Kendall Francois: The Killer on Fulton Avenue

The weekend my friend Juan moved into an apartment behind the house, the police found the bodies. The smell of it still haunts him.

Most of my friends who lived near there brought up the stench. The New York Times reported that even then-Dutchess County District Attorney, William V. Grady, confirmed that it “is not your average home — it stinks, it is garbage-ridden.”

The odor of the green clapboard home at 99 Fulton Avenue in Poughkeepsie reached far enough to gag people on the sidewalk. The house was ramshackle on an otherwise idyllic middle-class street. According to The Daily News, maggots prospered in the sinks, and Kendall Francois’ younger sister Kierstyn (sometimes spelled at Kirsten and Kirstyn in reports) slept on a mattress coated with their casings. It is two blocks from Vassar College. Hardly a bad neighborhood and less than a stone’s throw on either side from a neighbor. One neighbor is so close that one could look from its second floor into the attic.

Francois used this squalor to his advantage, telling his family that the overpowering reek was only a dead raccoon — which either massively overestimates raccoons or underestimates eight unembalmed dead women stored there. (He had an older and another younger sibling — Raquel and Aubrey, respectively — but they were not present in the home at the time of…