: kind of run down looking from the outside, and inside
Speaker 6: was a whole different thing. It was a scene that
Speaker 6: police detectives who had been in Lawn were spent thirty
Speaker 6: years told me they had never thirty years seen anything
Speaker 6: like this. This was the home of a family who
Speaker 6: went out and appeared absolutely fairly normal. The mom worked
Speaker 6: as a psychiatric nurse, and this had worked at DuPont,
Speaker 6: which is a chemical plant, and the two kids, Kendall
Speaker 6: and his younger sister, went to school. Kendall went to
Speaker 6: community college, his younger sister had just graduated high school.
Speaker 6: So they sort of operated in the regular world and
Speaker 6: appeared fairly normal. However, inside their home were eight decomposing corpses,
Speaker 6: five in the attic and three in the basement. On
Speaker 6: top of that, the home itself was an absolute sort
Speaker 6: of blizzard of species and underwear and papers and random
Speaker 6: furniture and rotting food all over the place. Some of
Speaker 6: the upstairs bathroom, some of the bathrooms didn't work, some
Speaker 6: of the lights didn't work, the gas had not been
Speaker 6: on periodically. It was, you know, a place where you
Speaker 6: might find like dirty underwear in the kitchen and pajamas
Speaker 6: on the steps and torn up insulation falling down. I
Speaker 6: mean it was it was there were trails through through
Speaker 6: the garbage that people that the that the family walked
Speaker 6: on to get ready for school and work. So they
Speaker 6: were living in this profoundly disconnected state, These people living
Speaker 6: in a in a in a kind of condition of
Speaker 6: denial where they were not incorporating the reality of a
Speaker 6: of a of a fully trashed home beyond trashed with Okay, well,
Speaker 6: when now we're going out into the working world. There
Speaker 6: was some profound disconnect there.
Speaker 4: Now you take us to September nineteen ninety eight. Now
Speaker 4: Kendall is in is arrested, he's in custody. He is
Speaker 4: talking about some of the women they're being questioned about,
Speaker 4: Wendy Meyers, Gina Barone, Catherine Marsh, Sandra French. Tell us
Speaker 4: about what he says. He's looking at photos. Tell us
Speaker 4: what he says to police.
Speaker 6: What he did was ask for immediately ask for photographs
Speaker 6: of the missing women. He had been booked for something else.
Speaker 6: I don't want to give away too much of the story,
Speaker 6: but he had been booked and brought in for questioning
Speaker 6: on another matter, and he confessed to that, and it
Speaker 6: was a completely different thing. It appeared the police acted
Speaker 6: or seemed to believe it was a completely different matter.
Speaker 6: And when they left him alone and said we're gonna
Speaker 6: go follow up on this, he sort of knocked on
Speaker 6: the door of the interview room he'd been shut into
Speaker 6: that I want to see photographs of the missing women.
Speaker 6: This really surprised police, but they sort of hustled together
Speaker 6: a bunch of xeroxes that they just printed off their computers.
Speaker 6: These were the very same missing women flyers I was
Speaker 6: referring to earlier, the same sort of police mugshots of
Speaker 6: women that had been posted. And Kendall sort of sorted
Speaker 6: through the pile and he put his hand over several
Speaker 6: of them and he slid it forward across the table
Speaker 6: to the prosecutor. He had asked to speak to the
Speaker 6: head prosecutor for sex crimes who was dealing with the
Speaker 6: missing women case, which is an unusual request, And he
Speaker 6: put his hand over these photographs and he said, I
Speaker 6: did it. I killed them.
Speaker 4: Now you introduced this very interesting character, Assistant DA Marjorie Smith,
Speaker 4: and she speaks with him for seven hours, and you
Speaker 4: talk about what happens at the end of that interview
Speaker 4: of that seven hours, but tell us a little bit
Speaker 4: about Marjorie.
Speaker 6: Smith's Margie Smith was a sex crimes prosecutor and she
Speaker 6: had primarily been involved with domestic violence cases and child
Speaker 6: abuse cases. She certainly handled rape cases as well as
Speaker 6: a sex crimes prosecutor. She was at that point in
Speaker 6: her forties, she had been divorced, She was exhausted. By
Speaker 6: the time she was summoned to the Poughkeepsie police station.
Speaker 6: She had already gone through her whole day, just moving along.
Speaker 6: And she knew that there had been a questioning regarding
Speaker 6: a rape, that Kendall Francois had been questioned regarding a rape,
Speaker 6: and this was the matter that brought him in for questioning,
Speaker 6: and she'd dealt with that as just a standard sort
Speaker 6: of part of her case load. And she was very
Speaker 6: surprised to be summoned to the police station by other
Speaker 6: officers saying, yeah, there's a guy here who wants to
Speaker 6: talk to sex crimes prosecutor who's dealing with missing women.
Speaker 6: You know, at that point Marjorie Smith might have prosecuted
Speaker 6: the case. Now she was being turned into a witness,
Speaker 6: taking this guy's confession. It was very unusual. Turn.
Speaker 4: Now you talk before we go any further, it's I
Speaker 4: think it's important to talk about what Kendall Francois looks like,
Speaker 4: what is his appearance.
Speaker 6: Sure, Kendall Francois was an enormous African American man. He
Speaker 6: was well over three hundred pounds and at least six
Speaker 6: six feet four inches. He was a huge guy. All
Speaker 6: of his victims were small white women, at least all
Speaker 6: of his confessed victims. They were all they sort of
Speaker 6: looked like me. They in physical type maybe about five
Speaker 6: foot five, you know, one hundred and twenty pounds. They
Speaker 6: were fairly small white women, and he was a huge guy.
Speaker 6: Race was a considerable part of his psychological makeup. Issues
Speaker 6: around race, which is why I bring that up.
Speaker 4: Now, let's talk about you're a part of the investigation,
Speaker 4: which is something that you can control, and as you do,
Speaker 4: you interview as many people as possible. But as part
Speaker 4: of your investigation, what do you learn early on about
Speaker 4: Kendall Francois and the missing women themselves?
Speaker 6: Well, seemed to me, I'm not sure if this is
Speaker 6: what you're asking about. It seemed to me there was
Speaker 6: a fairly clear trigger for him. You know, Kendall Francois
Speaker 6: was with many many women from main Street. He was
Speaker 6: a regular out there. They all knew him, and they,
Speaker 6: you know, many of these women had been with him
Speaker 6: a number of times and been beaten up by him
Speaker 6: a number of times. Many many women knew who he was,
Speaker 6: knew what his habits were, and had reported him to police.
Speaker 6: It's as a likely as likely responsible for their missing friends. Really,
Speaker 6: it seemed, in talking to Margie Smith and in reading
Speaker 6: over the confession, that there was something pretty specific that
Speaker 6: triggered Kendall Francois into why he would kill some women
Speaker 6: and some not. I'm not sure if this is what
Speaker 6: you were asking about. Is that what you're looking Yeah, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 6: So Kendell Francois appears to have had some kind of
Speaker 6: sexual dysfunction problem. Certainly, he was unable to complete sex
Speaker 6: in in what these women considered a normal manner and
Speaker 6: in a normal time frame. So as soon as any
Speaker 6: of them said, hey, this is taking a really long time,
Speaker 6: I've got to go. As soon as any of them
Speaker 6: said I've got to go either for hey, you're taking
Speaker 6: too long, I've got other appointments, you know, like what's
Speaker 6: up with you? He seemed to be triggered into a
Speaker 6: kind of blind rage. And sometimes in these blind rages,
Speaker 6: while he was raping and strangling them, he said things like,
Speaker 6: according to the police reports, oh my god, I almost
Speaker 6: did it again. Or if you tell, you'll be the
Speaker 6: victim of a crime. He said things. Now, those are
Speaker 6: obviously things he said to women who who he let go,
Speaker 6: who escaped in various ways and then reported him. But
Speaker 6: apparently other women, according to what he told the prosecutor,
Speaker 6: they said things like that too, I've got to go,
Speaker 6: I've got an appointment. He felt like a dupe to
Speaker 6: all of these women. He felt that they had stolen
Speaker 6: from him, that they were ripping him off, that they
Speaker 6: were in various ways humiliating or disrespecting him, and that
Speaker 6: seemed to be a trigger for him.
Speaker 4: You write about his demeanor with police when he's reciting this,
Speaker 4: and this is not unusual for somebody like me reading
Speaker 4: about these stories, but it was unusual for those people
Speaker 4: with that demeanor. So what was his demeanor during all
Speaker 4: of this, which was surprising even to people they're not
Speaker 4: usually surprised.
Speaker 6: Right, his demeanor, you know, when police was just when
Speaker 6: when Margie Smith described it to me, and there was
Speaker 6: another officer in there with her as well. When they
Speaker 6: described it to me, they described his demeanor as bored,
Speaker 6: as if he was talking about going to the store
Speaker 6: to buy a loaf of bread or filling up the
Speaker 6: car with gas. Just very matter of fact, very unemotional,
Speaker 6: very bored. That may well be. I also listened to
Speaker 6: the tapes of him confessing, and you know, because I
Speaker 6: wasn't there, I couldn't see him. I could only go
Speaker 6: on their description and what I heard on the tapes.
Speaker 6: I felt that at certain times he sounded exhausted. At
Speaker 6: certain times, possibly sad or wistful. At times, his voice
Speaker 6: would trail away into nothing. You know, when I would
Speaker 6: his voice was interesting, you know, Sometimes he was very forthright,
Speaker 6: sort of booming voice, especially when I later spoke with
Speaker 6: him in prison or on the phone. But at other
Speaker 6: times his voice would just sort of trickle away into nothing,
Speaker 6: as if he was barely there or barely able to
Speaker 6: say what was in his mind. So, yes, they described
Speaker 6: him as bored and matter of fact and absolutely without emotion,
Speaker 6: kind of robotic.
Speaker 4: Now, tell us how you get to the point where
Speaker 4: you decide to write to him in the late summer
Speaker 4: of nineteen ninety nine, tell us why, and what's Derek's reaction,
Speaker 4: and tell us how you get to this point where
Speaker 4: this becomes important to you to do well.
Speaker 6: So I covered the case, you know, in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 6: He confesses, and there was no trial, so there wasn't
Speaker 6: a ton to cover. There was just a confession. He pleads.
Speaker 6: There is a confession, and then there's some time passes
Speaker 6: and a deal is made where he decides he will
Speaker 6: plead not guilty in exchange for being spared a trial.
Speaker 6: If he pleads, I'm sorry. He pleads guilty in exchange
Speaker 6: for being spared a trial, so that was important to him,
Speaker 6: becau this could have been a death penalty trial of
Speaker 6: course in New York State at that time. So the
Speaker 6: sort of basics of the case are dispensed with in
Speaker 6: a fairly straightforward manner, and I covered it straight for
Speaker 6: the paper and that was that. However, I could not
Speaker 6: get this guy out of my head, nor this case
Speaker 6: which seemed to ring every bell for me about denial,
Speaker 6: because as you recall, I had already been wondering about
Speaker 6: the city of Poughkeepsie that never seemed to be honest
Speaker 6: about its reality at the core on Main Street, and
Speaker 6: now here was this man living in this family, a
Speaker 6: family of a mom, had a brother and a sister
Speaker 6: in a lovely house on a lovely street, or not
Speaker 6: the lovely house, but on a lovely street. Living in
Speaker 6: to call it living in garbage would be possibly doing
Speaker 6: a disturbce to garbage. I mean, it was so extreme
Speaker 6: that eight corpses the kying didn't really stand out from
Speaker 6: the general disarray. That's how extreme that home was. So
Speaker 6: there's this family living in profound denial, So that kind
Speaker 6: of mirrors the city, and it starts eating away in
Speaker 6: my mind. I cannot get it out of my head,
Speaker 6: and eventually I have to ask, well, what's your problem, Claudia,
Speaker 6: Why is this ringing every bell for you? Who are
Speaker 6: you in this? And why is this sticking in your head?
Speaker 6: And I could not avoid certain parallels with my own background,
Speaker 6: which were in no way the same sort of socioeconomic
Speaker 6: bracket as Kendall Francois and his family, but did involve
Speaker 6: a fair amount of denial. There was tremendous denial about
Speaker 6: the reality in my own childhood home growing up, and
Speaker 6: so it did really ring a lot of bells for me,
Speaker 6: and that may be why I was unable to get
Speaker 6: it out of my head. And so a year after
Speaker 6: he confessed, I wrote to him, King Kendall Francois was
Speaker 6: going to be my answer. He is going to lay
Speaker 6: it all out for me like a map. He's going
Speaker 6: to explain to me cruelty, this original thing that impelled
Speaker 6: me toward journalism to begin with. I need to understand
Speaker 6: this very dark and terrifying motivation. I need to get
Speaker 6: on top of it. And Kendel Francois is going to
Speaker 6: do it for me. He's going to be my answer,
Speaker 6: I naively thought.
Speaker 4: So I wrote to him, like, I say, what was
Speaker 4: your boyfriend Derek's reaction and his idea about this, even
Speaker 4: though he's the one that got you interested in this story?
Speaker 4: And then just tell us how you did approach that
Speaker 4: first letter, What was the content, what was the approach
Speaker 4: that you did to try to gain a correspondence with him?
Speaker 6: I think that I did not. I think I did
Speaker 6: not tell Derek right away. I think I wrote to
Speaker 6: Kendall before I mentioned it to Derek, though he knew
Speaker 6: I was consumed by this case, and he was very
Speaker 6: uncomfortable with that, as many people would be. He could
Speaker 6: not understand my interest and he didn't want to understand it.
Speaker 6: He at least that's how it seemed to me. He
Speaker 6: was revolted by the case, horrified by it. He was
Speaker 6: also fairly revolted by the behavior of media regarding the case,
Speaker 6: of which I was a member. Of course, so was
Speaker 6: he at the time, though he was not really covering this,
Speaker 6: and he was disgusted by the way media turned this
Speaker 6: into a bit of a circus, as media does, and
Speaker 6: by the way media, including me, used the victims we
Speaker 6: were chasing, asked them getting their story, and not only
Speaker 6: the the dead women, but their families, who were also,
Speaker 6: of course victims. He found the whole thing really distasteful,
Speaker 6: which is probably why I didn't mention to him when
Speaker 6: I finally decided to write to Kendle Francois. And when
Speaker 6: I did write to him, it was a very kind
Speaker 6: of naive approach. I really believed naively that if I
Speaker 6: approached him straight, you know, I was very close in
Speaker 6: age to Kendall. I was not some sort of authority
Speaker 6: with a clipboard. I was not a criminologist or a
Speaker 6: psychiatrist or a detective. I was not some superior looking
Speaker 6: down on this wretched heap before me. I was a contemporary,
Speaker 6: and I thought if I approached him straight like a contemporary, Hi,
Speaker 6: I just want to understand you. I thought he would
Speaker 6: approach me that way. It was I just made it up.
Speaker 6: There was no reason to believe that. I just that's
Speaker 6: the way I proceeded. So I approached him sort of
Speaker 6: very unvarnished, saying, I feel that you that your side
Speaker 6: of this story is important, and I want to hear it.
Speaker 6: So you know, I'm concerned something horrible must have happened
Speaker 6: to bring you to this place that you're at. Something
Speaker 6: must have happened to you, and I want to hear
Speaker 6: about it. I expected that he would sort of unspool
Speaker 6: for me this this litany of abuse, and he was
Speaker 6: this horribly abused kid, and that's why he was this guy. Now,
Speaker 6: that's what I anticipated, and I think that's what I wanted.
Speaker 6: I think it would have made it all more comprehensible
Speaker 6: to me and would have made him more pitiable. But
Speaker 6: that is not what happened.
Speaker 4: Yes, as you write, you you were waiting and you
Speaker 4: expect a quick response with us, not what you get
Speaker 4: for at least a month, and then you write again
Speaker 4: and try to reach out to him on a personal level,
Speaker 4: and still nothing. And then, unexpectedly, thanksgiving you, we do
Speaker 4: receive a letter. Now you talk about what is contained
Speaker 4: in that in terms of what he has to say
Speaker 4: about how things are going to work, if he's going
Speaker 4: to correspond with you. So tell us what he asked for,
Speaker 4: his rules. Tell us a little bit about this very
Speaker 4: revealing letter.
Speaker 6: Sure the letter was, yes, as you say, quite revealing
Speaker 6: and in retrospect sort of sort of. I can't really
Speaker 6: call it amusing. But he what Kendall did was I
Speaker 6: think what he did was flip, attempt to flip the
Speaker 6: power dynamic. So in his mind, even though in reality
Speaker 6: I was a stringer, I was nothing, and I was terrified,
Speaker 6: and I was young and naive and pretty low on
Speaker 6: the totem pole, that is not the way Kendall perceived me.
Speaker 6: He perceived me as a reporter for the New York
Speaker 6: Times who held all the cards and had all the power,
Speaker 6: which I did not realize until much later. But since
Speaker 6: that's what he thought, he flipped. He attempted to flip
Speaker 6: the dynamic and do to me what he thought reporters did.
Speaker 6: So he said, I want to know everything about you,
Speaker 6: every detail of your life, every person you've had an
Speaker 6: affair with, every school you ever went to. I want
Speaker 6: to know what kind of computer you used.
Speaker 4: You know what.
Speaker 6: He perceived to be the sort of reporter minutia. And
Speaker 6: he attempted to make a deal and say, yeah, I'll
Speaker 6: tell you stuff about me, but I want to know
Speaker 6: everything about you, and we're going to do kind of
Speaker 6: a trade. That's the deal he attempted to set up
Speaker 6: as a way I think of feeling like he had
Speaker 6: some kind of control. But I didn't play by those rules.
Speaker 4: What were the things that you had issue with and
Speaker 4: you you did not adhere to?
Speaker 6: Well, basically everything, I mean for one thing. I mean
Speaker 6: I I don't want to give away everything in the book.
Speaker 6: But he got quite personal in his demands. He wanted
Speaker 6: to know about my sex life, he wanted pictures, he
Speaker 6: wanted to know everything about me. And naive as I
Speaker 6: was at the time, and this is going back some years,
Speaker 6: I was not that naive and I was and I
Speaker 6: was not going to tell him that that level of
Speaker 6: personal detail.
Speaker 4: Now you take us that while you were at this correspondence,
Speaker 4: then there is the sentencing, and so you take us
Speaker 4: back to the to the courthouse, and so some of
Speaker 4: the confrontations there as well. Just tell us, as you
Speaker 4: do in the book about that sentencing.
Speaker 6: The sentencing was extremely emotional, as they often are, because
Speaker 6: the sentencing was really an opportunity for the families of
Speaker 6: Kendall Francois victims to speak not only experience and what
Speaker 6: he had taken from them, but to speak to him.
Speaker 6: And that's really what they wanted. They wanted to elicit
Speaker 6: some kind of reaction from him, and his stubborn refusal
Speaker 6: to react was I think what drove them wild, which
Speaker 6: drove many of his victims' family members wild. He would
Speaker 6: he didn't do any of the kind of pro forma
Speaker 6: i'm sorry, even as insincere as it would have founded.
Speaker 6: He didn't attempt to do anything that anyone wanted. He
Speaker 6: also had an opportunity to speak. He could have spoken,
Speaker 6: and he didn't. I'll just say that he did not
Speaker 6: satisfy what the victims' family members were looking for. I
Speaker 6: think they wanted some kind of engagement. I think they
Speaker 6: wanted their hatred to somehow pierce him. Their hatred was palpable,
Speaker 6: really truly palpable, and their pain was palpable. These were
Speaker 6: not powerful people. These were all of well almost all
Speaker 6: of these families were working class poor. They had been
Speaker 6: victims of society in various ways, far separate from Kendel Francois.
Speaker 6: These were not people who felt a lot of power
Speaker 6: in their lives, and he had just crushed them. They
Speaker 6: had very little sense of personal dignity to begin with,
Speaker 6: and he had humiliated and crushed them and made sort
Speaker 6: of a spectacle of them as much as of himself.
Speaker 6: So they really tried to goad him into some kind
Speaker 6: of reaction in this, in this sentencing proceeding, but he
Speaker 6: was quite impassive. He could be a quite infuriating personality.
Speaker 4: You say, he was even giggling at the trial.
Speaker 6: At one point.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 6: You know, if you've ever seen a kid who gets
Speaker 6: caught doing something wrong and you see them giggle, it's
Speaker 6: not because they think it's funny all the time. It's
Speaker 6: because they're afraid, I think, And that is what his
Speaker 6: lawyer said to me, that Kendel Francois was terrified by
Speaker 6: the hatred coming at him from these people. I don't
Speaker 6: know about that, but I certainly think that this is
Speaker 6: a man who who, despite his appearance, was not a
Speaker 6: strong person, and he may very well have been terrified
Speaker 6: of them.
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Speaker 4: You mentioned that there is something that the prosecution is
Speaker 4: very interested in this in this case, in that there
Speaker 4: is not any mention of a few very important things,
Speaker 4: three certainly very important things. Can you talk about those
Speaker 4: three things that you talk about about the photo and
Speaker 4: them being warned a year before, and more importantly, the men.
Speaker 4: No mention of Katina Newmark Newmaster and what she was
Speaker 4: doing with police.
Speaker 6: Oh well, as I alluded to previously, there were many
Speaker 6: many women who reported Kendall Francois to police as as
Speaker 6: a likely serial killer. And one of his victims had
Speaker 6: in fact been wearing a wire for police to elicit
Speaker 6: some information from Kendall. But she was but now she
Speaker 6: was dead. So there were a number of aspects to
Speaker 6: the police investigation that certainly raised questions. I think that's
Speaker 6: what you're getting at. So they were sent They were
Speaker 6: showing his photo to women on the street long before
Speaker 6: he confessed, saying stay away from this guy. They had
Speaker 6: one of these women who later turned out to be
Speaker 6: a victim. She was wired, though purportedly not on the
Speaker 6: night she was killed. And yeah, I mean he was
Speaker 6: not only known to women, he was known to police.
Speaker 6: I have to say, in fairness, they did bring him
Speaker 6: in for questioning, and they did polygraph him. It's not
Speaker 6: as if they completely ignored him. They did polygraph him
Speaker 6: about this investigation and he passed. He passed the lie
Speaker 6: detector test, which should tell us all about the reliability
Speaker 6: of polygraphs. Absolutely, but surely there were many aspects of
Speaker 6: the case that would have come out in a public trial,
Speaker 6: and now because there was no trial and there was
Speaker 6: a plea deal would never come out. And while Kendel
Speaker 6: Francois had his reasons for preferring to take a deal
Speaker 6: and avoid a death penalty trial, surely the prosecutors had
Speaker 6: their reasons as well.
Speaker 4: You right. That Well, the one reason that that he
Speaker 4: cites that is important to him, that that he doesn't
Speaker 4: have a trial, that there's someone important to him that
Speaker 4: she doesn't show up at this trial. Who would that be?
Speaker 6: His mother? Kendall Francois was absolutely adamant that his mother
Speaker 6: not be subject to scrutiny of any kind from me.
Speaker 6: When I tried to reach out to her and talk
Speaker 6: to her or anyone else, he was absolutely adamant. And
Speaker 6: indeed his mother was not there as far as I
Speaker 6: know that that day that he was sentenced. In fact,
Speaker 6: I don't believe any of his immediate family were there.
Speaker 6: They would have been, I mean, it would have been
Speaker 6: very difficult for them had they been there, in fairness, right,
Speaker 6: you know, the crowd would have absolutely attacked them.
Speaker 4: Now, you also, we just touched on this rule that
Speaker 4: he was very adamant about. But when you're in your correspondence,
Speaker 4: which was we talked about lasted for four years. Over
Speaker 4: four years. You talked about one rule that he was
Speaker 4: very adamant about in terms of correspondence. Tell us what
Speaker 4: that rule was, and what do you have to say
Speaker 4: about that.
Speaker 6: You're talking about his family. Yeah, in this case, yeah,
Speaker 6: he was. You know, there were points in time where,
Speaker 6: of course I wanted to speak with his family. I mean,
Speaker 6: of course I did and get a sense of you know,
Speaker 6: how did you live with eight corpses and not Noah,
Speaker 6: what is the story in your home? At one point
Speaker 6: his mother, I sent many many letters to her through
Speaker 6: through a lawyer, and at one point I did receive
Speaker 6: some indication that she was considering speaking with me. But
Speaker 6: he Kendall must have heard that as well. She must
Speaker 6: have told him that she would thinking about talking to me,
Speaker 6: because he started phoning my home and sending me this
Speaker 6: blizzard of letters, essentially saying, if you talk to anyone
Speaker 6: in my family, I will never talk to you again.
Speaker 6: I will consider it an attack against them and thus
Speaker 6: an attack against me. So he once again set up
Speaker 6: kind of a quid pro quote, kind of a deal.
Speaker 6: You either continue to talk to me and will proceed
Speaker 6: otherwise if you do anything else, if you ever talk
Speaker 6: to my family, I will never talk to you again.
Speaker 6: And so I had to kind of weigh make a determination,
Speaker 6: and do I stay with the with the source that
Speaker 6: is already talking with me and try to draw out
Speaker 6: of him whatever I can, or do I gamble and
Speaker 6: risk losing him completely and try to go after his
Speaker 6: family and maybe never get them. You know, they could
Speaker 6: have said no, forget it, and then I'd have nothing.
Speaker 6: So I felt at the time somewhat trapped. I might
Speaker 6: see that a little bit differently now I've been a
Speaker 6: reporter twenty five years at this point, and I would
Speaker 6: see that entire dynamics differently now, But at the time
Speaker 6: it was clear it was it was an either or,
Speaker 6: So I made my decision.
Speaker 4: Right now. You talk about eventually you get a phone
Speaker 4: call from him rather than the correspondence. So does this
Speaker 4: correspondence develop or change in any way as a result
Speaker 4: of the phone call rather than the letters? Are they different?
Speaker 4: And tell us what's contained in that phone call?
Speaker 6: Yeah, the phone calls, in letters, and in person visits,
Speaker 6: because we had all three and they were all somewhat different.
Speaker 6: The first phone call with Kendall was you know, I
Speaker 6: was terrified, you know, rightly or wrong, I was absolutely
Speaker 6: terrified to do this. But I was gonna do it.
Speaker 4: I was not gonna.
Speaker 6: I was not going to back off, and I was
Speaker 6: not gonna sort of slink away. I was going to
Speaker 6: see it through. And so here I was. We arranged
Speaker 6: a phone call. I kept pushing for an in person visit.
Speaker 6: He kept saying no, but he would do a phone call.
Speaker 6: So we had a phone call. And while I thought
Speaker 6: I was so frightened at first, actually after twenty minutes
Speaker 6: it was a twenty minute allotment. That was all you
Speaker 6: could talk. So at the end of twenty minutes, I
Speaker 6: realized that he was far less scary on the phone,
Speaker 6: at least than I had anticipated. And he sounded often
Speaker 6: somewhat shy, somewhat flummixed by what I was asking him.
Speaker 6: He his voice would trail away. As I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 6: he sounded often kind of bewildered and and confused and
Speaker 6: most of all bashful about the questions I was asking him.
Speaker 6: Any question that was really about, you know, the crux
Speaker 6: of the matter, his family, his crimes, he would sort
Speaker 6: of wither away into this shy, bashful, sometimes almost almost
Speaker 6: frightened or confused seeming voice if he was talking about
Speaker 6: other things. However, he was quite bombastic and grandiose and
Speaker 6: with this booming voice where he could talk about I'm this,
Speaker 6: I'm that, or this person is is jerk or or
Speaker 6: or school is boring, or you know, very sort of
Speaker 6: untrite stuff like that. He was sort of this bombastic,
Speaker 6: booming guy, but on anything that was really the heart
Speaker 6: of the matter, he would just sort of wither away.
Speaker 6: All in all, it was far less frightening to talk
Speaker 6: to him on the phone than I had anticipated.
Speaker 4: And so you have other phone calls. At some point
Speaker 4: he decides that he will want to meet you in person,
Speaker 4: but tell us about what kind of progress you make
Speaker 4: in terms of what you're looking for, what you're looking
Speaker 4: to understand, and how forthcoming he is progressively in these
Speaker 4: phone calls and letters.
Speaker 6: So it was an odd thing. You know, times he
Speaker 6: would almost in spite of himself, reveal family information, stuff
Speaker 6: that might seem rather innocuous to anyone to you or I,
Speaker 6: you know, like his father was from Louisiana and they
Speaker 6: hadn't and this family had a farm, you know, pretty
Speaker 6: innocuous stuff, but when but interesting to me. Of course,
Speaker 6: it was all interesting to me and went later. When
Speaker 6: I would circle back in another conversation and say, yeah,
Speaker 6: so what about what about this family farm? He would say,
Speaker 6: how did you know that? And as soon as I
Speaker 6: find out who's going to have told you that, I'm
Speaker 6: going to make sure they stay away from you because
Speaker 6: they're a trader. But I found out from him, so
Speaker 6: was this a game he was playing? Or was he
Speaker 6: really so dissociated from himself he didn't even remember what
Speaker 6: he had told me half the time? Sometimes I it
Speaker 6: could be either. It doesn't really matter what. What I
Speaker 6: came to glean from the conversations with Kendall Francois was
Speaker 6: the purported facts of whatever he told me became less
Speaker 6: and less important or revealing. And what became revealed was
Speaker 6: the way his mind worked, the way he thought, the
Speaker 6: way he entered acted, especially the way he interacted with
Speaker 6: a woman, a young you know, a woman who was
Speaker 6: sort of in his type. The way he interacted was
Speaker 6: what I learned, the level of his paranoia, the depths
Speaker 6: of his confusion, especially his his confusion, and sometimes it
Speaker 6: seemed like embarrassment when I would confront him with what
Speaker 6: he had done and ask him directly, what about this?
Speaker 6: What about that? Why did you kill them? Did you
Speaker 6: think they deserve to be murdered? Really direct questions seemed
Speaker 6: to absolutely set him on his heels, and it was
Speaker 6: very much the opposite of what I expected. I thought
Speaker 6: sort of thought he would want sprag about his powerful exploit,
Speaker 6: you know, but that very rarely. Once in a while
Speaker 6: he would make a quippy remark about what he had done,
Speaker 6: but very rarely. Mostly he seemed sort of embarrassed or
Speaker 6: bashful about it. It was certainly uncomfortable about my questioning him.
Speaker 4: He was in the army and he was discharged. There's
Speaker 4: tell us about when you asked him about the army.
Speaker 4: What did you know about his stint or his stay
Speaker 4: in the army, And what was his response to any
Speaker 4: questioning about the army and the stint in the army?
Speaker 6: Right, So, Kendall Francois had a weight problem. He had
Speaker 6: been fairly grossly overweighted all his life and in the
Speaker 6: army this became a big, big issue. And I think
Speaker 6: that the issue of weight and self image was enormous
Speaker 6: for him. I think it had been an issue for
Speaker 6: him most of his life, and it became very exaggerated
Speaker 6: as an issue and a humiliate issue for him in
Speaker 6: the army. So he was constantly weight, He was constantly overweight,
Speaker 6: and he was eventually discharged for being obese. That designation
Speaker 6: you know, to to you or I you know, maybe
Speaker 6: we go, yes, I'm overweight. Okay, now I'm going to
Speaker 6: do something about it, or I'm not going to do
Speaker 6: something about it, and that's that. It wasn't like that
Speaker 6: for him.
Speaker 4: He was so.
Speaker 6: Tangled up with what he thought that meant about him,
Speaker 6: how humiliating he found it. So the entire sort of
Speaker 6: experience in the army he seemed to find extremely humiliating.
Speaker 6: And it was, however, army earnings that were for you
Speaker 6: know what, he used to hire so many street walkers.
Speaker 6: He did work low leveled Once he had returned to Poughkeepsie,
Speaker 6: he worked as a janitor here and there, very low
Speaker 6: level jobs, so he did have some income, but he
Speaker 6: also used his army earnings to hire all these women.
Speaker 6: Either way, the experience in the army seemed to be
Speaker 6: so humiliating for him he could barely talk about it,
Speaker 6: and many people did want to talk to him about
Speaker 6: it because had been reported missing in the area where
Speaker 6: he was stationed in Hawaii at that at that same time,
Speaker 6: he said he knew nothing about that.
Speaker 4: You also write in your book about the eminent Michael
Speaker 4: Stone forensic psychiatrist, and he's been on the program and
Speaker 4: his assessment and his interaction with Kendall Francois, which is
Speaker 4: very very interesting if you don't mind tell us a
Speaker 4: little bit about what Michael Stone has to say and
Speaker 4: this little interaction, Well.
Speaker 6: Michael Stone interacts with me. He never actually interviewed Kendall
Speaker 6: Francois nor met him. He basically what he was doing
Speaker 6: at the time that I met him was creating this
Speaker 6: sort of scale, this this scale of evil where he
Speaker 6: kind of codified the crimes of various serial murderers and
Speaker 6: perhaps others, but he sort of made like a table
Speaker 6: of their crimes and kind of ranked them in. And
Speaker 6: that's what he was doing when I met him. And
Speaker 6: so Kendall Francois, you know, was not particularly high ranking.
Speaker 6: He wasn't low ranking either. He was just yet another
Speaker 6: sort of collection of diagnoses that Stone was funneling into
Speaker 6: his chart on evil. Certainly, Michael Stone seemed to believe
Speaker 6: that Kendall Francois was some variant of psychopath.
Speaker 4: You also, you also talk about that he gives you
Speaker 4: a bag of reports. What are those reports and what
Speaker 4: do you get from those reports that he gives you?
Speaker 6: Right? Those reports? There was an enormous stack of police
Speaker 6: reports from these women who had been with Kendall Francois
Speaker 6: and reported him, including a report from the woman who
Speaker 6: eventually is killed by Kendall, but she had reported him
Speaker 6: to police for rape over a year before that, So
Speaker 6: I had her report in there, and the reports of many, many,
Speaker 6: many many other women. And this is where I learned
Speaker 6: sort of what Kendall said when he was assaulting women,
Speaker 6: and I learned kind of what he did in the
Speaker 6: words of these women. So it was an enormous a
Speaker 6: stack of reports, and that showed me a very different
Speaker 6: face this was. You know, one woman described him as
Speaker 6: a sort of a jeccol and hide character, and I
Speaker 6: think that that description has probably become almost a cliche
Speaker 6: by now, but I understand why she said that, because
Speaker 6: I saw it too in him. There was an aspect
Speaker 6: of him that was absolutely granite, hard, absolutely cold, thundering
Speaker 6: and cutting and hard. That is the person who emerged
Speaker 6: when you said I've got to go, or forget it,
Speaker 6: I'm done here, or whatever. And I saw it too
Speaker 6: when I would have to leave prison visits, even though
Speaker 6: I wasn't disparaging him in any way, I would just say, Okay,
Speaker 6: you know, I've got to go now, I've got to
Speaker 6: get home. He would slip. He would change immediately. As
Speaker 6: soon as I said, in the most sort of straightforward,
Speaker 6: an innocuous way, I need to now, he would change
Speaker 6: and turn into this cold, hard, just like a like
Speaker 6: a mountain of granite, is the only way I can
Speaker 6: think to describe it. And I saw that for the
Speaker 6: first time through the words of those women who had
Speaker 6: been with him in these police reports. This was a brutal,
Speaker 6: brutal person, but he had this other side where he
Speaker 6: could seem and in fact did really seem confused and
Speaker 6: shy and frightened and all these things. Maybe that was
Speaker 6: just an act, but I don't know why. If it
Speaker 6: was only an act, what did he get out of
Speaker 6: it by playing that act on me? I don't know
Speaker 6: not what he wanted.
Speaker 4: I guess sure, I understand you also cite Dorothy ottno
Speaker 4: Lewis and her premise about killer's brains. Tell us a
Speaker 4: little bit about that research and how you applied that
Speaker 4: in questioning Francois.
Speaker 6: Right when I had, you know, previously, before this all
Speaker 6: got going, As you know, I was quite involved with
Speaker 6: trying to understand cruelty, and I, like many people, was
Speaker 6: really intrigued by serial murder and so had made kind
Speaker 6: of my own study of the field, not only reading
Speaker 6: a lot, but sort of reading research and academic papers,
Speaker 6: reading everything. And Dorothy Antel Lewis was one of the
Speaker 6: researchers whose work really interested me because she essentially at
Speaker 6: the time was positing that there could be physical trauma
Speaker 6: to the brains of people, whether through abuse at home
Speaker 6: or some other accidents, there could be physical trauma to
Speaker 6: the frontal lobes of their brain that might inhibit empathy
Speaker 6: and cut off certain governing governing factors that that would
Speaker 6: that would like guilt, that would pull you back from
Speaker 6: from doing the kinds of things that serial murderers do.
Speaker 6: So her essential hypothesis was that there there could be
Speaker 6: actual physiological differences in the brains of people who do
Speaker 6: things like this, and I was very intrigued by that idea,
Speaker 6: and it's it's it's still being researched, of course by
Speaker 6: many people, the notion of a killer's brain being physiologically
Speaker 6: different for whatever reason, but from birth or through traumatic
Speaker 6: accident or abuse. And I did ask Kendall about that.
Speaker 6: Did he think, for instance, a football injury because he
Speaker 6: played a lot of high school football, did he think
Speaker 6: that that there could have been some kind of head
Speaker 6: injury that he had sustained, mean that might be in
Speaker 6: some way responsible for this? He absolutely dismissed that out
Speaker 6: of hand. He did not think that a head injury
Speaker 6: or genetic had anything to do with with who he was.
Speaker 6: I you know, I don't know that he's the best
Speaker 6: source for diagnosing himself. I will say Kendell Francois was
Speaker 6: a deeply paranoid person, and I have since learned that
Speaker 6: there there is believed to be some kind of genetic
Speaker 6: component to paranoia. He was deeply paranoid.
Speaker 4: Man. You do you talk to him about this, but
Speaker 4: you also ask him if he thought this was genetic.
Speaker 4: What's his response?
Speaker 6: His response is that he doesn't think it's genetic. Otherwise
Speaker 6: his parents would have had other bad children, as he
Speaker 6: put it, Kendall. Kendall's siblings, you know, were relatively functioning
Speaker 6: for you know, law abiding people.
Speaker 4: In this interview, in this conversation you're having with him,
Speaker 4: you say that you employ a reporter's first trick or
Speaker 4: reporter learns what what trick do you employ and what
Speaker 4: do you get as a result? What tell us about this?
Speaker 6: A lot of reporters know that if you in an
Speaker 6: interview it is not so easy to do. But if
Speaker 6: you let their let silence just hang there, you ask
Speaker 6: a question, the person responds, and then you're quiet, they
Speaker 6: often will rush to fill that void so you'll more
Speaker 6: information just because of the discomfort of the silence. You
Speaker 6: know that anybody, even a serial murderer, might be uncomfortable
Speaker 6: in the silence. And for you know, sometimes this worked
Speaker 6: on him, sometimes it didn't, and we would get in
Speaker 6: this really silly sort of staring match where I would
Speaker 6: try to let silence just elapse in hope that he
Speaker 6: would fill it with something, and we would just sort
Speaker 6: of be staring at each other and who's going to
Speaker 6: break first? And sometimes I did, sometimes he did.
Speaker 4: He blames this on anger, and then he says he's
Speaker 4: not a sex offender. What else does he tell you
Speaker 4: about the motivation for all of this. We've talked about
Speaker 4: the humiliation, but is there anything else he attributes this to.
Speaker 6: Well, Kendall Francois is most certainly a sex offender, and
Speaker 6: he is you know, he's also a liar, so you know,
Speaker 6: so let's just you know, be clear here. Yeah, Kendall
Speaker 6: friends WHA had an enormous problem with anger. He was
Speaker 6: also sexually dysfunctional and was absolutely inappropriate sexually with everyone, me,
Speaker 6: women on the street, and a number of other women
Speaker 6: as well. I mean, he was for sure a sex offender,
Speaker 6: but he also did have a profound problem with anger.
Speaker 6: And I don't think that he you know, he didn't
Speaker 6: dispute that he knew it the you know, But I
Speaker 6: think that the most important thing I can say in
Speaker 6: this regard is that he was profoundly non self reflective.
Speaker 6: He was really reluctant to look at himself and be
Speaker 6: honest with himself about himself. It was really really difficult
Speaker 6: for him, and I think that this is true for
Speaker 6: many people of this category, you know, sort of that
Speaker 6: kind of criminal, a real inability or unwillingness to look
Speaker 6: inward and look at oneself. He was he could not
Speaker 6: tolerate looking at himself. He says it to me, and
Speaker 6: it's very clear he's deeply uncomfortable trying to understand himself.
Speaker 4: You talked about how in the letters the actual phone
Speaker 4: call was less terrifying to you and you became more
Speaker 4: comfortable and less intimidated. And you had visited him between
Speaker 4: plexiglass and then, but you talk about the trepidation of
Speaker 4: meeting with him in person, and tell us a little
Speaker 4: bit more about how intimate that visit was.
Speaker 6: We had three visits in person, and the first, as
Speaker 6: you say, was you know, we were separated by a
Speaker 6: sheet of place glass. It was still terrifying because you know,
Speaker 6: we're shut in this tiny little cubicle. So he's on
Speaker 6: his side and I'm on my side, and we're separated
Speaker 6: by plexiglass. Still, it was the first time he had
Speaker 6: ever seen me, and the way he looked at me
Speaker 6: was quite frightening. And but we proceeded. You know, we
Speaker 6: were talking on a little handset like a telephone through
Speaker 6: this glass, like like you see in prison movies. In
Speaker 6: later visits, that was at the county jail. In later visits,
Speaker 6: he was moved to state prison, and he was at
Speaker 6: Attica for almost all of his incarceration, and so we
Speaker 6: would meet at Attica, and in that case that was
Speaker 6: not behind plexiglass, nor was Kendall shackled. So we were
Speaker 6: just sitting, you know, like knee to knee at a
Speaker 6: little card table, no barriers, no shackles, no nothing, just
Speaker 6: sitting there in the visitors room at Attica, talking and
Speaker 6: playing cards, playing lot of cards. Kendall was really really
Speaker 6: into games, as he might imagine, and he loved all games,
Speaker 6: particularly card games.
Speaker 4: What how far did he go in that interview, that
Speaker 4: visit in terms of crossing the line, in terms of
Speaker 4: what he said to you? Did he use that as
Speaker 4: an opportunity that you were there, that he could say
Speaker 4: things he wouldn't otherwise have said.
Speaker 6: I don't know if he will, Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 6: if he wouldn't have ever said them otherwise. But he
Speaker 6: did say some profoundly frightening and we can say, sexually
Speaker 6: inappropriate things to me at at least one of those visits.
Speaker 6: And he was, you know, he was constantly trying to
Speaker 6: get under my skin, get into my head, get into
Speaker 6: my life. He found that kind of I think amusing you, Tah.
Speaker 4: He's mentioned the phrase before about sainthood. What does he
Speaker 4: have to say about these prostitutes? That is very disturbing.
Speaker 6: Camil Francois was raised very religious, so he and his
Speaker 6: mom and siblings went to church three times a week.
Speaker 6: He was, you know, a scholar of the Bible. I
Speaker 6: guess you could certainly more than I. I mean, he
Speaker 6: really knew the Bible inside and out. So he was
Speaker 6: all taken up with kind of moral hierarchy. And he said,
Speaker 6: I'm I'm reluctant to repeat it because I out of
Speaker 6: the out of respect for the memory of the women
Speaker 6: that he killed. It's so dismissive and disrespectful. But he
Speaker 6: was essentially trying to say. He did say I will
Speaker 6: I should add he did say he knew that none
Speaker 6: of them deserved to be murdered. He understood that, and
Speaker 6: he said he deserved to die for what he had done.
Speaker 6: He did say that as well. But he did disparage
Speaker 6: them by saying, you know that they weren't saints, as
Speaker 6: if anyone is, you know, right, they had problems like
Speaker 6: many of us do, so I mean, it was a
Speaker 6: pretty empty He wasn't saying that because they were involved,
Speaker 6: they had some of them had had criminal records, low
Speaker 6: level records, or robusted for prostitution or drug possession or
Speaker 6: drug use, you know, to say. He wasn't trying to say,
Speaker 6: well they'd have those things, so they were killed. He
Speaker 6: never did say that. He was just trying to, in
Speaker 6: a kind of grasping way, I think, in a kind
Speaker 6: of grasping way way, say well they weren't perfect either,
Speaker 6: which was fairly empty considering the context. But he was
Speaker 6: very taken up with moral hierarchies.
Speaker 4: Yes, now through this you do chronicle the changes and
Speaker 4: events that happened in your personal life because of this case.
Speaker 4: So tell us what happens in your personal life around
Speaker 4: this time and the contract that you eventually get, and
Speaker 4: your just decision to set yourself and very seriously set
Speaker 4: to writing this book.
Speaker 6: Well, initially I got a contract. I was approached to
Speaker 6: write what I would call a fairly traditional true crime
Speaker 6: book that was quite early on, very early before our
Speaker 6: correspondence had really gotten going. You know, that was shortly
Speaker 6: after the confession, and I was covering the case for
Speaker 6: the New York Times. So sort of a publisher that
Speaker 6: that publishes a lot of true crime approached me. But
Speaker 6: I knew that my connection to the case and my
Speaker 6: interest in it was not that it was very personal.
Speaker 6: And I knew that the kind of book I wanted
Speaker 6: to write was one that would explore what were the
Speaker 6: things that drew me to this and what might that
Speaker 6: say about other people's interest in crime, and what might
Speaker 6: that say about other people's tolerance for abuse. There were
Speaker 6: a number of factors that drew me to this case
Speaker 6: that I thought were worth exploring, and they had no
Speaker 6: place in a traditional true crime book. This was much
Speaker 6: more memoir. So I said thanks, but no thanks to
Speaker 6: the first and that was it. Then I was on
Speaker 6: my own for many many years. Nobody wanted to go
Speaker 6: where I was going with a pretty deep look at
Speaker 6: my own psychology and my own background, and where were
Speaker 6: there commonalities between Kendall and me and me and his victims?
Speaker 6: You know, what were the strands that all of us
Speaker 6: shared as humans and as people who had struggled. That's
Speaker 6: what I was interested in looking at, and that is
Speaker 6: a much more complicated and much more internal process. And
Speaker 6: for a long time, that was it. It was just
Speaker 6: he on my own, mucking around in this, and no
Speaker 6: one wanted anything to do with it, and then more
Speaker 6: recently they did, and I wrote this book, but I
Speaker 6: really wrote the book that I wanted to write, which
Speaker 6: was something different from traditional true crime.
Speaker 4: Certainly one of the most interesting exchanges in this and
Speaker 4: it's very much like at least in the movie version
Speaker 4: in Cold Blood, where one of the killers who has
Speaker 4: been courted by Truman Capoti, decides to ask what the
Speaker 4: name of the book is because he's heard the name
Speaker 4: of the book and it's in cool Blood, which is
Speaker 4: the equivalent of you know, he's been considered a psychopathic killer,
Speaker 4: which was surprising to him at that time. Very much
Speaker 4: like that Francois ask you what the title of your
Speaker 4: book is going to be?
Speaker 6: I know that was very funny. So along the way,
Speaker 6: you know, well nobody, nobody but me was interested in
Speaker 6: this crazy quest that I had embarked on. I wanted
Speaker 6: him to be interested in it, and I wanted to
Speaker 6: show him what I was writing, and I wanted his
Speaker 6: thoughts about it. And I thought maybe if I sent
Speaker 6: him some pages, it might elicit whatever it would elicit.
Speaker 6: So I would often say can I send you some stuff?
Speaker 6: And he would say no, he didn't want to see
Speaker 6: any of what I was writing. Though he was constantly
Speaker 6: asking me about it. Who are you talking to, what
Speaker 6: are you learning? But he didn't want to see anything
Speaker 6: I was writing. And a certain point he asked me
Speaker 6: about the title, and the title for the book has changed.
Speaker 6: There was a previous title, and the previous title I
Speaker 6: took from Kendall's senior class yearbook. He had a biblical
Speaker 6: quote as his chosen little statement in his yearbook and
Speaker 6: it was about faith and it was you know, faith
Speaker 6: is this, and faith is that. Faith is the evidence
Speaker 6: of things not seen. So that was my working time
Speaker 6: for the book, Evidence of Things Not Seen. And you know,
Speaker 6: only later did I learn that James Baldwin also used title.
Speaker 6: So there's I'm not going to go there. But at
Speaker 6: the time, I thought evidence of Things Not Seen was
Speaker 6: quite fitting for what I was looking at here. It
Speaker 6: was a biblical quote, it was something Kendall had chosen
Speaker 6: himself himself for his yearbook. So what did that mean?
Speaker 6: And obviously nobody was seeing what had gone on in
Speaker 6: that home, and and you know, there was lots of
Speaker 6: evidence of things not seen. But he kind of his
Speaker 6: response to that was, yeah, okay, I guess that's all right.
Speaker 6: It seems to have a double meaning though, which I
Speaker 6: thought was, yeah, yeah, there's a double meaning. Same within
Speaker 6: cold blood. You know that's a double meaning as well.
Speaker 4: He also sent you something that's very dramatic contrast to
Speaker 4: killing eight women the way he did. What were some
Speaker 4: of the things he sent you as well?
Speaker 6: Right, Kendall had always been good at art, and he
Speaker 6: did not find this to be particularly admirable. It was
Speaker 6: just something that came naturally to him. I think he
Speaker 6: found it sort of woosy. But he would draw off
Speaker 6: for me, not that I asked him to, but he
Speaker 6: would tend to draw greeting cards. He drew pictures a lot,
Speaker 6: and they were always the same kind of picture. He
Speaker 6: drew hearts and flowers. He drew butterflies and spiders. He
Speaker 6: was terrified of spiders, by the way, but he drew
Speaker 6: nature scenes, very sort of girlish, carefully shaded hearts and
Speaker 6: flowers like a sixth grade girl, is how I think
Speaker 6: of what he would draw.
Speaker 4: Now, we talked about this consumer you consuming you this
Speaker 4: quest to find the connection, the reason to also exercise
Speaker 4: your own demons. It would seem unconsciously you did and
Speaker 4: dealt with a lot of issues that as a journalist.
Speaker 4: How consumed were you? What demonstrate for us what exactly
Speaker 4: an example of how consumed you were with this? Before
Speaker 4: we talk about how you get to this, what we
Speaker 4: talked about the abyss, that edge that you got too
Speaker 4: close to. Well, I.
Speaker 6: Was so consumed with it that, if you know, eventually
Speaker 6: I was by myself, you know, quite estranged from my family,
Speaker 6: from any friends, and the only person I was in
Speaker 6: any kind of regular contact with at a certain point
Speaker 6: was a serial murderer I lived by. Eventually the thing
Speaker 6: was Derek ended, and and I was by myself. And
Speaker 6: I remember one day it was Valentine's Day, and you know, yeah,
Speaker 6: I got a Valentine's Day card from him. Too close
Speaker 6: to the abyss, as you as you said, I don't know,
Speaker 6: I got pretty close, and it was pretty frightening. But
Speaker 6: it did propel me to a much a very different
Speaker 6: place with my writing and as a journalist, and with
Speaker 6: my family as well. It helped me reconnect with my family,
Speaker 6: It helped me see aspects of my past and my
Speaker 6: childhood in a more empathic way. It helped me understand
Speaker 6: people in a much more complex way, and that helped
Speaker 6: me understand my past in a more complex way, and
Speaker 6: in a way that wasn't so damaging to me. So
Speaker 6: I was, in a sense freed by this.
Speaker 4: Why the title you had an earlier title, why the
Speaker 4: Spider and the Fly?
Speaker 6: Well, as I said, Kendall used to draw nature scenes
Speaker 6: for me, and in many of them there is a
Speaker 6: spider waving, and somebody once said to me, well that
Speaker 6: Kendall Kendle's the spider. He's the spider. He thinks he's
Speaker 6: a spider. But Kendall was mortally terrified by spiders. He
Speaker 6: told me. I was surprised he would tell me this.
Speaker 6: He told me about leaping up onto his jailhouse cot
Speaker 6: and shrieking in fear when there was a spider in
Speaker 6: his cell. So while he may have thought he was
Speaker 6: the spider waving in the picture, he was also terrified
Speaker 6: of spiders. Also, the relationship between a journalist and her
Speaker 6: source is a kind of predator prey relationship. So the
Speaker 6: title of the book The Spider and the Fly is
Speaker 6: really who is the spider and who is the fly?
Speaker 6: Here I think that people might assume that the serial
Speaker 6: killer is the spider seducing the hapless fly to her death,
Speaker 6: but that is not in fact what happened. And there
Speaker 6: are many people who would say, no, it's the journalist
Speaker 6: who's the predator. And I think I will leave it
Speaker 6: to every reader to decide what they think in this book.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, what was the effect? I mean, we just talked
Speaker 4: about the effect of this book it had on you.
Speaker 4: What was kendall fence? Was reaction to this?
Speaker 6: Well, Kendall knew I was writing a book. He knew
Speaker 6: it all along, even though nobody else in the world
Speaker 6: was on board. I knew this would be a book.
Speaker 6: Whether anyone ever wanted to publish it was another question.
Speaker 6: But I knew what I was going to do, and
Speaker 6: he knew too. I don't think he ever questioned, you know,
Speaker 6: he thought, like I said before, that I was this
Speaker 6: powerful journalist and I was going to write a book
Speaker 6: and expose him and leave him in ruin. So he
Speaker 6: was well frightened and angry at the power he perceived
Speaker 6: the writer to have. And he constantly said he knew
Speaker 6: I was going to betray him through writing this book,
Speaker 6: yet he continued the relationship. He continued the relationship with
Speaker 6: the very person who he thought would betray him and
Speaker 6: leave him in ruin, which is exactly what he did
Speaker 6: with the women on Main Street. He felt that they
Speaker 6: were humiliating him, that they had made a fool of him,
Speaker 6: But he was constantly currying favor with them, sort of
Speaker 6: pining after the imagining these flowery scenarios of marrying them
Speaker 6: and absolutely ridiculous and unrealistic fantasies. So this was really,
Speaker 6: I think the crux of Kendall Francois's personality. A profoundly
Speaker 6: self defeating, self loathing person who would chase after or
Speaker 6: curry favor with the very person or force that he
Speaker 6: believed would do him in.
Speaker 4: A US after all was said and done, was he
Speaker 4: a monster or was it somehow, somehow understandable how he
Speaker 4: got to where he was.
Speaker 6: I do not understand how somebody can slide bones around
Speaker 6: in their attic. There were skulls in a kiddie pool.
Speaker 6: I mean, I that is very hard for me to
Speaker 6: understand the psychological disconnect that you that you have to
Speaker 6: live in to to exist that way, to mess around
Speaker 6: with skulls at night and then go off to you know,
Speaker 6: your US government community college class during the day. However,
Speaker 6: while while that is absolutely what we would call monstrous,
Speaker 6: it is more complicated than that, because Kendall Francois once
Speaker 6: was a child, He was not always that person. He
Speaker 6: once was a child who who was shy, that lonely
Speaker 6: alienated kid like many of us. And he was a
Speaker 6: person who had a sense of humor and a sense
Speaker 6: of beauty and a twisted but profound sense of loyalty.
Speaker 6: He also was a person who had a sort of
Speaker 6: heightened sense of outrage at social or historical injustice. Those
Speaker 6: were things that I could that I could understand. So
Speaker 6: it is complicated. There was once some kind of person there.
Speaker 6: And what is so sad about the story is what
Speaker 6: that person morphed into. How that shy, fat alienated kid
Speaker 6: who nobody really saw, and who went home to a
Speaker 6: place where people lived in garbage and feces, but nobody
Speaker 6: saw that kid, and nobody went to their home, and
Speaker 6: nobody knocked on the door and found out what was
Speaker 6: going on there. It is so profoundly sad that that
Speaker 6: lonely kid became this brutal, brutal man who caused such
Speaker 6: terrible destruction. So the question of is he a monster?
Speaker 6: He did monstrous things, came monstrous, but that's not all.
Speaker 2: That he was.
Speaker 6: And that is not where he started. That is not
Speaker 6: where he began.
Speaker 4: I guess this took a toll on you. How long
Speaker 4: do you think it's taken before you sort of again,
Speaker 4: You reconnected with your family, You learnt a lot about
Speaker 4: yourself and also yourself as a journalist. How long did
Speaker 4: it take after discontinuing this and having the book come out?
Speaker 4: Are you getting to that point where you're feeling grounded
Speaker 4: and well adjusted again?
Speaker 6: Oh? For quite a while. Yeah, I couldn't write this
Speaker 6: if I was I could not have written this book
Speaker 6: if I was in the place where that I was
Speaker 6: in at that time. You know, that was many, many
Speaker 6: years ago. I started writing to him in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 6: I stopped writing to him in two thousand and three,
Speaker 6: and we're in twenty seventeen now, so it's fourteen years
Speaker 6: since I stopped writing to him, and I would not
Speaker 6: have been able. I was not able to put this
Speaker 6: book together until I was through it, until I was
Speaker 6: well through it and really understood what it had meant
Speaker 6: to me in my life, what it had shown me,
Speaker 6: what it had taught me, and where I came out
Speaker 6: on the other side. So yeah, I was through it
Speaker 6: a while ago.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, it's an incredible tale. I want to thank
Speaker 4: you very much Claudia for coming on and talking about
Speaker 4: the Spider and the Fly. For those people that might
Speaker 4: want to look at other work or find out more
Speaker 4: about the Spider and the Fly, a Facebook page, a
Speaker 4: website people might take a look at.
Speaker 6: Sure, thanks. My website is Claudiaowjournalist dot com. And there's
Speaker 6: there's stuff there. It's always changing. I am still an
Speaker 6: education reporter, so you can see some education stories there.
Speaker 6: You can see some book stuff that you can order
Speaker 6: the book there. The book also is online of course,
Speaker 6: you know Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Indie Bound
Speaker 6: or any of your favorite ways to get books. It's
Speaker 6: also at every you know, normal regular old bookstore. Yeap.
Speaker 6: Please write to me. You can always contact me at
Speaker 6: right to row at gmail dot com. That's on my website.
Speaker 6: It's it's the word right and then the numeral too
Speaker 6: and my last name and I'm happy to hello hello,
Speaker 6: oh hello, sorry, the phone just sleeped. Happy to correspond
Speaker 6: with reaters anytime.
Speaker 4: Well, I wanna thank you very much, uh and talking
Speaker 4: about the Spider and the Fly. A reporter, a serial
Speaker 4: killer and the meaning of murder it's been very very interesting.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much Claudia for coming on and talking
Speaker 4: about this incredible book. You have yourself a great evening.
Speaker 6: Thanks thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you.