Getty Image / Amanda Edwards
The contestant personal anecdote is a time honored tradition on Jeopardy! and one contestant just raised the bar for how crazy those stories can be with a serial killer anecdote that nobody saw coming.
One thing about the personal anecdotes is that the longer a contestant is winning the more outlandish they get. When current Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings went on his 74-game winning streak the personal anecdotes went off the rails because there are only *so many* things you can say about yourself in that short period of time that are interesting.
This contestant, Amanda, saw her chance to make Jeopardy! history with a serial killer story and took her shot. The volume on this clip is low so be sure to turn up your speakers:
excuse me, how am I just learning that we got a new contender for Wildest Jeopardy! PersonalAnecdote Ever earlier this week pic.twitter.com/glG26aFVn5
— Claire McNear (@clairemcnear) September 12, 2024
For those who couldn’t hear Amanda, she said “my middle school hall monitor was always a little bit odd… Very friendly, but weird. It turns out he was a hall monitor during the day and doing something very different at night. He was caught with seven bodies buried under his house.”
One person saved me the Google search and looked up that hall monitor serial killer with seven bodies under their house and the person at the heart of this Jeopardy! story appears to be a serial killer by the name of Kendall Francois.
According to AllThatsInteresting, Kendall Francois, a U.S. Army veteran, was caught in September 1998 after murdering 8 women while living in the Hudson Valley town of Poughkeepsie.
To say that his story is disturbing might be the understatement of the decade and I don’t think any of us expected to hear his serial killer tale told in a Jeopardy! personal anecdote this week.
Side note: there is a previous connection between Jeopardy! and murder. A 2-time Jeopardy! champion named Paul Curry is currently serving a life sentence for murdering his wife.