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