Around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, July 20, 1993, White
House counsel Vincent Foster told Linda Tripp, “There are some
M&Ms in the candy tray if you want them. I’ll be back.” Then
he left the office. Five hours later, he was found dead in Fort
Marcy Park, a gunshot wound in the back of his mouth. That
was five years ago today.
Despite a mountain of evidence that shows Foster didn’t
die in that park, Kenneth Starr closed the books on the case in
August 1997. Even though the bullet was never found. Even
though no motive was established. Even though the 27-piece
“suicide note” that turned up days later was not a suicide note at
all. Even though Foster’s body was covered with fibers (as if it
had been rolled up in a carpet). Even though there was no soil
from the dusty footpath on his shoes.
Investigators gave conflicting versions of almost every
aspect of the evidence, including whether or not the bullet
produced an exit wound, whether the wound was located in the
head or neck, and even whether Foster was found on the ground
or in his car. If Vince Foster pressed a .38 against the back of
his mouth and pulled the trigger, there should have been burns
and gunpowder deposits around the wound, as well as broken
teeth and blood on the gun-barrel — but there was none.
The most intriguing evidence is this: Four different
people searched Foster’s pockets while the body was in the park,
but couldn’t find his car keys. There were no keys in Foster’s
Honda in the parking lot. Obvious question: How could Foster
drive to the park and shoot himself without car keys? Obvious
answer: He couldn’t. Obvious conclusion: Someone drove
Foster’s body to the park and left it there — and forgot to leave the
keys.
Did the keys eventually turn up? Yes, they did. Where?
At the morgue where Foster’s body was taken. There, a check of
his pockets — which had already been found empty at the park —
revealed two sets of keys. Could four investigators have missed
two sets of keys in Foster’s pockets? Impossible.
So how did the keys get there? Perhaps Kenneth Starr
should have posed that question to two White House officials
who were alone with Foster’s body in the morgue shortly before
the keys were found: (1) former Rose Law partner and
Travelgate figure William Kennedy III, and (2) Craig
Livingstone of Filegate fame. Incredibly, neither Kennedy nor
Livingstone has ever been questioned about the matter.
And here’s another fascinating angle to this story: The
night Foster died, a man named Jerry Luther Parks was
watching TV in his Little Rock home when a news bulletin
announced Foster’s death. Parks turned pale. “I’m a dead man,”
he whispered. For weeks after Foster’s death, he lived in fear,
constantly watching his back, and even taking a gun with him
when he went to the mailbox.
On Sunday, September 25, 1993 — two months after the
Foster death — Jerry Luther Parks was returning home from a
restaurant when a white Chevy Caprice with two men pulled up
alongside his car. The passenger sprayed Parks’ car with
semiautomatic gunfire, then jumped out and finished Parks off
with a 9 mm handgun. The killers were never apprehended.
Parks had been a player in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas
political machine for years, and first became acquainted with
Foster by doing investigative work for the Rose Law Firm in the
1980s. The London Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
reports that in the late ’80s, Foster — apparently on behalf of
Hillary Clinton — hired Parks to do surveillance on Bill Clinton
“to gauge exactly how vulnerable her husband would be to
charges of philandering” if he ran for president. Parks
accumulated thick files (with photographs) detailing the future
president’s pattern of womanizing.
According to Parks’ widow, Foster called Parks from
Washington about a week before his death, saying Hillary was
frantic about those files and the potential damage they could
cause both Bill and Hillary. Just a day or two before his death,
Foster called Parks again, heatedly demanding the files. Parks
refused. A week or so after Foster’s death, the Parks home was
broken into — a sophisticated burglary in which phone lines and
the alarm system were disabled. The files were stolen. Two
months later, Parks was murdered.
I asked Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on my radio show what
was the most under-investigated aspect of the Clinton scandals.
He replied without hesitation, “The death of Jerry Luther Parks.”
Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Michael Reagan is
the author of “The City on a Hill: Fulfilling Ronald Reagan’s
Vision for America.” His Web site is http://www.reagan.com.