DUE TO my frequent travels between Italy and the United States during these years, I was sometimes months behind in our correspondence, and it occurred to me often that I would be wise to discontinue. What was the point of all this back-and-forth letter writing? Gerald Foos was not my literary property. He was not a subject I could write about despite my continuing curiosity about how it would end. Would he ever get caught? If he did, what would be the trial strategy of his attorneys? Was he so naive to think that jurors could be convinced to accept his attic as a laboratory in quest of truth? And moreover, if the prosecutors had discovered our correspondence while rummaging through his files, might I be subpoenaed to testify?
I would do everything possible to avoid this, of course. But even if he continued to avoid detection, he served no purpose to me as a writer because, as mentioned earlier, I insisted on using real names in my articles and books. I was not a fiction writer who made up identities and created situations. I was a nonfiction writer who imagined nothing and gained whatever I got from talking to people and following them around. I hid nothing from my readers—real names and real facts that could be verified, or no story.
Still, whenever the mail arrived bearing his return address on the envelope, I opened it without delay. And it was with shock and dismay that, after receiving a letter from Gerald, dated March 8, 1985, I learned that Donna was dead. She had died on September 27, 1984. She had been in her late forties and suffering from lupus.
“It has been almost two years since I’ve had any contact with you,” Gerald’s letter began, and, although I did not perceive an incriminating tone in his words, I wondered why it had taken him a year and a half to pass on the sad news. Maybe he had written me earlier and my houseguest in New York had incorrectly forwarded it to me in Italy. In any case, Donna was dead and Gerald’s letter went on to provide me with additional information: “There is a new woman in my life.”
I immediately called Gerald from New York to express my condolences about Donna, and then I followed days later with a letter asking about this new woman’s knowledge of the Voyeur as discreetly as I could: “Does your present lady friend have any sense of your interesting past?”
In time I learned that she did; and, like Donna before her, she not only condoned his snooping but sometimes joined him in the attic to participate. I did not learn this all at once; in fact, it would take dozens of letters, several conversations on the phone, and years of polite inquiry on my part, to piece together a summary of Gerald Foos’s life that extended from my one and only personal visit with him in 1980 to my receiving his letter in 1985 informing me of Donna’s death.
His “new woman” was a buxom five-foot-four, green-eyed divorcée with reddish hair named Anita Clark, and she was eighteen years his junior. Born in Nebraska to working-class parents, she came with them to Colorado when she was seven. After graduating from high school in Aurora, she held such short-term jobs as a nanny, a nurse’s aid, and a bus girl at a roadside diner. It was at the diner that she met her future husband, a truck driver, whom she married in 1976 when she was twenty-four.
Three years later the couple was divorced, and, with limited child support and no job, she struggled on her own to raise their two young boys, the older one having been born crippled. One of his legs was missing at the knee, the other at the foot. As he turned five, Anita was living with him and his three-year-old brother on food stamps in a trailer park.
While taking the boys for a ride in a Radio Flyer wagon one afternoon along East Colfax Avenue, she noticed a man standing on a ladder changing the lettering on the Manor House Motel’s sign near the entranceway. In response to her cheerful greeting, Gerald Foos climbed down and engaged her briefly in conversation. She introduced him to her boys by name—the older one was Jody, the younger one, Will—both having red hair like their mother.