On the observation platform, on this autumn evening in 1976, the Voyeur is masturbating while watching a white woman almost choking because the black penis in her mouth is too large for her to contain. But she continues to give her partner fellatio, sucking his penis on one side and then the other, and suddenly, as he begins to come, she removes her mouth—and then she watches as this black man’s sperm begins shooting up in the air about three or four feet toward the observation vent. At the same time, the Voyeur in the attic is also having an orgasm, right in tandem with the black man. The Voyeur propels a strong first spasm of sperm right onto the vent, and then it begins to drip downward to the foot of the bed below.
The woman, still grasping the end of the bed, sees evidence of sperm spotting the bed cover. Then she looks up to see more sperm dripping from the vent, and she says to her partner: “My gosh, you shot your come right across the bed and up to the heating vent!” She raised herself on the bed and wiped her finger across the vent. She then placed her fingers in her mouth. “Yes,” she said, “this tastes like your come.”
And the Voyeur watched quietly as she proceeded to sample his sperm.
As a footnote to this incident, the Voyeur asked in his journal, “Will anybody believe that this actually happened?”
If I had not seen the observation platform with my own eyes, I would have found it hard to believe Foos’s entire account. Indeed, over the decades since we met, in 1980, I had noticed various inconsistencies in his story: for instance, the first entries in his Voyeur’s Journal are dated 1966, but the deed of sale for the Manor House, which I obtained recently from the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office, shows that he purchased the place in 1969. And there are other dates in his notes and journals that don’t quite scan. I have no doubt that Foos was an epic voyeur, but he could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript.
By necessity, Foos existed in the shadows, doing so successfully for many years, a success he felt was worthy of note—while, at the same time, he had created a unique laboratory for the study of secret human behavior, for which he also believed he deserved some credit. As he saw it, he was not some lurid “Peeping Tom” but rather a pioneering researcher whose efforts were comparable to those of the renowned sexologists at the Kinsey Institute and the Masters & Johnson Institute. Much of the research and record-keeping at these places was obtained while observing volunteer participants, whereas his subjects never knew they were being watched and therefore he saw his findings as more representative of unconscious and unadulterated realism.
Gerald was not purely a removed observer, however. “In order to discover what individuals will do if provided with the proper sexual stimulation,” the Voyeur planted “sexual paraphernalia and hard-core pornography in their rooms.”
The Voyeur purchased fifty dildos and several hard-core pornographic magazines as an experiment. I would conceal one dildo and one pornographic magazine in a room, usually in the drawer of a nightstand, and then wait for an unsuspecting subject, and place her, or him, or a couple in that room, depending on what type of information was desired from the subject.
During this period of observation, the Voyeur didn’t have any of the individuals complain or return any of the planted sexual paraphernalia. Fifty percent of the women utilized the dildo or magazines, the other fifty percent either ignored the devices or discarded them.
One of those 50 percent who utilized the planted materials was a nun.
In his journal, Gerald wrote that his experimentation and observation had a higher purpose.
“The only way that our society is going to achieve proper sexual stability and mental health, which are undisputed requirements for maturity, is to know the truth of what people are actually doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms. We must educate people with the truth, not indoctrinate; teach facts, not fallacies; formulate a code that accepts all sexual practices, not preaches asceticism.”
While it was true that Donna was fully aware of his activities, and on occasion joined him in the attic as a second witness and sexual partner, he nevertheless felt a need for wider recognition. He admitted as much in his writing, which during the mid-1970s began to reflect, not only what he saw and felt while watching other people, but also how he saw and felt about himself, beginning with his origins as a farm boy whose infatuation with his beautiful aunt Katheryn led him into a lifetime of voyeurism.