The Spider and the Fly

A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder

De: Claudia Rowe

Narrado por: Cassandra Campbell

In this superb work of literary true crime—a spellbinding combination of memoir and psychological suspense—a female journalist chronicles her unusual connection with a convicted serial killer and her search to understand the darkness inside us.

""Well, well, Claudia. Can I call you Claudia? I’ll have to give it to you, when confronted at least you’re honest, as honest as any reporter. . . . You want to go into the depths of my mind and into my past. I want a peek into yours. It is only fair, isn’t it?""—Kendall Francois

In September 1998, young reporter Claudia Rowe was working as a stringer for the New York Times in Poughkeepsie, New York, when local police discovered the bodies of eight women stashed in the attic and basement of the small colonial home that Kendall Francois, a painfully polite twenty-seven-year-old community college student, shared with his parents and sister.

Growing up amid the safe, bourgeois affluence of New York City, Rowe had always been secretly fascinated by the darkness, and soon became obsessed with the story and with Francois. She was consumed with the desire to understand just how a man could abduct and strangle eight women—and how a family could live for two years, seemingly unaware, in a house with the victims’ rotting corpses. She also hoped to uncover what humanity, if any, a murderer could maintain in the wake of such monstrous evil.

Reaching out after Francois was arrested, Rowe and the serial killer began a dizzying four-year conversation about cruelty, compassion, and control; an unusual and provocative relationship that would eventually lead her to the abyss, forcing her to clearly see herself and her own past—and why she was drawn to danger.

Good read, actual words overwrought

Author is a great story teller. Good introspective deep dive but every sentence has one or two too many descriptive words for my particular taste. Your mileage may vary.

Opaque. Shorter Treatment Called For

Although Ms. Wells writes well, as a listener I felt a tension. She seemed to want the personal insight that comes from cracking the code on herself and someone who behaved with extreme depravity. Yet in the telling she hedged. She did commit to the story even to the point of obsession but the same criticism she had François , lacking self-awareness seems to be something she herself has in short supply. Frustrating.

That they had hin all wrong even in the end.

I liked that I could see myself in the reporter. The making sense of it all.

Wow

It was very interesting to hear the other side to the story about the murders.

I was obsessed, just like the author!

I finished listening within two days. The intertwining stories of victims, killer, and author/survivor of her own past, had me entranced.