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 his arrest.)

Yet his family maintained the air that they were commonplace, middle-class people. His mother, Paulette, worked to help mentally ill people get jobs. Kierstyn sought a degree in family studies. The ironic overlap of their professional motivations and Kendall’s crimes is aching.

I had never met Francois. I was too old (and in the wrong town) for him to be my detention and hall monitor, his job at Arlington Middle School before his tenure as a serial killer. No one mentioned him when I substitute taught there, even in whispers. The children didn’t know that they learned grammar where once a serial killer earned his keep. It was only seven years after Francois — uncreatively dubbed “The Poughkeepsie Killer” (he didn’t deserve a better moniker and had been previously called “Stinky”) — had been active.

(Poughkeepsie had another serial killer the same decade, Nathaniel White, who killed six between…