For Many, Questions Remain About Foster’s Death

The keening voices of doubt fill the nightly airwaves, bombard news organizations and echo through countless chatrooms along the information highway.

Why was the fatal bullet never found? Why did the .38-caliber revolver dangling from the dead man’s right hand bear no fingerprints - neither his nor anyone else’s? Wasn’t it odd, given the violent nature of his death, that both arms were extended neatly at his sides?

And what of the observation by paramedics that the victim had sustained a lethal head wound but there was relatively little blood at the scene? Didn’t that suggest that death had occurred somewhere else and the body had been moved to the lonely patch of grass high above the Potomac River?

To his family, the death of senior White House aide Vincent Foster Jr. was a shattering personal tragedy. To President Clinton and many others around him it was the baffling loss of a friend they had thought they knew too well for this.

And to a succession of official investigators, including the U.S. Park Police, a congressional committee and the first Whitewater independent counsel, it was a compelling case of suicide.

But to thousands of Americans, Foster’s death in 1993 has become a mystery that only grows darker with the passage of time.

Why, after so many investigations, do doubts linger?

For almost all the questions, police investigators have what they consider sufficient answers.

The case involves no ordinary death. Foster’s portfolio at the White House included two of the administration’s greatest political embarrassments, Whitewater and Travelgate. The senior aide’s ties to the first family went back to the days in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was governor and Hillary Rodham Clinton worked closely with Foster at the Rose Law Firm.

Adding to suspicions that Foster possessed secrets the White House wanted to bury, Clinton aides removed papers from Foster’s office immediately after his death and took other steps that even some high-ranking federal law enforcement officials have criticized.

Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel investigating the Whitewater affair, is still looking into the death, despite the fact that his predecessor, Robert B. Fiske Jr., concluded it was suicide.

A federal grand jury working for Starr recently subpoenaed a witness who claims he saw an empty parked car at the scene with Arkansas license plates that differed from the car Foster was driving.

Beyond the questions about Foster’s death, an unresolved issue is whether the White House obstructed the investigation or improperly withheld or mishandled documents in his office - a question likely to occupy congressional committees for some weeks to come.

The suspicious behavior following Foster’s death is still being documented by House and Senate committees, although the panels have not challenged the suicide finding itself.

Calling the lack of White House cooperation “unprecedented,” Michael E. Shaheen Jr., a career attorney who has run the Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit for nearly 20 years, said it was a unique experience for him. He said it was the first time there had been a total failure of cooperation and candor “by a group whose conduct we were asked to review.”

David Margolis, another career Justice Department lawyer, agreed with Shaheen that presidential aides, particularly then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, had improperly restricted the initial investigation into Foster’s death.

Margolis told the Senate Whitewater Committee last summer that Nussbaum violated an agreement to allow Justice Department investigators to look through papers in Foster’s office for any indications that extortion or blackmail might have figured in his death.

Nussbaum has defended his actions as necessary to protect the privacy of some of Foster’s papers.

Even without indications of stonewalling and a coverup, sufficient unresolved questions about Foster’s last act remain to keep speculation alive about how he really died. On the question of blood at the scene, relatively little blood was visible when U.S. Park Police and Emergency Medical Service personnel first found Foster’s body, the Fiske report noted.

But when the body was rolled over, the report said, Park Police observed “a fairly large pool of blood on the ground where his head had been and further noted that the upper portion of the back of Foster’s shirt was bloodsoaked.”

The pathologists’ report noted that the relative lack of blood can be explained by the position of Foster’s body and the path of the fatal bullet: He was lying on a steeply inclined slope with his feet pointing downhill; blood would have tended to remain in his body rather than flow out through the head wounds - especially since cardiovascular activity stopped quickly after the bullet injured his brainstem.

Several efforts have been made to retrieve the bullet that killed Foster. One of them turned up 12 modern-day bullets and assorted cartridges and shell casings - along with an assortment of Civil War-era ammunition and other objects - but lab tests showed none matched the pistol in Foster’s hand.

“It is impossible to determine where the bullet landed” because there is no information “on the precise angle of Foster’s head when the gun was fired,” the Fiske report said.

Moreover, the park occupies a wooded area high above the Potomac. The bullet could have traveled a considerable distance or been deflected in any direction by tree limbs.

Pathologists and FBI ballistic experts also concluded Foster himself fired the fatal shot because his thumb was trapped and compressed between the trigger and the trigger guard of the weapon.

As for the FBI laboratory’s recovering no fingerprints from Foster’s gun except for a non-Foster print from the inner surface of one of the gun’s grips, the Fiske report said: “The ability to recover prints varies due to a number of factors including the texture of the tested object and characteristics of the persons who came in contact with that object. Latent prints can be destroyed by exposure to certain elements, such as heat.”