He went on: “I called Donna. ‘Go over there and check her.’ So Donna did, and soon she came back, walking back really quick, and I thought, Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me—no heartbeat. And Donna came in and said, ‘She’s dead, Gerald, she’s dead.’ I said, ‘Okay, we got to call the police. Only thing we can do is go call the police.’
“The police came, and then we had to wait until the coroner gets there, which takes an hour or two. The police just walk around waiting for the coroner, they have to guard the body. Then the coroner shows up in his little panel truck with a helper, and they cover the body and load it up in the wagon and off they go to an autopsy room, and I’m sick and saying, ‘You know, I could be responsible for this.’ I said to Donna, ‘I saw her breathing.’ She said, ‘I know, you told me.’”
Gerald took a breath and repeated what he had said earlier: “Yes, if I’d known she was dead, I could have called an ambulance and explained that I’d been walking by the window and heard a scream . . . but that’s not the way it occurred.”
THIRTY-FOUR
AFTER I had returned to New York, I continued to correspond and talk regularly on the phone with Gerald Foos, but not much more seemed to be happening—there was nothing more to add to his story. He had written the final page of his journal. But even though he hoped that his confessions might bring him “redemption,” and also expedite the sale of his home and sports collection, I sensed that he was guided by more than just that, and even that might be wishful thinking on his part.
How could he assume that his honesty would achieve anything positive? It might just as easily provide evidence leading to his immediate arrest, subsequent lawsuits, and widespread public outrage.
Still, it was possible that Gerald Foos needed the notoriety—his ego, especially now that he was so aware of his advanced age and diminishing health, drove him to want to become known for what he had seen and written during his many years as a private observer, and this was more compelling than his fear of being found out. In a way he was like the nineteenth-century rogue and voyeur portrayed in Professor Steven Marcus’s book The Other Victorians—an individual so taken by the idea of self-exposure or narcissism that he produced a multivolume confession called My Secret Life, although he withheld his name from the manuscript. By contrast, Gerald Foos was acknowledging his true identity, taking all the risks, and, while he was giving me what I wanted, I was still not sure what motivated Gerald Foos, who, after all, was a master of deception.
In decades of snooping he had never been caught. “Because of the extreme cautiousness and concern that embodies the Voyeur,” Gerald wrote, “not one subject has ever discovered the complete secret of the observation vents. No one was ever hurt or exposed.” And what he communicated in letters and phone calls was not necessarily what he believed, if he even knew what he believed. He was a man of many moods and attitudes, and at times he presented himself as a social historian, a pioneering sex researcher, a whistle-blower, a loner, a double personality, and a critic intent on exposing the hypocrisies and hidden appetites of his contemporaries.
Although the comparison is perhaps inappropriate, since he was not responsible for exposing the corruption of a president, Gerald Foos’s eagerness to take credit late in life called to mind the decision by a retired FBI agent named Mark Felt to come forward and admit to being the famed Watergate whistle-blower known as “Deep Throat.” In a memoir published in 1979, Felt wrote that he “never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!” But by 2005, when he was nearly ninety-two years old, Felt at last unmasked himself. Felt and his family had argued over whether or not to go public with his identity. A decisive element, according to his daughter, was a wish to profit from the revelation. According to the article in Vanity Fair that revealed Felt’s secret, she told her father, “We could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I’ve run up for the kids.”
Yet Felt was conflicted over how the revelation would affect his reputation, and up until the night before, he wavered. It was unlikely that Felt would face any legal repercussions for being Deep Throat, though he had earlier been charged in an unrelated case with conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. In 1972 and 1973, as an FBI agent, Felt had authorized illegal break-ins at the homes of nine people associated with the Weather Underground, the leftist group. At Felt’s trial in 1980, Richard Nixon appeared on his behalf; his testimony was interrupted by spectators shouting out “liar” and “war criminal.” Felt was convicted, and ordered to pay an $8,500 fine, but a few months later, he was pardoned by Ronald Reagan. Nixon sent Felt a bottle of champagne with a note: “Justice ultimately prevails.”