I had received cooperation from the Denver Post’s news department, I mentioned to Gerald Foos, but nothing in the paper’s 1977 obituary files provided us with a lead.
“It seems as if that young woman just fell through the cracks,” he said, but added that this might not exonerate him from legal consequences. In publicly admitting that he had watched the drug dealer murder the woman, and did nothing to prevent it, “I could be an accessory to a crime. It would be a serious deal because I never called the police at the time . . . I might be convicted of second-degree murder charges. Who knows? One attorney told me there’s a law called ‘circumnavigate’ which allows the courts to do a lot of things. It was put into effect because of sex offenders, like priests who offended children long ago, and by ‘circumnavigating’ you can make it appear that it happened last night.”
Still, Foos went on, after years of reluctance, he was now willing to admit the truth. “Life comes with risks,” he said, “but we can’t be concerned with that. We just tell the truth.”
With his cane he pointed up toward a few video cameras that were positioned high above our heads within the hotel’s atrium, a vast open space that soared six stories high and reflected the movement of a pair of glossy glass-sided elevators.
“I noticed cameras posted on the roof outside as I walked in, and others are above the front desk and everywhere else you look around here,” Gerald Foos said, repeating his complaint about widespread voyeurism that he had already cited in letters. It was of course ironic that he, of all people, would take offense at being watched; but rather than debate the point here, where a waiter was removing our breakfast dishes, I decided to delay our discussion until we had our promised on-the-record interview at his home.
THIRTY-TWO
AS WE stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, waiting for Anita to bring the car, he again pointed up to an overhanging camera but withheld comment, noticing that a doorman stood nearby watching him.
Sitting behind the wheel of her four-door blue Ford Escape hatchback, Anita waited while her husband squeezed his large body into the passenger seat, and I climbed in the back, and soon we were headed north along sparsely trafficked country roads bordered by cornfields, wheat fields, and stretches of uncultivated land that Gerald said was owned by speculators and was sometimes invaded by mountain lions, bears, skunks, and badgers, while above were Canadian geese flying in from the north.
Half turned around in his seat, Gerald directed my attention to other things that interested him, such as the lake where he and Anita often went fishing, and the Valero store where they bought gas and Anita knew the manager (“He’s from Nepal.”), and then we headed toward where the couple lived—a quiet community of neatly paved streets, manicured lawns, cul-de-sacs, rows of blue spruce trees, and high-end residences whose similarity in design made it difficult for Gerald and Anita to relocate their own home after they had first bought it and had driven to a real-estate office two miles away to sign the deed.
“On our way back we spent hours wandering all over this place looking for our house,” Gerald recalled. “We kept getting lost in and around all those cul-de-sacs. Finally we saw a guy in the street and I called to him, ‘Hey, we bought a house around here but can’t find it,’ and he said, ‘Oh, that also happened to me. Lots of these new houses look alike.’ I didn’t have a GPS then, but I had the address, and soon this guy sent us in the right direction.”
Anita paused before turning into the driveway of a large, modern green house with white trimming and stone facing and spruce trees in front. Gerald clicked a remote that opened the door of a three-car garage in which was parked a white Ford Fusion sedan, and hung along the walls of the garage was an orderly arrangement of household tools and fishing rods and also a mounted deer’s head and the bow and arrow with which Gerald said he shot the animal during a hunting trip years ago.