After the Voyeur arrived at the motel office he carefully considered what he had observed, and upon reconsideration he definitely concluded that the female was alright, and, if she wasn’t alright, then he couldn’t do anything anyway, because at this moment in time he was only an observer and not a reporter, and really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned.
The next morning, the maid who was cleaning rooms rushed into the motel office and said that a woman was dead in Room 10. The Voyeur immediately called the police, who began an extensive investigation. The Voyeur could only provide the name of the male subject who occupied the room with the female subject, his description, make of car, license number, and that he was in the room with the female subject the evening she was killed. The Voyeur could never provide information that he actually witnessed the male subject’s assault of the female subject last evening.
The Voyeur had finally come to grips with his own morality and would have to forever suffer in silence, but he would never condemn his conduct or behavior in this situation.
After the police had checked out their leads, they returned to the motel to report:
The information was bogus. The suspect was using a fake name, a fake address, and a fake license plate on a stolen car.
When I read this account in New York a few years after I’d visited him in Aurora—and nearly six years after the murder—I was shocked and surprised. I thought that the Voyeur’s detached and irresponsible response to the fracas in Room 10 was similar to the behavior of New York crime witnesses when a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager named Kitty Genovese was being attacked by a man with a knife on a street in Queens shortly after 3:00 a.m. on March 13, 1964.
Although some facts in this case were later disputed—among them that the initial estimate of thirty-eight murder witnesses was an exaggerated number—there was no dispute that several people in Queens saw at least part of the brutality from their apartment windows, and that none of them rushed down into the street in time to rescue or assist the young woman who would soon bleed to death. The New York Times, which broke the story, quoted one unidentified neighbor as saying that he told another neighbor to telephone the police because “I didn’t want to get involved.”
Gerald Foos’s explanation in his journal—he was “only an observer and not a reporter,” and he “really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned”—were explanations that didn’t surprise me because of his often-expressed notion that he was a fractured individual, a hybridized combination of the Voyeur and Gerald Foos, and he was also desperately protective of his secret life in the attic. If the police had grilled him and decided that he knew more than he was telling them, they might have obtained a search warrant to explore his property, including his attic, and the consequences could have been catastrophic.
I telephoned Foos right away to ask about the situation. I wanted to find out whether he realized that, in addition to witnessing a murder, he might have in some way caused it. He was reluctant to say more than he had written in his journal, while reminding me that I had signed a secrecy agreement. He might have also reminded me that I was now a coconspirator in whatever crimes he had committed. I spent a few sleepless nights asking myself whether I ought to turn Foos in or continue to honor the agreement he had asked me to sign at the baggage claim in Denver in January 1980. But even though he had in some way caused the young woman’s death years before by flushing the drugs, had failed to stop the boyfriend as he strangled her, and had callously failed to call for help until the next day because he claimed to see her chest rising and falling, I did not believe Gerald Foos was a murderer. And he had told the police all he knew about the identity of the drug dealer and his girlfriend—who it was now too late to save.
I filed away his notes on the murder along with all the other material he had mailed me earlier in the year. I now knew all that I wanted to know about the Voyeur.