Fred Rosen - Four Shocking True Crime Tales

Four Shocking True Crime Tales

Body Dump, Flesh Collectors, Lobster Boy, and Deacon of Death

Fred Rosen

CONTENTS

About the Author

Fred Rosen, a former columnist for the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, is an award-winning author of true crime and history books, including Gold!, Did They Really Do It?, and Lobster Boy. He can frequently be seen on the Investigation Discovery network's Evil Kin and Evil Twins TV series, where he is a regular on-air commentator.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Body Dump copyright 2002 by Fred Rosen

Flesh Collectors copyright 2003 by Fred Rosen

Lobster Boy copyright 1995 by Fred Rosen

Deacon of Death copyright 2000 by Fred Rosen

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

ISBN: 978-1-5040-4804-0

This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Body Dump

Kendall Francois, the Poughkeepsie Serial Killer

For my dear Aunt Irene and Uncle Nat

Prologue

September 1998

Eight women were missing. Only he knew how many more he had eliminated.

Eliminated. That was a good word to describe what he did. Once he was through with them, the women ceased to exist; he just eliminated them.

To their grieving families who couldnt find them, they vanished off the face of the earth. To Bill Siegrist, lieutenant of detectives dedicated to tracking him down, the harsh fact that his victims were prostitutes worked in the bad guys favor.

Prostitutes, Siegrist knew, followed a nomadic lifestyle. One day they were working Main Street, the next Oak Street, the next who knew? They might find a sugar daddy who would take them off the street and support them. Or maybe they would escape from the citys cold and damp into the warmth of Florida or California or Arizona.

Street people. They vanished without a trace. The majority of the time, it was not murder, just a by-product of their lifestyle. Nothing for anyone to worry about, in fact, maybe even a good thing. The more hookers that got off the streets, the less the cops had to run them in for prostitution. That meant less of a strain on the legal system and less for the reformers to kick up a storm about.

Eight prostitutes in a city of just over 28,000, a city where everyone knew everybody. The cops knew the prostitutes and the prostitutes knew the storekeepers whose stores they stood in front of, trying to attract the men in their cars to pull over to the side of the street and ask them to hop in. The storekeepers up and down Main Street knew the eight who had vanished off their street in the downtown area of the city. So, where were they? A few blocks away was the answer.

The house looked like something out of a Vincent Price movie. It was an old Victorian that children walking by could easily fantasize was haunted. But they had to walk fast.

The place smelled something awful, said Jim White, the postman who had the house on his regular route. But I couldnt figure out what it smelled from. It was just awful.

People would gaze up at the gables of the old Victorian, wondering what in hell that smell was. At the Arlington Middle School where one of the residents worked as a hall monitor, the kids noticed the odor emanating from him and they wondered what it was.

It was a stink reeking off his massive, wrestlers body, the kind of body capable of putting a man in a stranglehold that would quickly leave him unconscious. The kids had coined a name for the hall monitor that would dog him for the rest of his life.

Stinky. The kids had called him Stinky.

So he smelled; so do a lot of people. But Stinky smelled from body odor and something else. That something else was hard to define. Only a war veteran would have known what it was. It was a smell etched in memory, created in battle. The odor never faded from consciousness. It was a simple smell, actually, an elemental smell, as elemental as life itself.