“Fine,” I said, “but will I be able to join you while you watch people?”
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe tonight. But only after Viola, my mother-in-law, has gone to bed. She’s a widow who works with us, and she stays in one of the rooms of our apartment behind the office. My wife and I have been careful never to let her in on our secret, and the same thing goes, of course, for our children. The attic where the viewing vents are located is always locked. Only my wife and I have keys to the attic. As I mentioned in my letter, no guest has ever had a clue that they’ve been under observation for close to the last fifteen years.”
He then removed from his breast pocket a folded piece of stationery and handed it to me. “I hope you’ll not mind reading and signing this,” he said. “It’ll allow me to be completely frank with you, and I’ll have no problem about showing you around the motel.”
It was a neatly typed, one-page document stating that I would never identify him by name in my writings, nor publicly associate his motel with whatever information he shared with me, until he had granted me a waiver. It essentially repeated his concerns as expressed in his introductory letter. After reading the document, I signed it. What did it matter? I had already decided that I would not write about Gerald Foos under these restrictions. I had come to Denver merely to meet this man of “unlimited curiosity about people” and to satisfy my own unlimited curiosity about him.
When my luggage arrived he insisted on carrying it, and so I followed him through the terminal to the parking area and finally in the direction of a highly polished black Cadillac sedan. After placing my luggage in the trunk and waving me into the passenger seat, he started the engine. He responded to my favorable comment on his car by saying that he also owned a new Lincoln Continental Mark V but was mainly proud of his three aging Thunderbirds—his 1955 convertible and his ’56 and ’57 hardtops. He added that his wife, Donna, drove a 1957 red Mercedes-Benz 220S sedan.
“Donna and I have been married since 1960,” he said, driving toward the airport’s exit before entering the highway to begin our ride to the motel, located in the suburban city of Aurora. “Donna and I went to the same high school in a town called Ault, about sixty-five miles north of here. It had a population of about 1,300, mostly farmers and ranchers.” His parents had a 160-acre farm and were German Americans. He described them as hardworking, trustworthy, and kindhearted people who would do anything for him—“except discuss sex.” Every morning his mother dressed in the closet of his parents’ bedroom, and he never witnessed either of them exhibiting an interest in sex. “And so, being very curious about sex even as an early adolescent—with all those farm animals around, how could you avoid thinking of sex?—I looked beyond my home to learn what I could about people’s private lives.”
He did not have far to look, he said, steering the car slowly through the commuter traffic. A farmhouse next to his parents’, about seventy-five yards away, was occupied by one of his mother’s younger married sisters, Katheryn. When he started watching his aunt Katheryn she was probably in her early thirties, and he described her as having “large breasts, a slim athletic body, and flaming red hair.” She often walked around nude in her bedroom at night with the lights on, the shutters folded back, and he would peek in from below the windowsill—“a moth drawn to her flame”—and hide there quietly for an hour or so, watching and masturbating. “She was the reason I started masturbating.”
He watched her for five or six years, and never got caught. “My mother would sometimes notice me sneaking out and she’d ask: ‘Where are you going at this hour?’ and I’d make some excuse like I was checking on our dogs because it sounded like coyotes were out there.” Then he would sneak over to Aunt Katheryn’s window, hoping she would be walking or sitting in the nude, maybe at her dressing table arranging her collection of porcelain miniature dolls from Germany, or her valuable collection of thimbles, which were kept in a wooden curio cabinet hung on the bedroom wall.