Episode 36: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I'm your host Julie Mattson. As you may have heard from my previous episode, last week I was at advanced homicide investigation training put on by the Legal and Liability Risk Management Institute. This is a continuing education class to keep us current on different types of investigation techniques. One of the speakers at the event worked as an investigator on the Kendall Francois case, a serial killer from Poughkeepsie, New York, convicted of killing eight women, from 1996 to 1998, and he described to us the gruesome story of the crime scene. Today, I am going to share what I learned with you. Are you ready? Listen in...
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly True crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:30 I know y'all remember that last week, I was at advanced homicide investigation training.
0:36 It was an amazing conference.
0:40 This was put on by the Legal and Liability Risk Management Institute.
0:46 It was probably one of the best courses I've been to.
0:50 We get 36 hours of, I guess what you could call continuing education because as a diplomat with the American Board of Medical Legal Death Investigators, we are required not only to work in the field but also to get continuing education just to keep us current on different investigation techniques and those kinds of things.
1:15 One of the speakers was one of the investigators that worked the Kendall Francois case.
1:23 This is a case that I had never heard of.
1:25 So it was really interesting to hear from the investigators who worked the case.
1:30 This guy lived in Poughkeepsie, New York.
1:35 He was a serial killer who killed eight women.
1:40 There was a 9th that was missing, that they suspected was tied to him but was never found.
1:48 So this guy was born in 71.
1:52 He played football at Arlington High School in New York.
1:57 He graduated in 1989.
2:00 The population of this town at the time was about 40,000.
2:04 So he was a big guy.
2:05 He was 64 and weighed about 250 and the students called him Stinky.
2:12 That was his nickname, which, you know, we all have friends from high school that had nicknames.
2:18 That weren't really something they wanted to carry on with him in life.
2:22 But Stinky was his, he graduated in 1990 from basic training in the army.
2:31 And then he ended up enrolling in a community college in 1993, lived at home with his parents and his sister and he worked as a hall and detention monitor at the Middle School and their address.
2:47 It's kind of weird.
2:48 It was on Fulton Avenue in Poughkeepsie again, kind of a different guy.
2:53 I mean, if you look at his pictures on the internet, not exactly what you would expect a serial killer to look like.
3:01 And he did actually not display the traits of a serial killer.
3:07 And that was one thing that made it hard for them to catch him a lot of serial killers.
3:13 I know we've talked before about Jeffrey Dahmer.
3:16 They abuse animals and they are cruel to animals.
3:20 Some of them also experience bedwetting.
3:22 Some of them have a history of starting fires.
3:26 Some of them have a history of brain injuries or concussions and most of them are white males.
3:34 He was African American six ft 4, 250 lbs, smelled terrible, according to everybody.
3:42 But what he did was he would solicit sex from these prostitutes and bring them back to his house and keep in mind his parents and his sister lived there.
3:57 They believe that the first killing was Wendy Myers.
4:01 She was 30 years old.
4:02 He was soliciting her for sex.
4:05 This was back in October of 96 and he brought her to his house and then grabbed her and crushed her throat and put her in the attic.
4:17 About a month later, November 29.
4:20 His second victim, same year, 1996 was a 29 year old sex worker, Gina Barone and he choked her, broke her neck and then also put her in the attic next to Myers.
4:36 Myers had been there a month already.
4:40 So mom and dad are oblivious apparently to what's going on, which is hard to believe.
4:46 And course I never saw a picture of mom and dad and I don't know very much about them, but the sister is relatively young.
4:54 So probably a little more with it.
4:57 And it's just hard to believe that they don't know what's going on.
5:01 Days later, Catherine Marsh who was pregnant, he murdered her and then for some reason, washed her corpse in the bathtub before he carried her upstairs to the attic and he put her next to the other two women.
5:17 And then Kathleen Hurley in 97 then Mary Healey Giaccone in November of 97.
5:27 And then the mother of three, Sandra French vanished in June of 98.
5:33 All these women, apparently not all of them, but some of them were drug users.
5:39 I believe most of them were prostitutes.
5:42 And then he murdered 34 year old Audrey Pugliese and 25 year old Catina Newmaster in August.
5:52 Now Newmaster actually worked with Giaccone.
5:56 And that's kind of what caused the police to patrol the area to see Because these two women knew each other or worked together.
6:05 And then the police were flagged down by a woman who had been sexually assaulted nearby.
6:11 Kendall was a regular customer on her street.
6:16 So that kind of led them back in September of 98 to get a search warrant.
6:22 It was after midnight when they found this graveyard in his attic.
6:29 I'm kind of telling you like a rundown of kind of what happened and then I'll give you a little bit of background information that the detective gave me because I know that you'll find it as interesting as I did.
6:39 Now, he pled not guilty, but he was charged with eight counts of first degree murder, second degree murder, and attempted assault.
6:48 And this was back in October of 98.
6:52 Now, in 99, it was discovered that he had actually contracted HIV from a victim.
7:00 So he was given, I believe what the detective said is the families of the victims came forward and said, we don't really want this to go to trial.
7:12 We want him to get life in prison because we know that if it goes to trial and everyone testifies that it's gonna come out that these women were prostitutes and they really did not want their family members to be remembered that way, which totally made sense to me.
7:31 So they wanted them to, you know, be laid to rest without being remembered as the prostitutes who were murdered or whatnot.
7:40 The police had already kind of done a good job of being respectful of them regardless of what they did for a living because they didn't deserve this.
7:51 The family members didn't really want that to come out in the trial.
7:54 So they asked that he get life in prison instead of the death penalty.
7:59 And he was incarcerated at Attica correctional facility and ended up dying of cancer in September of 2014.
8:08 But he did strangle these eight women.
8:12 He always paid cash and the women that he had been with before that he didn't murder for whatever reason said that he liked rough sex, but they were pretty much controlled by addiction.
8:26 Like I said, many of them were on drugs, but he put the first five women in the attic and then apparently ran out of room.
8:35 So that's when they said that he kind of took a break and started to think about what would I do with these bodies if I decided to start murdering again?
8:45 And at that point, he decided to put them under the front porch down in the crawl space.
8:50 So the first five, he put in the attic and then the other three, he actually put in this crawl space.
8:59 Now, the police said that he may have taken a break during that time also because his mom asked him what the smell was in the house.
9:11 And now I know that you're not privy to the photos that I saw at the conference, but they were hoarders.
9:17 So this house was a wreck.
9:19 I mean, it was nasty.
9:21 It's probably one reason why he always smelled when he was younger, even before he started killing people and keeping bodies in his attic.
9:29 And in the crawlspace, his mom actually noticed the stench and asked him what it was and his response was that there was a dead raccoon in the attic and that he had taken it out and put something up there to help improve the smell.
9:45 And apparently, I guess mom felt whatever he put up there to make the smell better isn't really working, but that's all it is.
9:52 There was just a raccoon carcass up there.
9:55 And so that's why our house smells terrible.
9:57 I'm quite sure by the pictures that it already smelled bad before these bodies were put up there.
10:02 But it was such an interesting story.
10:05 And so I wrote down some notes because I didn't want to forget what all he told us.
10:10 The two in the crawl space were actually put in there and covered in light plastic and then one was actually buried and they said that they kind of looked into, you know, why did he bury her?
10:24 And they said that he may have had some affection for her.
10:29 He did talk about her specifically, she was victim seven.
10:35 She was very difficult.
10:37 She was street tough.
10:38 She had spent some time in prison.
10:41 She wasn't like a very nurturing person for some reason.
10:44 Her feet were in plastic bags.
10:46 They asked him why and he denied doing it, but he did get angry when he was asked, there's probably a reason he just didn't really want to share it.
10:57 But three of the first four were strangled in his room and then he would hold their head under water to make sure they were dead because he didn't know how to check a pulse.
11:13 He wanted to make sure they were dead before he put him up in the attic because, you know, then they wake up and start screaming and then mom really knows something's up.
11:20 He would hold them underwater to make sure they weren't breathing and make sure they weren't gonna wake up or whatnot before he moved them up into the attic.
11:30 Now, he also solicited a lot of women over the internet.
11:34 I mean, not only did he have like a regular place where he went to solicit for sex.
11:39 He would also solicit women over the internet.
11:42 He was actually discharged medically from the army because he was overweight and he had, I guess during this time, written some female classmates from high school who returned his letters and some of those letters were found in his house whenever the police went over there.
11:59 But the officer said that they actually took 1100 pieces of evidence from the house and then they found dentures in the house that did not belong to one of the victims.
12:12 So what he did was the first five victims that he had in the attic.
12:18 He would occasionally go up and dismember them.
12:22 Apparently by the time this all came to fruition and he was discovered there was a bag of bones like a plastic trash bag.
12:33 And I got to see the picture and this was crazy y'all.
12:35 He had put pieces of each one of the first five victims into a plastic trash bag.
12:42 And there was just this huge bag of random bones up in the attic.
12:48 He had put pieces of them in a suitcase.
12:53 And he had also had like a kitty pool up there, which they think was because these fluids I guess you could say were starting to seep through the ceiling and at one point his sister was asleep in bed and maggots were actually falling from the ceiling onto her bed.
13:14 So they think this is when he bought this kitty pool to put up there, like the little small plastic pools.
13:20 He had like skulls and legs and hips and all different kinds of body parts.
13:27 And there was also like a can kind of like a trash can and it had a victim wrapped in plastic.
13:34 There were maggots in it.
13:36 So you can only imagine the stench in that house.
13:40 I know what I'm subjected to when I go into a home where someone's decomposed and there's only one person, of course, it is worse if they're a hoarder.
13:48 But I could not imagine.
13:50 Eight, could not imagine eight anyway.
13:53 Of course, you can imagine because all these women have to be positively identified even though they think they know who they are.
14:01 All they have is three decomposed bodies in this crawl space and then just pieces of people up in the attic of the eight women, three of them were able to be identified by fingerprints, which we know that those are the three that were most likely down in the crawl space.
14:21 And now that in itself is unusual because these women had been there for a while.
14:26 And he did tell us that what they would do is actually deglove the person.
14:34 So the hands, you know, the skin kind of starts to loosen.
14:40 And so they would deglove them and actually put on gloves, several pair of gloves and then they would put their finger inside the person's skin of their hand and actually roll the fingerprints that way and actually get prints off of these women.
14:59 So I know that sounds terrible.
15:01 But four of them were able to be identified by dental records.
15:06 So we do that a lot where if we don't know who someone is or the prints don't come back or we can't get a good print on someone.
15:13 We will, of course, you have to kind of know who they are in the first place, right?
15:18 Because then you ask the family, hey, who's their dentist?
15:22 And then you get the record.
15:23 Four of them were actually able to be identified by dental records.
15:28 They reached out to the family of these women, went to the dentist, got the records or really just the x-rays and then were able to actually match up the dentals and get them identified.
15:39 And then one of them was actually identified by x-rays, a skull x-ray.
15:44 They did say that on all the bones that were upstairs in the attic that you could actually see the cut marks.
15:50 He had actually cut them with a hacksaw blade and he couldn't use anything loud because his parents lived in the house.
15:56 So he used a hacksaw blade this is the victims, one through five that were actually upstairs.
16:03 So they could see the cut marks on a lot of the bones and that kind of thing.
16:07 The only bone of all the eight women that was not found was one hip bone, which is amazing.
16:15 I mean, who knows where that is?
16:16 But in the search of the house, they completely tore up the yard and were looking to see if there was any other women or other body parts buried.
16:28 And they found a lot of animal bones which again goes back to serial killers abusing animals.
16:36 And they don't know if that was something that he did or if that was always there.
16:41 But they did find some animal bones.
16:43 They found some belongings and those types of things that were actually in the yard and a shed had been built in the backyard during the time of all the killings.
16:56 And so they actually got a jackhammer and looked under the shed to see because, you know, we talked before about that being a good place to hide a body.
17:06 And so they knew that the concrete slab had been poured during all these murders.
17:11 And so they wanted to look under it.
17:13 That was something that they did as well.
17:15 The judge ordered him also when he got the life in prison to pay $164 in court fees.
17:24 So this was kind of something that we thought was funny because he got a job when he was in the prison in the metal shop and they said he was only making six cents an hour.
17:35 His favorite things in the jail to eat were canned ravioli and those, what you might call it, candy bars.
17:42 And so he got this job in the metal shop.
17:45 He would work days and days and days and then save up enough money to buy the ravioli and the what you might call it.
17:51 But when he, when he went to get the money out to buy these things, the judge had actually garnished his wages.
17:58 So the judge was having his wages garnished for that $164 in court fees was gonna make him pay it with his earnings from the metal shop, which I thought was kind of funny, you know, just in hearing the story, what was so interesting is he'd go through as many as eight prostitutes a day, bring him to his house.
18:18 How did his parents not know?
18:20 I don't understand, like, I know what my kids were doing when they were, you know, of course he was older.
18:25 But it's weird.
18:27 I can't imagine.
18:28 I mean, bringing eight women home a day and he would say that he only killed the ones who tried to rip him off.
18:34 Like people who tried to, he felt like cut them short after he had paid them.
18:39 Evidently you just didn't make him mad.
18:42 Was kind of the moral to that story it sounds like.
18:45 But so I had never heard of this murder.
18:49 And again, he did die in prison.
18:51 They said he had cancer.
18:52 But I think he also had AIDS because he had been diagnosed with HIV in 1999.
18:57 But very interesting story.
18:59 And like I said, I got to see a lot of the photos and just, you just wonder how their mind works.
19:07 He's somebody that I love, love, love to interview.
19:10 I think that that would be fascinating.
19:11 Of course, that can't be done now.
19:12 But I think that would be fascinating to interview someone like that to see like what was going through his mind.
19:19 And again, they did, the police did talk to a lot of women that had been to his house and just said that he was very rough with them and he just killed the ones that he felt like were ripping him off.
19:31 If he wasn't getting his money was worth, then it does not make him happy.
19:35 So anyway, I did enjoy seeing all the pictures and it's just crazy how he had, I guess taken over his brother's bedroom when his brother moved out, but he still would have sex with the women and murder them in his old bedroom.
19:52 And then he would sleep in his new bedroom, which was his brother's after he moved out the bedroom pictures that they showed.
19:59 Oh my God.
20:00 I mean, the mattress was nasty and the pillowcase on the pillow he said was like crusted, folded, over, crusted with fluid.
20:11 I could only imagine.
20:13 And so, I don't know, I just can't imagine even as a prostitute being ok with having sex with that nasty guy, especially, I mean, his nickname was Stinky.
20:23 So, anyway, I encourage you to go online and look up this case and let me know what you think about it.
20:30 I know that a lot of the pictures that I got to see aren't gonna be on the internet, but super interesting case.
20:37 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
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