Who is poughkeepsie killer

Police increased their efforts on the case. The similarities between the girls were striking. All the girls lived in or near Poughkeepsie, all had the same physical build, several of the girls had been arrested for prostitution and most did not have regular contact with their families. But all shared one common bond: they had simply vanished. The Investigation. For the next few months, the police tried many different tactics to locate the missing women.

Helicopter searches were made of the Dutchess County area by air. The Hudson River was searched on a regular basis by the State Police and municipalities along the shores. Police informants were pressed for any information on the case. Hundreds of people were interviewed. With no hard evidence and above all, no bodies, police were stumped. Although they realized the suspicious nature of the disappearances, the investigation was at a standstill.

But there was an ominous feeling among the detectives. A former F.. I profiler, Gregg McCrary, told the Associated Press that the disappearances "were well beyond suspicious".

And because some of the women were prostitutes made the situation worse because prostitutes get into cars with just about anyone at anytime. To complicate the situation further, different suspects continuously drifted in and out of the case.

One man, who had arrived in the Poughkeepsie area in the summer of from the South became a suspect when it was revealed he was a convicted rapist. He was also mentioned in a missing persons case down South. Almost to the very end of the case, this individual was considered a suspect in the disappearances. Another city resident came to the attention of the police when prostitutes said that he was very rough with the girls during sex. In June of , another local man was arrested for the rape and assault of a Poughkeepsie woman.

Later he was found to be in custody during the disappearances of the first three women. A boyfriend of one of the missing was also considered suspect because he had an extensive criminal record and assaulted women in the past. But as various suspects were developed and abandoned, Kendall Francois remained on the list. Slowly, the public grew more concerned. A story on the case was published in The Poughkeepsie Beat in April, Another article appeared later in The Poughkeepsie Journal in November, Criticism of the police was growing.

There was a feeling in the community that the police were not taking the reports seriously since the missing women may have been prostitutes. Early on, street people were well aware of the situation since they were accustomed to seeing these women on a daily basis. The disappearances were very obvious to them. But the police rejected the criticism. Siegrist said "These girls don't have set schedules. It took time for the families to realize something was wrong, and then they even thought for a while they might turn up" Albany Times Union, p.

By the time the stories began to appear in the papers, the City of Poughkeepsie Police were already working the case for more than 8 months. Of course, the public could not be told of the details of that investigation. For now, the police had to take criticism mostly in silence.

In early January, , Poughkeepsie Police made a decision to interview Francois about the missing women. They began to stake out the Francois home at 99 Fulton Avenue.

Police soon discovered that Francois had a routine that he often followed. In the morning he would take the family car, drive his mother to work at a nearby psychiatric center, where she was a nurse, drop her off and then return to downtown Poughkeepsie where he would cruise the streets. On a cold morning in January, Lt. Siegrist and his detectives pulled over Francois and asked him to come into the police department for an interview.

Francois, who had a calm and respectful demeanor, readily agreed and drove his own car over to the police station. Francois was interviewed over a period of several hours and answered all questions police asked of him. Of course, police still had no concrete ideas exactly what had happened to the missing girls and no clue where they could be found.

But Francois was easy to talk to and cooperative. The police, however, were not convinced. Poughkeepsie police accompanied him to his home where Francois even let a detective inside his room for a brief time. The detective reported back that the inside of the house was in horrendous condition. There was garbage virtually everywhere he could see. It smelled awful. But Francois made no admissions and said nothing incriminating. By law, he was free to go about his business. Then in late January, Kendall Francois was arrested for the crime of assaulting a prostitute.

The crime took place on the second floor of 99 Fulton Avenue. Kendall drove her to his house where he took the girl up to his room on the second floor. They had a dispute over money and Kendall punched her in the face knocking the girl down onto the bed. He then got on top of her and began to choke her with his bare hands. She agreed to have sex with him and when he finished, he brought the girl back to Cannon Street.

The victim reluctantly reported the incident to the police and pressed charges against him. Francois was arrested and received the assistance of an attorney. Later, on May 5, he pled guilty to 3rd degree assault, a misdemeanor, in City Court. He spent a total of 15 days in jail. More Vanish. On June 12, , Sandra Jean French, 51, disappeared. She was white, 5', just lbs.

She was reported missing from the small Town of Dover, which is about 20 miles east of Poughkeepsie. It was located barely three blocks from the Francois home. The City contributed two investigators, the Town gave one detective, the New York State Police gave two investigators.

The task force would be under the command of City of Poughkeepsie Sgt. Michael Horkan. The unit took up residence in the city's downtown area at Market and Main Street, not far from the police station. But the existence of the team was not announced nor was it publicized. The formation of this team was an unusual event because task forces such as these are usually assembled after bodies are found and foul play is apparent.

The work load was enormous. Each tip or scrap of information had to be evaluated and acted upon. These teletypes originate from every police municipality in the nation and report on every single unidentified body in America days a year. Attempts to match up any of the girls to the reports were fruitless. Many on the investigative team were convinced that the girls were already dead, the victim of some unknown serial killer.

Others were not so sure. But the task force was ordered not to talk about any details of the case, an essential point to any successful police investigation. The need for confidentiality is paramount in murder investigations, more so in a multiple homicide. The revelation of some significant detail or the publication of some other aspect of the investigation could alert the killer and wreck the case.

Or worse, induce the killer to flee. Just two months later, on August 26, , another woman, Catina Newmaster, 25 years old, vanished. Like almost all the others, she was slight of build, brown hair and was last seen in the same downtown streets of Poughkeepsie. At the police department, pressures to solve the case were enormous. A sudden feeling of urgency descended upon the community.

There was real fear on the streets. People were afraid to come outside, especially street dwellers. People don't care that we're missing because they think we don't belong on the streets in the first place.

It's not just the police, it's the community" a prostitute told the Journal on July 26, But they were wrong, the police were taking it very seriously and had been for nearly 22 months.

Thousands of hours of investigative work and man hours were already expended on the case. I had all worked together on the investigation which had grown to epic proportions. The families of the missing girls were numb from worry. In a prophetic statement to the Albany Times, Patricia Barone, whose daughter had been missing nearly two years, said: "If they find one of them, they'll find all of them, I'm sure of that".

She didn't know how right she was. Of course, she had no way of knowing, no one knew, that not far from the Market Street office, where the members of the task force diligently processed their paperwork every day, a house of horrors awaited them.

The home was set on a quiet residential block, in the shadow of famous Vassar College; a dark, gloomy, two-story house virtually across the street from a funeral home. A house that neighbors and children knew well. They saw it every day as they walked to work, parked their cars, rode their bicycles, played on the street. The local mailman and some neighborhood kids, the usual delivery people, they knew it too.

They all knew the house well, because it stunk to high heaven. The Beginning of the End. On Tuesday, September 1, , at about in the morning, in the second floor bedroom of this same house, a young woman was quietly being strangled.

She was a slightly built woman who had gone there to get paid for sex. The person who was trying to kill her was a large man, a very large man, whom she had seen before on the city streets, late at night, cruising for girls. He had his huge hands wrapped around her throat, his thumbs pressed deep into her flesh while she fought against him with all the strength God could give her.

Somehow, someway, she wriggled free and convinced the man to let her go. The man agreed to drive her back to Main Street where he had picked her up only a short time ago. They got into his white car and drove the girl to a local gas station. But just before he pulled into the station, the girl jumped from the car and ran away. The man continued to drive down the street. At the same moment and less than one block away, City of Poughkeepsie Det.

Skip Mannain and Town of Poughkeepsie Det. Bob McCready were in their unmarked car preparing to give out flyers asking the public for help in the Catina Newmaster disappearance.

Within seconds, they saw the very large man in his familiar white Camry and waved to him. The man quickly waved back because he recognized Det. Mannain from previous contacts. It was Kendall Francois.

As the officers pulled into the same gas station that Francois just left, a man came up to the car and told the police that a girl, who was now walking away, said that she was just assaulted. Quickly, the cops located the girl who confirmed the attack. That same afternoon, the police returned to 99 Fulton Street to talk with Kendall Francois about this most recent attack. Over the next few hours, Francois eventually made many admissions regarding the disappearance of the women. He was arrested and charged with a single count of murder in the death of Catina Newmaster on August 25, The police were elated.

A search warrant was drawn up and signed by a Town court judge. And then, on September 2, , shortly after midnight, the Town of Poughkeepsie police, State Police, City of Poughkeepsie police, a team of detectives, the district attorney, EMS crews, crime scene processors and an army of cops, drove over to 99 Fulton Street and entered into the house of the unreal. The House of Horrors.

Upon arrival, police knocked on the door and it was soon answered by Kendall's mother. His parents and sister were informed of the authority and purpose of the visit. They were removed from the home and brought to the Town of Poughkeepsie Police Department while the police began their search.

Within the hour, they located the first body. The house was immediately surrounded by police and secured. Rather than work the house throughout the night, the New York State Police decided to process the crime scene beginning at daylight. The address 99 Fulton was a two story green colonial home situated in the middle of the block, sandwiched in between two other similar houses.

Trivia Despite having been completed, and having had its theatrical trailer attached to several widely-released horror films in , the film was eventually pulled from release without any official explanation. It was later given its first official limited release seven years later in , when it became available as a "Video on Demand" title through DirecTV. The film was finally granted a DVD and Blu-Ray release through Shout Factory three years later in late ten full years after its initial planned release.

Goofs A police officer claims that a person has to be missing for 24 hours before filing a missing person's report. While this is a common myth and trope in film it is untrue. Quotes Victoria Dempsey : She kept covering her eyes, whispering "please take me home, please take me home, please take me home Crazy credits There is an additional scene after the credits.

User reviews Review. Top review. No, it's NOT real. An interview at the Tribeca Film Fest with director John Dowdle revealed - when asked if this movie is based on an actual killer in Poughkeepsie - that and I quote : "It's actually a combination of a number of them, but there's one -- Edmund Kemper. He was a really, really scary guy and we took a lot of pieces from him and we took some from the Green River Killer. There was a guy in Chicago we took pieces from. There was a duo in Michigan who worked together and filmed everything they did, and we took some stuff from them.

Some from Ted Bundy too. So we sort of combined a lot of different real stories. The found footage film is shot in the style of a documentary, purporting to be put together from the private video collection of an Upstate New York serial killer who filmed more than murders. Interviews from criminal experts, testimony from the only victim recovered alive, and even clips from local TV stations lead many to believe it's a real story, along with the chilling plot description:.

Astonishingly, that was only the beginning. Inside the home, police uncovered over neatly organized videotapes detailing the exploits of one man's decade-long crime spree.

The most disturbing part of the find was that the killer had filmed all of the footage himself -- from his first moments stalking his victims to their last seconds alive. According to Slash Film , "The Poughkeepsie Tapes" quietly premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in , but didn't stir buzz until it screened at a hour movie marathon later that year.

Both found footage movies offer disturbing depictions of kidnapping, assault on women and children, as well as murder. While marketing for found footage movies informs audiences that what they are about to witness is almost entirely real, The Poughkeepsie Tapes is all fabricated with only a few shreds of truth utilized by Dowdle to create one of horror's most terrifying killers.

The movie follows a team of investigators as they discuss the videotape recordings the killer kept as a keepsake; they served as a reminder of each murder.

The investigation uncovered videotapes hidden in the basement of a house he rented. As the detectives dive into the unknown killer's mind, it leads them down a path more disturbing than they could have ever predicted.

Despite the claim that The Poughkeepsie Tapes was based on a real-life event, it wasn't. Instead, it was influenced entirely by past serial killers and their crimes as well as the exploitative contents of snuff films. Snuff films commonly depict obscene content, normally acts of real homicide.