"Suicide" ruled the park police, he shot himself in the mouth with a handgun. "Suicide" ruled the first special counsel, having looked into the matter. "Suicide" ruled the first senate committee to examine the case.
Yet questions remain about Vince Foster's death and the circumstances surrounding the case. The current special counsel has quietly reopened an investigation into the death. Outside government corridors, a core of researchers, led by investigative journalists and determined amateur sleuths, has unearthed wide discrepancies in the official accounts of the death. Not surprisingly, conspiracy theories abound, some of which test the boundaries of credibility. Many read better than any novel, weaving a story of money, sex, high intrigue, and blood with yarns of espionage....
The best place to start exploring the facts and fancies surrounding Vincent Foster's death is a lengthy report, based entirely on documents in the public record, compiled by Mr. Hugh Sprunt. Mr. Sprunt, dissatisfied with media coverage of Foster's death,
decided to write my own report, based on the 2,726 pages of Senate documents. Although I had no intention of producing so lengthy a report, it grew to 165 single-spaced pages, tightly cross-referenced, with maps (including one traced from aerial imagery of Fort Marcy Park [the place where Vincent Foster's body was found] flown a few weeks before Foster's death) and tabular data in eight appendices.Mr. Sprunt had personal experience with a person who committed suicide using the same type of weapon that Vincent Foster is said to have used.
I write about the death of Vince Foster from a unique perspective. When my elderly grandfather, terminal with cancer and in horrible pain, decided to take his own life some 25 years ago, I was "first-on-the-scene" and could do nothing to help him. He shot himself in the head using an Army Colt .38 Special Revolver with a four-inch barrel, the very same type of weapon that Mr. Foster allegedly used to kill himself in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993.What are some of the blatant discrepancies in documents in the public record? For starters, how about a suicide gun that first is not at the scene, then is? The first official to discover Vince Foster's body, a U.S. Park Police officer, was quite clear he "never saw the gun" that, according to the official reports, was in Mr. Foster's right hand at the time the body was located. The first civilian witness, "CW", who discovered the body, stated emphatically in his FBI interviews and deposition that he too had not seen a gun....Since I had direct personal experience both with suicide-by gunshot and with the tremendous damage a high-velocity .38 round from this particular weapon does to the human head when fired point blank, I was intrigued by the relatively modest head wound Mr. Foster was said to have suffered from the identical revolver and ammunition.
As I pursued the blatant anomaly concerning his head wound, I discovered many equally amazing facts within the official records of Mr. Foster's death. I obtained copies of the Fiske Report and the U.S. Park Police Case File on the death of Vince Foster. When the Senate released two Hearings Volumes and a Report Volume on the Foster death in 1995, I obtained these volumes (a total of 2,726 pages of documents, testimony, depositions, and FBI interview reports, including Fiske and U.S. Park Police Reports). I studied all the documents and reached two fundamental conclusions: 1) The raw evidence in the official record was amazing in light of the conclusions reached by the official reports and 2) With minor exceptions, no one in the media was at all familiar with the raw evidence compiled in the Senate documents.
The most recent twist in the affair is a contribution by the Washington correspondent of the (London) Sunday Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Mr. Evans-Pritchard uncovered a witness who was in the park just before Foster's body was discovered and saw a suspicious person who may have been Foster's killer or an accomplice. The witness reported reported what he had seen to the police, but his story was completely ignored. The same witness subsequently
was interviewed by the FBI, which somehow got the crux of his story wrong. According to Mr. Evans-Pritchard's article of 22 October in the Sunday Telegraph (10/23 in the Electronic
Telegraph):
His FBI statement says that Knowlton [the witness] "could not further identify this individual and stated that he would be unable to recognise him in the future".Immediately after publication of the Telegraph article, the witness was subpoenaed by the Senate committee investigating Whitewater. The witness, according to published accounts, was then harrassed by a number of individuals, some of which drove vehicles whose registration was traced by Evans-Pritchard...."That's an outright lie," he [the witness] said, angrily. "I want it on the record that I never said that. I told them [the FBI] that I could pick him out of a line-up."
Further startling details were revealed in a continuation of the story by Evans-Pritchard's entitled "Washington Notebook: Another mad week in DC," which appeared in the 5 November edition of the Sunday Telegraph (6 November in the electronic edition). To quote:
The Telegraph has tracked leads that suggest a possible link between Arab interests and the mysterious death of the deputy White House counsel. We also have an indication that the CIA played a role in the immediate aftermath of the death, something that has never been disclosed before.The Telegraph, a conservative newspaper often referred to as "The Torygraph," is not given to hype.