July 20 will be the eighth anniversary of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr. This is an appropriate time to make another effort to get the establishment media to examine the overwhelming evidence that proves Foster was murdered. This report was written for that reason. The cover-up is so transparent to those familiar with the facts that it is maddening to see those responsible make America look like a nation of dolts. Not that we haven’t tried to make the truth known, but the brilliant men and women who decide what’s fit to print and to air in the traditional media need to have their closed minds pried open. This was written with them in mind.

Of the 12 or 13 persons known to have been at the Fort Marcy parking lot between 4:25 and 6:00 p.m. on July 20, 1993 only five have told why they were there and what they saw. The behavior of those who haven’t done so indicates that some of them were involved with Foster’s death. Four of the five who talked, have provided evidence proving that Foster did not drive his car to Ft. Marcy and kill himself. They are Patrick Knowlton, Mark Feist, Judy Doody and Jeanne Slade.

Statement of Patrick Knowlton

Patrick Knowlton, who had pulled into the Fort Marcy parking lot shortly before 4:30 to relieve himself saw two parked cars. One was a rust-brown, mid-eighties Honda Accord with Arkansas tags. The other was a later-model metallic-blue Japanese sedan backed into a space about three spaces to the right. Knowlton parked between them. A Hispanic-looking man in the driver’s seat of the blue car glared at Knowlton, making him nervous. When Knowlton got out of his car, this man got out of his and watched to see where Knowlton was going. Fearfully returning to his car, Knowlton peered through the windows of the brown car to see if he was in danger of being mugged. He wasn’t. The man was back in his own car, still staring at Knowlton, who quickly got in his car and left. He noted that the time was just 4:30. He was there no more than five minutes.

On learning that Foster’s body had been found in the park, Knowlton called the Park Police and told them what he had seen. They wrote up a brief report based on his phone call. When interviewed by FBI agents on April 14, 1994, he described the mid-eighties brown Honda and the suspicious behavior of the man in the blue car. Describing him in detail, he said he could pick him out of a line-up. The FBI interview report (302) said he had described the brown car as a 1988 to1990 Honda and that he would not be able to identify the man in the blue car. On May 11, they re-interviewed Knowlton, trying to get him to say that he had seen Foster’s car by telling him that others had described Foster’s Honda as gray/brown or brown.

When asked to select the Honda color panel closest to the color of the car he had seen, he chose a rust-brown color that had been used only on 1983-84 models. That proved his claim that the car he had seen was an older model as well as a different color than Foster’s. The FBI 302 said Knowlton “believes” the car he saw looked older than Foster’s, that it “was shorter in length or more compact” than the photos of Foster’s car and that the finish was flat, not glossy. They did not report that his color panel choice had identified it as a 1983-84 model.

When Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Washington correspondent of the London Sunday Telegraph, located Knowlton and showed him the FBI reports of his interviews, he was very upset by their misrepresentations of what he told them. The Telegraph had an artist draw a sketch of the man in the blue car from Knowlton’s description. It was published in London, but neither the press nor the FBI made an effort to get it published or distributed in the Washington metropolitan area. However, the Telegraph’s stories resulted in Knowlton being summoned to testify before the grand jury convened by Kenneth Starr to investigate Foster’s death. As soon as he got the secret subpoena, Knowlton was subjected to intimidating harassment. He believes the FBI was trying to get him to alter his story.

This only steeled his determination to get the truth to the public. He sued the FBI and he and his attorney, John H. Clarke, prepared a devastating critique of the Fiske and Starr investigations and of those portions of Starr’s report that he was allowed to see. The three-judge panel that appointed Starr ordered it appended to every copy of the report. He and Clarke and their researcher/investigator Hugh Turley have published a 510-page book, Failure of the Public Trust, using official Foster case documents to expose the cover-up by the FBI and the OIC. (Go to www.fbicover-up.com.) His story has yet to be reported by any major American newspaper.

Statements of Judy Doody and Mark Feist

This couple drove into the parking lot at about 5:15 and parked at the northeast end of the parking lot. In separate interviews by the FBI they both said they saw a small, brownish older-model Japanese car parked in one of the spaces near the entrance at the south end of the lot. Judy Doody said she saw a man, who may have been shirtless, sitting in the driver’s seat. Mark Feist saw a tall, long-haired, bearded man standing beside the car with the hood up. Doody and Feist sat in her car for about 15 minutes before going into the woods. The brown car and the two men were still there at that time.

The only other car they saw was a white van that parked between them and the brown car. Doody said the driver got out and emptied some trash. While in the woods they saw an older man wearing red shorts jogging south, away from the parking lot. They were still in the woods when the rescue workers and police arrived. They were discovered by the rescue workers who went south looking for the body while Kevin Fornshill, a Park Police officer, and other rescue workers went north and found it.

The Park Police report of their interview of this couple was very brief and very misleading. It said they had seen a small car in which a man without a shirt was sitting that left shortly after they arrived and that they saw a white car pull in and park beside “the deceased vehicle.” Doody and Feist were escorted to the parking lot where they were questioned by Park Police officers. Standing in the parking lot where a car with license tags showing that it was registered as a 1989 Honda Accord belonging to Vincent Foster was then parked, they said that at 5:30 an older, small, brown Honda occupied that space. No handwritten notes of the interview have been released. They no doubt showed that Doody and Feist had said they had not seen Foster’s car an hour earlier. The officers who conducted the interview may not have realized the importance of this evidence. It was proof that Foster did not drive to Ft. Marcy and kill himself. Two days later, when Patrick Knowlton called to tell them what he had seen, they showed no interest in finding out if his description agreed with that of Doody and Feist.

Instead, they typed a report that said Doody and Feist had seen the brown car leave and that “the last car they had observed was a light colored older model car that pulled in next to the deceased vehicle.” Doody and Feist told the FBI that was not true. The police had made up that story to account for Foster’s car, “the deceased vehicle,” being in the parking lot. They told the FBI that the only vehicles they had seen in the parking lot were the brown car and the white van. The FBI did not try to pressure them, as they did Knowlton, to change their story, probably because they thought it futile to try to suggest that they were wrong about what they had seen only an hour earlier.

Statements of Jeanne Slade and Dale Kyle

Jeanne Slade, experiencing car trouble on the parkway as she approached Fort Marcy Park, turned onto the road leading to the Fort Marcy parking lot. Parking her Mercedes behind a white car on the entrance ramp, she began walking to the park, hoping to find a phone. The driver of the white car, who appeared to be looking at papers or a map, started his car when she passed him and offered her a ride. After she declined his offer twice, he drove up to the lot, turned around and came back down the road. Reaching the parking lot entrance, she saw there was no phone there, but she noticed two cars parked close together, one light gray and one dark blue. She didn’t go far enough to see Doody’s car at the far end, or any other cars.

She returned to the parkway and walked toward the next exit, where there was a gas station. On the way, she saw several emergency vehicles with sirens sounding heading for Ft. Marcy. They arrived there at 6:10 p.m., which indicates that she was there at about 6 o’clock. She was the first person to report having seen a light gray car parked where Foster’s light gray Honda was found by the police and rescue workers.

Dale Kyle, the man who belatedly claimed to have found Foster’s body, arrived soon after Doody and Feist went into the woods. He left shortly before Jeanne Slade appeared. He told the FBI he had seen a compact Japanese car parked at the north end of the parking lot, and he thought it was possibly light blue or tan. He said his recollection was “sketchy” and when shown a photo of Foster’s car, he could not say that it was the car he had seen. He had parked at the other end of the lot and had entered the park from there. Returning after finding Foster’s body, he mistakenly assumed that Doody’s car belonged to the dead man, creating some confusion about its description.

There was an unusual amount of activity in the parking lot just before and after Slade made her brief appearance. There was the driver who offered Slade a ride. He has never come forward to tell why he was there and what he had seen. He could have been a confused tourist or he could have been stationed there to warn those in the parking lot of any cars headed their way.

Foster’s car had apparently just taken the place of the brown Honda, and there were things, like Foster’s jacket and tie, that had to be transferred to it. The blue car parked near it was evidently there to extract the driver who delivered Foster’s car. The drivers of those two cars remain unknown. The brown car was still in the lot, as the statements below by Todd Hall and Jennifer Wacha show. The blue car got away before the rescue workers arrived, but the two men with the brown car apparently were delayed by an assignment, perhaps the placement in Foster’s hand of a gun that may have been delivered along with Foster’s car. Kyle has insisted that there was no gun in either hand when he saw the body only minutes earlier.

Statements of Hall and Wacha

Paramedic Todd Hall and firefighter Jennifer Wacha, who arrived in the parking lot at 6:10, reported seeing a brown car, not in a parking space, with its engine running but no driver. This had to be the brown car that Knowlton, Doody and Feist had seen with a man sitting in it and another standing alongside it. Apparently its occupants heard the fire engine coming and hastily hid.

After all the rescue workers rushed off to find the body, the driver and his partner emerged from hiding and made their escape. They were not the least bit curious about why the rescue workers were there. They already knew. Needless to say, the authorities have never heard from them, and they made no effort to find them. Kenneth Starr absolved them and all the others of any involvement in Foster’s death.

Summing Up

The brown Honda in their custody had been a stand-in for Foster’s gray Honda for at least an hour and a half. If they had been caught or if Foster’s car had arrived just 10 minutes later, it would have been obvious to all that Foster was murdered. The evidence cited here proves that his car did not reach Ft. Marcy until at least two hours after his death. Of all the people who were in the parking lot after 4:25 p.m., three have said Foster’s car was not there. Not one has come forward to say that it was.

There is not an iota of evidence to support the belief that Foster drove his car to Ft. Marcy. The only basis for the claim made in the Park Police, Fiske and Starr reports that Knowlton, Doody and Feist all saw Foster’s car is the theory that Foster committed suicide. Starr claims that all the forensic, testimonial, circumstantial and state-of-mind evidence proves that none of the people at Fort Marcy were connected with Foster’s death. The testimonial evidence proves just the reverse. And so does the forensic evidence as is shown below. The state-of-mind evidence was discussed in depth in AIM Report 2001 No. 12

II. The Gun In His Hand Wasn’t Foster’s

Foster had two handguns in his home in Georgetown, a .45 semiautomatic and a .38 modern silver revolver that he inherited from his father. His wife had packed and brought it to Washington in June 1993. When the Park Police asked her if she could identify the 1913 black revolver found in Foster’s hand, that was made up of parts of two different guns, she told them that it was not the gun she thought it was, “a silver six-gun with a large barrel.” She had never seen the old black revolver before and neither had any of the three children.

The Park Police and the Fiske report gave the impression that Foster’s sister, Sharon Bowman, had identified the gun as one Foster inherited from his father. An FBI 302 dated April 11, 1995 reveals that she “never positively identified the gun,” having said only that it was similar to one she recalled her father owning. She said her father owned only one revolver. Her son, L. Foster Bowman, who had fired his grandfather’s handguns, told the FBI it was the wrong color. He told AIM that his grandfather’s revolver was a modern, “store-bought” silver gun and that he would not have owned the old black revolver that has been called a piece of junk. Dr. Henry Lee, Starr’s consultant, said it had rust spots and a broken grip.

Unable to get anyone in the family to say that the old black gun belonged to Foster, the FBI agents worked on his widow, Lisa. They finally succeeded in getting her to say that the black gun was the silver gun she had brought from Little Rock, although she recalled the barrel being “lighter in color.” That was good enough for the Starr report, which was artfully crafted to conceal from readers who did not study the footnotes carefully the fact that the gun found in Foster’s hand was black. It does mention that the gun she brought to Washington was silver.

III. He Was Not Shot With the Old .38

Dr. Donald Haut, the Fairfax County medical examiner who examined Foster’s body at Fort Marcy Park, commented that he had seen more damage done by a .25 caliber bullet than what he saw in this case. He said there was very little blood, as did the paramedics and rescue workers. Park Police Sgt. John Rolla, who probed the back of Foster’s head looking for an exit wound, could find only a soft spot. He reported that the bullet had not exited from the skull. That is in a report the FBI’s Washington field office submitted to FBI headquarters. Those who wrote and read that report must have questioned the possibility of a .38 high velocity bullet fired into Foster’s mouth failing to create an exit wound, but nothing in the records released so far show that this claim was questioned by the FBI.

Dr. James C. Beyer, the medical examiner for Northern Virginia, solved that problem by finding an exit wound that no one else who had examined Foster’s head had noticed. Beyer described it as a hole 1-1/4 inches long and an inch wide in the back of Foster’s skull, three inches below the crown. But no one has reported seeing it except Dr. Beyer. If it were there, Sgt. Rolla could have poked two fingers into it, unless he has very fat fingers. Dr. Haut couldn’t see it. His death report described the wound as “mouth-to-neck.”

Dr. Julian Orenstein who examined Foster’s head when his body was brought to the Fairfax County Hospital on its way to the morgue, said that he could see no wound, only hair matted with blood. A torrent of blood and tissue, as well as bone fragments, should have burst through a hole that large, but no blood could be seen on the vegetation around Foster’s body, there was some on the ground under his head that was visible only when the body was rolled over. No bone or tissue could be found at the crime scene.

There is another very serious problem with the exit wound that Dr. Beyer claims to have found. He said in his autopsy report that the entrance wound was in the posterior oropharynx (the rear wall of the throat), 7-1/2 inches below the top of the head. But he claimed there was an exit wound in the skull only three inches below the top of the head. None of the medical examiners who have commented on Beyer’s autopsy report has given a plausible explanation of how a high-velocity .38 bullet entering at the back of the throat could exit through the skull 4-1/2 inches above where it entered.

This was of concern to the pathologists hired by special prose-cutor Fiske as his consultants. On March 31, 1994, two of them, Dr. James C. Luke and Dr. C.J. Stahl, together with the chief medical examiner of Virginia, Dr. Marcella Fierro (Dr. Beyer’s boss), Robert Fiske’s deputy, Roderick Lankler, and others met with Dr. Beyer to discuss his autopsy report. What came out of this meeting was a revised autopsy report that changed the location of the entrance wound. They moved it from the posterior oropharynx 7-1/2 inches below the top of the head, to the midline of the soft palate “directly beyond the junction with the hard palate.” They left the distance from the top of the head at 7-1/2 inches, but calculations by Hugh Sprunt, a careful student of the evidence in the Foster case, indicate that this distance should have been reduced by about one inch.

This relocation was not based on any physical evidence available to those who made it. Dr. Beyer had removed the soft palate and sliced it up for microscopic slides. He had determined that the entrance wound was in the rear of the throat because of the large amount of gunshot residue that he observed there. In his autopsy report he added, “…there is also a defect in the tissues of the soft palate and some of these tissues contain probable powder debris.” This shows not only that he distinguished between the soft palate and the posterior oropharynx, but that he had also decided that the defect in the soft palate was not an entrance wound. It appears he made that decision because the palate did not exhibit the quantity of gunshot residue that would be deposited by a gun fired with its muzzle close to or in contact with it.

The revised autopsy report altered the description of the soft palate to “Abundant gunpowder residue with contusion hemorrhage.” The only physical evidence available to the revisionists was Beyer’s microscopic slides of the soft palate tissue. The decision to change the location had to be based on the need to place the entrance wound where it would line up with Beyer’s exit wound in the back of the skull. That meant the bullet had to pass through the soft palate. It was not possible for them to resolve this problem by checking the head x-rays.

IV. Missing X-rays Expose the Cover-up

X-rays should have top priority in cases where a head wound is involved. Dr. Beyer checked “Yes” for “x-rays made” on the autopsy report. He told Park Police officer James Morrisette, who attended the autopsy, that the x-rays showed no bullet fragments in the skull. But he later told the FBI that there were no x-rays. He said he checked “Yes” because he intended to take them, but the machine malfunctioned. He said he didn’t learn that until the autopsy was finished. Testifying before a Senate committee on July 29, 1994, he said he did not recall telling officer Morrisette that the x-rays showed no bullet fragments. Asked when the machine was repaired he said, “I have no x-rays in my files between July 6 and 26. After July 26, we were getting x-rays.” This was a deliberately deceptive response. The machine was newly installed in June. Foster’s autopsy was on July 21, and the service records obtained by Starr’s office (the OIC) show that the first call for service on the machine was made on October 29. We obtained copies of those records from the OIC.

Beyer’s story about why there were no x-rays was false, and those records show that Starr and his staff knew it. Nothing in the record indicates that they pressured Beyer to tell what he did with the x-rays or what they showed that caused him to lie. Paramedic Richard Arthur, who had far more experience with gunshot wounds than the Park Police officers, reported seeing a small caliber entrance wound on the right side of Foster’s neck, under the jaw line. Aimed upward, a .22 fired there would go through the tongue and soft palate into the brain, killing without creating a messy exit wound. It is often used by professional hit men. An enhanced crime scene photo, which the OIC refuses to release, is said by some who have seen it to show trauma where Richard Arthur said there was a wound. This would account for the “defect” Beyer found in the soft palate. He didn’t call it an entrance wound, because he didn’t find an abundance of gunshot debris in that wound.

As Sgt. Rolla reported, there was no exit wound in the skull. The x-rays probably showed that the bullet that killed Foster was a .22 caliber trapped inside the skull, certainly not a .38 fired by the revolver found in his hand. That is why the x-rays vanished. The fact that Starr’s FBI agents didn’t threaten Beyer with perjury and obstruction of justice charges to get him to tell the truth about the x-rays indicates that their goal was to confirm the suicide finding, not expose its falsity. Starr’s staff didn’t even inform Dr. Brian Blackbourne, the medical examiner Starr hired as a consultant, that they had proof that Beyer had lied about the x-rays not being made. The four pathologists hired by Starr’s predecessor, Robert Fiske, probably were unaware of this as well.

A small caliber bullet fired into the back of the throat 7-1/2 inches below the top of Foster’s head would exit from the neck, below the base of the skull and above Foster’s hairline. That would explain the blood-matted hair and the blood on the back of Foster’s shirt. A close friend of Foster’s, Joe Purvis, told Joe Goulden, who was on AIM’s staff at the time, that the mortician in Little Rock showed him a hole the size of a dime in the back of Foster’s neck above the hair line. Purvis later denied this, but the telephone interview in which he said it was recorded. Beyer’s report of an entrance wound in the back of the throat explains and confirms this exit wound.

Reporting that Foster was shot twice, first neck to head and second mouth to neck, would have proved that he was murdered. Beyer’s solution was to say a nonexistent exit wound in the skull was made by a bullet fired into the back of Foster’s throat. Uncomfortable with that, the pathologists who met with Beyer on March 31, 1994 saved the suicide theory by converting the “defect” in the soft palate caused by the shot under the right jaw into an entrance wound. They eliminated the wounds in the back of the throat and neck. Apparently unaware of this history, Starr’s team reverted to Beyer’s original theory, and they have gotten away with it.

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