“Even now,” he went on, “years after I sold the motels, I just try to stay away from people. I have no one that I consider a neighbor. Anita and I both try to stay away from our neighbors. We might say hello to them, but we keep our distance. When we go out to dinner, it’s just the two of us. Otherwise, I’m a loner.”
“But you once described yourself as two people,” I reminded him. “In the motel office, you said you were Gerald the Businessman. In the attic, you were Gerald the Voyeur. Well, who is responsible for not making a telephone call for an ambulance while that woman lay strangled on the floor of Room 10, on the night of November 10, 1977?”
“If I’d known that this particular lady was dying, I’d have called an ambulance immediately,” he said. “I would have said, ‘I was walking by the window and heard a scream’—or something like that. Of course, I would not have said that I’d seen it from the observation platform. I’d have said I’d seen it through a crack in the curtain.”
This was certainly not the first time that he had remained inactive while witnessing horrible scenes at his motel, he acknowledged. He had previously seen examples of rape, robbery, child abuse, incest, and once he watched quietly while a pimp pressed a knife to the throat of a prostitute until she agreed to surrender money she was accused of withholding. Gerald’s journal had mentioned a time when he had telephoned the police to report drug dealing at his motel, but no action was taken due to his unwillingness to fully cooperate as a witness.
He loathed drug dealers in part because he feared their activities would draw narcs to his hotel, but he was especially sensitive to the harmful effects of drug usage following the arrest of his son, Mark. Although it was in a losing cause, Gerald said that in 2012 he voted against the legalization of marijuana in Colorado.
“This drug dealer back in 1977 was selling drugs out of Room 10 to some young students, and one of them didn’t look more than twelve,” Gerald recalled. “Anyway, when this dealer left the room with his girlfriend, I did what I’d done with dealers before—I flushed the drugs down the toilet. Now when he comes back that night, and can’t find the drugs—he’d hidden them in a bag within the registry system against the wall, after removing the screws—he begins arguing with his girlfriend.
“‘Who the hell was in here?’ he begins to yell, and then he is blaming her, and hitting her, and she’s crying, ‘I’m your girlfriend—let me go.’
“He kept hitting her, harder, and once she kicked him in the groin and he really got mad and began strangling her. Soon she collapsed and fell to the floor, right in front of the vent. I was looking right down at her, there on the floor, and I kept saying under my breath, ‘Don’t move, don’t move, he might strangle you again.’
“Before he left the motel, he picked through some of her things on the floor, and took some cash and credit cards. ‘Don’t move,’ I kept telling her. He then turned, opened the door, and he was gone. I kept watching from up there, and thought she was breathing, but she was not moving at all. Her eyes were closed, but I swear I saw her chest moving, and I thought, ‘Well, she’s okay.’
“I quit the observation platform for the night, and went down to the office. Later I told Donna about it, when she returned from the night shift at her hospital. She asked, ‘Well, you saw the chest going up and down?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, she’s probably just unconscious, or something like that. You know, she’s going to come around and everything will be okay,’ and I said, ‘Well, I hope so.’ It was very late, and I remember Donna repeating, ‘In the morning, she’ll probably be okay. We won’t say anything, and neither will she. You know, her life’s her life, and that’s the way things are.’ Donna went on to say, ‘People come into the hospital all the time, and they’ve been strangled by their husbands, or they’re shot in the head by someone, and it’s terrible and . . .’”
He paused, and continued, “The next morning, the maid came to work, and I watched her as she went to the rooms, and soon she came to that room, Room 10, and she opened the door and went in. And all of a sudden she came running out, and I thought, ‘Oh, no.’ And I knew what she was going to tell me. She told me, ‘Gerald, I think the lady in No.10 is dead.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ ‘She’s not breathing.’ I said, ‘Where’s she lying?’ ‘She’s on the floor.’ Oh, no. She was lying just as I’d last seen her.”