by Roger Stone
Journalist and author Marinka Peschmann discovered in her lengthy interviews with Linda Tripp that Foster was carrying his briefcase with him when he left his office in the early afternoon of July 20, 1993. This is critically important because after Foster’s body was found dead, his briefcase was discovered in his office.
At the time of Foster’s suicide, Tripp was working in the White House Counsel’s office, seated outside of Nussbaum’s office.
Had Foster left early in the afternoon with his briefcase only to return later? Upon discovery of the body, had the First Lady ordered the removal and the cleanup?
“In every investigation we were told exactly what happened and what to say, and suddenly that became the so-called truth,” Tripp told Peschmann.361
White House intern Tom Castleton also remembered Foster carrying his briefcase when he left for lunch, a fact he related to both Tripp and to the Office of Independent Counsel.
Patsy Thomasson, former director of administration for the White House said “she saw Foster’s briefcase by the desk in his office on the night of July 20” after the body had been found.362
When we confronted Thomasson with the theory that Foster killed himself in his office and the body was expeditiously removed by the administration, she warily replied “Where did you ever get that nutty idea?” Shortly thereafter, as Thomasson hung up the phone, it rattled unsettlingly into the cradle.
A likely scenario is that Foster left the White House just after 1 p.m. and he left with his suitcase, which is a very critical point. For the rest of the afternoon the other lawyers in the Counsel’s office did not know where Foster was, and it is standard procedure to know exactly where important officials of the White House are at all times.
Foster likely returned to the White House in the late afternoon after most of the support staff had left for the day. It is reasonable to assume that Foster put his .38 caliber pistol, which he had stored in his car in an oven mitt, into his suitcase before returning to his office. He likely committed suicide in the time period of 4:30 to 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
The people who are likely candidates to have found the corpse are Nussbaum, Foster’s old Rose Law Firm partner William Kennedy, or Nussbaum’s secretary Betsy Pond.
We can suspect that Bernie Nussbaum called the First Lady around 5 p.m. and told her about the suicide. Hillary then took action.
A cadaver in the official residence and principal workplace of the president, especially in an office with numerous sensitive and potentially incriminating documents, was poison to the administration. Hillary would have to order the body expeditiously transported off White House premises. She then likely ordered the cleanup of bodily fluids and pieces and the removal of sensitive, or incriminating, documents in Foster’s office.
Kellet pointed out that two things were found all over Vince Foster’s body: carpet fibers and mica, which are tiny rock particles. The carpet fibers could have come from the body rolled up in carpet, a classic means of body transportation, or it could have been fibers from the trunk of the car used during the body transfer.363
The carpet theory makes the most sense. The White House was in a perpetual state of interior redesign. A rolled-up carpet would raise no suspicion.
A top national Democratic operative who worked for President Clinton told Roger Stone that Clinton White House Director of Security Craig Livingstone transported Vince Foster’s corpse. Though not proven, we think it’s possible that Livingstone and possibly his cohort Tony Marcea transported Vince Foster’s body between 5:15 and 6 p.m.
The body was discovered by Dale Kyle shortly past 6 p.m. in Fort Marcy Park, a public park in nearby McLean, Virginia. Kyle was looking for a place to urinate in the woods that offered privacy.364 Kyle heard no gunshot. In fact, no one heard a gunshot … no one in the park that day…. no one in the five homes within 570 feet of where the body was found, the closest of which was three hundred feet away.365
Foster’s body had not been there long.
One of the first responders, Sergeant Rolla, “noticed blood coming from the right nostril and the right corner of his mouth down the side of his face. It appeared to still be wet, but drying. Flies were buzzing around his face, starting to—no eggs were laid yet. I think they were just making their way to do that.” Rolla mentioned that Foster’s blood was just beginning to gel “So it led me to believe that he hadn’t been there more than a couple of hours. Again, the flies I just—he hadn’t been there that long because they are fast workers.”366
Michael Kellett called the American Entomological Association and was referred to a specialist on insects, Professor Carl Jones of the College of Veterinary Medicine. “After questioning me on the date, the temperature that day, and the approximate time of day, he stated in no more than one and a half hours, flies would have laid eggs,” said Kellet.367
Kellet points out that the first responders were viewing the body at about 6:40 p.m. Eastern. “The egg laying-activity, or lack of it, would place the time that the body was in the park at 5:10 [p.m.] at the earliest.” Vince Foster’s body at Fort Marcy Park was a “fresh” corpse.368 Foster’s body was found as soon as it was dumped in the park.
Upon spotting the body, Dale Kyle immediately noticed two very important things. First, there was no gun in Vince Foster’s hand. Also, there were footprints around his body.
The gun was not in Foster’s hand because Kyle had interrupted individuals staging the body. They had not had the time to place the gun into Foster’s hand. After Kyle went for help, a gun was later discovered in Foster’s right hand. The FBI later badgered Kyle under questioning.
“CW (Confidential Witness) stated that the agents asked him ‘25 times’ if he was sure that he didn’t see a gun, and he repeatedly confirmed that he did not. Finally, they took a response from CW, a response to a hypothetical question, for which CW gave a hypothetical answer,” wrote Kellet.369
As Human Events described it: “An agent asked, ‘What if the trigger guard was around the thumb and the thumb was obscured by foliage and the rest of the gun was obscured by the foliage and Mr. Foster’s hand?’ That was all Mr. Fiske needed to suggest. CW had acknowledged that he may not have seen the gun because it was obscured by foliage. But CW did not change his story.”370
The footprints around the body were left by the same unskilled individuals that clumsily arranged Foster’s body. Kyle told Representative Dan Burton that the trampled area looked “like somebody had been walking or messing around that area.”371
The FBI report later established that “[Kyle] stated that he stood directly over the body, looking down, for several seconds, specifically recalling that he looked at both hands. He stated that the hands were palms up. He stated that while he was not looking for a gun, he has no recollection of there being a gun in either hand…. He stated that as best he recalls from his vantage point on the top of the berm, the foliage and brush as the bottom of the berm or slope (approximately 15 feet below the body) was trampled down as if the individual might have been walking or pacing in that area.”372
After Kyle found the body, he drove to the Turkey Run Maintenance Yard and told Park Service employees that there was a dead body in the park. Kyle had spent approximately ten minutes total in the park.
Kyle had discovered Foster’s body lying straight, with hands hanging down his sides. He did not see much blood and he saw “no gun, no sign of a weapon. It looked like [Foster] had been placed there.” And that is because Kyle “saw the leaves trampled down below” and a lot of “foot traffic at the bottom of the hill.”373
Despite all the impressions made from footwear scattered around the body, Foster’s shoes had absolutely no dirt on the bottom, even though his body was found more than two hundred yards away from the parking lot and down a trail.
After Chris Ruddy of the New York Post started investigating the Foster case, he published an article that included interviews with the first responders.
“The EMTs told Ruddy
that there was a suspicious lack of blood around Foster’s body and that the body had looked laid out on the sloping embankment, as though placed there, ‘as if it was ready for the coffin,’ stated historian Matthew MacAdam. One of the responders hadn’t seen an exit wound in Foster’s head even though he had lifted him into a body bag. Based on these descriptions, homicide investigators Ruddy spoke to speculated that Foster may have been killed elsewhere, and the body moved.”374
There were more clues that the body had been moved. Michael Kellet later pointed out the FBI report’s clear statement that “the pattern of the blood on Foster’s face and on Foster’s shoulder is consistent with Foster’s face having come into contact with the shoulder of his shirt at some point.”375 The stain made the purported suicide in the park nearly impossible due to the position of the body. “The chin was pushed against the right shoulder which caused the contact stain,” wrote Kellet.376
The grossly misplaced theory of the Fiske report was that someone had knocked Foster’s head so that his cheek fell down on his bloody shoulder causing the contact stain. Kyle said he had not touched the body. The first responders, Sergeant Gonzalez, Todd Hall, and Officer Fornshill all “swore under oath that they did not touch the head [of Vince Foster] which they all described as ‘looking up’ and slightly tilted to the right as did those who arrived afterward.”377
Kellett made a key point about Foster’s blood-soaked shirt: “The only way the upper back could be soaked is if there were an enormous pool of blood found under the exit wound, not a ‘fairly large’ amount. It is the distribution of the blood that suggests the body was moved.”378
There was another inconsistency between the blood found on Foster’s body in relation to its position. The FBI laboratory report on Foster noted “two clearly visible blood drain tracks on Foster’s face, extending from the nose and mouth, to the ear and temple.”379 In other words blood flowed out of the deceased Foster in an upside-down fashion from mouth to temple, yet Foster’s body was not found upside down. Foster’s body was placed on a berm in Fort Marcy Park, and it was leaned with the feet at the bottom and the head at a higher elevation on the incline of the berm. “The draining tracks suggest his head was tipped back slightly when the draining of the blood occurred,” observed media watchdog Reed Irvine. “In other words, after Foster was shot, his head was tilted back or was lower than the rest of the body while the blood was draining from his mouth and nostril. He could not have been lying feet down, on a 45-degree slope. As he moved into that position following his suicide, the drainage of the blood toward the temple area occurred.”380
Following the arrival and subsequent departure of the first responders, a crew arrived to transport the body to the morgue. EMT Corey Ashford lifted the body, with the head of the corpse on his white uniform, and placed it in a body bag. Ashford got no blood on his clean uniform and saw no blood on the ground beneath the body. Roger Harrison of Fairfax County Fire and Rescue, who helped Ashford fit the corpse into the bag, saw no blood either.381
“Vincent Foster could not have killed himself by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger as reported in the media,” Ruddy wrote in The Strange Death of Vince Foster: An Investigation. “The crime scene displayed none of the telltale signs of suicide, from the amount of blood spilled to the position of the body. Foster’s shoes and clothing held no grass or soil particles, despite the official determination that he walked across nearly 800 feet of grass and dirt paths before sitting on the ground and killing himself.”382
Ruddy interviewed Joe Purvis, a longtime friend of Vince Foster. Purvis had been able to talk with one of the morticians who had worked on Foster’s body up close at Little Rock’s Reubel’s Funeral Home. The mortician said that bullet entrance wound was a small hole in the back of Vince Foster’s mouth and the exit wound was found in the back neck at the base of Foster’s head.383 Foster was leaned up against an incline on a berm, and if a bullet had come out the back of his neck it should have burrowed into the dirt. The fatal bullet that Foster used to kill himself was not found despite the fact that Robert Fiske’s and Ken Starr’s people made extensive searches of the area.
Foster’s glasses, covered in gunpowder, were found nineteen feet away and behind the body. Both of Vince Foster’s hands were found to have gunpowder on them as well. There was heavy foliage and vegetation on the berm behind Foster. The question is: did Foster throw down his glasses before he shot himself? But how could that have happened if there was gunpowder on the glasses? The report of the Independent Counsel states “This powder is physically and chemically similar to the gunpowder found in the cartridge removed from Foster’s gun…. These facts are consistent with the eyeglasses being positioned near the gun when fired (such as Foster’s face or in his shirt pocket.)”384
In his book The Murder of Vince Foster, Kellett mocked the eyeglass theory with his offer of “$10,000 TO THE WORLD’S BEST FALLING, NECK SNAPPING EYEGLASS THROWER.” A .38 revolver has a sharp recoil but not one that can toss a pair of glasses nineteen feet. “According to the ‘independent’ counsel, the head [of Vince Foster] snapped back with such force that it caused the eyeglasses to be dislodged and thrown over the five-foot berm, plus another thirteen feet.”385
When Vince Foster’s body was found, he had no car keys on his body, according to Park Police Detective John Rolla, who conducted the initial examination. Rolla did find Foster’s pager on the body but not the large mass of keys that Foster carried. Ken Starr’s report speculated that Detective Rolla must not have dug deep enough into the pockets to find the large clump of keys.
“When the Park Police investigators realized they did not have Foster’s car keys, they went to the morgue to research the body,” wrote Marinka Peschmann. “Not only did the investigators locate Foster’s car keys in his right pant pocket but they also found a second set of keys with four door and cabinet keys. Foster’s right pant pocket was near ‘his right waist area,’ where Rolla retrieved his pager during the initial search. How could he have missed them?”386
Craig Livingstone and Kennedy were the two people who went to the morgue to identify Foster’s body. It has been said by numerous researchers that either Livingstone or Kennedy could have planted keys on the corpse during their morgue visit.
Though Vince Foster drove a gray Honda, there is no Honda car key in the FBI photographs of the keys belonging to Vince Foster. Nor is there a Honda key listed in the evidence recovered for the Foster case. “A Park Police evidence report listed a key ring with a tab, ‘Vince’s Keys,’ but these alleged keys were never photographed and were never on the FBI official list of evidence. Honda automobile keys are double-sided and there is no double-sided Honda key in the official photo of Foster’s keys.”387
Besides the physical incongruences, there were also problematic time issues in the “official” version of events.
In her autobiography Hillary wrote that she first heard of Foster’s death “That night, sometime between eight and nine o’clock, Mack McLarty called me at my mother’s house and told me he had terrible news: Vince Foster was dead; it looked like a suicide.”388 In 1993 the Clinton White House said Bill had learned about Foster’s death at 10 p.m. Eastern while on a break during a Larry King Live interview. A CNN makeup artist told Robert Fiske that just before 9 p.m. an aide told Bill that some sort of document had been already been found in Foster’s office. This is proof that Clinton was aware the search for documents had commenced.
The odds are high that by five in the evening, the Clintons knew about Foster’s suicide.
Shortly after Foster’s suicide, Helen Dickey, Chelsea’s nanny, called the Arkansas governor’s mansion and told Arkansas state trooper Roger Perry that Foster had committed suicide in the White House parking lot.
“Vince shot himself,” a clearly distraught and confused Dickey told Perry. “He walked out to his car and shot himself in the head.”
Perry stated that Dickey called him sometime between 4:30 and 7 p.m. Ce
ntral Time. Perry then called Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker and fellow trooper Larry Patterson. Patterson said that he was “fairly certain” the Perry call occurred, at the very latest, before 7 p.m. Eastern. Perry also called Lynn Davis, the former head of the Arkansas State Police, who plainly declared in an affidavit the call was no later than 7 p.m. Central.
“It was during the rush hour, before 6:00pm our time,” Davis said. “He told me they’d found Vince Foster’s body in his car, he’s shot himself in the [White House] parking lot.”389
At approximately the same time this series of calls was occurring, Dale Kyle stumbled upon the body. In fact, “If Patterson’s memory is accurate, he learned of the Vince Foster’s death fifteen minutes before the body was found by police at Fort Marcy Park,” wrote Ruddy.390 This was problematic.
Senator Alphonse D’Amato led a sham Senate investigation into Whitewater and other Clinton scandals. His Senate Banking Committee subpoenaed Helen Dickey who signed a sworn affidavit that stated that she did not learn about Foster’s death until 10 p.m. Time magazine at the time reported that the “White House has offered D’Amato a sworn statement from Dickey in which she describes learning of Foster’s suicide late that night and discussing it with a state trooper at the Governor’s mansion in Arkansas.”391
In a closed-door deposition to the Senate, Dickey couldn’t remember much about the night Foster committed suicide: the time she got off work, what she did for dinner, whether she talked to the First Lady that night—she could not remember any of it.
Former Arkansas state trooper L. D. Brown confirmed that Robyn Dickey, the mother of Helen Dickey, was carrying on an affair with Clinton. Both Bill and Robyn confirmed this to L. D. Brown, and, later, Robyn went to work in the Clinton White House.392
Robyn’s daughter Helen Dickey “worked for Marsha Scott on the illicit ‘Big Brother’ database that has been the subject of an investigation on Capitol Hill. She helped Hillary Clinton write It Takes a Village, typing up the pages every day in July and August of 1995. For two years she lived in a suite in the third floor Living Quarters of the White House, directly above the Clintons, and went in and out of their kitchens as if it were her own.”