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The Foster controversy - death of Clinton administration attorney Vincent Foster - Brief Article
Reed Irvine

Mr. Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media.

PROFESSOR Jacob Cohen’s review of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster by Christopher Ruddy is badly out of focus (”Conspiracy Central” November 24). He confines himself to discussing peripheral oddities and ignores the evidence that has convinced students of the case that Foster did not die in Fort Marcy Park.

Two of the paramedics who viewed Foster’s body reported his death as a homicide. They had more experience with suicides and homicides than the U.S. Park Police officers who were in charge of the investigation. Their suspicions were aroused by the attitude of the body, which was laid out as if ready for a coffin. That is very unusual for a suicide by gunshot. The neatness of the scene was also suspicious. A gunshot to the head usually creates a bloody mess. Paramedic Richard Arthur said the only wound he could see was on the right side of the neck, and he said it was too small to have been made by the large-caliber brown/black semi-automatic he said he saw in Foster’s hand.

The fact that a gun was found in Foster’s hand should not have been regarded as evidence of suicide, because in the case of cadaveric spasm the gun is usually thrown out of the hand by the recoil when a person shoots himself to death.

Mr. Cohen apparently does not know that Kenneth Starr ordered a third intensive search to find the bullet that killed Foster because without it he had no evidence that proved that the fatal shot was fired in the park. The search took seven weeks, and it was a failure. That means there is still no forensic evidence that Foster died where his body was found.

Dr. Henry Lee, a consultant Starr hired, tried to make up for this troublesome deficiency by claiming to find red stains on some of the foliage shown in the Polaroid photos of Foster’s body. His claims are not evidence. There should have been blood spattered all over the vegetation, but no one at the scene saw any. Nor did they find any bone fragments from the exit wound in the skull, or any brain tissue.

Neither blood nor fingerprints were found on the gun. The absence of blood is especially suspicious because the muzzle had to have been pressed against the soft palate to account for the absence of severe powder burns inside the mouth. There should have been blowback of blood and tissue inside the barrel. The DNA on the gun to which Cohen attaches so much weight does not prove that the barrel was ever inside Foster’s mouth. It is a type shared by 6 per cent of Caucasians and 8 per cent of blacks and Hispanics, according to the FBI Crime Lab.

No one has explained how Foster’s glasses could have flown through the air and landed 13 feet in front of his body. Starr’s report makes the astonishing claim that “the location where the glasses were found is consistent with the conclusion that Mr. Foster was wearing the glasses when the shot was fired.” He doesn’t try to explain what propelled them through the air.

Starr and his predecessor Robert Fiske both recognized that it was important to show that Foster owned the gun that was found in his hand. Since he owned two modern handguns, a silver revolver and a semi-automatic .45, the question of why he would shoot himself with an eighty-year-old gun that he didn’t own had to be answered. Starr and Fiske tried to make it appear that Foster’s widow, Lisa, had identified the eighty-year-old black Colt Army Special as the “silver six-gun” that she herself had packed and brought to Washington. They accomplished this by not reporting that the gun found in Foster’s hand was black. Starr acknowledged that the gun Mrs. Foster brought from Arkansas was silver. That was the nice, “store-bought” silver revolver that Foster’s nephew, Foster Bowman, says Foster inherited from his father. There is no evidence that the black gun belonged to Foster. It was not a family heirloom, as Cohen describes it. It was a typical untraceable drop gun, made up from parts of two different weapons.

Cohen cannot dismiss the eyewitness testimony and photographic evidence of a possible wound in the neck simply by saying that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy did not notice it. This would not be the first time Dr. James Beyer had failed to notice a wound that proved that the victim had not committed suicide. The body should be exhumed and a second autopsy made.

All these bits of evidence that undermine the suicide-in-the-park theory are rendered superfluous by the unrefuted evidence that Foster’s car did not arrive at the Fort Marcy parking lot until at least two hours after the estimated time of his death. Patrick Knowlton reported seeing a 1983 or 1984 brown Honda with Arkansas plates in the parking lot at 4:30 P.M. After viewing photos of Foster’s grey 1989 Honda, he told the FBI that the car he saw in that spot was definitely not Foster’s. It was the wrong color, the wrong age, the wrong size, and lacked several features that distinguished Foster’s car, including a decal in the rear window and a dent on the back.

Two other eyewitnesses who pulled into the parking lot not long after Knowlton left also saw a brown, mid-1980s Honda parked in the same spot in the lot. They were still in the park when the police arrived and were questioned about what cars they had seen. This was done in the parking lot where Foster’s light grey Honda was now parked in the spot where they had seen the brown Honda an hour or so before. The car they described to the police and the FBI was the brown Honda, not Foster’s light grey Honda. Both the Fiske and Starr reports are completely silent on the description these witnesses gave of the brown car. They do not claim that these witnesses saw Foster’s car, but Starr’s report uses a footnote to imply that they did.

The three judges who appointed Starr ordered him to append to his report twenty pages of comments and exhibits submitted by Knowlton’s attorney which show that Vince Foster did not drive to Fort Marcy Park and kill himself, as Starr’s report contends. The judges were not compelled by law to do this. They obviously saw that Starr had suppressed important evidence that disproved his finding. They decided that the public had a right to know it. Cohen tries to discredit Knowlton, portraying him as paranoid. The FBI went to a lot of trouble to create that impression, but the judges didn’t buy it. It is too bad NATIONAL REVIEW did.