Free Body Dump by Fred Rosen

the missing women, it wasn’t a priority. It couldn’t be. There were no bodies, no crime scene. And while it would be nice to believe that every serial killer gets captured, that is just not the case.
    According to Dr. Maurice Godwin, an investigative psychologist who works with police departments in developing “profiles” on serial killers, at any one time there are forty to fifty serial killers at large in the United States. Police don’t like to talk about it lest the public panic, but it is a fact—not all serial killers are captured. Many continue to kill again and again.
    In Washington State, the Green River Serial Killer was still at large after almost twenty years. He is believed to be responsible for the murder of forty-nine women, mostly drug-addicted prostitutes, between 1982 and 1984. The case was so cold only one detective was still on it full-time when DNA testing finally found a match in December 2001.
    In Vancouver, British Columbia, twenty-one prostitutes were missing off the streets of the east side of the city. Like in Poughkeepsie, they had simply disappeared, leaving no crime scene. Which didn’t mean they weren’t dead. Of course, everyone really believed they were, but couldn’t say it.
    “We were agonizing what to do with the public,” Siegrist recalls. “Do we go public and create a scare or keep going with the investigation without [letting the public know]? I have been a cop long enough to know you don’t have all the answers.”
    There was no really good answer. If they went public, it would also be telling the killer they were now on his trail. That might cause him to go to ground and make getting him even tougher. On the other hand, maybe there was a way to turn such a public admission into an asset. Television’s America’s Most Wanted had shown how, done judiciously, the public’s participation in apprehending a bad guy could be invaluable.
    No one person, of course, could make that decision. Poughkeepsie is a small town after all and the decisions you make today will come back to haunt you tomorrow. Everyone is your neighbor. It isn’t a good idea to anger them, especially the voters.
    Anyone who lived in the town and city of Poughkeepsie got to vote for the Dutchess County Sheriff and District Attorney. City and town residents voted for their respective mayors. Catching a serial killer now, rather than later, would not only save lives, it might guarantee politicians’ reelections.
    In the end, the saner, practical heads won out. Siegrist and others involved in the case were allowed to speak on the record to the Poughkeepsie Beat , the weekly newspaper. The Beat was an upscale, local paper that featured hard news reporting in the front, and entertainment, lifestyle and sports articles farther back in its pages.
    The article that appeared in April 1997 talked about the missing women and the possibility they had met their fate at the hands of a serial killer. What was curious was not the much-anticipated public reaction; the public didn’t seem to care and no one panicked. What was more interesting was how the media reacted to the story.
    The media reaction to the story was zero. No one seemed to care. The one daily paper in town, the Poughkeepsie Journal , didn’t even pick up on the story. In a town with upscale pretensions, the murders of prostitutes hardly merited any ink. The media were not hounding the cops for a solution either, another break for Kendall Francois. Poughkeepsie’s in-between geographic status had worked to the killer’s advantage.
    Poughkeepsie is too far from either New York or Albany to be included in their daily TV coverage. Only a Poughkeepsie murder or murders covered on the Associated Press National Wire would break through onto the television news assignment editors’ desks for further coverage.
    The Poughkeepsie Beat got what amounted to an exclusive because no one cared to take it any further. As for the public reaction to the story, leads