The Voyeur's Motel Read online

  Later I asked Foos if he had heard of Erin Andrews, the television sportscaster who was secretly filmed coming out of the shower in her hotel room by a stalker who had altered the peephole in her door. The man, who then posted nude footage of Andrews on the Internet, was convicted of a felony and served thirty months in prison. Andrews sued him and the hotel for $75 million in damages to compensate for the “horror, shame, and humiliation” she suffered. In February 2016, a judge awarded her $55 million.

  Foos had been following the case on the news; his take did not surprise me. “While I’ve said that most men are voyeurs, there are some voyeurs—like this creep in the Fox Sports case—who are beneath contempt,” he told me. “Again, he is a product of the new technology, exposing his prey on the Internet, and doing something that has nothing in common with what I did. I exposed no one. What this guy did was ruthless and vengeful. If I were a member of the jury, I’d unhesitatingly vote to convict.”

  Back in his living room Foos added, “All I needed up there was lots of patience and the ability to describe in my Voyeur’s Journal the situations and trends that I saw below.”

  He recalled that one of the early trends of the 1970s’ Sexual Revolution that was evident at the Manor House Motel was when couples began to undress one another, rather than to change in a bathroom, or with the lights out, as had been the custom in earlier years. Another sign of the ’70s’ liberation was an increase in his guests’ participation in group sex, interracial sex, and same-sex activity, adding that “people began to be freer with one another, sexual relations seemed to be more relaxed, and women began telling men what they wanted, being more open and less shy about it.”

  He, too, became physically responsive, he said, explaining, “I became more pepped up sexually up there—any man would, any woman would—and so consequently I would come down and Anita and I would have great sex. We always had great sex,” he said, nodding toward Anita, who sat nearby. After a pause, she nodded back.

  He conceded that he learned a lot about sex from his wives, first from Donna, and then even more from Anita. While he was an obsessive watcher, he had known few women intimately beyond his wives, he pointed out. As a bachelor in the Navy for four years, he had been picked up a few times by bar girls, and during his twenty-year marriage to Donna he had been faithful until the final year, when he had the brief fling with the Denver public relations woman. And he had been faithful throughout nearly thirty years of marriage to Anita, he continued, adding that what made Anita a compatible partner, in addition to her loving nature, was her being “visual.” By this he meant that, unlike most women, Anita liked watching other people having sex and also enjoyed viewing porno films. Most women more preferred being watched than watching others, he said, which may partly explain why men spent fortunes on porn and women on cosmetics.

  “Only 10 percent of women are voyeurs,” he said, “while almost 100 percent of men are voyeurs.” He described Anita as being among the 10 percent.

  “This is true?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she answered in a soft voice.

  “Yes,” he declared, and went on to explain, “I’m not saying that other women aren’t turned on by erotic material. I’m only saying that men are much more visual, and that women are more likely to be sexually aroused by reading erotic material in a book.” He recalled having watched many female guests at the Manor House holding a book with one hand and masturbating with the other.

  “Since you have spent half your life invading privacy, why are you so critical of our government invading our privacy in the interest of tracking down terrorists and other criminals?” I asked.

  “I don’t like criticizing the government—it’s the only one we have, and everyone is allowed mistakes,” he said, “but I think we’ve made too many mistakes. Government voyeurism is now coming out of the woodwork. Big Brother now has incorporated our lives, our opinions, our thought processes—we’re all being recorded electronically on devices few of us understand. We just know it’s there. I counted twenty video cameras around your Embassy Suites hotel this morning.

  “Any justification for this level of voyeurism at the Embassy Suites is nonexistent,” he said, and he repeated what he had told me many times in the past: his voyeurism at the Manor House was “harmless,” because guests were unaware of it and its purpose was never to trap or entrap or criminalize anyone. But he suggested that the government-conducted voyeurism that we know today is essentially an evidence-gathering game; and anyone who actively opposes this invasive technology at this time, in this period of post-9/11 protectiveness, might be regarded as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

  “People in power want the status quo,” he said, and such people do not want to be exposed as deceitful and ­duplicitous—which is what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, managed to do in releasing documents alleging that, for example, U.S. intelligence agencies were even tapping the cell phone of its ally in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

  “Edward Snowden in my opinion is a ‘whistle-blower,’” Gerald Foos said. Instead of being driven into exile in Russia, and considered by many to be guilty of treason, he should be praised “for exposing things that are wrong in our society.”

  “Do you not also claim to be exposing wrongs in our society as you share with us what you described in The Voyeur’s Journal?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I also consider myself a whistle-blower.”

  “And what do you conclude from all that you’ve witnessed?”

  “That basically you can’t trust people,” he said. “Most of them lie, and cheat, and are deceptive. There are many, many examples of this in The Voyeur’s Journal, like all those people failing the ‘honesty test,’ and preaching one thing and doing another. What they reveal about themselves in private they try to hide in public. What they try to show you in public is not what they really are—and knowing this has made me very skeptical of people in general. In fact, because of what I learned from the observation platform, I’m now antisocial. I just don’t trust people much, and, if I can avoid them, I do.

  “Even now,” he went on, “years after I sold the motels, I just try to stay away from people. I have no one that I consider a neighbor. Anita and I both try to stay away from our neighbors. We might say hello to them, but we keep our distance. When we go out to dinner, it’s just the two of us. Otherwise, I’m a loner.”

  “But you once described yourself as two people,” I reminded him. “In the motel office, you said you were Gerald the Businessman. In the attic, you were Gerald the Voyeur. Well, who is responsible for not making a telephone call for an ambulance while that woman lay strangled on the floor of Room 10, on the night of November 10, 1977?”

  “If I’d known that this particular lady was dying, I’d have called an ambulance immediately,” he said. “I would have said, ‘I was walking by the window and heard a scream’—or something like that. Of course, I would not have said that I’d seen it from the observation platform. I’d have said I’d seen it through a crack in the curtain.”

  This was certainly not the first time that he had remained inactive while witnessing horrible scenes at his motel, he acknowledged. He had previously seen examples of rape, robbery, child abuse, incest, and once he watched quietly while a pimp pressed a knife to the throat of a prostitute until she agreed to surrender money she was accused of withholding. Gerald’s journal had mentioned a time when he had telephoned the police to report drug dealing at his motel, but no action was taken due to his unwillingness to fully cooperate as a witness.

  He loathed drug dealers in part because he feared their activities would draw narcs to his hotel, but he was especially sensitive to the harmful effects of drug usage following the arrest of his son, Mark. Although it was in a losing cause, Gerald said that in 2012 he voted against the legalization of marijuana in Colorado.

  “This drug dealer back in 197
7 was selling drugs out of Room 10 to some young students, and one of them didn’t look more than twelve,” Gerald recalled. “Anyway, when this dealer left the room with his girlfriend, I did what I’d done with dealers before—I flushed the drugs down the toilet. Now when he comes back that night, and can’t find the drugs—he’d hidden them in a bag within the registry system against the wall, after removing the screws—he begins arguing with his girlfriend.

  “‘Who the hell was in here?’ he begins to yell, and then he is blaming her, and hitting her, and she’s crying, ‘I’m your girlfriend—let me go.’

  “He kept hitting her, harder, and once she kicked him in the groin and he really got mad and began strangling her. Soon she collapsed and fell to the floor, right in front of the vent. I was looking right down at her, there on the floor, and I kept saying under my breath, ‘Don’t move, don’t move, he might strangle you again.’

  “Before he left the motel, he picked through some of her things on the floor, and took some cash and credit cards. ‘Don’t move,’ I kept telling her. He then turned, opened the door, and he was gone. I kept watching from up there, and thought she was breathing, but she was not moving at all. Her eyes were closed, but I swear I saw her chest moving, and I thought, ‘Well, she’s okay.’

  “I quit the observation platform for the night, and went down to the office. Later I told Donna about it, when she returned from the night shift at her hospital. She asked, ‘Well, you saw the chest going up and down?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, she’s probably just unconscious, or something like that. You know, she’s going to come around and everything will be okay,’ and I said, ‘Well, I hope so.’ It was very late, and I remember Donna repeating, ‘In the morning, she’ll probably be okay. We won’t say anything, and neither will she. You know, her life’s her life, and that’s the way things are.’ Donna went on to say, ‘People come into the hospital all the time, and they’ve been strangled by their husbands, or they’re shot in the head by someone, and it’s terrible and . . .’”

  He paused, and continued, “The next morning, the maid came to work, and I watched her as she went to the rooms, and soon she came to that room, Room 10, and she opened the door and went in. And all of a sudden she came running out, and I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ And I knew what she was going to tell me. She told me, ‘Gerald, I think the lady in No.10 is dead.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ ‘She’s not breathing.’ I said, ‘Where’s she lying?’ ‘She’s on the floor.’ Oh, no. She was lying just as I’d last seen her.”

  He went on: “I called Donna. ‘Go over there and check her.’ So Donna did, and soon she came back, walking back really quick, and I thought, Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me—no heartbeat. And Donna came in and said, ‘She’s dead, Gerald, she’s dead.’ I said, ‘Okay, we got to call the police. Only thing we can do is go call the police.’

  “The police came, and then we had to wait until the coroner gets there, which takes an hour or two. The police just walk around waiting for the coroner, they have to guard the body. Then the coroner shows up in his little panel truck with a helper, and they cover the body and load it up in the wagon and off they go to an autopsy room, and I’m sick and saying, ‘You know, I could be responsible for this.’ I said to Donna, ‘I saw her breathing.’ She said, ‘I know, you told me.’”

  Gerald took a breath and repeated what he had said earlier: “Yes, if I’d known she was dead, I could have called an ambulance and explained that I’d been walking by the window and heard a scream . . . but that’s not the way it occurred.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  AFTER I had returned to New York, I continued to correspond and talk regularly on the phone with Gerald Foos, but not much more seemed to be happening—there was nothing more to add to his story. He had written the final page of his journal. But even though he hoped that his confessions might bring him “redemption,” and also expedite the sale of his home and sports collection, I sensed that he was guided by more than just that, and even that might be wishful thinking on his part.

  How could he assume that his honesty would achieve anything positive? It might just as easily provide evidence leading to his immediate arrest, subsequent lawsuits, and widespread public outrage.

  Still, it was possible that Gerald Foos needed the notoriety—his ego, especially now that he was so aware of his advanced age and diminishing health, drove him to want to become known for what he had seen and written during his many years as a private observer, and this was more compelling than his fear of being found out. In a way he was like the nineteenth-­century rogue and voyeur portrayed in Professor Steven Marcus’s book The Other Victorians—an individual so taken by the idea of self-exposure or narcissism that he produced a multivolume confession called My Secret Life, although he withheld his name from the manuscript. By contrast, Gerald Foos was acknowledging his true identity, taking all the risks, and, while he was giving me what I wanted, I was still not sure what motivated Gerald Foos, who, after all, was a master of deception.

  In decades of snooping he had never been caught. “Because of the extreme cautiousness and concern that embodies the Voyeur,” Gerald wrote, “not one subject has ever discovered the complete secret of the observation vents. No one was ever hurt or exposed.” And what he communicated in letters and phone calls was not necessarily what he believed, if he even knew what he believed. He was a man of many moods and attitudes, and at times he presented himself as a social historian, a pioneering sex researcher, a whistle-blower, a loner, a double personality, and a critic intent on exposing the hypocrisies and hidden appetites of his contemporaries.

  Although the comparison is perhaps inappropriate, since he was not responsible for exposing the corruption of a president, Gerald Foos’s eagerness to take credit late in life called to mind the decision by a retired FBI agent named Mark Felt to come forward and admit to being the famed Watergate whistle-blower known as “Deep Throat.” In a memoir published in 1979, Felt wrote that he “never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!” But by 2005, when he was nearly ninety-two years old, Felt at last unmasked himself. Felt and his family had argued over whether or not to go public with his identity. A decisive element, according to his daughter, was a wish to profit from the revelation. According to the article in Vanity Fair that revealed Felt’s secret, she told her father, “We could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I’ve run up for the kids.”

  Yet Felt was conflicted over how the revelation would affect his reputation, and up until the night before, he wavered. It was unlikely that Felt would face any legal repercussions for being Deep Throat, though he had earlier been charged in an unrelated case with conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. In 1972 and 1973, as an FBI agent, Felt had authorized illegal break-ins at the homes of nine people associated with the Weather Underground, the leftist group. At Felt’s trial in 1980, Richard Nixon appeared on his behalf; his testimony was interrupted by spectators shouting out “liar” and “war criminal.” Felt was convicted, and ordered to pay an $8,500 fine, but a few months later, he was pardoned by Ronald Reagan. Nixon sent Felt a bottle of champagne with a note: “Justice ultimately prevails.”

  What charges, if any, might be levied against Gerald Foos? He openly admitted to being a voyeur, although he added that nearly all men are voyeurs. Foos insisted that he never harmed any of his guests, since none were aware of his watching them, and so the worst that might be said was that he was guilty of trying to see too much.

  He began as a boy kneeling under windowsills, and then, a half century later, he retired from his louvered life in the attic to exist in a society overseen by street cameras, drones, and the eyes of the National Security Agency.

  As a voyeur, Gerald Foos was now passé.

  And the Manor House Motel was now passé as well.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE KOREAN family that had succeeded Gerald and Anita Foos as owners in
1995, and subsequently ran the place without knowing the history behind the rectangular-shaped six-by-fourteen-inch plaster-board patches that were centered in the ceilings of a dozen rooms, sold the Manor House during the winter of 2014 to a real estate partnership headed by a seventy-five-year-old Denver-based developer named Brooke Banbury.

  Mr. Banbury envisioned replacing the motel with a multi-level apartment house, or a hotel, or perhaps a medical building with a bank on the ground floor. After he had acquired the motel, its contents, and the surrounding land for $770,000 in cash, the Korean occupants promptly vacated their office and living quarters and left behind clothes and shoes in the closets and food in the refrigerator and under the front counter. There was also a small suitcase secured with a padlock, and when Brooke Banbury opened it he discovered a submachine gun with three loaded magazines and extra bullets. The police were summoned and they did not return the rifle.

  Most of the twenty-one rooms in the main building had fresh linen on the beds except for about a half dozen that had been used by guests just prior to the sale and after the departure of the chambermaids.

  But a week or so after the sale, while Banbury was standing in the parking area talking to a couple of city officials, a Lexus SUV drove by and pulled into one of the parking spaces. A well-dressed Asian gentleman then stepped out of the vehicle and walked toward a door of one of the rooms, presumably having a key.

  Interrupted by the loud voice of Banbury, who declared that the motel was now out of business, the man quietly returned to his car and left. A few minutes later, a second car arrived and parked in the same spot. This time two young Asian women stepped out and were about to knock on the door, but quickly retreated upon hearing Banbury calling to them and waving them away. After staring quizzically at Banbury for a moment, both women turned toward one another and laughed as they drove off.