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The Current Transcript for July 10, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

It was just there, you know? All of a sudden it just pops out of the trees and then they’re like, “You’ve got to leave. You’ve got to leave now.” They wouldn’t even let us get our goats out of the yard, or the chickens. They just said, “Open up the gates and just let it be.”

MIKE FINNERTY: The shock of sudden evacuation in BC. Now it's people from 100 Mile House forced to flee their homes as hundreds of fires burn, half of them starting over the weekend. Why are summer forest fires starting a month earlier than they used to? And are these extreme conditions now set to become the new normal? We’ll look at the situation on the ground, hear from people who've had to grab what they can and run for their lives and discuss why measures to prevent the worst fires before they start are not being taken. That's coming right up. And in our second half hour, the journalist and the serial killer.

SOUNDCLIP

He knocked on the door and said, “I'd really like to talk with someone about the missing women,” and it stunned everybody. And out came hours and hours and hours of confession.

MF: Claudia Rowe on the murders that changed life in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York in the 1990s. I'm Mike Finnerty. This is the summer edition of The Current.

'I just wanted my dog': Cache Creek, B.C., evacuee flees home amid raging wildfires

Guests: Doug Herbert, Sherrie Fraser, Robert Gray

MF: British Columbia remains under a state of emergency this morning with the federal government saying it's preparing to send in help after the worst wildfires the province has seen in 14 years. More than 200 fires are burning across the province’s interior at the moment. Many of them new starts that erupted over the weekend, and most are raging out of control. Thousands of people have had to flee their home and many others are on tenterhooks as their communities remain under evacuation alerts. For those who've already had to pack up and leave – often with just a phone calls notice or a sudden knock at the door. It's an emotional and uncertain time.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My wife works in a local cafe at the mall and she found out at 12 p.m. that they were evacuating. We had the car packed. My boys picked up their backpacks and we just jumped in the car because the fire’s two kilometres from my house and 60 kilometres an hour winds.

VOICE 2: It became a total panic. And unfortunately a lot of people do panic in this situation. We just calmly went through the house and we videotaped everything in the house and packed everything of importance—our important papers and our pictures that we can't replace—and headed out because they knocked on our door and said “Get out.”

VOICE 1: It was actually quite horrifying to look at the clouds and just see the plume of smoke, wondering, “Will you have something to go back to?” But the main thing is as long as I knew my family was with me and they were safe—that was my number one concern. And then when I got to Kamloops, we could see the hotel we stayed at, people were pouring in one after the other, with a displaced look on their face of “What now? Where do I go? What do I do?” It was like a catastrophic war zone. And looking around here at the people and just, the volunteers are fantastic. But the people look so displaced.

VOICE 2: It's very difficult. You just have to have to keep taking a deep breath and getting your head together because it's inevitable that your house could be gone.

MF: Voices of evacuees speaking with CBC Kelowna’s call-in show over the weekend. Many of those who have been forced to flee their homes are being housed temporarily in Kamloops. From there we're joined now by CBC reporter and anchor Doug Herbert. Doug, hello.

DOUG HERBERT: Good morning.

MF: What is the situation like in Kamloops this morning?

DOUG HERBERT: Well, it's very smoky here. The wildfires, of course, continuing to burn to the west, the north and then further south of Kamloops. We don't actually have any fires at this point on our doorstep, but we're housing thousands of evacuees as you mentioned from the other fires. Now the fire risk is high in Kamloops though and they've just closed all of our nature parks out of concern that a wildfire could get going here. But thankfully at this point in the city, we aren't dealing with the same problems that we're seeing elsewhere across the province.

MF: How well equipped are you Doug, to handle all those evacuees in Kamloops?

DOUG HERBERT: Well, at this point it seems like we're almost full. We haven't been told that we are officially full but they are sending evacuees from the district of 100 Mile House further north to Prince George. So they're not actually being sent to Kamloops anymore, whereas earlier this week many of the evacuees in the Cariboo were sent to Kamloops. Actually I did stop by the evacuation centre this weekend and everybody was here to help out. There were mountains of pet food just stacked up to help anybody that needed it. There is group lodging. All of our hotels have been filled. All of the nearby hotels and other communities have been filled. So I'd say it seems from what I was hearing from the evacuees, they were being well cared for. There was some annoyance in how long it took to actually register with the evacuation centre, but at this point from what I understand everybody feels like they're being well taken care of.

MF: And how many people, how many more people may have to leave their homes if the situation continues as it is?

DOUG HERBERT: Well jeez, that's hard to say. The city of Williams Lake isn't under evacuation but a lot of the nearby communities there—that's in central BC—the surrounding communities have either been evacuated or are placed on alert. I mean we're speaking across the province with the amount of fires we're seeing, you could see thousands of more evacuees potentially. It's really hard to say at this time because of the fire's behaviour and all of the different fires that we're seeing around the province. It's kind of hard to track actually because there's new fire pops happening every day actually.

MF: It must make people feel really nervous.

DOUG HERBERT: There is a lot of nervousness. One young woman I spoke with, she’d actually left in such a rush that she didn't have any shoes and she was worried about her boyfriend, where was he. She hadn't got him on the phone. So yeah, people are definitely afraid for their family. They're afraid for what's happening in their communities. And they're just afraid of what might happen.

MF: Doug, what about fire crews in in BC and other first responders? How well are they able to cope?

DOUG HERBERT: Well, that's hard to say. From what I've been hearing from fire officials, they do feel stretched. They are eagerly waiting help from other provinces. From what we understand, we should be getting around 300 out-of-province firefighters coming either today or tomorrow, mainly from Alberta and Ontario, which will help. I know Saskatchewan is going to send some heavy equipment as well. But at this point, there's so many fires that some of them aren't being attended to or they know where they are but they're not actually at risk for homes. So they're sort of prioritizing which fires they're fighting.

MF: When does it end?

DOUG HERBERT: When does it end? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean it came on so quickly. There's so many fires that are burning out of control right now. You can't really put an end date on it.

MF: Doug, thanks for speaking to us this morning.

DOUG HERBERT: Thank you. Doug Herbert, CBC reporter and anchor in Kamloops, British Columbia. Like so many others, Sherrie Fraser didn't have a moment to spare before fire engulfed Boston Flats Community Estates – the mobile home development where she lived for over five years in Cache Creek, BC. Following the evacuation order on Friday, Sherrie rushed home from work to gather her things before setting off east to Kamloops. She's now staying there with her son and that is where we've reached her this morning. Sherrie, hello.

SHERRIE FRASER: Hi.

MF: Can you tell us about the moment when you first were told you had to leave your home?

SHERRIE FRASER: I was at work and my boss told me they were evacuating my trailer court. And the only thing I wanted to get was my dog. So I left work and drove 60 kilometres to be told I couldn't go into the trailer court by the RCMP.

MF: Was that a wise idea to have tried to get in even though they'd given you the evacuation order?

SHERRIE FRASER: Well, I just wanted my dog. That was my concern, was getting her out because I knew that the fire was still far enough away I had time to get in there and get out again.

MF: So you did persuade authorities that you could get in?

SHERRIE FRASER: Yes.

MF: So what happened? Can you tell us what it was like?

SHERRIE FRASER: It was just so frightening because I went around one roadblock to get to another roadblock and the RCMP stopped me and said, I said I wanted to get into Boston flats because my dog was in there and they said you can't go down. And I said I have to get my dog. And they said then get your dog and get out. So I went down, grabbed my dog and I left.

MF: Can you describe the scene when you finally reached the trailer park, you passed the different road blocks and were able to get to your home?

SHERRIE FRASER: At that time there was still no fire in there. The fire hadn't reached the trailer court at that point. But to me it still looked like it was a few kilometres away. Once I was out of it, so it was full of smoke, very smoky in there. But I was able to get out and within about two hours, I'd heard the trailer court was in fire, on fire and burning.

MF: Those last moments in your home, what did you have a chance to do?

SHERRIE FRASER: Grab my dog, food for her. I was able to grab my cameras that were right by the door and a photograph of my boys off the wall. That was it. And I left.

MF: And it was a couple hours later when the fire struck.

SHERRIE FRASER: I had heard that the trailer court was on fire.

MF: Do you know what happened?

SHERRIE FRASER: No, not at all. I've seen photographs of the trailer court and there's my trailer sitting there.

MF: Still standing.

SHERRIE FRASER: Not burned. Not burned. Yeah. Which is so devastating because it's the only one and all those other places are gone. All those other people have nothing. I may be able to get something. They have nothing, absolutely nothing. And that’s horrible. That just makes me sick. The only thing I have is myself and my dog.

MF: I saw one of those photos of the community and it just looks otherworldly.

SHERRIE FRASER: It is. You know, those are my neighbours. Those are the people that I live by. And I just, I can't imagine how they feel.

MF: What was that community like, Boston Flats, before the fire?

SHERRIE FRASER: It was a 55-plus community. People were retired there and it was quiet. It was peaceful. It was a nice community and it's gone, all those people.

MF: What kind of a sense of community was there in Boston Flats? What was it like living there?

SHERRIE FRASER: It was nice. You knew your neighbours. You were safe there. You didn't have to worry about. I never locked my door. You know? I never locked my door because my neighbours watched. Everybody looked out for everybody else and that's what happened that day. Everybody made sure everybody else was out.

MF: So as far as you know, is everyone okay physically?

SHERRIE FRASER: Everybody got out. Yes. Everybody got out of there before the fire. There was nobody left behind. As far as I know, everybody, from what I heard, everybody got out safely.

MF: This was on Friday you managed to get out.

SHERRIE FRASER: Yes.

MF: What's it been like watching so much more devastation over the weekend, other people having to live through these evacuation orders?

SHERRIE FRASER: Well, it's just, it's crazy. It happened so fast and you know watching the Fort McMurray fire last year and thinking I couldn't imagine. And you don't until it happens to you. And I still look at it and go this isn’t happening. You go through denial and shock. It's hard to explain.

MF: What's going to happen to Boston Flats? Do you think the community will ever—

SHERRIE FRASER: I've heard that they may rebuild, but it could take years for that to happen.

MF: So where does that leave you?

SHERRIE FRASER: I have no idea. I haven't even talked to my insurance company yet. I have no idea what's going to happen.

MF: Well Sherrie, thanks for telling us this story. And we wish you all the best as you face a lot of difficult decisions over the next few weeks and months.

SHERRIE FRASER: Yes. Thank you so much.

MF: Sherrie Fraser.

SHERRIE FRASER: And—

MF: Go ahead.

SHERRIE FRASER: Thanks to all the volunteers. It's been amazing what these people in this community in Kamloops have done. All the Red Cross, the emergency people, the firefighters—I want to be able to go back and help over there. You know, like I'm thinking how are these people eating and drinking? Like how did they get anything? I want to go help.

MF: You feel like you want to give back.

SHERRIE FRASER: Of course. Absolutely. That's what that community, that whole community—Ashcroft, Cache Creek—everybody helps everybody over there. That whole area.

[Crosstalk]

MF: Sherrie, thanks.

SHERRIE FRASER: Thank you.

MF: Thanks for getting up early. We appreciate it.

SHERRIE FRASER: Thank you.

MF: Sherrie Fraser. She is one of the people who lived in Boston Flats Community Estates. That's a trailer park that was almost completely wiped out by a wildfire in Cache Creek, BC and she was at her son’s in Kamloops, British Columbia. For people who study wildfires and how to prevent them, the current emergency offers lots of sobering lessons for the future. Robert Gray is a fire ecologist with R.W. Gray Consulting Ltd. and we've reached him this morning in Cranbrook, BC. Bob, hello.

ROBERT GRAY: Good morning.

MF: The volume and the intensity of these fires for this time of year, 10th of July, how unusual is that?

ROBERT GRAY: It's quite unusual to have this many fires of this magnitude this early in the fire season.

MF: And what happened to produce them?

ROBERT GRAY: Well, we had a very, very wet winter and spring and spring started to warm up and we produced a lot of what we refer to as fine fuel, so grass. In places the grass is a metre tall. It's very, very thick and has a lot of basically stored energy in it. So we had all that grass growth and then it just dried out. We started hitting 30-degree days in May and then again in June and basically all that fuel is now cured and ready to go.

MF: The fires though, obviously not new for British Columbia. So the key factors that lead to this happening at this time of the year? It's not just the grasses. Is it the weather also? How is that playing into it?

ROBERT GRAY: Yeah, weather is a big factor in this. It takes weather and fuels to drive these things. But you know we had that period of a very, very long winter and a lot of heavy snowpack. And then a very, very wet spring and then you could think that we may not have much of a fire season in BC. But then then things shifted around very quickly almost like 180 degrees and we started hitting, like I said, 30- degree days but accompanying those 30 degree days were very, very low humidity and strong winds. So strong winds and low humidity just desiccate the vegetation and dry it out that much quicker. With that type of winter and spring weather pattern, we wouldn't expect to see much of a fire season until possibly mid-August, but that's been basically truncated by about six weeks. And now we're into a very long period of 30-plus degree days, RH below 10 per cent and strong winds. And that's just a recipe for disaster.

MF: Well, that sort of leads you to believe that this could last quite a while longer.

ROBERT GRAY: Yeah. Correct. So like I said, we’re quite early in the fire season and looking at the long range forecast, we’re under this dome of high pressure that's coming up from the desert in the southwest US and the current pattern looks like at least a week, 10 days of more of this. And then out beyond that, Environment Canada has suggested that this could be the pattern throughout the rest of the summer. So typically our fire season in BC goes until mid to late September. So we could be looking at 10 or more weeks of this.

MF: Do you see this yourself as due to a change in climate?

ROBERT GRAY: There are certainly indicators that climate change has got something to do with this. Fire seasons, we would expect from modeling to get longer. It's already looking like it's longer in parts of the western US, about 70 days. Climate projections here definitely show shorter winters, some years with no snowpack, some years with excessive snowpack. But then springtime coming earlier and basically getting rid of all that snow and the water and then long period drought and just longer fire seasons by anywhere from 50 to 60 days.

MF: The thing is there always have to be fires. It's just trying to make sure or find some way for them not to get completely out of control. And you've spoken about or written about working to mitigate fires and the intensity of them in the past. How much has been done by authorities on fire prevention and mitigation?

ROBERT GRAY: On the mitigation side, we've had a program in BC under the Union of BC Municipalities and the BC Wildfire Service for a number of years now and it's had some success. Communities have been writing community welfare protection plans and they've been embarking on fuels treatment projects. In a lot of cases, we’re basically onto a maintenance schedule now where we did projects starting back in 2005, 2006 and vegetation has regrown enough that we have to go back in and retreat them. And that's the process. We have to treat large areas, reduce fuels and we have to retreat because basically vegetation grows back. As we saw this spring, it can grow back in gangbusters. But we're still not doing enough and we have to find a way to get larger areas treated and we have to be doing a much more controlled burning, what you call prescribed burning. But there's issues around that when it comes to smoke and liability of escape.

MF: So you have to burn to prevent out-of-control burning?

ROBERT GRAY: Yeah. Correct. So we're basically, we're trying to control the accumulation of fuel through combustion. And it's one of the most effective methods we have. And most of our ecosystems here in BC, the plants are adapted to fire in some form, whether it's low severity or high severity or frequent or infrequent. So fire is a natural part of the system. And like you said, it's going to happen. So one of the ways we build resilience for our communities and our ecosystems is to burn. It seems kind of counterintuitive, but the more we apply fire, the less we have big ugly nasty fires.

MF: Is there a role for the private sector? I mean there’s a lot of forestry activity in BC of course.

ROBERT GRAY: Yeah, there is a role. Certainly the timber industry is an active participant in it. There are contractors, contractors who also do prescribed burning. The problem we have now is that in BC, there used to be a lot of burning going on back in the 1980s and then it stopped. There were issues around smoke and too much burning and inappropriate ecosystems, large areas that escaped prescribed fires. So the skill set has largely been lost. And so we're in a problem now where we have a deficit in the skill set and we have to rebuild it.

MF: Bob, listen, thanks for speaking to us and we appreciate your time.

ROBERT GRAY: You're very welcome.

MF: Bob Gray, Robert Gray. Fire ecologist with R.W. Gray Consulting Ltd. He was in Cranbrook, British Columbia. CBC News is next. Then a story that journalist Claudia Rowe just couldn't shake—her strange fascination with a serial killer and what he taught her about the evil and good in all of us. That's The Spider and the Fly and it's in our next half hour. I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

ENCORE | How a serial killer taught a reporter the complicated meaning of evil

Guests: Claudia Rowe

MF: Hello, I’m Mike Finnerty and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MF: Up next, the journalist and a killer. But which is the spider and which is the fly?

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Ominous organs]

VOICE 1: “Will you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly. “‘Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy. The way into my parlour is up a winding stair, and I have a many curious things to show when you are there.”

VOICE 2: “Oh no, no,” said the little fly. “To ask me is in vain. For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

VOICE 1: “I'm sure you must be weary dear, with soaring up so high. Will you rest upon my little bed?” said the spider to the fly. “There are pretty curtains drawn around. The sheets are fine and thin and if you’d like to rest awhile, I'll snugly tuck you in.”

VOICE 2: “Oh no, no,” said the little fly. “For I've often heard it said, ‘They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed.’”

MF: The Spider and the Fly is a grim cautionary tale in Mary Howitt’s classic poem. It's also the title of a new book about a series of very real and grisly murders, written by Claudia Rowe who was a reporter working in upstate New York, when local women began to vanish one by one. Their murders changed life in the town of Poughkeepsie in the 1990s. And Claudia Rowe’s investigation into them changed her life too. It led her to forge an uncomfortable connection to the serial killer who committed the murders and forced her to some confront demons of her own. The full title of her book is The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder. Anna Maria spoke with Claudia Rowe from Seattle earlier this year. And a warning: this interview will deal with disturbing material.

AMT: What did you think of that poem?

CLAUDIA ROWE: I love that poem. I think it's so eerily relevant to the connection between myself and Kendall Francois, and what I try to examine in this book. I'm glad you played it.

AMT: Well, let's begin at the beginning. This began as a news story for you.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Exactly. I was a stringer for the New York Times in the late 1990s. I was living in the Poughkeepsie area. And I had known that a number of women were missing, but I didn't really know if it was a story. Nobody did, because there was no actual proof that a crime, or crimes, had been committed. There were no crime scenes. People just knew that women were missing and I told my editors at the New York Times something strange seemed to be going on but I wasn't sure what. And they said start making phone calls and I did. Very shortly after that, Kendall Francois confessed. Just in a coincidence of timing.

AMT: So what can you tell me about the women who disappeared?

CLAUDIA ROWE: They were all quite similar in some ways. They all were drug users, most of them pretty severe drug addicts. They were crack addicts mostly. They all walked a small strip of Main Street in downtown Poughkeepsie, New York, essentially just walking in the street to support their habits. They were prostitutes, but they were also mothers and daughters and they had hopes and they had dreams. And Kendall Francois really crushed out any hope of change for them.

AMT: So Kendall Francois, 27 at the time, is arrested not on a murder charge and he confesses.

CLAUDIA ROWE: It surprised everyone. He had once been a suspect and he had been questioned and he had been polygraphed, and he passed the polygraph. This was quite a while before the final night. And there were other reasons that police may have slightly discounted him. But in any case, he was brought in for questioning on a rape and assault, to which he immediately confessed. And then when the police said they were going to leave him alone in a room for a little bit and get a warrant to get the shirt he was wearing during this rape, they just let him sit there and they proceeded with their paperwork. And he knocked on the door and said, “I'd really like to talk with someone about the missing women,” and it stunned everybody. And out came hours and hours and hours of confession.

AMT: Confession to the killing of eight women.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Correct. All of whom were stored in his home. Their bodies were in the home where he lived with his mom, dad, and teenage sister.

AMT: Well this is the part that just boggles me. So the police go to his house. Describe what they find.

CLAUDIA ROWE: They found a scene unlike any that they had ever encountered. I had detectives with 30 years on the job say they had never ever seen anything like what they found in the Francois home. Feces and rot and maggots dropping from the ceiling, paperwork and clothes and used underwear, and just everything everywhere. No order to the home at all. They were hoarders for sure, but they were in many cases hoarders of garbage and rot. The family did not know, or at least they were never charged with any crime with aiding and abetting or anything like that. They lived in apparently a state of such denial such of eight corpses in their home and such denial of the reality of the home itself.

AMT: So who was in that home at the time with him?

CLAUDIA ROWE: Kendall Francois’ mother, who was a psychiatric nurse. Kendall Francois’ father, who worked for DuPont. And Kendall Francois’ younger sister who had just graduated high school when this all came out.

AMT: And they knew nothing? They didn't smell anything?

CLAUDIA ROWE: They did, they did smell something. And apparently, Kendall Francois’ mother asked him what is that smell coming from the attic? He told her it was a family of dead raccoons, which struck me as a very curious image. And that was it. And she apparently accepted explanations that no more demanding or incisive parent would accept. It's very hard to know really exactly what the family dynamics were, but perhaps they were frightened of him or perhaps they were frightened to simply ask the next question and this really speaks to a profound psychological disconnect and deep denial.

AMT: Mm. So the police swarm in. I mean, it's like a hazardous waste site.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Right.

AMT: And there are eight bodies in there, some in the attic, some in the crawl space in the basement.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Correct. None of them very well concealed I should add. The basement had three bodies and they were sort of shoved into a hole in the wall, but in the attic they were just sort of there.

AMT: Over what period of time had he killed these women?

CLAUDIA ROWE: This was two years, between 1996 and 1998.

AMT: And the family lived with that in denial?

CLAUDIA ROWE: All the time.

AMT: Yeah. What sentence did he get?

CLAUDIA ROWE: Kendall Francois got eight life terms in exchange—this was a deal made with the prosecuting attorney's office. If he would plead guilty to eight counts of first degree murder, he would escape the chance of a death penalty trial and that is what happened.

AMT: Mm. And of course, because there wasn't a trial, a lot of these questions about the family and what they knew, they just never came out.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Correct. Almost nothing came out. Nothing was made public because there was no trial.

AMT: So tell me how you made contact with him.

CLAUDIA ROWE: I covered the story straight for the New York Times as a stringer on the scene, just simply about the arrest and the sentencing and the agreement—really basic kind of court procedural stuff. I, however, could not get this story out of my head. It rang a lot of bells for me personally and I sort of ruminated over it over the course of a year. And finally about a year after Kendall's arrest, I wrote to him where he was staying in the county jail.

AMT: It rang a lot of bells for you personally. Like what?

CLAUDIA ROWE: Well, the story of Kendall Francois from the beginning struck me as a story of denial. The city of Poughkeepsie really never sort of confronted the reality of what was happening down on Main Street. And I had been a local reporter for the small town, The Poughkeepsie Journal, the local paper. You would never, reading the local paper, you would never know what Poughkeepsie was, how downtrodden, what kind of deep social problems were existing there. There was sort of a relentless boosterism to the town, which is understandable of course. It's also in an area pretty heavily invested in tourism. So this issue of community denial had long been grinding at me and I had always intended to write something about that. And then came this story in the middle of it, of a family living in such profound denial. So that seemed another ring echoing the same theme. And then, the longer I began corresponding with Kendall Francois, I had to reckon with levels of denial in my own life and in the way I had grown up as well.

AMT: And I want to ask more about that. But let's talk a little bit more about the back and forth. You'd always been fascinated by serial killers.

CLAUDIA ROWE: As a younger person, I was really drawn—and I did not understand why—but really drawn to crime narratives any kind of crime. Mysteries, I read Agatha Christie when I was eight. I was [chuckles] really, really quite mesmerized by crime stories, fiction and nonfiction. And I did not completely understand why, but I had the sense that having grown up a pretty fearful kid, and there was a fair amount of rage in my family home growing up, and a certain amount of emotional violence, I was kind of paralyzed by that growing up and, as I say, terribly frightened. And I think my attraction to crime narratives was as a way to try to understand those impulses, that motivation, the action toward cruelty, the mechanism behind explosive rage and explosive violence. I think I was trying to understand that as a way to leech it of some of its mystery and then some of its power. And that's initially how I came to the Kendall Francois case.

AMT: And you grew up affluent in Manhattan.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Comparatively affluent, yeah.

AMT: So again, that's sort of what the world might see versus what's going on underneath.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Absolutely.

AMT: That in a little place like Poughkeepsie, which has all this affluence that surrounds it, and the degradation of the community. That again, was a kind of a parallel to what you were thinking.

CLAUDIA ROWE: The reality of the way people present to the world outside. Kendall Francois’ family for instance, they went to regular jobs. He was a college student, as was his younger sister. They were churchgoers. They had sort of a public face that was so profoundly different from the reality within their home. And at a much different scale, there was some of that in my own home. A public face that was quite different from the reality inside.

AMT: So he tried to impose rules on your correspondence. What were they?

CLAUDIA ROWE: He said if you want to know me, I'm going to have to know you too. And here's how it's going to go. You're going to tell me everything and then I'll answer your questions from me. Now, [chuckles] pretty simplistic rules and that's not in fact what happened. But that's how we began our correspondence.

AMT: He had actually told you that he wanted, like 10 typed pages of all sorts of detail about your life, your sexual life, your feelings and in exchange, he'd answer four questions.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Right. It didn't seem a very fair trade, if that's what you're getting at. [chuckles]

AMT: And you ignored that and he kept writing.

CLAUDIA ROWE: That was the thing that I began to learn about Kendall Francois. Yeah, I ignored that and he stayed hooked into this back and forth, because really what he wanted was connection. He could not really sustain connection in any kind of healthy or normal way, but he had a grasping need for some kind of sense of connection.

AMT: How long into writing back and forth did you meet with him the first time?

CLAUDIA ROWE: The first time was about a year after we had begun corresponding. We started, I got my first letter from him, I think, in November of 1999. And then in, I believe it was September of 2000, maybe August of 2000, was the first meeting. And that was Kendall Francois and myself at the Dutchess County Jail. So there was a barrier between us in that first meeting, like a window of Plexiglas. But I was still terrified.

AMT: And how did it go? What did you talk about?

CLAUDIA ROWE: The first thing Kendall Francois did after this year of correspondence with me and a number of phone calls, but he had never seen me, he didn't know what I looked like. He kept asking for a photograph, which I refused to give him. When he saw me, first thing he did was laugh. He laughed at me. He said that I was smaller than he had pictured. I was not as young. I didn't have hair as long and I was tinier than he imagined. And I said, well, okay, and he said but, you know, most of the people on the planet looked small to me. He was of course, an enormous person physically, but that comment “Most of the people on the planet look small to me” seemed to go to other areas of his psyche, I thought.

AMT: Enormous, he was like 300 or more pounds.

CLAUDIA ROWE: He was over 300 pounds and he was at least 6’4”, maybe taller.

AMT: And as this correspondence goes on with him, what kind of emotions did all of this stir up in you?

CLAUDIA ROWE: Very complicated emotions. That's what kept me hooked in for so long. I think it wouldn't have been true for every single serial killer that exists. It was Kendall Francois himself who began to become quite an intriguing figure to me because while people described him as a monster and as evil, and he had surely committed monstrous and evil acts, he also had elements in him that were recognizable to me. He had certain threads of a trace of a previous humanity maybe and that did keep me hooked in. So he made many comments about Dutchess County that I could not completely disagree with. He spoke frequently about the hypocrisy of the world around him. He had this sense of goofball humour and a sense of beauty and a sense of—twisted sense—but a sense of loyalty. He had a sense of outrage at historic or societal injustices. These were all things that really resonated for me. So they evoked a lot of confused emotion in me. I was terrified of him, but I was also pained by what he might have once been, who we could have been. And also his victims, who they might have been as well, and how he had crushed that hope. He was in my head. And what I felt was a kind of compulsion to, even despite my fear, I could not stop and that was one of the most perplexing things about it. I just was not going to stop until I understood what was behind those words, evil and monster, which to me sounded like cut outs, like fairy tales, like magic. They didn't give me any sense of what are we talking about when we're talking about monster? Right. But this is a person who interacted with the world and who had friendships. And while he had no capacity for empathy or a true bond, he had elements that made me wonder about what we mean by these words evil. And I just felt a deep, deep need to understand it at a more complex level. It also of course, helped me understand my own background a little bit. Not that there was evil to that degree in any way in my growing up. However, trying to understand Kendall Francois from a more 360 vantage point did allow me, finally, and in a strange and unexpected way, to come to a much better understanding of those in my own life who had hurt me and it helped me to understand that we are all the sum of powerful forces growing up. And that motivation is complicated. And within evil, there can be little strands or ghosts of something we would call humanity, and within good people that can be a capacity for terrible damage.

AMT: And I want to talk a little bit more about your family. Because you write, even as a teenager living in New York, you would end up, as you say, you stepping into strangers’ cars and allowing them to wonder if I'm for sale. What were you going through as a teenager?

CLAUDIA ROWE: Those were rough, rough years. Things were not great at home. I was terribly angry, terribly alienated, and deeply self-destructive. Like Kendall Francois, I had a fair amount of self-loathing. And I think I was, you know, at the time it seemed to me that what was going on inside of our home was so different from what we presented, and it seemed to me that violence and criminality, those things were real. Though they were dark and ugly, they were real. And this kind of elevated or sort of upper crust life seemed not real. It was not true, at least not emotionally. And as a young person it seemed to me that the only thing that was honest was darkness.

AMT: Did you ever get the answers you were seeking?

CLAUDIA ROWE: You know, at the beginning I thought that Kendall Francois would provide for me—this was entirely my invention—but I imagined that he would provide for me kind of a map of cruelty or a diagram of the mechanism behind it. That's what I thought I wanted at the beginning. This happened to me and then it makes me do this and then I do that, you know, like an algebraic equation. 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. I think that we think about serial murderers largely in the Hollywood idea, of this kind of dashing, highly sophisticated, very eloquent, fully in control sociopath. The Hannibal Lecter model. And that is not in any way who Kendall Francois was. So what I did get was an answer about the misery within cruelty. He was a miserable person. And I got, in the end, a sense of more compassion, not for him or what he did, but for the child he might have been. And for his victims who are also people we looked away from, I did as well. So did all of Poughkeepsie, they were troubling to look at. And I got a much deeper sense of we must look with more compassion at people who trouble us and much, much earlier, much earlier, way before it gets to this level of terrible destruction. And I believe that if somebody had seen the 10-year-old Kendall, you know, he was enormous but he was never seen. If somebody had seen this child and seen the kind of conditions he was living in, maybe some of this could have been headed off.

AMT: He died a few years ago. What did you think when you heard that?

CLAUDIA ROWE: When Kendall Francois died in 2014, it provoked in me a very confusing reaction—a very strange mix of relief and regret. Not regret for his death, but again, regret for the person he might have been. I don't believe he was destined to be a serial murderer. I learned during the reporting, that he had once been this very fat lonely kid, a fifth grader who wouldn't speak. He wouldn't fight. He just wouldn't speak. He wouldn't open a book. He wouldn't respond to his teachers. He was locked, frozen, paralyzed. Go to class, wouldn't speak. What is a kid who doesn't speak? So 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.

AMT: So who was the spider and who was the fly?

CLAUDIA ROWE: I really think that that is up to each reader to determine for themselves.

AMT: But I want to know how you feel because it was your choice of a title. And you describe this intricate back and forth with a serial killer. Who was winding the thread around whom?

CLAUDIA ROWE: At the beginning, I think it was he. He often drew pictures for me where there was a spider waving, and yet, Kendall Francois was mortally terrified of spiders. This enormous man would leap onto his jail cot quaking and screaming when he saw a spider in his cell. I think at the beginning, he was the spider. But I think in truth, always it is the writer who has the power to tell the story. And in the end, we know who died and who survived.

AMT: Well, that's a raw and honest and disturbing story, but it's very thought provoking. Thank you for talking to me today.

CLAUDIA ROWE: Thank you for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

MF: Claudia Rowe, author of The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer and the Meaning of Murder. She spoke with Anna Maria earlier this year from Seattle. That’s our program for today. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One for Love Me. This week, the show explores our complicated relationships with our fathers, including the journey of a son trying to figure out how to mourn his father after his father’s suicide. You can take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show. You can start listening in just a few seconds. You can make your own playlist before you head out on a road trip, to the beach, for a summer walk. The app also lets you listen live to your local CBC station—don’t miss your local morning show, of course—all right from your smartphone or tablet. It is free from the App Store or Google Play. I’m Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current and we’ll see you tomorrow.

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