Colorado motel owner for decades spied on guests having sex

quote:

---

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.

---

quote:

---

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.

---

quote:

---

"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.

---

quote:

---

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.

---