Gerald Foos once owned the Manor House Motel on Colfax Avenue in Aurora, where he outfitted more than a dozen rooms with fake ceiling vents so that he could watch people having sex.
He started in the mid-1960s and continued for decades, never getting caught.
In 1980, he wrote to veteran journalist Gay Talese, who was soon to publish “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” the landmark exploration of America’s sexual revolution that swiftly became a bestseller. Foos said he had information that might be useful for the book, or possibly a future book.
Nearly four decades later, The New Yorker magazine this week is publishing “The Voyeur’s Motel” by Gay Talese, an extensive investigation into voyeurism — specifically, how Foos bought the motel to achieve his “uncontrollable desire to peer into other people’s lives,” including their most private sexual moments, which he said both of his wives supported.
On July 12, Talese’s book “The Voyeur’s Motel” will be published by Grove Atlantic.
“It’s my life — my secret life,” said Foos, who lives in metro Denver with his second wife.
He’s not sure what to expect when the story gets out, and because he’s under contract, he says he can’t comment.
“I think the book will create a real situation, let’s put it that way,” Foos told The Denver Post on Monday. “I don’t know if I’m ready for anything, to be honest with you. I’m just a poor soul.”
Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office, said the statute of limitations has passed for any crimes that might be connected to his voyeurism.
When Talese visited Denver in 2013, however, he was looking into details of a murder that Foos said he witnessed in one of his motel rooms in 1977 but never reported to authorities.
“He thinks he’s the greatest voyeur in the world,” Talese said. “He doesn’t want to be seen as a Peeping Tom but as a voyeur — not as a pervert but an observer of human nature.”
Talese spent much time with Foos, making many trips to Colorado including a journey to Ault, where Foos grew up the child of German-American farmers and, at age 9, began peeking into his aunt’s window, a woman in her 20s who often walked around nude.
“I looked beyond my home to learn what I could about people’s private lives,” he told Talese.
But in some ways, Foos remains a mystery.
“He lied to me many times,” Talese said. “The question is, did he make up the murder. But why would he? If he gets into any trouble with the law, it would be associated with the murder.”
“The Voyeur’s Journal”
Talese said he first met Foos in the early 1980s, after receiving his letter. He visited him at his motel, where Foos soon invited the journalist to his observation “laboratory” to check out an attractive young couple who’d come to Colorado on a ski trip.
Foos and Talese crept up into the attic to spy through the fake vents.
“I saw a naked couple spread out on the bed below,” Talese writes in the New Yorker story.
They were having sex. To get a better look, Talese leaned closer — and his necktie slipped through the louvered screen that shielded the spyhole, dangling “within yards of the woman’s head.”
Foos, irritated, yanked him back.
But the next morning, he acted as if Talese hadn’t nearly blown his cover and eagerly shared his trove of yellow legal pads, 15 years of detailed notes on what he’d observed behind closed doors in that Colfax motel.
Foos called it “The Voyeur’s Journal.”
Reading those accounts, Talese discovered that Foos also monitored motel guest’s bathroom habits from viewing posts he’d installed in several bathrooms.
And one year he created an annual report “trying to identify significant social trends,” Talese writes. “In 1973, he noted that of the 296 sexual acts he’d witnessed, 195 involved white heterosexuals, who favored the missionary position. Over all, he counted 184 male orgasms and 33 female orgasms.”
He also categorized people according to their sex drive, observing that 62 percent led “moderately active sexual lives” while “12 percent of all observable couples at the motel are highly sexed” and 22 percent exhibited a low sex drive.
Three percent had no sex.
Over time, a relationship of trust developed between the voyeur and the journalist, and Foos mailed Talese 300 pages of typewritten manuscript of the logs through 1978.
Talese was astonished to see that Foos described a murder he said he’d witnessed one night.
“The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor,” writes Talese, quoting from Foos’ journal.
The next morning, Foos said, a motel maid found the woman dead in the room.
Foos said he never reported to police what he witnessed, and Talese signed a confidentiality agreement to not reveal Foos’ name.
Over the years, they lost touch, but Talese reconnected with him in 2012 after the Aurora shooting.
Foos, who’d sold his motel in 1995, soon began writing to Talese again, and by 2013, he told Talese he was ready to go public with his story.
So Talese got on a plane to Denver and immediately began digging into what he could find on that alleged murder.
Aurora police said they could find no record of the murder, and coroner’s offices had no record of it.
What does exist, however, are the detailed journals of Foos’ decades as a voyeur in the Manor House Motel in the years after America’s sexual revolution transformed the nation’s culture, back when Foos viewed himself as a sex researcher and social observer.
“Some of it is crazy,” said Talese, “and some of it is insightful.”
He’s still pondering Foos’ true motive in revealing his secrets.
One reason could be money.
Foos showed Talese his collection of sports memorabilia — thousands of sports cards — that Foos believes is worth millions of dollars. He hopes publicity will help drum up sales.
But Talese draws parallels to the Unabomber and Watergate’s Deep Throat, men who did not want to take secrets to their grave.
“In a way, it’s like the guilt of indecent exposure,” Talese said. “He’s hoping to come clean 30 years later and find redemption.”
Colleen O’Connor: 303-954-1083, coconnor@denverpost.com or @coconnordp
