Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 28, 1994 TAG: 9401280042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
A report in the New York Post suggested Thursday that the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster might not have been a suicide.
Several Clinton administration officials said they had no reason to believe Foster's death was anything but a suicide, and forensics experts were quick to criticize the story.
The Post interviewed Fairfax County, Va., paramedic George Gonzalez; an emergency service technician; and unidentified homicide experts who found it unusual that Foster's body and clothing had few bloodstains and that a .38-caliber revolver was still in his hand.
The newspaper said these facts "raised the possibility that Foster may have been killed elsewhere and that his body was dumped in the park."
U.S. Park Police Major Robert Hines, whose department investigated Foster's July 20 death, disputed the conclusion. "We said then it was a suicide, and that's what it was," he said.
Attorney General Janet Reno, whose department coordinated the investigation of the death, said, "I have heard absolutely no information at all that would indicate that it is anything but a suicide."
Special Counsel Robert Fiske, who is investigating the Clintons' ties to a failed vacation-home development, is also examining the circumstances of Foster's death. In the days afterward, White House officials removed files from his office relating to the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater Development Corp.
Forensic experts and pathologists were skeptical of the newspaper's conclusions.
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a Pittsburgh forensic pathologist, said it was not unusual for a suicide victim to still be clutching a weapon.
"You get in many of these instances, an instantaneous, spasmodic reflex, which is entirely involuntary, and the hand will clutch an object, in this case a gun," Wecht said.
Foster's body was found face-up on an incline, with his head higher than his feet, in a park near the Potomac River in Northern Virginia on July 20.
Wecht, the first nongovernment pathologist to examine the autopsy files of President John F. Kennedy, listed reasons why little blood might have showed.
In such a case, he said, "there may not be much blood externally" because it will flow into the victim's throat and stomach, Wecht said. "You don't die from that kind of a wound because you lose blood. You die because you have hit the vital centers of the brain that control breathing and heartbeat."
Dr. Joy Carter, the District of Columbia's medical examiner, noted that the grass underneath Foster's body might well have absorbed much, if not all, the blood.
Foster's autopsy results have not publicly been released.
"I don't know if paramedics have the expertise to render an opinion here," Carter said. "In forensics, anything is possible, but it seems to me that there is a whole lot of second-guessing going on."
by CNB