Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Spider and the Fly
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://claudiarowejournalist.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://claudiarowejournalist.com/about/ * https://www.harpercollins.com/cr-123576/claudia-rowe * http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/510816523/the-spider-and-the-fly-gets-stuck-in-a-web-of-self-regard
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016059008
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016059008
HEADING: Rowe, Claudia, 1966-
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100 1_ |a Rowe, Claudia, |d 1966-
670 __ |a The spider and the fly, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Claudia Rowe) data view screen (award winning journalist, b. 05/29/1966)
PERSONAL
Born May 29, 1966.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and reporter. Has worked for the New York Times and Seattle Times.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Claudia Rowe began covering the case of serial killer Kendall Francois while working as a reporter for the New York Times. In the late 1990s, while living with his mother and two younger siblings in a ramshackle house in Poughkeepsie, New York, Francois raped and killed eight sex workers. He piled their bodies in the attic, and the poor state of the house masked the smell of rotting bodies above. Rowe began interviewing Francois through letters she sent to him in prison, and while the assignment began as professional, it morphed into a personal obsession. In her memoir, The Spider and the Fly: A Web of Memory and Murder, Rowe recounts that she developed a strange rapport with Francois. She shares her years’-long correspondence with him, as well as several phone conversations, and she writes about her fascination with her subject. In particular, Rowe interrogates her motives for maintaining her correspondence with the serial killer. She asks why she, as a successful white woman, is enthralled by an obese black man who killed women who looked a lot like her.
In a rare negative assessment on the NPR Web site, Annalisa Quinn remarked: “I can’t help but think — perhaps unfairly, since no one thinks their own writing is bad — that a story that touches on so much suffering has an almost ethical demand to be the best book it can be. Rowe is not a truly bad writer. But she enters into a world of pain and violence and comes away only with a book about herself.” Yet, as Ardi Alspach noted in the online Criminal Element, “Rowe’s memoir is astonishing. Readers are taken into the mind of the reporter as she seeks the truth from a violent man. Her obsession is frightening as she goes to such great lengths for the truth. After years of correspondence, phone calls, and jail visits, Rowe learns a lot about the mind of a serial killer. But in the end, I think it’s what she learns about herself that is most important.” Paul Constant, writing in the Seattle Weekly Online, was also impressed, asserting: “So much of this book is dedicated to big concepts: forgiveness, the possibility of change, the thought that if one of us commits a preventable heinous act, maybe we all carry a little bit of that stain on our souls.” Constant added: “Spider is a messy, complicated book about a messy, complicated human. It’s about finding yourself inextricably bound in a situation that you never wanted.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Rowe, Claudia, The Spider and the Fly: A Web of Memory and Murder, Dey Street (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2017, Kathy Sexton, review of The Spider and the Fly.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of The Spider and the Fly.
ONLINE
Big Thrill, http://www.thebigthrill.org/ (January 31, 2017), review of The Spider and the Fly.
Criminal Element, https://www.criminalelement.com/ (February 2, 2017), Ardi Alspach, review of The Spider and the Fly.
NPR Website, http://www.npr.org/ (January 26, 2017), Annalisa Quinn, review of The Spider and the Fly.
Seattle Review of Books, http://www.seattlereviewofbooks.com/ (January 24, 2017), Paul Constant, review of The Spider and the Fly.
Seattle Times Online, http://www.seattletimes.com/ (Jauaryn 26, 2017), review of The Spider and the Fly.
Seattle Weekly Online, http://www.seattleweekly.com/ (January 25, 2017), review of The Spider and the Fly.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com.au/ (March 31, 2017), review of The Spider and the Fly.
Willamette Week Online, http://www.wweek.com/ (March 3, 2017), review of The Spider and the Fly.*
The Spider and the Fly (2017 book)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Spider and the Fly was published on January 24, 2017, by Dey Street Books and was written by Claudia Rowe. It chronicles interviews between Rowe and serial killer Kendall Francois[1][2][3] also known as "The Poughkeepsie Killer" and "Stinky."
While working for The New York Times, Rowe was assigned to cover the murders of eight women by Francois and interviewed him for five years during which she experienced a strange bond with the killer and eventually conquered her own struggles. The book is part memoir and part psychological thriller.
BOOKS JAN 24, 2017
Claudia Rowe Examines Her Life Through the Eyes of a Serial Killer in The Spider and the Fly
by Rich Smith
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In the late 1990s, Kendall Francois raped and killed eight sex workers in Poughkeepsie, New York. For two years, he piled their bodies in the attic of a house he shared with his mother and his two younger siblings. At the time of these murders, current Seattle Times education reporter, Claudia Rowe, was working in Poughkeepsie as a stringer for the New York Times. She wanted the story, but she also wanted to know the culprit; she wanted to get inside his head.
Her debut book, The Spider and the Fly, is a gripping memoir/true crime hybrid in which Rowe recounts her lengthy correspondence with Francois, an epistolary (and telephonic!) relationship she became obsessed with, nearly to the exclusion of all else. Along the way, she investigates her motives for investigating him.
Her central question: Why would she, a well-off white woman, develop an addiction to the mind of an obese black man who brutalized women, the majority of whom sort of resembled her? The reader's response: You don't have to do this, you don't have to do this, who cares about why this guy did it, oh my god, why are you doing this?
On Friday, January 27, Rowe will launch the book, read from it, and hold a Q&A at Elliott Bay Book Company. But I had some questions of my own.
Humanizing a serial killer in the way you do in this book makes me think any of us can become a serial killer.
Any of us is capable of one burst of rage that could kill someone. But to gain some sort of strange sense of satisfaction from doing it compulsively—that is a whole other thing. That is different from snapping in a moment of rage. I think [Francois] alternated between this towering narcissism, these grandiose illusions of his powerfulness, and then this deeply abject sense of himself. I think he was terrified to look honestly at himself.
You started writing this book in 2000. It's 2017. What took so long?
It's not an easy thing to do. It took me a long time to get the perspective on myself. I couldn't do it at the time, but I tried. I had to get older. I had to get a lot older, and a lot more seasoned as a journalist, which I did.
Did any other writers serve as a model?
No. I was really really frustrated at the time that I couldn't find anything like this in 2000-01. [In the book], I mention Janet Malcom's The Journalist and the Murderer, which was really important to me, but it's more of a view from on high about the fraught relationship between the writer and the source. My book is different in that I'm not way up high—I'm in the muck of it.
I was disgusted by the way the police handled the sex workers in this story. How much blame does the state shoulder in this case?
There are infinite sources where somebody might logically place blame in this story. You can say the police in Poughkeepsie did whatever job you think they did. You can also say the newspaper didn't report it. And the people who lived in the city, who knew what the center of town was like, avoided it. In some way, obviously, it's on Kendall Francois—it's on him because he did what he did. But it's also on all of us, who preferred to look away because it was unpalatable.
You're hard on Poughkeepsie in the book. What kind of response do you anticipate there?
I don't know. My experience of Poughkeepsie at the time was one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. I think it's about denial. Rings of denial. Expanding circles of denial. Poughkeepsie itself is the largest circle. They denied the reality of what was happening on Main Street, in the center of downtown. The denial of the family—what was going on in their own home, the rot they were living in. Then my own denial.
The point of the book is to say: look closer. Look with more human compassion at everything. At the women on the street who are so ugly that you just want to turn away from them. Once upon a time, they were kids. They went to elementary school. See people as we all are: struggling. If we could just see each other with that in our minds, with a little more sense of common humanity, then I really believe that some of this pain and destruction might not have to exist to the degree that it does. recommended
Author bio:
Claudia Rowe is a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist, writer and speaker. She is currently a staff writer at the Seattle Times, her work has been published in the New York Times and Huffington Post among others. Please do visit her website here http://claudiarowejournalist.com/.
Claudia Rowe writes Spider and the Fly about unusual letters written to serial killer
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Serial Killer Plays 'mind Games' With Author of 'Spider and the Fly'
Olivia Lambert
news.com.au
@LivLambert
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A JOURNALIST fascinated by a depraved serial killer began writing him letters in prison.
Claudia Rowe was driven to understand why he committed his crimes but the man she was corresponding with was no ordinary monster.
Kendall Francois, a man convicted of killing eight women in a series of grisly crimes between 1996 and 1998 in Poughkeepsie, New York, was an open book. But his information came at a cost.
She could ask questions of him as long as he could ask questions of her. The first letter turned into a four-year correspondence. The pair developed a strange connection — from behind bars, the killer got inside her head.
Years later, Ms Rowe is telling her story. The author of The Spider and the Fly tells news.com.au how the quest for a story turned her life upside down.
THE LETTERS
Francois liked the attention, but her questions infuriated him and he wanted control. In his eerie first response to her letter, he demanded to know the most specific and personal details about her life.
“I want to know about your hometown, childhood house, elementary school and high school up through college, your first car, your first kiss, the dress you wore under your graduation gown, I want to know the first time (if ever) you gave a guy a blow job, the first time you had intercourse, the last time, people you hate at work, affairs, when (if ever) you dyed your hair, the types of computers you have/use,” he wrote.
Rowe told news.com.au he was searching for meaningless details because he perceived that to be what journalists do. In asking, he thought he was flipping the balance of power.
“Another reporter would have said, ‘You’re a total creep and forget it’ but I was so consumed with what I wanted to know,” she said.
“I continued the conversation but I never told him the answers to those questions, never gave him a photograph though he insisted constantly in every letter, every phone call. He never achieved the power and control he wanted.”
Francois played mind games with the reporter who now works for The Seattle Times but who previously spent time with The New York Times and The Huffington Post. He refused to give her any details about the depravity behind his killings.
Kendall Francois exchanged letters with journalist Claudia Rowe. Picture: NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision
Kendall Francois exchanged letters with journalist Claudia Rowe. Picture: NYS Department of Corrections and Community SupervisionSource:Supplied
Rowe was at the start of her journalism career and yearned to understand how a person could be cruel enough to kill, again and again.
“That came out of my own childhood and teenage years. I met people who were extremely cruel and had rough times in my family, that’s what drove me towards journalism, trying to see into a person and figure out why people do things,” she said.
“I was consumed by questions like why had people in my own family been seemingly out of control? Why had friends done hurtful things? Questions many people carry around.
“Kendall Francois was going to be my map of cruelty.”
Rowe was living in Poughkeepsie where Francois slayed a number of prostitutes. She followed his footsteps down the streets he walked and visited the schools where he was enrolled.
“I sort of knew the backdrop of his life in this very white, conservative, Republican community that he had grown up in. He was a completely different entity in this world and definitely an odd ball in this world,” she said.
Francois was erratic and paranoid and would never give much away about his family.
One time he told Rowe his dad was a farmer in Louisiana in America’s south and his sister was studying to become a minister.
When Rowe asked him questions about that years later, Francois became enraged, demanding she reveal who she’d been talking to about him.
“He was angry at the phantom person who told me these family secrets, but it was him,” Rowe said.
That's when she realised how sinister he really was.
Gina Barone, killed by Kendall Francois.
Gina Barone, killed by Kendall Francois.Source:Supplied
Kendall Francois’ victim Wendy Meyers.
Kendall Francois’ victim Wendy Meyers.Source:Supplied
‘I WAS IN A DARK PLACE’
Rowe’s appearance matched Francois’ victims — she had brown hair, white skin and a petite build.
“There was in some way some kind of a connection between us,” Rowe said.
“I won’t say it was a connection you would have with a normal person, but in some strange way I became important to him and for a short while he was an important figure in my life as a destructive force. He did consume a lot of my mental energy for a while.”
Rowe believed Francois fantasised about the life he was going to have with his murder victims, the white picket fence, fairytale life.
“He would spin these elaborate fantasies in his mind and I do think he kind of imagined the perfect domestic life which was utterly delusional. I think he had something of that going on with me as well,” she said.
“He got a huge charge out of our cat and mouse game and I found that really exhausting.”
Kendall Francois murdered about eight women. Picture: Supplied
Kendall Francois murdered about eight women. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied
Rowe said the letters to Francois started taking over her life and even destroyed some of her relationships.
“I was living with a man at the time and that completely shattered. He was utterly horrified with my pursuit and the question I wanted to answer so that ended,” she said.
“I was very ashamed, I was ashamed of what I was doing. People would have all kinds of judgments and I was shy to talk about it and became increasingly isolated from family and old friends.
“I knew it was way out there what I was doing and I was quite conflicted about it. Doing this put me in a very isolated, dark place for a while.
“But I’m not in that place anymore, things have changed radically in my life for the good.”
Looking back now, Rowe said her and Francois never listened to each other.
She was a young gun reporter wanting a reason for his madness, while he was a sad, lonely man in a cell, wanting a friend, and to connect with somebody who was not a lawyer or psychiatrist.
Rowe did not reveal exactly how she and Francois ended their correspondence but said it was abrupt and they never did get what they wanted. Francois died in jail in 2014.
The Spider and the Fly: Inside a Reporter's Prison Correspondence with Serial Killer Kendall Francois
BY JEFF TRUESDELL•@JHTRUESDELL
POSTED ON JANUARY 31, 2017 AT 5:45PM EDT
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The Spider and the Fly
Journalist Claudia Rowe had always been haunted by her traumatic childhood. She made sense of it with a correspondence with an unlikely person: a convicted serial killer.
Over a two-year period, Kendall Francois strangled eight women and stuffed their bodies in his attic before his 1998 arrest. His victims all worked as prostitutes on the downtrodden Main Street of Poughkeepsie, New York. All the while, he shared a house one block from Vassar College with his parents and sister, who were ostensibly ignorant of the corpses rotting in their attic.
His outbursts of rage were terrifying and familiar to Rowe — for personal reasons.
In a new book, The Spider and the Fly, Rowe, now a reporter for The Seattle Times, explores parallels between Francois’ destructive life, ending with his 2014 death at 43, and her own upbringing amid violence and turbulence.
“I had seen it in my own family,” Rowe tells PEOPLE. “It completely bewildered me, and it confused and frightened me.”
Trying to understand Francois’ impulses became “an effort to feel better about forces that had shaped me growing up. I felt like if I could understand the mechanism behind that violence, I wouldn’t be so bewildered by it.”
Rowe covered the horrific revelations of Francois’ crimes as a reporter. Even before he was sentenced to eight life terms, she reached out to him with a letter that launched five years of correspondence, phone calls and face-to-face meetings.
“Here is this guy who’s going to explain to me cruelty; he’s going to lay out a map to me, an A to B to C,” explains Rowe. “That would somehow satisfy these ghosts that I had carried around with me all my life about people who had hurt me, and why.”
Claudia Rowe
MERYL SCHENKER
“I decided in my mind Kendall Francois was going to be my answer. I thought he’d be all-too-happy to explain,” she says. But she adds, “What I expected was in no way what I got.”
During their correspondence, Francois kept his secrets, just as Rowe—in her conversations with the killer—held onto hers.
Troubled Childhoods, Despite Appearances
Rowe grew up in affluence on Manhattan’s Central Park West. Her mother was a college literature professor; her father worked in news promotions at NBC.
But appearances masked explosive conflicts inside the home and attacks on Rowe’s self-esteem that fueled her need in adolescence to escape. She ran the streets after dark, consorting in Central Park with drug dealers and delinquents. While her parents lived an outer life “framed in culture and grace,” she writes, “Every gentility was a lie, undermined by their bitter marriage, their petrified kids.”
Her book exposes and implodes such façades — beginning with the place in which Francois committed his crimes.
• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.
Poughkeepsie is an old city along the Hudson River that Rowe, 50, a former reporter for the Poughkeepsie Journal, describes as “a hard, dirty place surrounded by wealth and natural beauty,” adding, “I had the sense that this city was kind of an emblem for denial.”
The discovery of Francois’ victims decomposing in an attic “seemed to me this very notion writ large— here was this family living in denial about what was right above their heads.”
A big man — 6-foot-4 and 320 pounds upon his arrest — Francois had been one of the few African-Americans in his predominantly white middle and high school. His mother taught Baptist Sunday school and made sure her children were regulars at church. In their public appearances, he and his family members presented a comfortable middle-class exterior.
But there were disconnects in his life that began to pile up, and they resonated with Rowe.
“I had a sense of him pretty early as deeply alienated, very out of step with the world he had grown up in and was living in,” she says. “I had the sense of him as this kind of loser-reject. I also felt out of step with the world I grew up in, tremendously alienated and lonely. I felt ugly and worthless, and those were things I felt I might be able to see into him somehow.”
She adds, “I could feel his inability to connect. That was real. And that was real for me, too.”
A Stunning Confession
Francois joined the army after graduation but was discharged for obesity. He returned home and found work as a custodian at the school he attended.
He quickly developed a reputation with law enforcement for assaulting prostitutes. When prostitutes began disappearing from Poughkeepsie’s streets, police circulated photos of Francois as a warning. Authorities also asked one woman who met up with him to wear a wire to help them build a case; she later vanished and turned up as one of his victims.
He was being questioned about an unrelated attack when he stunned authorities by voluntarily confessing to the killings.
Inside his residence, the lie of the Francois family’s exterior was punctured forever by what detectives encountered.
They found, Rowe writes, “a woman’s body dissolved in a garbage bin; a pile of skulls; a bit of rope with an eyeball attached, tied to a skeleton’s arms.”
All of it was inside a home where four people lived that was filled top-to-bottom with piled garbage and decay.
It turned out Francois’ mom had complained about certain strong odors. He had told her there was a dead raccoon in the attic, but he couldn’t find it, so he couldn’t remove it.
Correspondence with a Killer
Eleven months after Francois’ arrest, Rowe drafted her first letter. When Francois answered, it came with demands that she share a photo of herself and intimate details of her sex life. All of it was to be laid out in a precise number of single-spaced pages.
• Pick up PEOPLE’s special edition True Crime Stories: Cases That Shocked America, on sale now, for the latest on Casey Anthony, JonBenét Ramsey and more.
Rowe ignored it and, through his repeated requests, held her ground. “In terms of the information he said he wanted, he didn’t care. It was a game and I saw that very quickly,” Rowe says.
But the exchanges that would illuminate both their lives had begun.
“Before every phone conversation and before every visit, I was so frightened I could barely breathe. But in actual moments of talking to him, I did like talking to him,” Rowe says.
“When I could see him, and see his eyes and his face, and see how flustered he sometimes became, it made him seem more like a very conflicted, messed-up human being rather than this kind of unknowable force.”
“I did find places where I could connect with aspects of him,” she says. “He had a sense of humor, he had a sense of beauty, he had a sense—a very twisted sense—of loyalty. He pined for something he imagined to be love, and I understood that.”
She describes “a buried thread of humanity in there. But it was so covered up with paranoia and rage that it was nothing you could hold onto in any solid way.”
She told him from the start she was pursuing a book, but Francois was suspicious, believing that he was being set up for betrayal.
But their contact continued, until, on what became her last prison visit, Rowe rebuffed his request for an embrace. She had never wanted to touch him. But she offered her hand, and after he forcefully grabbed it, “he slammed his other hand on top, and I was caught,” she writes. “I drew my hand back and he did not resist. Nor did he exactly release me. … Still mocking, half imploring, he kept smiling into my eyes as I reclaimed myself and finally pulled away.”
Hard Lessons Learned
After the violent encounter, Rowe left the prison, left New York, drove 3,000 miles west to begin her life anew and did not address Francois for another 11 years.
Before she left, she received a letter from him, which she read after she reached the West Coast. The letter read, “How I ‘deal’ with the awful things I’ve done is personal. Even if I wanted to pour out my heart to you, I couldn’t…. People will never get what they want from me, because I died many years ago and several times.”
Rowe realized that during their years of correspondence, she had transformed as well.
“The journey with Kendall Francois taught me that I needed to stand up for myself, and it really taught me to be a stronger person, and where to draw the line, and where to strike the balance in how far I was willing to go,” she says.
“When any of [his victims] said ‘I need to go,’ that was always his trigger,” she says. “The change in his affect was immediate, and it was ice-cold, so I knew what my just disappearing would trigger in him. I knew that it would do damage to a clearly damaged person. But I also knew that it was what had to happen for both of our sakes, really.”
In the end, she wrote one last letter to him summing up their correspondence, which, she believes, made her a better person.
“When I first wrote you, and in all the letters afterward, I was searching for proof that redemption was possible,” she wrote Francois. “Often you accused me of failing to listen. You were right. There were so many voices in my head that it was hard to hear. Voices shouting about what I wanted from you. Voices of judgment. Voices of my family and friends. But in all this, my own voice was silent. … You never wanted to tell me your secret life, and it is still yours. What I have written, the book you were so frightened of, is my secret life.”
“Thank you,” she wrote him, “for showing me who I needed to be.”
Journalist revisits relationship with serial killer who confessed to eight murders in N.Y.
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Handout from publisher
Claudia Rowe's new book explores her relationship with serial killer, Kendall Francois, who confessed to murdering eight women and stashing them in his Poughkeepsie family home. (MERYL SCHENKER)
BY
SHERRYL CONNELLY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, January 14, 2017, 9:31 PM
After Kendall Francois murdered a woman, he’d stash her body in the attic of his Poughkeepsie family home to let it rot. One after another, until there were eight.
The murders went on from 1996 to 1998, terrorizing the upstate city and befuddling investigators who failed to piece together clues linking the killings to Francois.
It was only after one of his victims escaped his clutches that Francois was brought in for police questioning. He ultimately confessed to the rape and killing of eight prostitutes.
Journalist Claudia Rowe revisits her tortured relationship with Francois in a new book, “The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder.”
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Rowe, at the time a stringer for The New York Times, carried on an intense four-year correspondence with Francois, visiting him in prison twice, as well as talking with him by phone for hours.
Now a reporter at The Seattle Times, Rowe’s conversations with Francois forced her to confront her own history of assault. Along the way, she gained a deep look at the man and his murders.
Francois was discharged from the Army for obesity in 1992. Back in Poughkeepsie, he lived with his parents and younger sister, Kierstyn. Lumbering and unkempt, Francois sporadically attended school.
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Mostly, he hired prostitutes. Or tried to.
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Wendy Meyers, 30, took his cash twice, but ran away. The time she gave him his money’s worth, she also gave him AIDS.
"The Spider and the Fly" book by Claudia Row.
"The Spider and the Fly" book by Claudia Row.
Meyers was in his bedroom when he started choking her in October 1996. She fought hard and wouldn’t die. Francois dumped her in the bathtub facedown and turned the faucets on.
When her leg stopped twitching, he carried her lifeless body to the attic.
Later, a cop charged with clearing corpses from the upstairs room at Francois’ place ruined two pairs of boots plowing through the sludge of decayed flesh.
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The skulls had been dumped into a kiddie pool. Three other bodies were jammed in a basement crawlspace next to where Francois’ father, McKinley, spent hours hanging out at night.
“Killing,” Francois told the prosecutor, “seemed easier than getting into a relationship.”
In November, he brought home Catherine Marsh, 31, who didn’t do much of anything to annoy him, but he killed her anyway. Up in the attic, she went.
Gina Barone, 29, was a working girl and a junkie. During sex in his car, she whined he was too heavy and it was taking too long. Francois choked her into silence so he could finish.
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Then she woke up, but she wasn’t conscious for long. Francois strangled Barone and threw her into the trunk, hauling her body in the next day.
Barbara Perry (r.) attended the sentencing of her daughter’s killer, Kendall Francois, at the Dutchess County Courthouse in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Monday, Aug. 7, 2000.
Barbara Perry (r.) attended the sentencing of her daughter’s killer, Kendall Francois, at the Dutchess County Courthouse in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Monday, Aug. 7, 2000. (LEE FERRIS/THE POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL/AP)
The bodies in the attic were piling up and the smell was drifting down. Francois told his family there was a dead raccoon he couldn’t find.
The house was already a sordid mess. Syringes among the family pictures, soiled underwear in the kitchen, maggots in a bathroom sink. His sister slept on a mattress in direct line of the maggot casings that fell from the ceiling.
On the outside, the family maintained a middle-class appearance. Francois’ mother, Paulette, was a vocational counselor for the mentally ill. Sister Kierstyn was a full-time student pursuing a degree in family studies.
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Every few months, a police report would be filed, yet another half-naked woman running from 99 Fulton Ave. screaming, banging on neighbors’ doors for help.
Francois racked up a few arrests. But investigators saw him as a brute who beat up women, not as a sadistic serial killer.
Soon reports of missing women were filtering in to police. Lt. Bill Siegrist and Detective Skip Mannain carried on a lackluster investigation as community outrage swelled, according to Rowe.
The investigators figured the perpetrator was white. It’s an anomaly for serial killers to cross racial lines. Besides, Francois passed a lie detector test.
Woman chained in storage container by serial killer files lawsuit
The burly former middle-school hall monitor kept on murdering. Kathleen Hurley, 47, and Mary Giaccone, 29, were strangled in 1997. Sandra French, 51; Audrey Pugliese, 34, and Catina Newmaster, 25, all met grisly ends in the summer of 1998.
A team of New York State Police forensic investigators remove the bodies that Francois stashed away in his Poughkeepsie house.
A team of New York State Police forensic investigators remove the bodies that Francois stashed away in his Poughkeepsie house. (SPENCER AINSLEY/THE POUGHKEEPSIE JOURNAL/AP)
The details were always gruesome. Francois left French’s body on his Mickey Mouse comforter while he dressed and went to school. He finished off one woman by pressing his boot to her throat, exhausted from the struggle of murdering her.
Newmaster’s case drew particular outrage. She was an informant for the police, a “waiflike junkie.” Busted on dozens of drug arrests, Newmaster had dodged a sentence by wearing a wire for the cops. Mannain sent her back out on Main St. with instructions not to get in Francois’ car.
She did again and again. The police always found a way to pull her out. At one court date in the winter of 1998, Newmaster pointed at Francois — who was seated in the front row charged with assault.
“That’s him. That’s the killer,” she giggled out loud to a friend.
The details of her death are vague, but she was Francois’ last murder victim.
A week later, Francois set his sights on Christine Scala. Francois visited Scala’s motel room all summer, watching her get high. He later told Rowe he imagined marrying her and having a family together.
That morning, he invited her over to his house to get something to eat. Two blocks away, Mannain, making a rare appearance in uniform, was handing out flyers printed with Newmaster’s face to motorists.
Francois pulled the car into the garage and demanded sex. Scala told him that was not going to happen. First, he punched her in the face and held her down by the throat as she fought him.
Serial killer Kendall Francois died in prison on Sept. 11, 2014.
Serial killer Kendall Francois died in prison on Sept. 11, 2014. (NYS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS & COMMUNITY SUPERVISION)
Finally, he pulled her out of the car by her hair, demanding she perform a sex act on him. But his condom kept falling off. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you,” Francois shouted.
It was then he heard his sister’s voice calling outside the garage door. Kierstyn really needed the car. She had to get to school. Francois and Kierstyn actually passed Mannain on the way. The cop and the killer waved at each other.
Scala stumbled into a convenience store where the cops, summoned by a customer, caught up to her.
Rowe writes that Mannain, whom she interviewed, was annoyed that he was pulled from his serial killer hunt to deal with yet another report of Francois assaulting a prostitute.
Incredibly, Mannain didn’t put it together. The thumbprints at her neck, the attack in the car, matched what Newmaster reported when she was alive.
Earlier in the case, Francois had invited Mannain into 99 Fulton Ave., taking him upstairs to his bedroom. There, right under the rotting bodies, the detective didn’t pick up the scent, according to the book.
In Attica four years later, Francois howled at that memory when he told Rowe. She’d never heard him sound so pleased. On the day of the attack on Scala, cops brought in Francois for questioning. It became obvious that the police were only looking at him for assault. That’s when he came out with it.
“I want to talk to the chief prosecutor of the missing women,” he announced. A full confession followed.
A page from the missing persons section of the New York State Police shows undated file photos of seven women who are missing in the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area.
A page from the missing persons section of the New York State Police shows undated file photos of seven women who are missing in the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area. (AP)
Nine hours later, the prosecutor, Margie Smith, stumbled out of the interrogation room and fell sobbing into the arms of a cop.
Later in court, Francois giggled as relatives read their victims’ statements. He pulled eight consecutive life sentences.
Francois died in prison in September 2014 at the age of 43, having served 16 years.
On Rowe’s last visit to Attica, Francois boasted that if he hadn’t confessed, “I could have kept going, it would have gone on and gone on, and they never would have found a thing.”
A Poughkeepsie cop had already admitted as much to Rowe.
So why did he do it? Why confess?
“It just came to me when I was sitting there by myself,” he said.
An exchange moments later made it chillingly clear Francois was still a monster.
“I was thinking I want to throw you down on this table,” he told Rowe, “and f--k your brains out.”
“The Spider and the Fly” will go on sale Jan. 24.
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Tuesday January 31, 2017
How a serial killer taught a reporter the complicated meaning of evil
Reporter Claudia Rowe says her uncomfortable connection with serial killer Kendall Francois became an addiction. Her new book is called The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder.
Reporter Claudia Rowe says her uncomfortable connection with serial killer Kendall Francois became an addiction. Her new book is called The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder. (Meryl Schenker/Harper Collins)
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How a serial killer taught a reporter the complicated meaning of evil
January 31, 2017 full episode transcript
FULL EPISODE
Read story transcript
* Warning: This interview deals with disturbing material *
In the 1990s, New York Times stringer Claudia Rowe knew something sinister was happening when women who worked the streets of Poughkeepsie, New York, as prostitutes began disappearing.
But when Kendall Francois was arrested — and later confessed to killing eight women and hiding their bodies in his house — what began as a reporter's investigation into the meaning of evil became an obsession that would have a profound impact on her life.
Rowe writes about her relationship with Francois in her new book, The Spider and The Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder.
Read a sample from The Spider and The Fly
The reporter would become so obsessed with trying to understand the volcanic violence and rage inside Francois, it would destroy her personal life.
The Spider and the Fly
(Harper Collins Canada)
She says the relationship became an addiction for her. And the two engaged a dance of mutual manipulation.
"I imagined that he would provide for me kind of a map of cruelty or a diagram of the mechanism behind it," Rowe tells The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
"That is not in any way what I got. But what I did get was a sense of the complexity of evil — the texture of a person who is so torn up." she adds.
"What I did get was an answer about the misery within cruelty. He was a miserable person."
Rowe says that despite his heinous crimes, she could identify some humanity in the killer. And when he died in 2014, she says she was filled with complicated emotions.
"When he died I felt this terrible regret for the waste that is embodied in that story — the waste of the eight women who might have had a chance to be something else."
"And the waste of a child who also could have been something else, instead of a serial killer."
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this web post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Howard Goldenthal.
HomeCultureAuthor Claudia Rowe on What It's Like to a Befriend a Serial Killer
Author Claudia Rowe on What It’s Like to a Befriend a Serial Killer
What’s it really like to form a pseudo-friendship with a serial killer? For four years, journalist Claudia Rowe wrote and visited a man who had confessed to murdering eight women. In her new book, The Spider and the Fly, she explains why
Jan 26, 2017 Jennifer Berry 0
In her new book, The Spider and the Fly, Claudia Rowe explains why she befriended a serial killer
(PHOTO: MERYL SCHENKER)
Journalist Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for The New York Times in Poughkeepsie, NY when she formed a relationship with a killer. His name was Kendall Francois, a quiet, hulking community college student, and in 1998 he confessed to murdering eight women and hiding their bodies in the attic and basement of the home he shared with his parents and sister. Rowe wrote back and forth with Francois for four years. She spoke to him on the phone several times and visited him in prison on three occasions. What motivated her to reach out to a serial murderer of women? The answer is complex but she says she was drawn to the case because she was searching for her own answers about the motivations of cruelty itself and the mechanics of denial—Francois’ family lived in a home littered with bodily matter and used condoms while the children went to school and his mother worked full-time at a psychiatric hospital, after all. Rowe calls this disconnect between the public face and the reality at home “emblematic of the city [of Poughkeepsie] itself,” something she ruminated over since her stint as an education reporter at the Poughkeepsie Journal. She pursued a pseudo-friendship with Francois because she was convinced, in an overly simplistic way, she says, that he held all the answers to the questions of cruelty and denial that had plagued her her entire life. Ultimately, she says, his case was the vehicle that helped her confront her own ghosts.
Now, 18 years after their first letters were exchanged, her novel—based on the tale of their connection and her own personal journey of discovery—The Spider and the Fly (Harper, $34), is finally out. We spoke to the author about the fear she felt each time she checked her mailbox, how this unusual relationship helped her face her own traumatic past, and how it felt to finally walk away from her unlikely prison pen pal.
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How did you first decide to reach out to Kendall Francois? It was a year after his arrest when I first wrote and for that entire intervening year, I just couldn’t get this case out of my head. I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I couldn’t escape it. I was just ruminating and grinding over it all the time. Initially, I decided that I was very interested in understanding the motivations behind cruelty and Kendall Francois was gonna be my map. He was going to sketch for me the landscape of cruelty! That was my fairly simplistic belief at the beginning and that was what prompted me finally to write to him, though I was really frightened when I did so. I was not practiced at that kind of thing and I was no kind of expert.
In the years that you and Francois corresponded, and the three times you met in person, were you scared around him? I was terrified all the time. I was terrified of the letters. I was terrified to read them. They felt like a person reaching out of the paper and grabbing me by the throat. In the first visit, Kendall Francois was behind a huge Plexiglas window but in the subsequent visits at Attica State Prison, he was not shackled, he was not behind any kind of barrier at all. We were sitting thigh to thigh, next to each other at a little card table. The idea that he could do something to me—he certainly could touch me—[was there, but] of course, that was crazy. That was just not the environment in which he operated, but that rationale didn’t matter. My own terror in terms of what he represented for me was really pervasive and it didn’t matter whether he was shackled or not shackled or what the rational understanding was.
Can you give the readers a little bit of information about what he represented for you? At the beginning Kendall Francois was, for me, this idea of a monstrous person that I wanted to understand. But as we corresponded and as the interaction evolved over four years, he came to represent for me something beyond the person himself. He came to represent all my ghosts. All my fears. All my backstory. All the ways other people had hurt me. All the ways I had weathered criticism. He came to represent this mountain of past pain. That’s why he felt so familiar to me. And so it was about confronting my own ghosts through him. That’s what the story is.
Throughout your interactions with him, did he ever try to sway or guide your opinion of him? Constantly. I think he was constantly trying to manipulate my opinion of him just as writers are often trying to guide the opinion of their source. The interaction between me and Kendall Francois and the way he was trying to manipulate me was an absolute parallel to the way reporters—and I have been a reporter, I am a reporter—try to guide an interview and a conversation with a source, so we were both kind of “working” the other. And surely, he was trying to influence or manipulate my opinion of him.
Did he ever succeed? I don’t know that he succeeded but I came to understand him, mostly through his letters and through some of the conversations, as a far more complex person than just “a monster.” A monster is not untrue but it’s just very one-dimensional and I came to understand him as a more dimensional person. That doesn’t mean forgiveness; it just means a deeper understanding of a more complex person and, I guess, in spite of himself though he tried to work me at every turn.
In her new book, The Spider and the Fly, Claudia Rowe explains why she befriended a serial killer
In those dimensions of his self, did you discover any more surprising human qualities? I can say this: there were commonalities. Kendall Francois had a sense of humour; not gross, evil humour, but goofy, slapstick humour. He had a sense of beauty; he drew these flowery, intricately shaded hearts and butterfly pictures. He had an admittedly twisted yet very strong sense of loyalty. A sense of family. A sense of wanting a loving relationship though he was in no way able in fact to connect with anyone, but he pined for that. He had a sense of outrage at social injustice. Now, obviously those aspects of him were quite warped but they were things I could recognize as things I wanted, a sense of outrage that I also had about hypocrisy. He often made comments about Poughkeepsie and Duchess County that while extreme, were not entirely wrong, and I too wanted a relationship with somebody I could trust and really believe in. He had aspects of humanity that were recognizable to me.
In those aspects of humanity, do you feel like you got close to understanding why he committed his crimes? I think it’s like this: in the “official” recounting, if you will—and I’ve waded through tons of police reports—there was a fairly consistent pattern. There were many, many women who were with Kendall and survived that interaction. Who he brought home and who ended up bruised and battered, but they survived. There seemed to be a very consistent pattern involved with those who did not. So you could say “When Kendall Francois felt humiliated or rejected, he was triggered into this blind rage.” And that would be a very simple A + B = C understanding of his pattern, yes. But people are complicated and I became increasingly unsatisfied with that answer. While it’s not wrong, it just wasn’t enough for me. That trigger was real, that’s true. He interpreted people leaving as rejection and he could not tolerate it. And when he felt humiliated, particularly in public, same thing. But, the why of why anyone does anything is a very complex knot of personal history.
And did you ever experience his reaction to rejection? When I would say “OK, I have to leave now” on our in-person visits, he would completely change in a second and it didn’t seem to be terribly thoughtful. It seemed more like a reflex, just a change came over him and he became hard and cold like granite and it was immediate. It happened every time.
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How do you think he felt about his confession? Was he relieved to have confessed or did he ever regret it? I’ve thought about this question many, many times and gone round and round. And I have to say that I have come down to believing this: Kendall Francois was deeply invested in control, even though he was clearly an out-of-control person. But he was deeply invested in maintaining what he felt was control—control of conversation, control of every situation. Regarding the police, when he felt that he as about to lose control of the story—even though I don’t think the police necessarily knew that at that time! They left him alone in a room questioning him about a rape and assault, which he had confessed to. And they tell him “Okay, we need to get a warrant for your house to get the shirt that you were wearing during this rape that you have just confessed to. We need this for evidence.” That seems to have triggered in his mind “Oh man, it’s all going to come apart now. They’re going to find out everything and I am going to do it on my terms.” And that’s what I think happened. And I think that’s what police believe as well. This guy was heavily invested in control and when he felt like control was about to wrested away from him, he took control.
How did you feel when you stopped communicating with him? I don’t want to give away too much of the book but I had come to a different place in myself through the interactions with Kendall and digging into the whole case. I had come to understand myself in a different way than I did at the beginning. And so I felt like I had a) gotten a certain understanding that I needed, and b) no longer needed to tolerate somebody toying with, battering and berating me. He was alternately solicitous and cruel. He was both. And I just said “You know what, I don’t need this anymore.”
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Was coming to that decision difficult? Honestly, it was not an easy decision because I kept imagining what this would feel like for him which would be absolute rejection which it was, of course. And rejection, I knew, set him off into this horrible place. Obviously he was in prison, what can he do? But just on an understanding of a human being, I knew this would be deeply tormenting to him. Was that like “ha-ha, I got you now?” in some way? Not explicitly, but I knew that in that sense, in the end I was the one who had control.
Do you ever feel like you got any indication that he had regrets about his actions? Kind of. With him, nothing was pure. It was all shades of grey. He did say that he understood none of those women deserved to be murdered, which I found surprising, actually. But I think the regret was more self-centered. I think it was more of a regret of what he had done to his own life. This was a person who was not an idiot, who in a parallel universe might have been able to make something of himself, but obviously he did not have the emotional grit to leave home, to really grow up and be a functioning adult. There was a quality of him like a big overgrown child. So I think his regret was a “How did I get to this place?” kind of regret.
How does it feel for your book to be released after working towards it for 18 years? It feels a little bit surreal that this thing that I was working on and working towards, kind of in private in this sad, dark place for such a long time, has become public. It is a very surreal experience. But it also feels… real. I’m telling my story. And it is really is the story of the narrator. It is my story, it is who I came to be through this interaction with Kendall Francois. Understanding his case was the vehicle for me having a different understanding of my own life and my own story. And it is very hard to tell your story with all of its faults and frailties and to be learning in public which is what this is. This the story of a young reporter and a young woman learning a more nuanced understanding of kind of humanity and human cruelty, and also of journalism! That is the story. And so, it is not an easy thing to do but it is what I had to do to stand up and stand up for myself.
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Nicole Brodeur / Columnist
How a reporter’s talks with a serial killer helped her understand herself
Originally published January 20, 2017 at 6:00 am Updated January 27, 2017 at 6:33 pm
Seattle Times reporter Claudia Rowe will speak about her book “The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder” at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company on Jan. 27.
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By Nicole Brodeur
Seattle Times columnist
He called her “Elf,” because she was a young and diminutive reporter whose only defense was her pen. And he was a large, intimidating man who admitted to killing eight women and stashing them to rot in his family’s fetid house.
For more than a decade, the reporter and the serial killer corresponded, talked on the phone and met a few times in a prison visiting room.
Kendall Francois loved it. He was a narcissist who basked in Claudia Rowe’s attention.
Author appearance
Claudia Rowe
The author of “The Spider and the Fly” will discuss her book at these area locations:
•7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 27, at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600 or elliottbaybook.com).
•7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 31, at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333 or thirdplacebooks.com).
•1:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 4, at Page 2 Books in Burien (206-248-7248 or page2books.com).
But Rowe wanted something, too. She used Francois to understand the origins of the cruelty that had defined her childhood and stunted her heart.
Rowe, now an education writer at The Seattle Times, has captured her 18-year odyssey with Francois in “The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder.” The book will bring her to The Elliott Bay Book Company on Jan. 27.
The story starts in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Rowe was working as a stringer for The New York Times. After six women — known drug addicts and prostitutes — disappeared, Rowe alerted her editors and started following the story.
It led to Francois, a member of one of the few African-American families in Dutchess County. He was arrested, and eventually confessed to killing eight women and stashing their bodies in his family’s home, where dishes were left to be blanketed by mold and the plumbing seized.
Five bodies in the attic, three in the basement.
Rowe dutifully reported on Francois’ case as it wound through the legal system, and he was finally sent to Attica Correctional Facility. But she couldn’t let it go.
“It just stayed in my head,” she said recently, of that time in 1998, “grinding and grinding over it.”
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A year later she wrote to Francois, asking for an interview, an explanation for his crimes.
“It was a way of looking at various types of violence in my own life,” Rowe said. “A couple of things about him triggered me. A sense of being lonely in your own community. Not fitting in.”
Like Francois, Rowe was “deeply alienated early on” by her mother, who was verbally and emotionally abusive. In school, she felt ostracized.
“I thought that (Francois) might be able to tell me what I needed to know,” Rowe said. “What is the motivation for cruelty? What makes a person knowingly hurt? I was frantic to know that, and he was going to be a way in.”
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Francois gave her little about what drove him to rape and murder eight women, and toss them, like trash bags, into a heap.
“How I ‘deal’ with the awful things I’ve done is personal,” he wrote in one letter. “Even if I wanted to pour my heart to you, I couldn’t … It is far more complicated than you know. Rage was the vehicle, but not the cause or trigger. I no longer believe ‘anger management’ would have helped me.”
It’s hard to understand why Rowe turned to a serial killer to better understand her mother.
“I’m aware that’s a stretch, for some,” she said. “But to me, it was a compulsion. It was not rational. I told myself I was going to identify the mysteries of cruelty. It was personal for me. And that was why I couldn’t stop.”
Rowe didn’t get too personal in the book. She makes brief mentions of rides in cabs, late-night partying and sex, but doesn’t really delve into what she did, or why.
“Lots of high-risk behavior in high school,” Rowe said, when pressed. “Self-destructive. I did every awful thing. It was bad. That comes out of growing up in a fractured, fractious home.”
Rowe grew up in privilege on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Elite schools, nice clothes, vacations. But her parents had explosive fights, and her mother was prone to caustic, withering criticism.
“My mother wanted to be a good mother, but she was in a difficult marriage and had her own problems,” Rowe said. “Those … created a caldron of real rage.”
As a result, Rowe’s childhood was marked by fear and confusion, “a constant current of terror,” she said.
“This was the emotional setup that propelled me toward the story.”
Eventually, she was propelled away from Francois and from Poughkeepsie, to Seattle, where she got a job covering education at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2003.
But she brought with her all her correspondence with Francois, along with the police and court documents, and a handful of interviews she had with his former friends and colleagues. The Francois family never spoke with her.
Only years later, when she started writing the book, did she see what Kendall Francois had taught her, that “compassion is comprehension in a fuller way. It’s not weak or soft, you just try to look at people who repel you.”
That allowed her to reach a deeper understanding of her mother.
“It helped me understand all kinds of people, even the most reviled, and what may be the forces within them,” she said, “and see her as a person with very conflicting impulses — love and anger — and that those things can coexist.”
Rowe lives in Seattle with her family. She reads, cooks and has “a secret addiction to ‘Project Runway.’ ”
She continues to cover education, and sees her job as bearing witness to daily change and inspiration. Classrooms are where so many things can be started, nurtured — and prevented.
Think what could have happened, she said, if someone had taken the time with Francois — or his victims, whose families didn’t even report them missing.
If someone, such as a teacher, had looked them in the eye and asked how they were, told them they were better than they had been led to believe. Listened.
“Education seems dry and wonky and impenetrable,” she said, “or soft, like cookies and bake sales. The roots of a person’s character and soul can be made in connection to a teacher.”
In Rowe’s case, though, it took a connection with a killer to pull the roots of her own pain.
Nicole Brodeur: nbrodeur@seattletimes.com
Claudia Rowe is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Women’s Day, the Huffington Post and The Stranger, among other magazines and newspapers. She currently covers education as a staff reporter at The Seattle Times.
Claudia is a frequent radio guest and public speaker on journalism, ethics and the delicate tension between subject and interviewer.
Selected Literary Honors
2013 – GAP Literary Award, Artist Trust, Washington
2012 – Fellow, Jack Straw Writers Program, Seattle
2011 – Promise Award for Literature, Sustainable Arts Foundation, San Francisco
Recent Journalism Awards
2015 – First Place, Coverage of Diversity, C.B. Blethen Awards
2015 – Associated Press Media Editors’ Journalism Excellence Awards, Community Engagement
2009 – Finalist, Taylor Award for Fairness, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University
2008 – First Place, Coverage of Minorities, Society of Professional Journalists
2008 – Winner, Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism, Journalism Center on Children & Families at the University of Maryland
Claudia Rowe
Claudia Rowe
Biography
Claudia Rowe is an award-winning journalist who has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Woman’s Day, Yes! and Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. Currently, Claudia is a staff writer at the Seattle Times. Her coverage of social issues, race, and violence has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and the Journalism Center on Children & Families, which awarded her a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.
http://claudiarowejournalist.com/
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Print Marked Items
Rowe, Claudia. The Spider and the Fly: A
Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of
Murder
Kate Sheehan
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p114.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
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Full Text:
Rowe, Claudia. The Spider and the Fly; A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder. Dey St: HarperCollins.
Jan. 2017. 288p. ISBN 9780062416124. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062416148. CRIME
There are a multitude of ways to have an unhappy childhood. Journalist Rowe (staff writer, Seattle Times) explores two
of them in this book: her own, and that of serial killer Kendall Francois. Uncertain about her career and future and
caught in a crumbling and emotionally abusive relationship, Rowe became fascinated with a series of local murders in
Poughkeepsie, NY. Her notions of being the one to understand the killer were quickly dispelled--she is neither spider
nor fly. Unlike both Francois and his victims, the author's unhappiness as a child and young adult was buffered by
affluence. While Rowe works to acknowledge that privilege, readers may find the stark contrast between her childhood
and Francois's merits more attention. A shared interest in the worst of humanity is not enough to forge a bond, and
Francois generally keeps Rowe at arm's length, while his impact on her life is much greater. VERDICT Readers who
wonder what draws writers to grisly crimes will find insight here. The interwoven stories of author and subject will
appeal to both true crime and memoir readers.--Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sheehan, Kate. "Rowe, Claudia. The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder."
Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 114. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562413&it=r&asid=eb160d46f9e79f8c56609bca27ef3b23.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
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The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial
Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
113.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2017): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
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Full Text:
The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder. By Claudia Rowe. Jan. 2017. 288p.
Harper/Dey Street, $26.99 (9780062416124); e-book (9780062416148). 364.152.
In 1998, journalist Rowe was working in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she reported on the odd but generally mild
crime scene. Mild, that is, until the day that local resident Kendall Francois confessed to murdering eight women and
leaving their bodies to decompose in his family's attic. A shy, overly polite young man, Kendall fascinated Rowe, and
she began a four-year correspondence with him. Ostensibly working as a reporter, she became fixated by their game of
giving and receiving personal information. Her obsession was fueled by her own dark past, her resemblance to his
victims, and her feelings of connection with Kendall. This is true-crime writing where the story bleeds from journalism
into memoir, as the writer becomes a main character. Aiming for the heights of Truman Capotes classic In Cold Blood
(1966) or Sebastian Junger's A Death in Belmont (2006), Rowes book never quite makes it there. Her identification
with both Kendall and the victims feels forced. Her obsession, however, does not. Readers seeking a literary look at the
psychology of a criminal will find much to hold them rapt.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2017,
p. 20+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479077887&it=r&asid=db3ed394a5936ad99dc0ac8713269633.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479077887
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502473071842 3/4
Rowe, Claudia: THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rowe, Claudia THE SPIDER AND THE FLY Dey Street/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 1, 24 ISBN: 978-0-
06-241612-4
What happens when a reporter has the willpower and tenacity to try to overcome a serial killer's refusal to
communicate?Seattle Times staff writer Rowe chronicles her dogged search to learn about convicted serial killer
Kendall Francois, who killed eight female prostitutes in Poughkeepsie, New York, and stashed their bodies in the home
he shared with his parents and sister. Francois, it seems, communicated with Rowe, via letters and a few face-to-face
meetings, simply in an attempt to draw her into a relationship of some sort. For a while, it worked. Rowe sought a
greater understanding of what separates a killer from the rest of us and, specifically, from herself. Francois' refusal to
discuss the murders he committed means the book is light on the meat of the crimes it covers, but it becomes obvious as
the story progresses that at some point Rowe became as interested in investigating her own passage into adulthood as
her subject's interior life. Her childhood and difficult relationship with her mother and boyfriend become increasingly
important narrative fodder, while her communications with Francois fade into the background. It is unclear whether
Rowe sees herself as the spider or the fly in this strange, tense relationship, but the hunt was ineffectual in either case.
The author never got her exclusive story, and Francois never achieved the deep, meaningful relationship he tried to
force. Rowe's engaging prose means the pages practically turn themselves, regardless of the disappointing end to the
exchange. However, some readers may be frustrated with how to view the book: as a twisted coming-of-age memoir or
the chronicle of a determined hunt for a killer's motive.Uneven but capably written. Rowe leaves readers wishing for a
more satisfying solution to one puzzle while feeling relief in the resolution of the other.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Rowe, Claudia: THE SPIDER AND THE FLY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865811&it=r&asid=29e43f204e04847990e54f176ac72e1f.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865811
8/11/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502473071842 4/4
The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial
Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p100.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder
Claudia Rowe. Dey Street, $26.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-241612-4
With reporter-like descriptions of small town life and strong storytelling skills, Rowe, a Seattles Times staff writer,
unflinchingly depicts her decades-long obsession with Kendall Francois, a convicted serial killer, whom she first
encountered in the 1990s while working as a reporter for a local paper in upstate New York. What begins as an
investigation into how a person can commit cold-blooded murder became Rowe's albatross, ultimately leading her to
examine her own life. Although she admits her personal stakes from the outset, the focus on her own story in the
context of Francois's situation leads her to draw to comparisons that don't always measure up: for example, she attempts
to relate her childhood experiences growing up in an white, upper-middle-class family in New York City to Francois's
experience as the child of an extreme hoarder, in one of the few black families in a predominantly white part of
Dutchess County. Though she skewers Kendall for trivialities such as liking "white pop" and speaking with an affected
tone, she rarely turns that harsh lens on herself. It is only toward the end of the book, when Rowe admits her bias, that
her story begins to strike a chord. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p.
100+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273997&it=r&asid=ed253c4bebdaaff14ce1c87d70a3e6b4.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471273997
BooksEntertainment
‘The Spider and the Fly’: tangled strands between a reporter and a serial killer
Originally published January 26, 2017 at 12:00 am Updated January 26, 2017 at 4:22 pm
In her memoir “The Spider and the Fly,” journalist Claudia Rowe recalls her reporter-subject relationship with a serial killer. Rowe appears Jan. 27 at the Elliott Bay Book Co., Jan. 31 at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park and Feb. 4 at Page 2 Books in Burien.
Share story
By Ellen Emry Heltzel
Special to The Seattle Times
Kendall Francois stood out long before he became a serial killer.
Mostly, he was noteworthy for his size — 6-feet-4 and nearly 400 pounds — but also because he was African American, his dark skin an exception in the mostly white communities of upstate New York. Plus, as Claudia Rowe tells us in “The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder” (Dey Street, 288 pp., $26.99), he had a tendency to beat up prostitutes. This made him a known quantity to the cops, who gave him a nickname: “Fat Albert.”
Given these facts, Rowe writes, the Poughkeepsie police might have made an immediate connection between Francois and the eight women who disappeared, one at a time, during the mid-1990s. But they didn’t. Instead, it was Francois himself who offered an unblinking confession, then pointed them toward the home he shared with his parents and sister. There, they found all eight bodies stored like Christmas ornaments in the attic.
Author appearance
Claudia Rowe
The author of “The Spider and the Fly” will discuss her book at these area locations:
•7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 27, at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600 or elliottbaybook.com).
•7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 31, at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333 or thirdplacebooks.com).
•1:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 4, at Page 2 Books in Burien (206-248-7248 or page2books.com).
Rowe’s account of the murders is just the beginning for a book that blends true crime with memoir. As her subtitle suggests, its locus lies in her obsession with Francois. Rowe, who covered the murders as a stringer for The New York Times, initiated their five-year correspondence, letters that are quoted throughout and which graduated to phone calls and eventually face-to-face meetings. She describes Francois as “a man of reptilian impulses, with only intermittent control.” Yet, in her telling, he remains coy and controlling throughout their acquaintance, while she offers up her inner thoughts and past actions with keen disregard.
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Rowe, now a reporter for The Seattle Times, was struggling to find her professional footing in Poughkeepsie when Francois’ crimes came to light. Having grown up in New York City, she found her new home unfriendly and parochial. With Francois, she identified a possible story line: “how this cloistered community had spawned a killer.”
Unfortunately, this prospect explains more about Rowe’s frame of mind, an eagerness that pushes her to the front of the story, than the pathology that lurked around Francois.
The household in which he grew up stunk so much from rotting food and filth that the odor obscured the smell of decaying bodies above. Rowe consults mental-health experts and concludes with the unsurprising statement: “As a psychopath he appeared to me suspended, with one foot in our daylight world, where he struggled to negotiate shame, aspiration, confusion and love,” while in the other he dwelled in “a nether-realm of ghouls who felt nothing at all.”
Her own experience with the man shows how Francois concealed a keen intelligence within the body of a brute. “Stop trying to identify with me,” the perceptive killer advises her at one point, even as she confesses that she cannot. She explains that trying to figure him out was how she purged her own anger and shame over a dysfunctional childhood and the self-destructive behaviors that resulted.
Needless to say, no matter what her remembered deeds or their cause, they are mere peccadillos in contrast to that of a serial killer. “The Spider and the Fly” never adequately addresses this awkward juxtaposition or really explains “the meaning of murder.” But Rowe’s up-close portrait of Francois offers a fascinating meditation on the psychopathic mind.
Ellen Emry Heltzel is a Portland writer and book critic.
MARCH 31 2017
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The Spider and the Fly review: An engulfing spellbinder
Peter Craven
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The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe.
The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe.
The Spider and the Fly
Claudia Rowe
Allen & Unwin, $29.99
The Spider and the Fly comes with the recommendation of Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame, and when you read it you'll see why. This is a dazzling and engulfing spellbinder about a journalist who sought to entrap a convicted serial killer into spilling his guts and came to feel that her own innards were captive.
The setting is Poughkeepsie in upstate New York at the turn of this century. Kendall Francois – very tall, immensely fat and absolutely soft-spoken – has murdered a number of prostitutes over a two-year period. The girls kept disappearing, the cops knew he beat them up, but no one twigged. In the Francois home the maggots dropped from the ceiling and the smell was so bad it couldn't just be the ordure on the floor, Kendall had to say it was dead racoons in the roofing he couldn't get out. In fact he had the dead women's bodies rotting around him and the stench was the stench of death.
It sounds a ghastly book that nine out of 10 people would run a mile from. Early on Francois escapes the death penalty, through a guilty plea that allowed him to escape a trial. Why? The thought of what this would have done to his mother.
Francois is sentenced to eight successive life sentences and is sent to the legendary Attica prison.
But that's just the start of Claudia Rowe's journey. She writes to this big fat quiet black man – you only hear he's black after a while – and he replies saying that if she'll write to him saying how she felt, what she wore, what she wore under, how it ticked, she can ask him questions.
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She does and he falls for it and she falls for whatever ill-fated thing they are groping towards, some key in her case to his enigma or her own.
He's bright, Francois, bad at school, ended up as its cleaner, but very far from stupid and with a sly voice that leaps off the page like a snake, sometimes slithering, sometimes about to strike.
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And his Boswell girl, who won't give him a photo, though she goes to see him twice and writes to him as if she's flirting with her own Armageddon, is rendered naked beyond anyone's imaginings because of the scathing zig-zagging masochism of this book's narrative.
She's the rich little Jewish girl from the Upper East Side who used to identify with the evil glamorous Nazis, not the people in the camps who were ferried away blinking in a flash of light. She's the girl who got into cabs or any old car with no money, she did tricks, she sucked up bitterness, she suffered desolation. And she went to Poughkeepsie and worked as a stringer for The New York Times hoping for a Big Story and found one like an atom bomb within herself.
It's an extraordinary nightmare of a book, eloquent, densely suspenseful. She's a drama queen, of course, a purveyor of stolen narrative goods. We get her resentment of her mother, her difficulties with her snaggy boyfriend. We hear the terrible story of their ferocious dog, Moses, so sad.
It's a portrait of this spoiled brat of a girl, struggling. She's not as subtly an unreliable a narrator as Helen Garner, but she does have a narrative vitamin. And she has superb portraits of the small-town cops, who are shrewd, compassionate, and stuffed it.
Or the prosecutor lady who felt for any lawbreaker – with murder, with violence, with kids – left cold as ice by Kendall. And what did it all come out of? What trailed behind his highly intelligent momma who worked in the mental hospital? Did he kill a black girl too (which he denied)? Does he just want to get his hands, his mighty, mighty hands round our heroine's throat?
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FRESH MEAT | TRUE CRIME THURSDAY
Review: The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe
ARDI ALSPACH
The Spider and the Fly by Claudia Rowe is a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense where a female journalist chronicles her unusual connection with a convicted serial killer and her search to understand the darkness inside us.
The story begins as any true crime story might—a reporter writes a letter to a criminal in prison. But this isn’t just any reporter or any criminal. It’s a woman on the edge of a dark obsession and a black serial killer with a preference for women who look just like Claudia. This isn’t a cat and mouse game—sometimes the mouse is clever enough to get away. This really is a spider building a web and a fly who gets caught with no chance for escape.
Claudia Rowe is a stringer for the New York Times when this story begins. She’s on the crime beat in Poughkeepsie, NY when she hears about women who keep disappearing. She’s poised to chase down all the leads, investigate the families, and talk to the police when she learns that the killer has confessed.
The killer is Kendall Francois, and the confession is a bit of a shock as he wasn’t on anyone’s radar for murder. When Rowe begins to exchange letters with Kendall, she has no idea how much of an impact it would ultimately have on her life.
The Spider and the Fly is more memoir than it is the typical true crime book. I found it very intriguing to see the reporter’s side of things. Often, we are presented with the cold facts and a focus on the aftermath of a crime, or an overview of how an investigation revealed the killer. But not here.
We know who the killer is within the first ten pages, and there’s very little investigation to even cover. Readers of true crime are often left with the “why” of a crime unexplained, and this is Rowe’s purpose as she writes letter after letter to Kendall. But, Kendall is a wily one and seeks more and more from her before he gives up much of himself. And Rowe is caught in his trap before too long:
I was important to him in some way. That much I knew. Whatever the facts might be about psychopaths and their incapacity for feeling, the faceless figure whom Kendall called “Ms. Rowe” or, more and more often, “Claudia,” meant something to him. That he had walked a similar path with dozens of women—and that those stormy sagas of betrayal had almost nothing to do with the women themselves—was a humbling realization that came much later. At first, the feeling of mattering was like a drug, and I could not get enough. I held on like a dog with its jaws clamped round a piece of meat. Never did I take the next step and consider what it meant that a man who had murdered eight women was focusing his attention on me.
Claudia Rowe’s obsession with Kendall Francois had a huge impact on her personal life. She was hiding letters from her boyfriend and ignoring him in favor of the story. It’s a rather frightening thing to watch as her life begins to unravel. As I read on, I wondered if she’d ever get what she needed from him. If he would give her the why of the crime. I wondered if her personal sacrifices to the story would be in vain.
Read an exclusive Q&A with Claudia Rowe, and learn how to win a copy of The Spider and the Fly!
I believe it’s a modern myth that non-white serial killers are rare or nonexistent. The media seems to cover white serial killers and their white victims more often. Rowe does not touch upon this in the book very thoroughly, though she does discuss the racial makeup and tension that divides the primarily white town of Poughkeepsie.
I sought out the statistics about serial killers myself and learned some surprising facts. In 2012, Radford University partnered with Florida Gulf Coast University to create a serial killer database. As of the September 4, 2016, update, 39.8% of all serial killers recorded between 1900 and 2010 were black. 59.8% of serial killers recorded in 2010 alone were black, following a decade-by-decade increase of this number. A number that does not fit what has long been considered the typical profile of a serial killer.
Claudia Rowe’s memoir is astonishing. Readers are taken into the mind of the reporter as she seeks the truth from a violent man. Her obsession is frightening as she goes to such great lengths for the truth. After years of correspondence, phone calls, and jail visits, Rowe learns a lot about the mind of a serial killer. But in the end, I think it’s what she learns about herself that is most important.
This literary true crime is unexpected and intriguing and will keep you up all night wondering what’s going to happen next. It’s perfect for those looking to dig a little deeper into the criminal mind and learn how a reporter seeks the truth.
Read Ardi's review of HBO's true crime documentary Beware the Slenderman!
To learn more or order a copy, visit:
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Ardi Alspach was born in Florida, raised in South Carolina, and now resides in New York City with her cat and an apartment full of books. By day, she's a publicist, and by night, she's a freelance writer. You can follow her on Twitter at @ardyceelaine or check out her website at ardyceelaine.wordpress.com.
‘The Spider and the Fly’ Starts as True Crime and Becomes Something Much Weirder
The first book from The Seattle Times’ Claudia Rowe tells the tale of her serial-killer pen pal.
By Paul Constant
Wednesday, January 25, 2017 1:30amARTS & CULTURE
We’ve been trained by popular culture to visualize serial killers in a very specific way: They’re sleek, efficient, charming hunters of humans. Sociopathic and hyperintelligent, serial killers are always five steps ahead of everyone else. They’re willful, clever, highly manipulative loners, and they’re relentlessly driven by some lone traumatic incident in their childhood. They’re not so much human beings as puzzle-boxes to entertain and alarm us for a couple hours until they’re finally captured and the closing credits roll.
The serial killer in Seattle Times education reporter Claudia Rowe’s first book, The Spider and the Fly, completely confounds these tropes. Kendall Francois lived with his parents and sister in a quiet Poughkeepsie, N.Y., neighborhood. Rather than murder his prey in elaborate rituals, Francois would simply lose his temper after hiring a prostitute. She’d say something innocuous that would set him off, and he’d choke the life out of her and dump her dead body in the attic of his house, where it would rot for months—even years.
Francois was not charming or cunning. He didn’t have an elaborate plan. He seemed to be practically begging to be caught. But he continued murdering women and stashing their bodies in a kiddie pool in the attic until, basically, society couldn’t ignore him anymore.
This is not to say that Francois was dumb, or that he lacked any sort of guile. After he was arrested for his crime, Francois was contacted by Rowe, at the time a young reporter doing piecework for The New York Times. Rowe thought she might be able to get a juicy story out of Francois. Instead, she gained a pen pal. Her first letter from Francois clumsily evokes The Silence of the Lambs—Hannibal Lecter’s quid pro quo with Clarice Starling—in a way that practically feels like fan fiction: “For every ten pages (typed) I will answer ANY four questions you have for me, completely and honestly… I will answer your questions with the completeness and honesty you answer me. I want to know about your hometown, childhood house, elementary school and high school up through college, your first car, your first kiss, the dress you wore under your graduation gown, I want to know the first time (if ever) you gave a guy a blow job, the first time you had intercourse, the last time, people you hate at work, affairs, when (if ever) you dyed your hair, the types of computers you have/use. Remember the more details the better.” Rowe almost immediately shut down the sexual angle of Francois’ questioning, but soon the two were corresponding with alarming regularity.
The Spider and the Fly brings to mind Ann Rule’s account of working with Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me. That is a high compliment: Rule is the patron saint of true crime, and Stranger is her masterpiece. But while Spider begins like a true-crime book—detailing Francois’ life and crimes in reportorial (and, it must be said, occasionally purple) prose—it gradually slides into memoir. “The first rule of reporting is that the writer is never the story,” Rowe warns us early in Spider, “so my tale, by definition, is not journalism.”
This gear shift, from the gawking exploitation of true crime to the more introspective exploration of memoir, likely could lose some readers. That’s their loss. Spider is not Francois’ story. It’s about Rowe, and how she responds to his monstrous acts. In one early letter to Francois, Rowe writes that “It’s hard for me to explain why I have trouble getting along with bosses and parents and people I know well, yet feel so much for people I’ve never met.” That’s part of the story: She’s misanthropic and anti-authoritarian—two traits that make for good reporters—but she’s also drawn to self-destruction, making bad choices and putting herself in bad situations seemingly just to find out what happens next. Some part of her identifies, or wants to identify, with some small, damaged part of Francois.
True-crime buffs might be frustrated by Spider’s unwillingness to tie everything together, to slap a moralistic Law & Order-style framework on the story. But readers interested in conversations deeper than a childlike fantasia of good versus evil will find its sentences echoing in their brain for weeks. So much of this book is dedicated to big concepts: forgiveness, the possibility of change, the thought that if one of us commits a preventable heinous act, maybe we all carry a little bit of that stain on our souls.
Spider is a messy, complicated book about a messy, complicated human. It’s about finding yourself inextricably bound in a situation that you never wanted. But most of all, it’s about the terrifying notion that when you scratch enough of yourself down on paper and throw it into the void, the void might just decide to write back. Claudia Rowe, Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 p.m. Fri., Jan. 27. Paul Constant is the co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. Read daily books coverage like this at seattlereviewofbooks.com.
books@seattleweekly.com
"The Spider and the Fly" Is About a Multiyear Pen-Pal Relationship With a Serial Killer, And Doesn’t Quite Pass the Smell Test
The power dynamics seem perversely one-sided.
By Zach Middleton | Published March 3 Updated March 3
Writers are drawn to a crime scene like flies to rotting flesh, and so when a serial killer was caught in her town of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., local reporter Claudia Rowe was of course…happy. Rowe's multiyear pen-pal relationship with Kendall Francois, the murderer of eight women, is the subject of her new true-crime memoir, The Spider and the Fly (Dey Street Books, 288 pages, $26.99).
Kendall Francois was a notorious local john repeatedly reported for abusing women throughout the late '90s. But it wasn't until police took out a warrant to raid his family's home that they found a hoarder's den filled with garbage, rotting food, mold and human bodies. Maggots fell from the attic where Francois had stashed his victims in plastic bags and a kiddie pool.
A Seattle Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize nominee, Rowe ravenously hunts down vignettes of derangement and despair. Francois is described as a "hoarder of dead bodies and old candy wrappers." About a grieving mother, she writes, "Marguerite's mouth was framed like a marionette's, with deep grooves on either side, parentheses that worked back and forth—pulling tight, then slack—as she composed herself."
In contrast to Francois' hellish home life, Rowe was a bored adrenaline junky raised in a swanky Central Park West apartment—in high school and college, she let men pick her up in their cars, allowing them to think she was a prostitute. Dissatisfied with the small pieces on Francois' crimes she wrote for The New York Times, Rowe contacted him herself. Before their first call, she writes, "My heart pounded the way it had with boys in high school."
One of the most compelling parts of true crime is when a writer is drawn into the web of the serial killer's mind, but here the power dynamics seem perversely one-sided. Rowe—a highly educated, affluent white woman—is writing with disgust about a black man who comes from poverty and abuse. Her apparent obsession with Francois' "fat lips" and rank body odor doesn't help matters.
Perhaps in recognition of this, Rowe attempts to build some level of sympathy with the reader, comparing the domestic tensions of her own life with those of Francois and his victims. "We soldiered on, through vacations at the Cape and ski weekends in Vermont," she writes, "working our New England family myth." How brave.
No one would expect her to have much compassion for a serial killer, but Rowe's apparent contempt for Francois (and just about everyone else) gives the book a rotten odor. If Rowe is the fly in the book's title, she's also the spider. Francois is just some nearby corpse.
Claudia Rowe will appear at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., on Thursday, Feb. 2. 7:30 pm. Free.
Paul Constant
January 24, 2017
Share on Twitter Share on Facebook
We’ve been trained by popular culture to visualize serial killers in a very specific way: they’re sleek, efficient, charming hunters of humans. Sociopathic and hyper-intelligent, serial killers are always five steps ahead of everyone else. They’re willful, clever, highly manipulative loners, and they’re relentlessly driven by some lone traumatic incident in their childhood. They’re not so much human beings as puzzle-boxes to entertain and alarm us for a couple hours until they’re finally captured and the closing credits roll.
The serial killer in Seattle Times education reporter Claudia Rowe’s first book, The Spider and the Fly, completely confounds those serial-killer tropes. Kendall Francois lived with his parents and sister in a quiet Poughkeepsie neighborhood. Rather than murder his prey with elaborate rituals, Francois would simply lose his temper after hiring a prostitute. She’d say something innocuous that would set him off and he’d choke the life out of her and then dump her dead body in the attic of his house, where it would rot for months — even years.
Francois was not charming, or cunning. He didn’t have an elaborate plan. He seemed to be practically begging to be caught. But he continued murdering women and stashing their bodies in a kiddie pool in the attic until, basically, society couldn’t ignore him anymore.
This is not to say that Francois was dumb, or that he lacked any sort of guile. Once he’d already been arrested for his crime, Francois was contacted by Rowe, at the time a young reporter doing piecework for the New York Times. Rowe thought she might be able to get a juicy story out of Francois. Instead, she gained a pen pal. Her first letter from Francois clumsily evoked Hannibal Lecter’s quid pro quo deal with Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs in such a way that it practically feels like fan fiction:
…For every ten pages (typed) I will answer ANY four questions you have for me, completely and honestly…I will answer your questions with the completeness and honesty you answer me. I want to know about your hometown, childhood house, elementary school and high school up through college, your first car, your first kiss, the dress you wore under your graduation gown, I want to know the first time (if ever) you gave a guy a blow job, the first time you had intercourse, the last time, people you hate at work, affairs, when (if ever) you dyed your hair, the types of computers you have/use. Remember the more details the better.
Rowe almost immediately shut down the sexual angle of Francois’s questioning, but soon the two were corresponding with alarming regularity.
The Spider and the Fly brings Ann Rule’s account of working with Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, to mind. That is a high compliment: Rule is the patron saint of true crime, and Stranger is her masterpiece. But while Spider begins like a true crime book — detailing Francois’s life and crimes in reportorial (and, it must be said, occasionally purple) prose — it gradually slides into memoir. “The first rule of reporting is that the writer is never the story,” Rowe warns us early in Spider, “so my tale, by definition, is not journalism.”
This gear-shift, from the gawking exploitation of true crime to the more introspective exploration of memoir, is a transition that could likely lose some readers. That’s their loss. Spider is not Francois’s story. It’s about Rowe, and how she responds to Francois’s monstrous acts.
In one of her early letters to Francois, Rowe writes that “It’s hard for me to explain why I have trouble getting along with bosses and parents and people I know well, yet feel so much for people I’ve never met.” That’s part of the story: she’s misanthropic and anti-authoritarian — two traits that make for good reporters — but she’s also drawn to self-destruction, making bad choices and putting herself in bad situations seemingly just to find out what happens next. Some part of her identifies, or wants to identify, with some small, damaged part of Francois.
True crime buffs might be frustrated by Spider’s unwillingness to tie everything together, to slap a moralistic Law & Order-style framework on the story. But readers who are interested in deeper conversations than a childlike fantasia of good versus evil will find sentences of this book echoing around in their brain for weeks afterward. So much of this book is dedicated to big concepts: the idea of forgiveness, the question of whether it’s possible to change, the thought that if one of us commits a preventable heinous act that maybe we all carry a little bit of that stain on our souls.
Spider is a messy, complicated book about a messy, complicated human. It’s about finding yourself inextricably bound in a situation that you never wanted. But most of all, it’s about the terrifying notion that when you scratch enough of yourself down on paper and throw it into the void, the void might just decide to write back.
Claudia Rowe reads at Elliott Bay Book Company at 7 pm on Friday January 27th. The reading is free.
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Books in this review:
The Spider and the Fly
by Claudia Rowe
Dey Street Books
January 23, 2017
288 pages
Provided by publisher
Buy on IndieBound
About the writer
Paul is a co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. He has written for The Progressive, Newsweek, Re/Code, the Utne Reader, the New York Observer, and many North American alternative weeklies. Paul has worked in the book business for two decades, starting as a bookseller (originally at Borders Books and Music, then at Boston’s grand old Brattle Bookshop and Seattle’s own Elliott Bay Book Company) and then becoming a literary critic. Formerly the books editor for the Stranger, Paul is now a fellow at Civic Ventures, a public policy incubator based out of Seattle.
Follow Paul Constant on Twitter: @paulconstant
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FEATURES
True Thrills: Claudia Rowe
JANUARY 31, 2017 by DAWN IUS
103 1 0
The Fatal Lure of the Serial Killer
By Dawn Ius
In 1998, reporter Claudia Rowe was living in small-town Poughkeepsie, New York, working as a stringer for the New York Times, when she began writing about a series of gruesome murders committed by a local man named Kendall Francois.
Unsatisfied with police reports and victim statements, Rowe reached out to Francois in prison, sparking a four-year relationship that by Rowe’s own admission transformed from professional curiosity into an obsession that could have been dangerous.
It saved her instead.
The more Rowe delved into the mind of the murderer, the more she realized the story was about much more than her search for answers to questions about the human psyche and the makings of a killer—it was a way to dissect, process, and overcome the personal demons of her own abusive and violent past.
“Kendall Francois became the embodiment of all my ghosts,” she says. “Blame is a natural response to horror. And it’s momentarily satisfying—but it doesn’t move the needle. It doesn’t get us any further. How we come to understand and work with our past dictates our future.”
For Rowe, that meant going deeper. Finding the strength to look beyond what repulsed and repelled her.
And at its core, that’s the message Rowe hopes readers take away from her book based on this relationship with Francois, THE SPIDER AND THE FLY. Part psychological thriller, part memoir, Rowe’s provocative narrative forces you to explore and find compassion for the complexity of the human condition.
To go deeper.
Kendall Francois’ Home at 99 Fulton Avenue in December 1998, three months after his arrest.
But this enlightened perspective didn’t come without a price. During the four-year span of her obsession with Francois, convicted of murdering eight women, Rowe’s personal sacrifices began to mount. At the height of her fixation, Rowe’s then-boyfriend left. She lost her house, her friends. Even that, coupled with the growing concern—and disgust—from family and peers, wasn’t enough to cull Rowe’s frantic chase.
“I was consumed with getting in Kendall’s head,” she says. “His brain was like a forest and I was walking through it with a flashlight. Sometimes the true awfulness of what he’d done would come to me in flashes and rise up like a wave. But then it would recede. I was unwilling to stop.”
In part, perhaps, because Rowe didn’t realize at the time what she was looking for, but also because Francois wasn’t willing to let go, either. His letters became more intimate, their phone calls more frequent, and his requests for personal information about Rowe more persuasive and aggressive.
The book is written with far more intimacy than Rowe ever shared with Francois. It’s raw, honest, compelling and staggeringly beautiful, if not morbidly fascinating—but, of course on the surface, their relationship isn’t all that uncommon.
“A lot of people become obsessed with true crime as a way of processing their own trauma,” Rowe says. “And there’s something inherently mysterious about the notion that anyone around you could be a serial killer, that they could exist in the shadow world. I wanted to know if you could recognize it. If you could sense it on a person.”
Claudia Rowe
Photography credit: Meryl Schenker
Rowe quickly learned that the answers to those questions are far more complex than the simple equation she envisioned, and looking back, she recognizes that her fascination with the case—the gruesome, but somewhat unremarkable rise of a small-town serial killer—was based on the idea that sometimes you can miss what’s right in front of you.
“There are a million things I could have put in this book,” she says. “But I chose a few key scenes that demonstrate how I came to be the one to write it. It’s a memoir of a time, not my whole life—which means the details are very specific and narrow.”
Which unfortunately, puts it at great risk of being misunderstood.
True crime lovers may balk at the lack of information on Francois’ actual crimes, and lovers of psychological suspense may be confused by the narrative’s more atmospheric vibe. But basing it on either of these attributes alone does this remarkable book a true disservice.
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY won’t reveal much more than you probably already know about the serial killer known as Kendall Francois, but it will force you to take a harder look at yourself, and at humanity as a whole.
It may even convince you to push away that which repulses you—and look deeper.
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Dawn Ius
Dawn Ius
Dawn Ius is the author of Anne & Henry, Overdrive, and the forthcoming Lizzie, all published by Simon Pulse (Simon & Schuster). She is the Deputy Editor of The Big Thrill, a book coach with Author Accelerator, and a co-instructor at Lit Reactor. When not slaying fictional monsters, Dawn can be found geeking out over fairy tales, true love, Jack Bauer, muscle cars, kayaking, and all things creepy. She lives in Alberta, Canada with her husband and two giant breed dogs.. Connect with her on Twitter via @dawnmius, or get the full scoop at www.dawnius.com.
BOOK REVIEWS
'The Spider And The Fly' Gets Stuck In A Web Of Self-Regard
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January 26, 201710:00 AM ET
ANNALISA QUINN
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The Spider and the Fly
Kendall Francois raped and killed at least eight women in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., leaving their bodies to rot in his house while his family went about their lives, apparently unaware.
Seattle Times reporter Claudia Rowe, then a stringer for The New York Times, was living in Poughkeepsie at the time of the murders. When she heard that Francois had been arrested, she rushed to his family home:
"[S]taring up at the Francoises' front porch that sultry September morning, blood in my veins turning to ice water, I knew I was looking at a story that would prove Derrick wrong."
Derrick was her boyfriend, and he had told her that reporters are not "real writers." As it happens, Rowe's book is not a piece of reporting, but an amalgamation of clichés: intrepid lady reporter becomes obsessed with rapist/serial killer who murders women who resemble her, and begins sending him emotional letters. She isn't interested in facts unless they illuminate some aspect of her own life. Rowe knows it isn't true journalism, and says so: "The first rule of reporting is that the writer is never the story." But even if she abandons the guise of journalist, it just isn't appropriate for her to be the center of Kendall Francois' story, particularly in the callous way she goes about writing it.
The ethics of writing a book that sexes up a serial killer while mostly ignoring his victims is queasy at best.
Annalisa Quinn
Rowe laces her descriptions of their early relationship with implicit eroticism: He wants intimately detailed information about her life, in exchange for answering questions about her own. She writes about the "sensuality" of the physical mail they send. Francois' brutality "tantalizes" her. His interest flatters her. When she visits him in prison, her heart "pounded the way it had with boys in high school." The feeling of mattering to him "was like a drug." But she gives few pages to his victims, after establishing their convenient resemblance to her.
The ethics of writing a book that sexes up a serial killer while mostly ignoring his victims is queasy at best. There are two axes of weakness: aesthetic and ethical. And the horrible truth is that I'd be much more willing to put up with the way Rowe more or less sells out these women if she did it with subtlety and élan. That's not fair, of course: It's like being easier on bank robbers who burgle with brio. But her writing, if competent, is purple, and her reporting patchy.
She has a curious lack of empathy for anyone but herself and the fictional version of Francois she has created in her mind. This is clear from the oddly material metaphors she chooses to describe people.
She sees someone who knew one of the victims on the street: "I could hardly miss the reporter's gold mine standing before me ..." Prostitutes she interviews who claimed Francois raped and assaulted them "grabbed for the attention [of their interviewers] like children at a candy buffet." A man who had grown up with Kendall walked around "trilling his outrage like a drag queen on ether." These eerily heartless metaphors treat them as local color or as useful sources, but not as people.
[Rowe] enters into a world of pain and violence and comes away only with a book about herself.
Annalisa Quinn
Francois is black, and Rowe is white. One of the odder themes of The Spider and the Fly is Rowe's need for Francois to think about his race the way she wants him to. She asks him about himself, and he tries to talk about his love of Macbeth. But she abruptly changes the subject: "I confessed that tears poured down my face whenever I watched footage of civil rights movements; that I winced when welcomed into hotels where I had no reservations, knowing my treatment would be different if I were black." But, "None of this got me any deeper into Kendall's life or heart or past, despite his demand for the information," as if her performance of guilt demanded payment in kind.
Lecturing him about black history, she complains, "My attempts to share this history with Kendall were met with scorn." Why does Rowe think it is her place to educate him on racial history? She wants and expects him to be black in bizarrely specific ways. The Francois she likes to imagine, she writes, is "alone in his bedroom, listening to blues and soul, the music I liked." Instead, she is disappointed to learn he prefers white pop. "I had enjoyed thinking of Kendall as complex and independent," she complains. Sorry your pet serial killer doesn't live up to your assumptions about black people, I found myself scribbling in the margin. (This book had me writing all over it: The page that casually describes her "Nazi fixation in the tenth grade, a common teenage deviance" is a sea of question marks).
Fiction and true crime have different demands. And I can't help but think — perhaps unfairly, since no one thinks their own writing is bad — that a story that touches on so much suffering has an almost ethical demand to be the best book it can be. Rowe is not a truly bad writer. But she enters into a world of pain and violence and comes away only with a book about herself.