Police Found 8 Women’s Bodies at New York Home of Kendall Francois

Eight women were reported missing in the greater Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area between 1996 and 1998.

The first woman to disappear, 30-year-old sex worker Wendy Myers, was reported missing in October 1996 to police in the town of Lloyd, N.Y., located across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie. She lived in Lloyd but did most of her soliciting in Poughkeepsie.

On December 9, 1996, another sex worker, Gina Barone, 29, was reported missing to the City of Poughkeepsie Police Department, where Bill Siegrist worked as a uniform lieutenant. He suspected the disappearances might be connected.

On January 15, 47-year-old Kathleen Hurley was reported missing.

“Wendy Myers and Gina Barone were both involved with drugs, and they both did prostitution to support their habits,” Siegrist tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Kathleen Hurley was different in that she lived with another woman, and she was [47] at the time, whereas Wendy and Gina were both in their late 20s. And Kathleen Hurley wasn't a full-time [sex worker]. Once in a while she’d go out and walk the streets, maybe to get some extra money to buy drugs.”

Siegrist conferred with narcotics detectives, who said some local sex workers told them a customer named Kendall Francois had been unusually rough with them. Francois lived with his mother, father and sister in a house near Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.—just outside the City of Poughkeepsie’s jurisdiction.

“We didn't know he was a serial killer, but we knew he was rough with the [sex workers],” Siegrist says. “We surveilled him for a couple weeks and put a camera in a doctor's office across the street from his house to see what activity was going on in his house—to see if he was bringing women there—but nothing came up.”

Then Catherine Marsh, 31, was reported missing on March 7, 1997, a full 115 days after anyone had seen her.

Concerned there could be a serial killer working in the area, Siegrist contacted the FBI and spoke with Charlie Dorsey at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), but NCAVC couldn’t help without a crime scene or physical evidence to analyze.

New York State Police sent a helicopter and detectives to search rural areas for signs of bodies. Nothing turned up. Volunteers from Ramapo Rescue Dog Association, which uses specially trained scent dogs to locate missing people and bodies, were called in to search several times, with no hits.

Without a crime scene, Siegrist says, “We had to make our own leads.” Female officers posed as sex workers to collect information on area johns, none of whom was above suspicion.

In October 1997, Michelle Eason, a 27-year-old Black woman, was reported missing. The next month, 29-year-old Mary Healey Giaccone’s grandmother reported her missing after she failed to show up for her mother’s funeral. “We found out that Mary Healey Giaccone was last seen in February of 1997—279 days prior,” Siegrist says.

That December, Dorsey arrived in Poughkeepsie with two NCAVC agents and someone from the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP). They met with City of Poughkeepsie and Town of Poughkeepsie police departments and the New York State Police.

“They said, ‘Bring him in for questioning. Put him into a room with files labeled Missing Women Investigation, Kendall Francois. Then on the bulletin board, have photographs of Kendall's car, of Kendall's house and pictures of all the missing women to date,’” Siegrist recalls.

Siegrist pulled Francois over one day when the suspect was driving his mom to work.

“When I walked up to the car, he said, ‘Hey, Lieutenant, how you doing?’ He recognized me, so obviously he was monitoring the newspapers,” Siegrist says.

Faced with files and photos, Francois didn’t flinch. He even agreed to a polygraph test by the State Police. He passed.

On June 12, 1998, Sandra French, a 51-year-old from Dutchess County, about 20 miles from Poughkeepsie, was reported missing.

To streamline missing persons investigations from multiple jurisdictions, a Missing Women’s Task Force was officially established around this time, but it wasn’t publicized.

When Catina Newmaster, 25, was reported missing on August 25, 1998, the number of known missing women rose to eight. She and French were both last seen near the same area, so Dorsey suggested setting up a roadblock there—about three blocks from Francois’ house—and distribute flyers to see if any passersby saw anything suspicious. Detectives Skip Mannain and Bob McCready were onsite and spotted Francois’ car. They were told a woman was at a gas station claiming she’d just been raped, so they checked it out.

“When she described a big Black male in a white car, they put two and two together pretty quickly,” Siegrist says. The victim was taken to the Town of Poughkeepsie Police station since the assault occurred in the town where Francois lived. She signed a complaint.

On September 1, 1998, Francois was brought in and questioned. “Once they said they were getting a search warrant for his house, he asked for the head prosecutor and spilled the beans,” Siegrist says. “He said he’d killed the women and their bodies were in his house.”

Police obtained a search warrant and found eight bodies, including Barone, French, Giaccone, Hurley, Marsh, Myers and Newmaster, but Eason’s remains were not there. The eighth victim was Audrey Pugliese, 34, who had not been reported missing.

Siegrist says Francois buried three victims in the basement and crawlspace, while others were hidden in the attic. “By the time the search warrant was executed, some were skeletonized,” he says.

Matthew Steiner, certified senior crime scene analyst with the International Association for Identification, calls Francois’ house a “complex crime scene.”

“You have things decomposing along with the bodies, and that's going to help hide the smell from the people who live there,” he tells A&E Crime + Investigation, adding that conditions of the Francois home—often described as “filthy”—means the family was likely used to putrid smells. “If you're in that environment for a while, you will become accustomed to it. Even as investigators, you first get to that scene and it's going to hit you like a shovel in the face. After a while, you won't notice, but it gets into your clothing, your hair, and you go home and everyone else notices.”

Advanced decomposition also destroys evidence.

“You'll have insects. You're going to have scavenging animals come and feed on that body, and the longer that body's decomposing, the more they’re eating and taking away evidence with them,” Steiner says.

Siegrist says forensic investigators spent approximately one month investigating the Francois house.

“This is labor-intensive work,” Steiner adds. “At a regular crime scene, you have to think about bloodborne pathogens when dealing with a body—things that you can contract from a dead person. But with this, now you're talking about a toxic environment.”

Investigators would need to change gloves every time they handled a piece of evidence to prevent cross-contamination. “It was probably the worst scene that those investigators ever saw in their careers,” Steiner says.

Francois pleaded guilty to all 17 of the first- and second-degree murder counts against him and was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2014 at age 43.