Sword and Scale - Episode 90

Episode Date: May 21, 2017

When Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Claudia Rowe, author of The Spider and The Fly, decided to write to a serial killer, she wasn't prepared for how it would change her life. In her quest to understand the nature of cruelty, she ended up discovering much more about herself. Kendall Francois murdered at least eight women and hid the rotting corpses in the home that he shared with his mother, father, and younger sister. A large foreboding figure who emanated a pungent odor, he demands that Rowe offers personal details of her life in exchange for the answers she is seeking. She does not comply with his wishes, which leads the reader to wonder "Who really is the spider and who really is the fly?"See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sort and scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences listener discretion is advised Surely there were officers who spoke to me about the smell in the home that was so bad that they couldn't get it off their skin. Welcome to Sword and Scale, Season 4 Episode 90, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. In this episode, we're going to delve into 19th century English poetry, Kitting Not Kidding. Actually you'll see what I mean in just a minute. We are joined by Pulitzer Prize nominated author and journalist Claudio Roe to talk about

her new book which reads like poetry. It's called The Spider and the Fly. It's a story about finding yourself and delving into what makes you human. And of course, murder. I think you're gonna like it. But before we get to that, I want to remind you that our new show, Sword and Scale, Rewind, hosted by Stephanie Wilder Taylor and Lynette Corolla,

will be launching very soon. We don't have a fixed date yet, but it will almost certainly be in early June. If you wanna know the second it's available, then join our Facebook, Twitter, and Insta pages. Just search for Sword and Scale Rewind or SS Rewind. This is Claudia. I'm a journalist and author of The Spider and the Fly,

a reporter, a serial killer, and the meaning of murder. And I'm assuming this is also a reference to the poem from the 1800s? Yeah, it is. And the poem is about flattery. The poem is about the spider flattering the ditzy fly, and you know, that flattery is eventually going to get you killed. And you know, who flattered whom in the relationship between Kendall Francois and myself, there was some surely mutual manipulation going on. Will you walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly, Will you walk into my parlor?" said the spider to the fly. Tissed the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy. The way into my parlor is up a winding stair.

And I have many pretty things to show you when you are there. Oh no, no, said the little fly. To ask me in vain, for who goes up your winding stair, can never come down again. I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high. Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the spider to the fly. There are pretty curtains drawn around. The sheets are fine and thin. And if you like to rest a while, I'll snugly tuck you in. Oh no, no, said the little fly.

Where I've often heard it said, they never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed. Kendall Francois was a 27-year-old hall monitor at a middle school. That's what he was doing at the time that he confessed to murdering eight women. He strangled them all to death while raping them and storing their bodies in the home where he lived with his mother, father, and teenage sister in Pekipsi, New York, which is a town about two hours north of New York City. This is an unusual case because you don't often hear about a black serial killer who only has white victims. That's actually one of the most unusual things about the case, not so much that he was an

African-American serial killer because there are plenty of those. But my understanding is that his choice to cross race when choosing victims does stand out in an interesting manner. Yes. Do you think that Kendall Francois has any concept of right and wrong? Yes, definitely. I think he absolutely knew what he was doing was wrong. What is it about a person like this who seems to lack any kind of empathy towards any other human being?

So in my conversations with Kendall, which were mainly through letters, but also phone calls and several in-person visits, what I came to realize, at least in his case, was that he was able, while understanding that he had done something wrong. He certainly didn't see it in any other way, but he was also able at the same time to see himself as the aggrieved party. And I think that you'll see this kind of thing hold true in many people who we would consider villains.

The bad guy never thinks that they are entirely bad or if they do, they think that there's a reason for what they're doing. There is sort of a very pitiful logic at play in their minds. He definitely felt the aggrieved party, not that we should feel sorry for him, but that is how he saw what was playing out. If you want to know something about me, I was once filled with a darkness so complete. I'm not even sure that it was part of me.

It didn't feel like it. To this day, there are times that I have to remind myself that it was the same hands that are now writing you that ended so many lives. I don't feel like a killer most of the time." This letter was written by Kendall Francois, to a Piquipsi woman who he met while being held in a Duchess County jail. Seventeen-year-old Christina Sharp had been held on charges that she had assaulted another woman with a knife.

According to her, Kendall Francois was placed in an isolated cell directly below her as one day, and the two began speaking through the Jail's ventilation system. They soon became friends of sorts, and began corresponding with each other via the prison's male system, which took three days to go from one cell to another. My name is Christina Sharp. I met Kendall Francois when I was 17 in Duchess County, jail. I wanted to write to him because I wanted to know why he did what he did and why he chose

what we choose. I wanted to know everything. I'm just a curious person. That's all it is. There's nothing more, nothing less. Just curious. The girls he said they deserve to die and they started quoting things from the Bible about sinners But he said they didn't deserve to die by his hands You know, and he's saying that they all of me, everyone's gonna meet their maker, you know, and he'll have to pay too. But he said that they didn't deserve to die by him.

Like little pieces that make you wanna know more. You know what I mean? That's all it is, like, to make me keep writing. If I were to ask you from your exchange with him, how did he feel about women? I think he loved them, but they didn't, he loved women, but they didn't love him. They looked at him as like just the fat nice guy. You know what I mean? And I maybe got tired of being the fat nice guy and then like it probably never works out.

Like I don't know. And then when he sees women she and he thought they were probably higher than men or smarter he said too so maybe that's why I don't know. He was a quite a heavy man. Kendall Francois yeah he was an enormous guy about 64 well over 300 pounds so he was a huge guy he was also just a sort of physically unattractive person. And the condition of his home, which I'm sure we'll get back to, is important here. He stank. Many people now looking back would say he's stank of death because he had these corpses in his home. And you know, it was not a large home. But the home itself, his family, they were hoarders.

So the home itself had a tremendous reek to it of rotten food and feces and garbage and and all kinds of stuff such that it is possible maybe that the reek of eight corpses kind of blended in with the general disarray. So yeah, Kendall Francois was a deeply unattractive person on a number of levels. And it seems maybe because of his build or his personality or the fact that he had a odor associated with him, he somewhat felt isolated. He definitely felt isolated and the thing about his personality, which is really sad to me, you had this very hard, ugly side to his personality, obviously.

He did have also another previous, earlier side that many people recognized and talked to me about a lot. He once had been a sort of goofy kid. He remained as a person with a sort of slapstick sense of humor. He loved really corn ball humor. He had this other side to him which clearly got warped and destroyed in some fashion, but there were still little shards of it that would poke out when we would speak. So his personality was, one woman had described him as sort of a juggle and hide, and I can see why, even though that has become a cliche. But yeah, he had this

sort of goofball shy kid part and this very hard remorseless part. And I know there are folks who would say the goofball shy kid part is just a ruse and you were taken in by it. But, you know, I don't think so. There were numerous people who remembered the child, Kendall Francois, and the teenager Kendall Francois. And there were people who speak in the book who kind of, I don't think they realized it at the time, but kind of spoke to that change that seemed to happen very distinctly in him during high school, where he in ninth grade had been this highly engaged student who loved history and was really worked

up about American slavery, by the way, the American slave period, and then by the end of high school seemed to have sort of turned. Well, what else do we know about him as a child? Did he have a lot of friends? He, he was a, no. He was a guy who, who people did like, but he was also very, very shy, very quiet, kind of an aloof kid.

And the Francois family didn't appear, as far as I've been able to tell, to interact much socially. So the kids were not allowed to bring anyone home. And of course, now we know why because the house was insane. The house, the condition of the home itself, which I've later learned, is true for many quarters. They will sort of have a fairly rich social life outside of their home, but there's this

other secret inner life. And that was certainly true of this family. So while Kendall Francois had sort of people who liked him during school, particularly girls, because he had sort of a gentle affect, he didn't have really close friends. And part of that surely is because the family sort of isolated itself. However, in later years, when Kendall would talk to me, he would constantly speak about this issue of friendship. And how he didn't believe that anyone had ever been a true friend to him. And one thing that really struck me about him was the way these sort of emotional triggers for him, you know, phony friendships, or he talked about all the time, are kind of familiar

to many of us just in his version writ large. He was an extremely paranoid guy by the time I met him. But many of the things he said, I kind of recognized as areas of hurt in myself, and in many of us, maybe, but surely in myself, it just in him, everything was magnified. His rage was magnified. His paranoia was magnified. His size was magnified. Everything. Yeah, and it seems like one of the first things he says to you is that he doesn't need some friend that's going to betray him. So he's very standoffish right off the bat. He is.

And this issue of betrayal was, again, one of these sort of ongoing threads that he clearly looked back on his earlier life thinking that and seemed to carry that into the way he understood his crimes. He felt these women had betrayed him, used him, made him a deep. Set the cunning spider to the fly, dear friend, what shall I do to prove the warm affection I've always felt for you. I have within my pantry good store of all that's nice. I'm sure you're very welcome. Will you please to take the slice?

Oh no, no said the little fly. Kinds sure that cannot be. I've heard what's in your pantry and I do not wish to see. and I do not wish to see. Kendall Francois lived a wretched life, often hiring prostitutes to satisfy his need for affection. They were mostly prostitutes. All of them had significant drug problems. So these were mostly local women, local girls, who had developed drug habits. These were mostly women who were addicted to crack, some heroin, but mostly crack cocaine.

And they were walking the strip, walking Main Street in downtown Pekipsi, which was a pretty degraded place at that time and still. They were walking the strip to support their habits, but they also had sort of lives in the community. One woman was expecting a grandchild, another woman was attending the same community college that Kendall himself was attending at that same time. They were part of the community, even if it was sort of on the margins of the community.

What did Francois murder some women and let others go? My belief from reading the huge stack of police reports that I saw, there were many women who, as you say, were with Francois and did survive, and many of them spoke to police and said, this is your guy, this is your guy, because these women had been, quote unquote, disappearing from Main Street over a period of two years. This went on and on and with very little attention to it or coverage until the end, until sort of the last, the sixth, seventh, and eighth women were missing.

But Kendall Francois clearly had some sort of sexual dysfunction, and he could not complete the act in any kind of reasonable time frame. So he would hire these women off the street, and they would go with him, but he was taking a very, very long time. So in some cases, when a woman would say, look, can you move it along here? I've got to be going. That was to him humiliating. If a woman at some point said, you know, I have an appointment, I've got to go. That to him was rejection. And these sorts of humiliation sort of demeaning his manhood or to him, you know, rejecting him in some way,

that was a trigger. And I saw a version of this, even myself, when I would visit him in prison, and after three hours of talking, I would say, okay, I really have to get on the road now, it's time for me to go. It's a long, long drive back. And he changed immediately, almost without a conscious decision on his part. It seemed his affect immediately shifted into this hard, cold. He was a different guy. As soon as I said, I had to go. And I was, and we had just spoken for three hours. So that seemed very consistent with what the women described who had survived interactions with him. And these women that did survive,

a lot of them say that he was extremely rough. He was always extremely rough. He certainly seemed to derive some kind of pleasure or release from violent sex. There was a police detective who suggested to me that he did derive some kind of horrible excitement from seeing women in their death throws, you know, when he would strangle them. I will say in the book, as you know, I don't get into that too much. It is mostly about me and him and not terribly much on the deep, deep, details of his crimes.

How did he get caught? Well, that's a really interesting thing. You know, Kendall Francois was a suspect fairly early. And the police did bring him in for questioning and they polygraphed him. And he passed the polygraph, which, you know, it should be a reason for all of us to understand why polygraphs are typically not admissible in court. So, he had been a suspect after he passed the polygraph, he kind of dropped down on the list, and they looked to other places. In subsequent years, many people have, you know, have said that

the police bungled the whole thing or they didn't care. And, you know, it's not my place to say that I will say it did go on and on and on. And so on September 1st, 1998, he had picked up this young woman, a woman he knew from the strip, he had known her all summer and they had sort of had an interaction but apparently not any sex. She was a drug addict and she was wanted on an outstanding warrant. He picked her up, he had decided that this was it, he was going to, he had given her money, he said all summer for food and different things, drugs. He was going to now get what he was owed. This was a constant thing. He felt like he had put

out given women money and now they owed him something. So he was going to get what he was owed and he was going to, you know, they were going to have sex and she said, no, that's not, I don't do that with you. You know, that's not our thing. And he said, yeah, it is, it is our thing. And that's what we're going to do. So he was in the process of raping her and strangling her. This was in his car, in his, in the driveway of his home, his parents' home. And he suddenly stopped in the book. I go into this in some detail.

He suddenly stopped and she, you know, she's choking and gasping and she's in the book. I go into this in some detail. He suddenly stopped and she, you know, she's choking and gasping and she's in the car and he shuts the car door and he pulls out of the driveway and he tears around out of out back onto Main Street and there are all these police there because finally the investigation is ramping up in a more public way. There are all these police there handing out flyers and this young woman, she's 19 years old, stumbles out of the car into a gas station and he's like, bye, call me later, you know, completely separated from what just happened. He just raped and strangled this woman.

She's almost dead. She staggers into a gas station and they say, oh my God, you need the police. The police are right outside because they're handing out flyers to all these people who do you know anything about these missing women? And there's Kendall driving by waving at the cops in standard sort of cat and mouse fashion that you hear about all the time with guys like this.

So the police are summoned to the gas station. They take this young woman's statement and they are talking to her about a rape and she says who it is and they know Kendall from other times where he's been booked for assaulting prostitutes. I mean, he was well known to police as a guy who frequently raped and assaulted prostitutes. They kind of thought he was, has a guy who frequently raped and assaulted prostitutes. They kind of thought he was, that's it, that he was the slumpy, doofy guy who maybe some felt, maybe wasn't smart enough to do anything more. They go to his house to say,

can we talk to you about these allegations of rape? And he says, sure. And he comes down to the police station with them. And they're going to book him for rape and assault of this young woman. And they leave the interview room after he says, yes, he did this to her. He knows her.

He knows what he did was wrong. He knows he has a problem with his anger. All of this is recounted in some detail in the book. They leave him in the room. And after a few minutes, he knocks on the door and asks, could he speak to a prosecutor, the person who's handling the missing women case? So he asks, now there are a lot of versions

of what triggered him to ask, and you have to read it in the book, but he asked to speak with a prosecutor, which is a very interesting choice. He didn't ask to speak with a prosecutor, which is a very interesting choice. He didn't ask to speak with a police detective. He asked to speak with a prosecutor, making that prosecutor then a witness. She took his confession. And then there it was.

There was like an eight or nine hour confession when the prosecutor comes to the police station. And at that point, there really was no prosecution. They didn't even have anybody at that point, there really was no prosecution. They didn't even have anybody at that point. But the woman who handled sex crimes for the county prosecutor's office came to the police station and sat there with him for eight or nine hours going over every single woman. So he confessed. He just, he confessed. He pointed out every single woman that that he had killed Well, he pointed out eight, you know, there was a missing women list of eight now The eight on the list were not exactly the eight in his home There was one woman on the list of the missing who never showed up and there was and he never confessed to and she is the only

black woman. And there was a woman's body in his home who had never been on any person's list of the missing. So he confessed to eight and there were eight bodies in his home, but he may have killed at least this one other woman, this black woman, Michelle Eason, who has never been found. In the attic, they found her remains of five women in various stages of decomposition, and it was a grizzly sight. Three of those bodies are together wrapped in plastic. It looks like Ezory started to dismember at least one of them. The fourth body is found in a child's waiting pool decomposing. The fifth body is found in a can, and the body had so decomposed it was like a square, and it was so disgusting that one of the police officers processing the scene couldn't take it and had to be excused. The three freshest bodies, the most current ones ones are found in the cruel space underneath the house.

How does a family live in a house for two years with eight rotting corpses? Right. Well, that is one of the most troubling and confusing questions of the whole case and there are many. The prosecutor's office interviewed the family and determined that they did not know and so we're not culpable and we're not charged. Now there are a lot of people who have asked me of course who have asked everybody this question how is it possible? They were hoarders. Hording has been in the last five or six years determined as a mental illness. And I will say, as I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist,

there is a profound level of denial, even pathological denial that one can live with. And that is what I believe was happening in this case now There's knowing and there's knowing right you might know that there's something Odd about your oldest son you might know that there are things in your home that you don't want people coming in and And having dinner parties at your house, you know, you know Something is wrong, but you don't want to go the next step and ask about what you know, because maybe you don't want to hear the answer. So there surely was an awareness of something. Kendall's mother, he told police, had commented

to him about the smell coming from the attic. And he told her, well, it was, it's a nest of dead raccoons. Now, a family, I'm sorry's a nest of dead raccoons. Now, a family, I'm sorry, a nest of dead raccoons, a family of dead raccoons. And I thought the use of family was very interesting on his part, a family kind of curled together in the attic dead. It seemed an interesting parallel to the life he was living.

But eight rotting corpses is a lot more than a family of dead raccoons. I mean, it's insane. Oh, yeah. Right. It's insane, you know, to us. I'm not, you know, I have to be mindful here to us on the outside. It surely appears insane. And there were certainly police detectives who said to me, that's impossible. Are you kidding? If you have a dead mouse in your house, you want to move, you know, it's so bad. So, right, this is a level of, at the very least, this is a pathological level of denial. And all I can say is the prosecutor's office did interview these people and determined

for whatever their reasons that they were not going to be charged. And they weren't. The scene was so bad that at least one police officer got sick to a stomach and had to be excused from the scene. You know, there were people who told me about seeing officers wretching behind the home officers said no. They, you know, officers have said that, you know, we're tough and that didn't happen. So, you know, surely there were officers who spoke to me about the smell in the home that was so bad that they couldn't

get it off their skin when they went home to their own lives. It was like all over them. So it was shortly pervasive, heavy as a cloud. It was thick. It was bad. And this is a pretty standard middle-class neighborhood. This is a very nice middle-class neighborhood. The Francois home was kind of the most ramshackle on the block, but the block is a really lovely block

about just down the street from Vassar College. These are sort of colonial homes with porches. This is, you know, lovely street with front lawns and backyards and it's a very nice middle class street. Doctors' offices, gynecologist. Kendall Francois, why this man? What was it about this story that intrigued you? Right, a lot of people have asked me that, and of course I've thought about it, and that's the point of the book. I don't think that necessarily any serial killer

would have kept me interested this long. Nor do I think coming from him that any would be reporter or correspondent would have kept him engaged for this long. I think it had to do with the triggers that we tripped in each other. So one thing about Kendall Francois was he wanted to be a writer. He fancied himself a writer, he wrote stories and poems constantly, and his letters were a large part of the reason that I stayed involved with this. I had my own personal reasons for wanting to understand cruelty, that was my initial

motivation in reaching out to him. I had my own life and people who had hurt me and a kind of life-long obsession with understanding what is that impulse to hurt another person. And that was the originating motivation when I first wrote to Kendall. That's what I thought I was searching for. To understand cruelty, it became a lot more complicated than that and his letters were a part of it. There was a certain kind of poignancy. A lot of people talk about serial killers as having these very charismatic or magnetic personalities. I would say that Kendall's personality was not terribly magnetic. He was alternately boastful and shy. He was sort of a doofus. You know,

he's not a guy I would have been friends with in regular life, but the letters had a sort of poignant quality that really ripped at me. So maybe that was manipulation or maybe that was a thread in him that was not apparent face to face, but came out through these letters. Surely the letters kept me involved. And then my understanding of kind of the complexity in cruelty, or in his cruelty, at least. And this is very different than what you would consider a traditional true crime type book. This is not just a book about a serial killer,

but it's also very much about you. What, why did you choose to explore that sort of storyline? Right. I really wrestled with it. I surely did not set out thinking I was gonna write about me, but the longer I followed this thread

of trying to understand him, the more I saw the sort of troubling echoes in myself. And I started to think that it was less than honest in telling this story to do it in the traditional method. You know, I had my reasons for being obsessed with the story and I felt that it was dishonest to not share those with a reader. And I do think that certain kind of totems of true crimes, certain sort of books that we hold up as greatest examples of true crime, are not always honest about the writer and the role of the writer in the interaction with the subjects.

So the role of the writer and the way that that kind of colors the interaction was really important to me because I was a reporter at the time and I'm still a reporter. And the interaction between the subject and the journalist affects what you see on the page. It affects the conversation, of course, between the subject and the journalist and the journalist's own history, their own backstory informs not only the way they speak with a source or a subject,

but the way they put it down on the page. And I know that journalism pretends to be objective, so-called objective all the time. I don't really think that it's, I don't really think that's possible. I think all journalism is about choices. Choices you make about what stories to cover and how to do it, and what note to leave as the final image in a reader's mind, and those choices are choices. That means inherently subjective. So I felt that it was important to be real with readers about

my subjectivity in this case. You talk about your exploration of finding an answer to the motivations of cruelty. But a lot of people seem to be fascinated by these types of stories, especially stories about serial killers. What do you think it is about serial killers that sort of fascinates the public and keeps us interested? Well, serial killers, I think the obsessive nature, the repetitive nature, it's one thing to commit a crime of passion, not to belittle that in any way, is equally awful for the victim and the victim's family, surely, and possibly the perpetrator's family. But that's a one-off. And the repetitive nature, seeking something, you know, seeking to fill a hole that you can't fill, scratch an

itch that is never satisfied, that obsessive repetitive nature, I think, is very intriguing to people. And I think the reason for that is it echoes things in ourselves. We all have our obsessions, a whole we can't fill, and itch we can't satisfy. I did, surely, in seeking out the story behind these crimes and this person. We all have them. And I think that that that's one reason. I also think that true crime more broadly, reading about real crimes and real criminals, many, many people are obviously consumed with an interest in understanding what makes you cross the line.

Why does one person cross the line and another doesn't? And I had those questions, too, for many, many, many years long before I ever met Kendall Francois, I was really quite consumed with those questions. And when I became, I think that's why I became a reporter to understand those questions. And again, they stemmed from my own life and my own past. So that's another reason for an interest in true crime. I also think that for me, and perhaps others, reading about crime for many years, it helped me process confusions in my own life and things that had happened to me in my past, in my childhood, particularly

and teenage years. It was a way to try to retrace it and understand and understand it differently, and understand the impulse toward cruelty differently. It surely was about me trying to understand those who had hurt me. I think it also is a way of numbing, to be honest. I think that reading about crime for me became a way to kind of separate myself from pain somehow. And you talk about some of the parallels there between these victims, these

women that made mistakes in their life and how your life could have gone differently. Had you made this choice instead of that choice and how you engaged in a lot of risk-taking behavior when you were young. I did engage, I did engage in some very high risk behavior in my teens and college years. I think there are a few things I surely think socioeconomic class and education played an enormous part. I think if certain things had been different in my own background, if I hadn't gone to schools, I think schools saved me in many ways, and if I hadn't gone to as good schools or didn't have teachers who recognized something in me that they would zero in on, you know, there were little threads of something

I could hang on to that eventually, eventually sort of pulled me to a place where I was started making better choices for myself. But had those things not happened, I think it's entirely possible I could have ended up in a box. Yeah. Looking back at yourself then, do you think you were being somewhat naive as to how this relationship with a serial killer would affect you? Nive about how it would affect me as in did I not expect it would utterly upend and destroy my life? Yeah. Um,

yeah, I didn't, I was not prepared for the intense toll that it would take. And even more than that, I was not prepared for my own compulsion to continue it. You know, it's not so much that Kendall Francois was doing anything to make me stay connected to it. You know, it's not so much that Kendall France's while was doing anything to make me stay connected to it. In fact, numerous times he said we should probably end this correspondence. It was me. It was me and I was not prepared for the intensity of my obsession and my impulse to keep it going. I did not, but it was me. I can't really blame it on him, though. He was surely manipulative and had all of his games and tricks.

He wasn't the only force at play here. Tell me a little bit about your life at that time. You were with someone, living with someone who didn't really approve of this path you were on. Not at all. I was living with a person who was also a reporter and he was a local guy. I was not from that town, but he was. And he was a very smart, sensitive person, really. And so his utter disgust and disapproval and complete bewilderment toward me for what I was doing and what I was trying to find out did surprise and hurt me, but he was, you know, utterly disgusted as probably many people would be.

Anyway, he was not interested in trying to help me or support me or understand the reasons why I was doing this or anything like that. And I did have really fairly valid reasons. I wanted to understand what had happened to me. And I thought Kendall Francois could provide a clue, a map to cruelty. That was it. My life at that time, I was a freelance reporter. I was mostly a stringer for the New York Times, so I worked for some other magazines as well.

But mostly, stringing for the New York Times, living in this little shack off the side of a wooded road, which turned out to be, in fact, down the street from Kendall France was uncle. But I didn't learn that till later. And I believe that his aunt was my male carrier. I didn't learn that till later, either, yeah that his aunt was my male carrier. I didn't learn that till later, either. Yeah.

So I was living in this little shack in the woods with this boyfriend who was a reporter and had a fairly isolated life myself. In, you know, looking back, I would call that a deeply abusive relationship, though not physically abusive, but deeply undermining in the ways that we've come to learn, you know, this is the 1990s that all this was going on. And obviously, we've all become much more attuned to the kinds of abusive relationships that can occur that need and only involve physical violence. So I do think that this one came to be an abusive relationship. Very undermining, very demeaning, so that I was sort of isolated, increasingly isolated from

my family or any friends from before I was living there. You talk about your boyfriend at the time, not understanding and disapproving of your interest in this story. I suspect that a lot of our Sword and Scale fans, their boyfriends and husbands don't understand the obsession either. And wives, surely wives. Exactly. Wow. So let's let's talk about how you started this correspondence with Kendall Francois. You sent him a letter and you waited and you waited. And finally, you got a response back. What did he want in return? When he finally responded, you know, I sent him a letter and waited and sent him another

one and waited. So, you know, I was really the instigator here. And when he responded, he demanded to know these minute details of my life. And looking back, I think he was doing to me what he thought reporters did to their sources. Tell me everything, every little bit of who you are, every detail, which is true. That is what we reporters like.

And that is what I wanted from him. I wanted to know all these details of his past. That's what he demanded of me in the first letter. You know, what was the dress you wore under your high school graduation robe and did you ever dye your hair and what kind of computer do you use? Stupid, meaningless stuff that could that could not be interesting to him as I later learned because though I never actually gave him what he wanted, none of that stuff. When I did sort of give him a few details from my personal life and my past, things that I felt okay about sharing, he didn't care at all. He didn't care at all about the material of what I was sharing.

We were not going to connect on some sort of, let's talk about racism or anything. Not at all. That was purely some kind of demonstration of power. He wanted to see what kind of power he had. I mean, it was absolutely that. But, you know, he didn't get that prize. I never gave it to him. And yet, he stayed locked into this correspondence, this relationship, too. So we both did. So it was about... We both wanted something. You know, each of us wanted something from the other. I don't know that either of us exactly got what we wanted. It seems like for him it was about control.

I think it was largely about control. I also think that, you know, Kendall Francois had some issues with women, some profound issues with women, obviously. You know, I don't mean to make light of that in any way. some issues with women, some profound issues with women, obviously. You know, I don't mean to make light of that in any way. He had really terrible hatred for women and also fascination with women, obsession with women. So while he surely was motivated by an urge toward control, I think he also, he constantly

talked about, are you my friend, are you my friend? I think in some sad, underdeveloped part of him, he did imagine that he wanted a so-called friend, though that was no kind of relationship he knew how to handle or sustain in any way. And I was never going to be his friend because a reporter is never the friend of the source, even though the relationship has a sort of intimacy that echoes friendship. And that becomes very, very confusing to people. Was he scary? In my mind, he was absolutely terrifying. I was terrified all the time. But actually, in person, he actually wasn't scary in person when you sat there with him. When I would visit him at Attica, we were face to face, no divider, he wasn't cuffed, we were sitting

at this tiny little card table. So, you know, he was inches from me and just right there. And his physical presence, despite his size and despite what he had done, he actually didn't act scary. I was terrified, but it was all this stuff in my head spinning. My memory of what he had done, my confusion of how could this guy sitting next to me do these things, you know,ulls and his attic. All these things were in my head while I was talking to him, but he didn't in fact act in a frightening way. Only at those tiny moments where I would say, I've got to go now.

Or if I would display frustration with him, displeasure in any way, exasperation with his answers. If I displayed any kind of negative response, there was this other person, this hard-edged, cold side of him that would come out, and that was somewhat more frightening. And what would he say when you would ask him the reason he committed these crimes? Oh, he just would weave and dodge and sort of flutter his eyes and act all bashful. And this was somewhat different. I had read tons of true crime and FBI profiler stuff where these killers kind of trotted

all out all their reasons on this buffet table, all tied up in a bow for you. Like it's the easiest thing in the world. Kendall Francois was more all over the map. So he would act kind of bashful and shy, almost as if he was embarrassed by these kinds of questions. Other times, he was bombastic when he felt like, you know, bragging to me, he would sort of toss off utterly awful comments about what he had done. But it was kind of in this like, braadocio sort of thing like you would hear from like a high school jock or something, you know, about about some, you know, football play. And then at other times he was trying to not rationalize, but explain to me that as he said over and over, he said, you know, these women weren't saints as if

that could in any way equal what he had done. And he knew it didn't. He said, I know they didn't deserve to be murdered, but X, Y, and Z, X, they did this. They did that. So he was sort of trying to navigate or negotiate himself what he had done. And at the very end, finally, he says to me, you know, maybe I don't really want to look. Maybe I'm afraid of what I'll see. And I think that's what the book is about. How willing are we to look at ourselves

and to look at those who really frighten us? In the end, did you find the answers that you were looking for? I found answers that satisfied something in me, though not what I thought I was looking for at the beginning. I found answers that helped me understand more of my own family and my own background and really the complexity in cruelty. And that this thing that we call evil is not some sort of monolithic black magic, you know.

It's complex. We call it evil and I find the word so frustrating because to me it doesn't tell me anything. It's like a curtain drawn across understanding as if evil and okay, and that's all we need to know. And that to me sounds like sorcery or something. And that is not what Kendall Francois was. What he was was a deeply messed up, I think mentally ill, completely miserable person. And you have to understand that to then interpret his actions, which were utterly evil,

they come from something. So it did help me understand the complexity behind cruelty. Sweet creature said the spider. Your witty and your wise. How handsome are your gauzy wings. How brilliant are your eyes. I have a little looking glass upon my parlor's shelf. If you'll step in one moment dear, you shall behold yourself. I thank you, General Sir, she said, for what you're pleased to say, and bidding you

good morning now, I'll call another day. The spider turned him round about, and went into his den. For well he knew the silly fly would soon be back again, so he wove a subtle web in a little corner sly, and set his table ready to dine upon a fly. Then he came out to his door again, and merrily did sing, come hither pretty fly, with the pearl and silver wing. Your robes are green and purple, there's a crest upon your head. Your eyes are like the diamond bright, but mine are dull as lead. Alas, alas, how very soon this silly little fly, hearing his

wildly flattering words came slowly flitting by. With buzzing wings she hung aloft, then near and nearer drew, thinking only of her brilliant eyes and green and purple hue, thinking only of her crusted head, poor foolish thing. At last, up jumped the cunning spider and fiercely held her fast. She dragged her up his winding stair into his dismal den. Within his little parlor, she Narra came out again. And now dear little children, who made this story read to idle silly flattering words, I pray you Narra give heed onto an evil counselor close heart and ear and eye, and take a lesson from this tale of the spider and the fly. And you said earlier, partially ingest that pursuing this story uprooted your entire life,

at the end, was it worth it? Oh, yeah. I think so. I should say that the boy friend and I, that was never gonna last, you know? So, if this hastened the end of it or just underscored our deep differences, so be it, one thing that comes out of this, Kendall Francois constantly criticized my writing, which is kind of funny in a dark way. He would constantly say, your writing is so report-ish and superficial and you're not getting deep.

And obviously that was pure manipulation. However, he wasn't wrong. And, you know, he was trying to face him out, you know, his own writing. And I also was trying to move to a kind of writing beyond just being a newspaper reporter. I wanted to write something longer, deeper, something that was more nuanced and more textured, and I do think that the interaction with Kendall Francois is what eventually propelled

me that way, not that his comments on my writing were what did it, but in writing about him, I was forced to confront myself and to do a different kind of writing. And to do the very thing I said I always had wanted to do, which was moved beyond being only a newspaper reporter. And so that's what this book is. It's what came out of that really torturous, protracted exercise to become a writer willing to look at some really hard stuff.

Kendall Francois died in prison. Yes. Pekipsi serial killer Kendall Francois has died in prison. Francois killed eight women over a two-year period between 1996 and 98 after soliciting them for sex in the town of city of Pekipsi. After killing the women, he kept their remains in his town of Pekipsi home. For PekipsiJournal.com, I'm John Barry. Have a great night. Kendall Francois had HIV. He never appeared sick. He never appeared to develop into AIDS. In the times that I saw him, he did not appear sick and he said he never got sick. The actual determination of what he died of in prison was never made public

for HIPAA rules. Those are federal health law privacy rules. However, I did see a report that came out shortly afterward saying that there had been a tumor in his groin area, which I find pretty strange and fascinating considering his sexual problems. So maybe it was cancer as that suggests. Maybe his HIV finally developed into AIDS. The only official report was that he died of natural causes in prison. Well, Claudia, thank you so much.

I love your book. I really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else you want to add before we close out? The one just to underscore that I think the book, I really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else you want to add before we close out? One, just to underscore that I think the book, as you've said, isn't traditional true crime. It is really trying to look at the subject writer relationship.

And while I spoke about that in this interview, and it's in the book to some degree, the subject writer relationship is as manipulative and confusing as, as the relationship between Kendall Francois and myself and any kind of serial killer and their mark and their prey. So I'm surely not saying a writer is like a serial killer, but I am saying that there were some parallel manipulations going on, and that's really what the book is about. Who is the reporter? What is their role? And how does that color what we see? Because this is a book, but it's true in your daily

newspaper too. I'm glad you brought that up because I did have one final question which I had forgotten about. The spider in the fly. Who's the spider and who's the fly? Right, well, exactly. So I leave that to every reader to determine for themselves. I will say I think most people would assume that that candle is the spider and that I'm the fly sort of attracted into his web. But I think that that's open to debate. I'll leave it there. You know, who survived and got away and who did not. Well, once again, thank you so much for joining us. Very much appreciate it and I love the book. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed the conversation. Remember that Claudia Rose book, The Spider and the Fly, a writer, a murderer, and a story of obsession is available on Audible, and listeners can get her audiobook for free with

a 30-day trial membership by going to audible.com slash monsters. Again that's audible.com slash monsters. Go get this audiobook which I highly recommend today. Oh and you can also find the original poem by Mary Hoet there too. Be sure to check out my guest appearance on the Adam Corolla show and for crying out loud, both of which should be out by the time this episode is released to the public feed. Once again thank you for your support, thank you for listening, and until next time,

stay safe. Hey Mike, above all else, I just wanted to let you know that you are really doing a service to people who are in relationships with people like you describe in some of these podcasts where you know I myself was just able to pick up on little personality traits that were such a match in my partner, which is really scary and you don't want to believe that or hear that at first within yourself. But the truth is your podcast really helped pave the way for me to leave my domestic violence situation.

And so I just wanted you to know that and thank people for good work and I really wanted to support the New York people. I'm able to financially do that. So thanks a lot Mike. You