Claudia Rowe writes Spider and the Fly about unusual letters written to serial killer
A JOURNALIST fascinated by a depraved serial killer began writing him letters to discover why he murdered. Instead, he got inside her head.
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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.
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.
‘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.”
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.
Originally published as Claudia Rowe writes Spider and the Fly about unusual letters written to serial killer