Shortly before Gerald Foos’s discharge from the Navy in 1958, while he was visiting his parents in Ault, his mother said that she had recently met on Main Street one of his fellow students from high school—Donna Strong, who was now studying nursing in Denver. Gerald contacted Donna immediately (his cheerleader friend, Barbara, was already married) and soon Gerald and Donna began a relationship that led to their own marriage in 1960.
By this time Donna had a full-time nursing job at a hospital in the suburban community of Aurora, while Gerald was working as a field auditor in the Denver headquarters of Conoco. He said he was miserably employed, sitting in a cubicle each day helping to keep records of the inventory levels of oil tanks in Colorado and neighboring states. His primary escape from the tedium came during his nighttime “voyeuristic excursions” around Aurora, where he and Donna rented a third-floor apartment not far from her hospital. Often on foot, although sometimes in a car, he would cruise through neighborhoods and take advantage of certain people that he knew to be casual about lowering their window shades, or were otherwise lax about preventing intrusive views into their bedrooms. He said that he made no secret of his voyeurism to Donna.
“Even before our marriage I told her I was obsessively curious about people, and that I liked to watch them when they didn’t know I was watching,” he said. “I told her that I found this exciting, and it gave me a feeling of power, and I said there were lots of men like me out there.” She seemed to understand this, he said, and she certainly wasn’t shocked by his admissions, adding, “I think her being a nurse made it easier for me. Donna and most nurses are very open-minded people. They’ve seen it all—death, disease, pain, disorders of every kind, and it takes a lot to shock a nurse. At least Donna wasn’t shocked.” Not only that, he went on, but she even accompanied him a few times on his voyeuristic excursions, and, after an evening of sharing scenes of foreplay or lovemaking, which she found interesting if not stimulating, she asked, “Do you keep notes on what you see?” “Never thought about it,” he answered. “Maybe you should,” she said. “I’ll think about it,” he said; and soon he started keeping a journal that, by the 1970s, would become several hundred pages in length, with nearly all of his notations centered on what he saw (and sometimes what Donna saw with him) after they had jointly purchased the Manor House Motel, on 12700 East Colfax Avenue in Aurora.
“We’re now getting close to our motel,” Gerald Foos said, as he continued to drive along East Colfax Avenue, passing through a white working-class neighborhood of many low-level buildings—stores, single-family residences, a trailer park, a Burger King, an auto repair shop, and an old Fox cinema house that reminded Foos of one of his favorite films, The Last Picture Show. Colfax was a major thoroughfare, the main east-west street in the area. Especially on its stretch in Denver, Colfax was a notorious drag, once called by Playboy the “longest, wickedest street in America.” Gerald said that there were 250 motels along Colfax, and we also drove past the two-story Riviera Motel that Foos expressed interest in owning someday (he said he had initially visited the Riviera as a Peeping Tom, prowling along its pathways and the lighted windows of its ground-floor rooms); but instead he decided to buy the single-story Manor House because it had a pitched roof that was elevated in the center to about six feet—high enough for him to walk across the attic floor in a standing position; and, if he created inconspicuous openings in the ceilings of the guest rooms, he would be able to survey the scenes below.
And so he soon approached the Manor House’s owner, an elderly man in failing health named Edward Green, and Foos rightly surmised that Mr. Green was eager to sell—and thus Foos promptly acquired the property for $145,000. As a down payment Foos said he contributed about $25,000 that he had saved from his paternal grandfather’s will and another $20,000 from the sale of a house in Aurora that Donna and he had bought during their third year of marriage.
“Donna wasn’t happy-happy about giving up our house and living in the manager’s quarters of the motel,” he said, “but I promised her that we’d buy another house as soon as we could afford it. I also agreed that Donna wasn’t going to give up her nursing career, which she loved, to work full-time behind a reception desk. So that’s when I brought her mother, Viola, into the picture, to help us run the place. Donna’s father had abandoned the family when Donna was a girl. He was a talented musician and also a skilled carpenter, but he drank. After we got married, he’d occasionally show up and beg her for loans that he never paid back. Once I remember him coming to our third-floor apartment, and Donna giving him every dollar in her purse, more than fifty dollars I believe. After he left, I took my binoculars and watched from the third-floor window as he crossed the street and headed into the nearest liquor store.”