Eighteen years younger than Gerald, Anita was as he had described her in his letters. She was a petite, quiet, and observant woman who stood five feet four and had frizzy red hair, green eyes, and a voluptuous figure that was notable even though she favored modest attire. She was now wearing a flowered dress buttoned at the neck, and, after her initial greeting, she sat in silence throughout breakfast while her talkative husband outlined our itinerary.
“After we leave here,” he said, “I’d like to take you to our home so you can see my collection of sports memorabilia in the basement—more than two-million sports cards that Anita has organized in alphabetical order, and we have two hundred baseballs signed by the likes of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, and so forth, including a rare one signed by ‘J.Honus Wagner.’ His name ‘Johannes’ was never referred to after he became famous as ‘Honus,’ but I have this ‘J.Honus Wagner’ from the early 1900s that went into packs of Piedmont cigarettes until Wagner, who didn’t smoke cigarettes, objected to it. So these cards are rare, as I say, as are the old leather football helmets that Sammy Baugh used to wear, and I also wore in high school. And I have Walter Hagen’s clubs, which he used in 1928 in winning the British Open . . .”
He went on to explain that one of the reasons he is now willing to reveal himself as a voyeur is that he might also have an opportunity to call media attention to his sports collection, which he said is worth many millions of dollars, and he was eager to sell it, along with his large house with its many steps that his arthritic knees cannot climb without causing him great pain.
“I’ll give away my big house for nothing to whoever buys my collection,” he said. His current dream is to live in a single-story home without steps.
I replied that I was eager to see his sports collection, but reminded him that I had flown here for on-the-record interviews about his career in the attic, and we had both already agreed that we should try to learn more about the 1977 murder of the drug dealer’s girlfriend in Room 10 of the Manor House Motel.
In mid-March, in fact—at least three weeks before my flight to Denver—I had telephoned Gerald Foos to inform him that, without naming him as a witness, I intended to contact the Aurora Police Department and learn if it had uncovered any new information about the death of a young woman in the Manor House Motel on the evening of November 10, 1977.
Foos did not object to my doing this because he had long regretted his negligence on that evening and believed that in going public with the story, and admitting his failings, he might obtain what Catholics seek when they confess their sins. He said he hoped to achieve some sort of “redemption,” especially if his candor revived public interest in the crime and eventually brought the killer to justice—if, indeed, the killer was still alive.
But the Aurora Police Department promptly reported back to me that it had no information about this almost forty-year-old crime, and during our breakfast I showed Gerald Foos copies of the letters I had recently received. One was from the division chief, Ken Murphy, who wrote, “Unfortunately we were unable to find any death/homicide matching your criteria. We found only one homicide in November 1977, but it occurred a couple of miles away from the Manor House Motel.” That murder, which remains unsolved, was of a twenty-eight-year old Hispanic woman named Irene Cruz. She was found strangled to death on the morning of November 3 by housekeeping staff in a room at the Bean Hotel in Denver.
The other letter, from Lieutenant Paul O’Keefe of the homicide unit, said, “I have personally checked the Colorado Bureau of Investigations Cold Case webpage, as well as our own internal list of active cold cases, and have found nothing that matches the information you have provided. A review of APD records was also completed for a week to either side of the date that you noted in your letter, and we have found no reported homicides (solved or unsolved) during that timeframe.”
Lieutenant O’Keefe recommended that I consult the two county coroner’s offices that might have then collected a dead woman’s body in the city of Aurora—the coroners in Adams County as well as Arapahoe County—but neither had any information, nor did the third source I checked for statistics and vital records: the State of Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The latter would not even consider my request for information, explaining that only family members of the deceased had access to death records. In phone calls, two police officers said it would not be unusual for there to be no paper trail in a murder such as the one I described; the identity of the victim was unknown, and the crime took place before police departments used electronic records.
It is also possible that Foos made an error in his record-keeping, or transcribed the date of the murder inaccurately, as he copied the original journal entry into a different format; Foos often told the same story more than once across his journals and letters. Over the years, as I burrowed deeper into Foos’s story, I found various inconsistencies—mostly about dates—that called his reliability into question.