Crime Junkie - MISSING: Michelle Eason Part 2

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

When the bodies of eight missing sex workers are found in the home of a serial killer in Poughkeepsie, New York, one woman is noticeably absent: Michelle Eason. Decades after closing the case against Kendall Francois, police are still looking for Michelle - and they think there’s a good chance someone else may be responsible for her disappearance.If you have any information about Michelle Eason, call the City of Poughkeepsie Police at 845-451-7577.National Domestic Violence Hotline: [phone]-SAFE (7233); for TTY: 1-800-787-3224 Text “START” to 88788Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357) For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-michelle-eason-part-2/

Hi crime junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brett. And this is part two of Michelle Eason's story. So if you haven't heard the first part, you need to go back and listen now or you won't have any clue what's going on. Because we're picking up right where we left off. Police have circled back to their main suspect in a string of serial missing persons cases that might be related to Michelle's, and they're determined to crack this guy. But when they devised this plan to corner him.

They had no clue at what horrors awaited them. One morning in mid January of 1998 after Kendall Francois drops his mother off at work, police stop him and ask him to come down to the station. He agrees. In fact, city of Poughkeepsie head of detectives Bill Segrist says he didn't even ask what he was about. This time though police have the table set and ready for Kendall. You see, Bill had touched base with his FBI profiler friend Charles Dorsey about how to

handle this interview. And they decided to stage the police conference room in a way that would make Kendall really nervous. So we had the conference room set up. We had pictures of his house. We had pictures of Kendall Francois. We had a file cabinet set up. We had Kendall Francois military records, Kendall Francois, you know, all this stuff.

It was all dummied up, you know. And Charlie Dorsey says, bring him in there, put him in there and let him sit there for a few minutes and stew. We put him in the room in the conference room, let him sit there for a little while, then we brought him into an interview room, somebody interviewed him and asked him to take a polygraph. This time Kendall agrees. Now, polygraphs are conducted offsite at the state police barracks and one of the detectives is tasked with taking Kendall over there.

Kendall wants to stop at his house on the way. He even says the detectives can come inside with him. When the detectives walk inside, they're disgusted by what they see. I mean, garbage, rotting food, bugs, soiled underwear, just like everywhere. But they don't see anything criminal that they could get a search warrant based off of. When they finally make it to the barracks and start the polygraph, investigators ask Kendall about all of the missing women. Did he kill them or is he responsible for their disappearances?

He answers no to every question and he passes with flying colors. So he's free to leave. It feels like a bust, but police don't have to wait long before he's back. You'd think all this time he's spending with police would make this guy, you know, watch his back, maybe try to keep his nose clean. Yeah, stay under the radar. Yeah, but just a few days later, police learned that Kendall has assaulted another sex worker in his home while they were having sex.

Now because the crime happened in his home, this is detectives' chance to get a search warrant for the house. But the woman is really reluctant to sign a complaint against him and she doesn't agree to do so for another month, which means that they can still arrest Kendall on a misdemeanor assault charge. But it's too late for a search warrant because apparently you need like fresh facts to show probable cause. Kendall pleads guilty to the misdemeanor charge in May of 1998 and he spends a whole whopping

week in jail. But then, less than a month later on June 12th, a seventh woman is reported missing. Sandra French fits the mold. Sex worker, substance use disorder, white, petite, brown hair. She works in Poughkeepsie but doesn't necessarily live there. And when she's reported missing, it's to the state police. After that report comes in, the Dutchess County District's attorney's office forms a joint task force to find the missing women.

Wait, that's just now happening? Shouldn't that have been done ages ago? Yeah, you're not the only one asking that question. Some family members of the missing women want to know the exact same thing, like why wasn't this done at the start? And for sure, some people thought the authorities were being slow to act because of who the victims were. Again, sex workers with substance use disorders.

Now it's not like this is the first time police have talked about the cases or even worked together on the investigation. The different departments were already collaborating unofficially. But Bill Segrist says that there was pressure from higher-ups to keep it kind of under wraps up until this point. But he says he thought the task force should have been formed even earlier. But even after it's created, it isn't publicly announced until the summer is nearly over on August 25th.

And that very same day, an eighth woman is reported missing, Katina Newmaster. And she has the same profile, sex worker, substance use disorder, white, petite, brown hair, everything? Yep. Bill contacts the FBI profiler again, and Charles has a suggestion. He tells Bill to set up a roadblock canvas on Main Street. Just saturate the area with police and give everyone flyers with photos of Katina. On September 1st, the task force sets up shop right near the line where the city and town

of Poughkeepsie meet. They're handing out flyers to cars when they notice Kendall François driving his white car right there on the same street. They watch as he stops at a red light, and suddenly they see a woman jump out of his car and run to a nearby gas station. The next thing police know, the gas station clerk is calling for them, saying that the woman told him that she had just been assaulted by the guy in the white car. Police are able to convince the woman whose name is Christine to file a complaint.

She says that Kendall strangled her in his garage earlier that day. So it's time to bring Kendall in for questioning yet again. And if police think it's going to be more of the same, they've got another thing coming. When they bring him in that day, police are once again sitting face to face with Kendall François. The place is packed with cops from all different departments. There's City of Poughkeepsie, where most of the missing persons cases were filed. There's the town of Poughkeepsie because Kendall lives in that town.

There's the state police. There's a prosecutor from the DA's office named Marge Smith. And Marge has been involved in the investigation for a while. And like the cops, she was familiar with pretty much all of the missing women. She actually had some history with Michelle specifically because in 1989, one of Michelle's persons was assaulted and Marge ended up working in a case and Michelle was a witness. So now all of these years later, when Michelle's name was added to the list of missing women, Marge remembered who she was right away.

And it's actually her job to get the long-awaited search warrant for Kendall's house ready to sign. And I'm figuring, we'll get you a search warrant, you'll go into the house, whatever is going to happen is going to happen, I'm going to go on my merry way. But as it turns out, she's not going anywhere for a while because a detective comes out of an interview room and tells her that Kendall wants to speak with someone from the DA's office. And he also wants pictures of all of the local sex workers.

Marge goes in and sits down across from Kendall in the interview room around 5.30pm. The only photos she has are the ones from the missing women fliers police have been circulating and Kendall starts flipping through them. Kendall tells Marge that police will find the bodies of eight women in his house. Eight bodies, eight missing women, case closed, right? Marge said, not so fast because one photo that he sets to the side is a picture of one woman that he says he didn't kill and it's the photo of Michelle Eason. Well of all the photos they have, he says he doesn't recognize all of the women and

some of the photos are pretty old so he basically says that he's not sure about some of them but with Michelle he's like, no I for sure did not kill her, he's 100% about it. So Marge keeps Kendall talking and investigators head over to the Francois family home on Fulton Avenue and make their way inside. And the first thing they notice is that smell. It's overwhelming, like enough to make your stomach turn. Just like the last time the detectives were in there, it's wall to wall trash, dirty clothes, dishes piled up and there are maggots everywhere.

They were clogging up the upstairs sink in the bathroom, it had been unusable. There was stuff hanging from the kitchen ceiling. I mean I've been in some horrible houses, I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. The sister said that before she'd go to bed at night she'd have to wipe the maggots off her bed. Despite the filth in the house, it's down in the basement in a crawl space that they first find what they're looking for.

The remains of three women, right where Kendall said they would be. And there's more in the attic, five more women. Some of them have been there for nearly two years, some of them less than a week. Lieutenant Segrist has been waiting for this moment and he thinks finally it's over. Eight bodies, eight missing women, Michelle has to be one of them. Over the next few days crowds gather in the streets to watch as eight bodies are carefully removed from the house. By September 7th, 1998, all of them have been identified.

But none of them were Michelle. The eighth woman turns out to be Audrey Puglies. According to Larry Hertz's reporting for the Poughkeepsie Journal, she had just moved to the area a few months ago and was never officially reported missing. So she wasn't even on police's radar. So Michelle for sure isn't one of Kendall's victims. Well police aren't ready to give up on Kendall's house just yet. Maybe he buried her somewhere else on the property so they keep looking and they go

through the home with a fine tooth comb. Actually not just the house, they go over the yard with ground penetrating radar and take up the entire concrete floor in the garage. For days investigators wearing Tyvek suits are in and out of the house, processing everything they can find. There are pages and pages of police records detailing things that they collected as evidence like bones, rope, a hacksaw blade, hair, candy wrappers, condom wrappers, screwdrivers, like you name it, it's in there.

But of everything they find, they can't tie anything to Michelle Eason. Okay, before we go any further, I need to know something. Was his family involved in this? Because if they weren't, like how did they not know, didn't they live there with him? Yeah, that's actually the first question everyone asks when they hear this story. But the DA says that there's no evidence they knew anything about it? And Marge says that Kendall insisted his family had no idea what he was up to. I remember saying to him, Kendall, you have eight dead people in your house.

That's got a smell. I said, well, yeah, I told my parents it was a dead raccoon in the attic. I'm sorry, a dead raccoon. I mean, as strange as it sounds, I guess the condition of the home was so bad already that they didn't realize. I mean, remember, thinking back to the detectives that went into Kendall's house with him too back in January, between the trash and everything, like again, there were bodies in there at that time that had been there for years at that point.

And a detective didn't even notice a smell. So it's not that kind of like out of the picture that somebody who has no idea what a body smells like, might not either. Anyway, authorities determined that all of the women they did find were strangled to death. Kendall is indicted on eight counts of second-degree murder and one count of second-degree attempted assault for Christine, the woman who escaped from his car that day. But despite his confession, he pleads not guilty. And the task force to find the missing women is now only looking for one woman, Michelle

Eason. There's still no shortage of suspects, and Kendall is still one of them. He may deny killing her, but it's hard to believe a word he says at this point. They also have the abusive boyfriend, the guy that we've been calling George, plus the drug dealers who were staying in Michelle's apartment, who she and George might have robbed, or one of the several dozen people that have come up during the investigation. So detectives set out to find out what they can about all of them, starting, of course, with Kendall.

And they learned pretty quickly that while he may have told police that he's not interested in black women, he had been telling a different story to some friends. These friends, a husband and wife that have known Kendall since college, tell police that in September of 97, Kendall told them that he was actually dating a black woman for the first time ever, and her name was Michelle. According to police records, Kendall had told the wife that Michelle was short and went to cosmetology school. He told the husband that she worked at a restaurant, though.

And the couple never saw her or even saw a photo of her or anything. But it's interesting that he's saying this stuff around the same time Michelle Eason went missing. And Michelle was short, just 5'2". In fact, like one of her nicknames was shorty. Oh, and get this, police actually find a letter in Kendall's house that's addressed to a woman named Michelle. Oh.

Now, it's kind of a confusing lead because it's not signed with his name. But in the police reports, it says that Kendall was the author of it. The letter is dated September 14, 1997, and Kendall wrote it as if he was in jail at the time. Kendall's the woman that he's writing to that he may get a year-long jail term, and if she doesn't wait for him, he'll kill himself. He even puts a list of dates and times for jail visits, like a whole schedule. And in the letter, he mentions a couple of guys that Michelle Eason was known to hang

out with. Kendall also wrote that he was afraid that they'd lead her down the wrong path. But what's weird about this is that he wasn't in jail at the time that this was written or at least dated. It's also bizarre, like I don't even know what to make of it. Is it a couple? I don't either. Is it evidence?

Is it nothing? Yeah, it's like, you want to say that maybe it's connecting him to Michelle, but nothing in the letter seems real, so does it actually connect him to Michelle? I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, after Kendall is arrested in September of 1998, police ask around about his sexual history, specifically with black women. And they actually hear different stories, but the overwhelming majority of people that

they interview say to their knowledge, Kendall was never sexually involved with a black woman. And even the black sex workers that they interview say that Kendall only hired white sex workers. So no one could connect him to Michelle? Well, a few people do say that Kendall knew Michelle, but our reporter Nina could only find record of two people. And that's out of like the hundreds of leads who said that Kendall and Michelle had been sexually involved. And for what it's worth, one of those two people is that guy Anthony.

You remember him, right? Uh, he's the pimp with the matching bracelets that maybe don't exist thing. Right. Right. Right. Right. So probably not the most dependable source, but here's what he says. And this is from a deposition dated September 22, 1998, according to Anthony in August or

September of 97. So right around the time Michelle went missing, Kendall came to his apartment looking for a sex worker because he couldn't find anyone that night and he was desperate. So Anthony says that he hooked him up with Michelle. Anthony says that same thing happened another night, although he doesn't give a date. And that time Kendall asked for Michelle specifically. Now, the other person who mentions Michelle and Kendall is a former sex worker, a white woman who Kendall had hired a bunch of times.

She says that she thinks Kendall hooked up with Michelle and one other black sex worker at some point. That same woman also tells police that the last time she had sex with Kendall, she told him to stop because he was taking too long to finish. He started calling her a whore and punching the car. Okay. So had any black sex workers ever accused him of assaulting them? Because I feel like we have a long list of white sex workers who had issues with him

and not just the ones he killed. Yet no one Nina interviews remembers any black sex workers complaining about him. But again, I mean, at the same time, it's rare to even put him with black sex workers. But if he was, there are zero reports of him assaulting them. Police say they found one woman who says that she knows of an instance where Kendall assaulted a black sex worker. But when cops track that woman down, she says that she has no idea what they're talking about.

Although in an interesting turn of events, she actually tells police that she had a creepy encounter with someone else, Michelle's on again, off again boyfriend, George. She says that she was selling him crack one time and he told her that he wanted to look at it before he bought it. And so he had her go into a basement with him, but she got super freaked out and left. As the months pass, police hear rumor after rumor about Michelle. People said she had plans to go to Arizona or Florida. She started over in Mississippi.

She's right over in Beacon. Maybe her body was dumped by the side of the road. Kendall buried her on a relative's property a few towns over. I mean, the rumors are endless. So detectives go back and revisit some of their stronger leads and they check out some new ones. They talked to that guy, Chris, who supposedly had Michelle's bracelet in his house, but he says that he's never heard of her.

They learn about another man who Michelle had hung out with a lot, who had past convictions for sodomy, attempted rape and sexual abuse, but it seems like he wasn't in the area when she went missing. At one point, they find out that Michelle was friendly with a retired sheriff's deputy who had just relocated to Florida. When detectives call him, he tells them that he hasn't seen her around in ages, but he also wants to know why they're reaching out to him. And when they tell him that they're still investigating her disappearance, he straight

up says to them, do you think I killed her? I didn't. Oh, uh, sir, no one said anything about killing. That seems pretty sketch. Yeah, it sounds weird, but there's nothing really linking him to Michelle's case that we know of. I mean, it is possible that he just figured like, okay, I was a cop. I know this move.

Like I know this is going. Now detectives also hear a news story about the drug dealers who were staying at Michelle's place. Michelle's one time ex David, this is the same David that George had mentioned to police tells detectives that he heard the drug dealers took her to the bottom of main street to a park that's next to the Hudson River and rumor has it that while Michelle was giving oral sex to one of the dealers, the other shot her in the head and they threw her into the river.

So do police interview the drug dealers? They do. And long story short, these guys are definitely suspicious. One of them even initially tries to deny that he ever went to Poughkeepsie in the first place, but Walt Horton, the lead detective on Michelle's case, doesn't think that they're the most likely suspects, even if they're a little sus. Typically what happens if you if you rip off a drug dealer, they want everybody to know they don't want to, you know, execute somebody and dispose of her so nobody will find her.

They want her on main street so people will know that if you mess with us, this is what's going to happen to you. And that didn't happen. But with all these possibilities, the one police keep coming back to over and over again is George. George never bothered to report Michelle missing. He didn't seem upset that she was gone and police knew that he had been physically abusive to her before.

So investigators don't let up on him. I interviewed a number of times about Michelle and asked him every time I saw him, I'd stop him and talk to him and see if I could glean anything else from him. I had him scheduled for a polygraph, the state police and the morning of the polygraph, I went to his house to pick him up and he refused to go. He didn't feel that the polygraph would be accurate because he was taking medication. Detectives get permission to search George's car and they bring cadaver dogs to places that he was known to frequent.

And in February of 1999, they even dig up the basement of a building that he spent a lot of time in. And here's something interesting. According to police notes, when they were digging up that basement, George walks by the building and he sees all the activity. And the first thing he asks is if they had found a body in there. I can only imagine what police must have been thinking at that point, but it doesn't really matter because they actually don't find a body.

Not in the car, not in the basement, nothing. Meanwhile, after some back and forth in the Duchess County court, the DA agrees to a deal with Kendall Francois. In 2000, he pleads guilty to eight murders and one assault to avoid the death penalty, which New York had at the time. As part of the plea, Kendall must tell police what he knows about Michelle, so Walt goes again to speak with him. He denied knowing her, denied having any contact with her.

So I said to him, Kendall, you know, now that this has all come to a head and you eventually admitted to killing eight women and disposing of their bodies, if something happened where perhaps you did the same thing to Michelle, what is your problem with disclosing that as well? And he said, well, he said, I'm a black man. He said, Michelle is a black woman. And he said, if I did anything to her, the black community would think much less of me.

So Kendall is basically saying, I didn't do it. But if I did do it, I wouldn't tell you anyway. Pretty much. Yeah, like not exactly the most convincing denial I've ever heard. Plus Walt says Kendall did know Michelle, at least from seeing her around. But no one could really prove that. So his comments didn't undo the plea deal. Now that being said, the people we spoke with generally don't seem to think that Kendall

was responsible for Michelle's disappearance. Walt says that he's not convinced Kendall killed her. He thinks George had more of a motive, not to mention there are so many other possibilities. Michelle's friend Antonia doesn't think Kendall and Michelle were ever together in the first place. She says that Michelle's clients tended to be older white men. I don't think he had anything to do with it. That wasn't her type of guy that she would even mess with.

Bill Segrist says it could be anyone, but he thinks it's unlikely that Kendall was involved. It's possible she was killed by Kendall Francois and that he had to stroke a lock and he put her body some place where it hasn't been found yet. Maybe he wouldn't admit it if he did. But for me, the whole thing goes back to the fact that his disposal problem, why would he dispose of Michelle Easton so carefully where she couldn't be found and the other women, he's got them in his house with his mother, his father, and his sister.

Could be a businessman. Could be a, you know, somebody who's respected in his community. Could be a politician. Could be anybody. And they have to do something with the body so they take the body and they put it in a place where it's not easily found. Bob Parada, the city cop who Michelle confided in about stealing the drug package, says that he never thought Kendall had anything to do with her disappearance.

I believe either f*****g or in conjunction with that group killed her and I believe they got rid of her in that dumpster in the back of the building. I think f*****g put the onus on her saying she's the one that ripped it off. I just know it wasn't Kendall. I believe it in my heart. Bob also remembers those drug dealers who were staying at her place and he thinks those guys would rather get away with murder than send a message. We reached out to an expert on serial sexual homicide, Lewis Schlesinger, a forensic psychology

professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He actually did a big study on this with the FBI, which we'll link to in our blog post. We wanted to see what he thought about the likelihood of Kendall being involved with Michelle's disappearance considering his patterns. But Lewis says that serial sexual murders really can't be compared with any other type of killers. All of the traditional time-tested law enforcement approaches to investigation, opportunity and means and motive and all that, that goes out the window.

There is a small group of serial sexual murderers who target victims based on physical characteristics. But the vast majority of serial sexual murderers target victims as a result of their vulnerability and availability. So basically just because Michelle is black and Kendall seemed to only be involved with white women, just because she wasn't found at his house but the others were, that still doesn't mean he didn't kill her. Exactly. Maybe he didn't have the chance to stash her in the house.

I wouldn't rule it out at all because someone might say that's not his pattern, that's not his MO. You see this type of diversity and behavior all the time with this group of offenders. And 70% of the cases an offender will experiment at a crime scene and do something different with one victim that he did not do with the others in his series. He also says that these killers tend to be weak and many times when the victims fight back aggressively, they escape. And when police are looking for an unidentified offender, they should always assume that a

victim got away and they need to go out of their way to make it easy for potential victims who survived to come forward. Now in Kendall's case, we know women had told police about his attacks over the years and when news broke of his arrest, some of the victims' family members and people in the community were angry. They thought he should have been arrested sooner and that police didn't take the reports seriously because of who the victims were. But police say there's a big difference between hearing about something and being able to

prove it. I faced a lot of criticism and a lot of second guessing and, you know, through this whole investigation. We always did the best we could. We didn't care who they were, where they came from. Years later, with no real answers, the mystery of what happened to Michelle Eason remains. Many of the suspects are dead, including Kendall and George. According to reporting by John Farrow for the Poughkeepsie Journal, Kendall died of cancer

in prison in 2014 and George died just a few years ago. And by the way, we didn't use George's real name because he was never charged with anything related to Michelle's disappearance. He was never named publicly as a suspect, and obviously we can't interview him now. Police say he never did change his story. Even though most of the people who we interviewed for this story are retired now, Michelle's case is still on their minds. She was just some poor girl out there trying to survive on a day-by-day basis, you know

what I'm saying? Probably not even a day-by-day, probably hour-by-hour, you know? She never hurt anybody. Honestly, the saddest part of this, to me, is that it was Michelle's case manager who reported her missing, not her boyfriend or her family or someone she loved. Bill Segrist says that he actually doesn't remember any of Michelle's loved ones ever contacting the police department to ask about her or even the status of her case. That's so heartbreaking.

It really is. I know her brother has been quoted in a couple of different articles, but overall it doesn't seem like she and her family were close. This isn't a story that we can wrap up for you with a neat bow, but it's still possible that Michelle's case will be solved one day. I think to myself, some morning I'm going to wake up or I'm going to get a phone call. I'm going to say, hey, listen, we found Michelle Eason. It's hard to let go.

Now, what happened to Michelle Eason? Where is Michelle Eason? Bill made sure that Michelle's DNA profile was entered into the national database, so if need be, it can be tested against Jane Doe's. And police tried to match her dental records with Jane Doe's as recently as 2017, but none were a match. City of Poughkeepsie police chief Tom Pape says they haven't gotten any new leads in a few years.

They want to speak with anyone who saw Michelle in the days before her disappearance or who may have heard about what happened to her. I just feel like somebody in this town knows what happened to her and they're not saying. If you have any information about Michelle, call this city of Poughkeepsie police at 845-451-7577. You can see all of the photos and sources for this week's episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at CrimeJunkie Podcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. CrimeJunkie is an audio chuck production.

So what do you think Chuck, do you approve?