The Voyeur's Motel Read online

  In those days he had been a vigorous and compactly built individual in his midforties who stood about six feet, weighed 200 pounds, was clean-shaven, and had a full head of dark hair. Now, as he slowly approached with his right hand extended, he carried a cane and was a balding, gray-haired senior citizen with a mustache and goatee. Tightly buttoned over his massive chest was a wide-shouldered gray tweed jacket and, under it, an orange-colored sports shirt, black trousers, and loafers.

  His hazel eyes were covered with tinted glasses that, as he later explained, were prescribed for his nearsightedness. He acknowledged as well that his height had shrunk to five nine and his weight had risen to 240 pounds.

  “But I feel fine,” he said after we had shaken hands and sat down and began scanning the menu. Then he looked up and, lifting his cane in my direction, said, “I see that you’re as dapper as ever,” and, with a smile, added, “Is that silk necktie you’re wearing the same one that slipped down through the slats that night when you joined me up in the attic?” I assured him that it was a different necktie, but our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of his wife, Anita, who apologized for being late because of her difficulty in finding a parking space.

  Eighteen years younger than Gerald, Anita was as he had described her in his letters. She was a petite, quiet, and observant woman who stood five feet four and had frizzy red hair, green eyes, and a voluptuous figure that was notable even though she favored modest attire. She was now wearing a flowered dress buttoned at the neck, and, after her initial greeting, she sat in silence throughout breakfast while her talkative husband outlined our itinerary.

  “After we leave here,” he said, “I’d like to take you to our home so you can see my collection of sports memorabilia in the basement—more than two-million sports cards that Anita has organized in alphabetical order, and we have two hundred baseballs signed by the likes of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, and so forth, including a rare one signed by ‘J.Honus Wagner.’ His name ‘Johannes’ was never referred to after he became famous as ‘Honus,’ but I have this ‘J.Honus Wagner’ from the early 1900s that went into packs of Piedmont cigarettes until Wagner, who didn’t smoke cigarettes, objected to it. So these cards are rare, as I say, as are the old leather football helmets that Sammy Baugh used to wear, and I also wore in high school. And I have Walter Hagen’s clubs, which he used in 1928 in winning the British Open . . .”

  He went on to explain that one of the reasons he is now willing to reveal himself as a voyeur is that he might also have an opportunity to call media attention to his sports collection, which he said is worth many millions of dollars, and he was eager to sell it, along with his large house with its many steps that his arthritic knees cannot climb without causing him great pain.

  “I’ll give away my big house for nothing to whoever buys my collection,” he said. His current dream is to live in a single-story home without steps.

  I replied that I was eager to see his sports collection, but reminded him that I had flown here for on-the-record interviews about his career in the attic, and we had both already agreed that we should try to learn more about the 1977 murder of the drug dealer’s girlfriend in Room 10 of the Manor House Motel.

  In mid-March, in fact—at least three weeks before my flight to Denver—I had telephoned Gerald Foos to inform him that, without naming him as a witness, I intended to contact the Aurora Police Department and learn if it had uncovered any new information about the death of a young woman in the Manor House Motel on the evening of November 10, 1977.

  Foos did not object to my doing this because he had long regretted his negligence on that evening and believed that in going public with the story, and admitting his failings, he might obtain what Catholics seek when they confess their sins. He said he hoped to achieve some sort of “redemption,” especially if his candor revived public interest in the crime and eventually brought the killer to justice—if, indeed, the killer was still alive.

  But the Aurora Police Department promptly reported back to me that it had no information about this almost forty-year-old crime, and during our breakfast I showed Gerald Foos copies of the letters I had recently received. One was from the division chief, Ken Murphy, who wrote, “Unfortunately we were unable to find any death/homicide matching your criteria. We found only one homicide in November 1977, but it occurred a couple of miles away from the Manor House Motel.” That murder, which remains unsolved, was of a twenty-eight-year old Hispanic woman named Irene Cruz. She was found strangled to death on the morning of November 3 by housekeeping staff in a room at the Bean Hotel in Denver.

  The other letter, from Lieutenant Paul O’Keefe of the homicide unit, said, “I have personally checked the Colorado Bureau of Investigations Cold Case webpage, as well as our own internal list of active cold cases, and have found nothing that matches the information you have provided. A review of APD records was also completed for a week to either side of the date that you noted in your letter, and we have found no reported homicides (solved or unsolved) during that timeframe.”

  Lieutenant O’Keefe recommended that I consult the two county coroner’s offices that might have then collected a dead woman’s body in the city of Aurora—the coroners in Adams County as well as Arapahoe County—but neither had any information, nor did the third source I checked for statistics and vital records: the State of Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The latter would not even consider my request for information, explaining that only family members of the deceased had access to death records. In phone calls, two police officers said it would not be unusual for there to be no paper trail in a murder such as the one I described; the identity of the victim was unknown, and the crime took place before police departments used electronic records.

  It is also possible that Foos made an error in his record-keeping, or transcribed the date of the murder inaccurately, as he copied the original journal entry into a different format; Foos often told the same story more than once across his journals and letters. Over the years, as I burrowed deeper into Foos’s story, I found various inconsistencies—mostly about dates—that called his reliability into question.

  I had received cooperation from the Denver Post’s news department, I mentioned to Gerald Foos, but nothing in the paper’s 1977 obituary files provided us with a lead.

  “It seems as if that young woman just fell through the cracks,” he said, but added that this might not exonerate him from legal consequences. In publicly admitting that he had watched the drug dealer murder the woman, and did nothing to prevent it, “I could be an accessory to a crime. It would be a serious deal because I never called the police at the time . . . I might be convicted of second-degree murder charges. Who knows? One attorney told me there’s a law called ‘circumnavigate’ which allows the courts to do a lot of things. It was put into effect because of sex offenders, like priests who offended children long ago, and by ‘circumnavigating’ you can make it appear that it happened last night.”

  Still, Foos went on, after years of reluctance, he was now willing to admit the truth. “Life comes with risks,” he said, “but we can’t be concerned with that. We just tell the truth.”

  With his cane he pointed up toward a few video cameras that were positioned high above our heads within the hotel’s atrium, a vast open space that soared six stories high and reflected the movement of a pair of glossy glass-sided elevators.

  “I noticed cameras posted on the roof outside as I walked in, and others are above the front desk and everywhere else you look around here,” Gerald Foos said, repeating his complaint about widespread voyeurism that he had already cited in letters. It was of course ironic that he, of all people, would take offense at being watched; but rather than debate the point here, where a waiter was removing our breakfast dishes, I decided to delay our discussion until we had our promised on-the-record interview at his home.

  THIRTY-TWO

  AS WE stood
on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, waiting for Anita to bring the car, he again pointed up to an overhanging camera but withheld comment, noticing that a doorman stood nearby watching him.

  Sitting behind the wheel of her four-door blue Ford Escape hatchback, Anita waited while her husband squeezed his large body into the passenger seat, and I climbed in the back, and soon we were headed north along sparsely trafficked country roads bordered by cornfields, wheat fields, and stretches of uncultivated land that Gerald said was owned by speculators and was sometimes invaded by mountain lions, bears, skunks, and badgers, while above were Canadian geese flying in from the north.

  Half turned around in his seat, Gerald directed my attention to other things that interested him, such as the lake where he and Anita often went fishing, and the Valero store where they bought gas and Anita knew the manager (“He’s from Nepal.”), and then we headed toward where the couple lived—a quiet community of neatly paved streets, manicured lawns, cul-de-sacs, rows of blue spruce trees, and high-end residences whose similarity in design made it difficult for Gerald and Anita to relocate their own home after they had first bought it and had driven to a real-estate office two miles away to sign the deed.

  “On our way back we spent hours wandering all over this place looking for our house,” Gerald recalled. “We kept getting lost in and around all those cul-de-sacs. Finally we saw a guy in the street and I called to him, ‘Hey, we bought a house around here but can’t find it,’ and he said, ‘Oh, that also happened to me. Lots of these new houses look alike.’ I didn’t have a GPS then, but I had the address, and soon this guy sent us in the right direction.”

  Anita paused before turning into the driveway of a large, modern green house with white trimming and stone facing and spruce trees in front. Gerald clicked a remote that opened the door of a three-car garage in which was parked a white Ford Fusion sedan, and hung along the walls of the garage was an orderly arrangement of household tools and fishing rods and also a mounted deer’s head and the bow and arrow with which Gerald said he shot the animal during a hunting trip years ago.

  After entering the house from a side door in the garage, Gerald asked Anita to turn off the alarms and the laser beams in the basement, and he told me that his sports collection down there was valued at $15 million. He then led me through the dining area into a large living room with mahogany furniture and an eighty-inch television screen and several tall cabinets along the walls containing some of the eighty dolls that he and Anita had collected during their almost thirty years of marriage. I remember reading his notes describing his boyhood attraction to the dolls he saw in his aunt Katheryn’s bedroom, and how his mother diverted his interest from dolls to collecting baseball cards; but it occurred to me that after his marriage to Anita, the latter served as his proxy in drawing him back to dolls and acquiring some of these models I was now seeing in the living-room cabinets and elsewhere in the house.

  As I stood next to him, he removed from a glass shelf a red-haired, green-eyed doll wearing a white lace dress and white shoes, and he said, “Anita and I were in Florida, and I had a picture of Anita when she was very young, and they made this doll right off that picture.” He went on to explain, “Every one of these dolls you see is totally porcelain, from the feet, through the body, everything,” and then he took in hand a pretty blue-eyed, blonde-haired doll measuring nearly three feet and said it was a one-of-a-kind product designed by the German doll maker Hildegard Günzel, who was known to collectors around the world. “We paid over $10,000 for this one,” he said.

  At my request he pointed out some pictures of his aunt Katheryn that were among the framed photos of family members hanging along the walls. In one photo she is shown standing in a farmyard with her hands on her hips smiling at the camera.

  Although she wore floppy trousers and a loose-fitting black lace blouse, the outlines of her curvaceous body were quite evident. There was also a photo near it showing Gerald as a farm boy, holding his dog within view of his aunt’s bedroom window. In addition, there were photos of his parents, Natalie and Jake, standing in front of the office of the Manor House Motel; and of Gerald and Anita in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria during a holiday visit to New York in 1991.

  Upstairs, hanging on the walls of his office, were the license plates of some of the automobiles he used to drive—his Cadillacs, Lincolns, Thunderbirds. Encased in one corner of the room, next to his desk, was his gun collection—several rifles, shotguns, and boyhood BB guns; and on a shelf nearby were two German Lugers that he claimed to have gotten from an American colonel who had taken them from the home of the Nazi commander Hermann Göring. There was also a Japanese sword and scabbard that Gerald said he acquired at a home sale.

  In a guest room next to his office were more of Anita’s porcelain dolls, a doll carriage, several of her Avanti-made stuffed animals, and dozens of glass figurines representing cats and other creatures—a menagerie occasionally joined by Anita’s two pet cats. All the women that Gerald Foos had been personally associated with were collectors, he said, adding that his first wife, Donna, had a very large stamp collection and “paid as high as a thousand dollars for one stamp.” Anita’s interests were not restricted to dolls, he went on, but included a coin collection as well as an accumulation of bottles of Velvet Collection wine from the Napa Valley bearing images of Marilyn Monroe on every bottle.

  Ever since the couple had sold their motels, Anita devoted much of her free time to alphabetizing his millions of sports cards (ranging from one depicting Troy Aikman, former quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, to that of Chris Zorich, a onetime lineman with the Chicago Bears)—an “act of labor and love” on her part that Gerald proudly pointed out to me after we had stepped down into the basement.

  Some of the sports cards were placed within the hundreds of photo albums that stood side by side along the multiple rows of bookshelves that lined all four walls of the subdivided basement, which had an eleven-feet-high ceiling and measured ­seventy-five by forty-five feet in total floor space.

  In addition to those in the photo albums, there were hundreds of other cards exhibited individually within small stand-up acrylic frames that rested on or within the room’s many display cases.

  As Gerald Foos slowly led me past the cases, he would sometimes pause, take hold of a certain card, and make comments about it.

  “Here’s a rookie card of Michael Jordan,” Gerald said, adding that he purchased it at a flea market years ago from an ill-informed trader for only twenty dollars. Gerald then held up a card showing the baseball player Alex Rodriguez and admitted that it had dropped in value in recent years. “Here’s a guy—excuse my English—but he just pisses me off, because if he would have stayed away from steroids he would have probably been the greatest player in the world.”

  After raising and praising the card of Hank Aaron, and then of Jackie Robinson, and then of the Detroit Lions’ Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders, who played during the 1990s, Gerald held a card that had come with a box of Cracker Jack candy, showing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ shortstop from the early 1900s, Honus Wagner. In one corner of the room were dozens of football helmets autographed by NFL stars—Joe Montana, Jim Brown, Len Dawson—and on the other side of the room, lined along four wooden shelves, were two hundred autographed baseballs that Gerald said were worth more than their weight in gold. Among the signatures were those of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Pete Rose. (“He should be in the Hall of Fame.”) Each ball was mounted on a small wooden stand with a brass plaque bearing the name of the player who signed the ball, and each ball was covered with a plastic globe that was slightly larger than the ball and protected it from fingerprints and other marks.

  Neatly stacked on shelves above the rows of baseballs were dozens of Wheaties boxes, the covers of each featuring a famous athlete, among them John Elway of the Denver Broncos, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Jerr
y Rice of the San Francisco 49ers. Some of these unopened cereal boxes, such as the one with Lou Gehrig on the cover, were decades old.

  “There must be generations of worms living in some of those boxes,” I said.

  “Yes, and that makes them more valuable,” Gerald replied, with a smile.

  THIRTY-THREE

  UPSTAIRS, SEATED across from me in the living room, Gerald answered some questions.

  “How would you like to be described in the press after you go public with your story?” I asked.

  “I hope I’m not described as just some pervert or ‘Peeping Tom,’” he said. “I think of myself as a ‘pioneering sex researcher.’” He said he felt qualified to be called a pioneer because he had observed and written about thousands of people who were never aware of being watched, and therefore his research was more “authentic and true to life” than, for example, the material coming from the Masters & Johnson Institute, where the findings were drawn from volunteering participants.

  “Why does your writing in The Voyeur’s Journal so often switch back and forth between the first and third person?”

  “Because I felt that I was different individuals,” he said. “When I was downstairs in the office, I was Gerald the Businessman. When I was up on the observation platform, I was Gerald the Voyeur.”

  “Did you ever think of filming or tape-recording your guests?”

  “No,” he said, explaining that to be caught with such equipment would have been easily incriminating, and using it was also impractical. There were often long stretches of time when not enough was happening in the bedrooms to justify the use of a camera or a recording device in the attic. In any case, he never considered the use of such equipment.