His arrival was heralded in huge headlines in the Denver broadsheet: CRIME ACE URGES PUBLIC AID IN C.U. CASE. In the first of his many dispatches for the Post, Gardner explained that he'd been retained "to assist the authorities," not to solve the case on his own: "I am to try to present to readers of the Denver Post the situation as it might appear to the eyes of Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer-detective who has solved so many cases in my books."
That, as Mason might have put it, was just bunk. Hoyt was paying Gardner an outrageous sum for a few days' work — more than most reporters made in a year — and he expected results. The frantic coverage would soon turn into a media assault unlike anything the state had ever seen, a blitz that would generate more than 230 articles in the Post in less than six months — and taint the criminal trial to come.
Hoyt wanted to catch a killer, and his newspaper would take credit for doing just that. But the paper's reckless approach to the Foster case would echo through the years, result in a belated scolding by the Colorado Supreme Court, and leave the true investigators of the murder haunted by one of two horrible possibilities.
One, authorities got the wrong man. Or two, they got the right one, and the Post's conflagration of fact and fiction ended up setting him free.
*****
At the time he accepted the Post assignment, Erle Stanley Gardner was the most widely read living author on the planet. Sales of his Perry Mason mysteries, available in paperback for a quarter, were topping seven million copies a year — and this was well before the long-running television series starring Raymond Burr. He described himself as a "fiction factory," capable of cranking out a hundred thousand words a month and an entire novel in a few days, usually dictated to a loyal team of typists.
With his books, movie and radio adaptations, along with other interests, Gardner didn't need to accept newspaper work. He viewed the scoop-happy industry with a mixture of pity and contempt, and resented being treated as a "trained seal" by editors. But he enjoyed the opportunity to delve into true-crime cases, consult with real detectives and test his own powers of deduction. It was a chance, however brief, for the bespectacled Gardner, pushing sixty at the time of the Foster murder and bearing an uncanny resemblance to a high-school principal, to become his handsome, cunning alter ego, the dashing Perry Mason.
Just hours after his arrival, Gardner met with DA Chilson, Boulder sheriff Arthur Everson and Denver detectives working on the Foster case. They greeted him like star-struck fans and quickly agreed to provide a VIP level of access to their files and other information. Half a dozen Post reporters took over a floor of the Hotel Boulderado while Gardner, a photographer and others went out to search for clues. They began where the body was found, along Highway 93 — "the lonely road where the murderer had transported the body of the ravished, mutilated coed," Gardner wrote.
Gawkers lined the wooden bridge above the creek. The police had found bloodstains on the bridge, indicating that the killer had unloaded the corpse from a car and dropped it into the creek below. Gardner found a peculiar half-moon stain on the railing and immediately theorized that Foster had wounded her assailant by biting his hand — his left hand, no less: "We couldn't exclude the possibility that the hand of the murderer, badly bitten by the plucky girl in her last desperate struggles, was bleeding from a deep wound made by her strong young teeth."
In hot pursuit of this chimera, Gardner decided to follow a blood trail that a sightseer had found two miles from the bridge. It was exactly the sort of "sinister train of red drops" one would expect from a sex-crazed fiend with a wounded left hand, "looking for a place to dispose of some incriminating evidence," he declared. The trail disappeared into a canyon, but the crime ace made sure that samples were collected and rushed back to Boulder for testing.
It turned out to be animal blood.
The crescent-shaped stain on the bridge, which could have been just about anything, was the first of many red herrings Gardner analyzed, emphasized and ultimately discarded. In Perry Mason's adventures, the clues always turn out to be vital pieces of the puzzle. But the Foster case generated a surplus of clues, many of which led nowhere. At the crime scene north of town, searchers found a rope and a wrench, in addition to the busted gun grip; all had traces of blood, hair or fibers that appeared to link them to the crime. Was Foster beaten with the wrench and the gun, then strangled with her coat and the rope? All that was missing was a lead pipe, a candlestick and Colonel Mustard.
The proliferation of dead ends was exacerbated by the Post's pleas for the public to report any suspicious characters, from young men with wounded hands to neighbors washing out the trunks of their cars. Encouraged by the paper's drumbeat and the lure of the $10,000 reward, tipsters deluged the cops with hunches, false alarms and pure hooey. The Denver Police Department fielded an average of 200 such calls a day — calls about a man with deep scratches on his face trying to trade in a DeSoto with dark splotches on the upholstery, calls about a lumberjack with bloody boots, calls about drunks making incriminating statements in bars and toughs in cars trying to pick up CU girls.
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I found the end of the article poetic myself. A fascinating account - I think it would be fun to be able research and write something like this! And the Denver Post was so helpful in those days.
Is that the end of the article? Not much of a conclusion - and an old man who knew lots of details was not listened to. The End.
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