How a serial killer taught a reporter the complicated meaning of evil
* 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
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.