Theresa Foster

**Theresa Foster** (March 5, 1930 – November 9, 1948) was an American teenage engineering student at the University of Colorado who was murdered in 1948 just outside of Boulder. Her death is mostly remembered by the prolific, misleading and sometimes false articles written by *The Denver Post* following her death.

## Events

### Life

Theresa Catherine Foster was born on March 5, 1930 and grew up on a farm outside the small town of Greeley, Colorado (pop. 15,995 in 1940). As the ninth of eleven children, she would milk cows and go hunting. She was also an honour student, religious and "a bit boy-shy". However, she did have a high school sweetheart named Bobby at one point in adolescence.

### Disappearance

Theresa was an 18-year-old engineering student at the University of Colorado in 1948. On the 9th of November 1948, she had attended a rosary service on the Boulder campus. Shortly after 10 PM, she started to head downtown on foot along the well-lit Broadway, the main road. It was her usual route to a faculty member's house on Spruce Street where she would do household chores in exchange for lodging.

She never arrived.

### The blood at Lover's Lane

The next morning, the professor's family called the police to report Theresa missing.

That day, a farmer discovered blood at Lee Hill Road, a notorious "lovers' lane", 4 mi (6.4 km) north of Boulder. There was so much blood that he thought one of his calves had been slaughtered there.

Sheriff's deputies arrived and collected bits of hair and scalp tissue, a broken grip of a .45 automatic, and a distinctive ring and white scarf. Theresa's mother Elizabeth identified the ring and scarf as being her daughter's.

Mrs Foster told reporters, "I know she's dead. It's just something a mother can feel." Theresa's disappearance quickly became the fodder of local journalists.

### Theresa's body is found

At 10:30 AM the next day, two rabbit hunters were in the woods 12 mi (19.3 km) south of Boulder when they discovered a woman's body half-buried in the snow. She laid beside a frozen stream with her legs pulled up "as if curled in sleep." It appeared that someone had dumped her from a bridge 15 ft (4.6 m) above that carried motorists along state highway 93. Police found bloodstains likely belonging to Theresa on the wooden bridge.

Her skin was blue and smeared with blood, with several cuts and gashes on her head. A reporter later described her as "battered almost beyond recognition." Her jacket was wound tightly around her neck. Her sweater was pulled up, her bra intact, but below the waist, she wore only loafers and bobby socks; her panties and slacks had been tossed a few feet away.

Due to reports by Colorado media, the woman was quickly identified as Theresa Foster.

### Initial aftermath

The autopsy examination revealed fifteen scalp wounds, three skull fractures among other injuries. She'd been raped, bludgeoned and possibly strangled with her own coat.

Theresa's death marked the first homicide of a University of Colorado student in their 72-year history, and the first murder in Boulder in nine years.

The university's regents offered a $10,000 reward, just over $106,000 in 2019 dollars, for information leading to an arrest. Officials warned female students not to walk alone at night, law students combed the campus for clues, and District Attorney Hatfield Chilson called for assistance from multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Denver homicide squad.

### *The Denver Post* and Erle Stanley Gardner

*The Denver Post* had already begun to print story after story about Theresa's murder. They launched a campaign in an attempt to catch Theresa's killer by hiring well-known pulp novelist Erle Stanley Gardner. A "self-taught attorney", Erle had abandoned his legal practice in the 1930s to pursue writing. He ended up creating a character named Perry Mason, "the most famous lawyer in fiction."

Two *Denver Post* editors met Erle at the airport and accompanied him to the Brown Palace for an early-morning briefing. Erle's arrival was heralded in huge headlines by Denver's newspapers. In his first article for *The Denver Post*, Erle explained that he was being paid "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."

In the following six months, *The Denver Post* would print over 230 articles about Theresa and her killer. An average of 1–3 stories *every day*.
At the time, Erle Stanley Gardner was the most widely read living author in the country. Sales of his Perry Mason mysteries would sell over seven million copies a year. The series would even later become a television show from 1957 to 1966. He was provided with a high level of access to police files and other information by DA Chilson, Boulder sheriff Arthur Everson and Denver detectives on the case. Arguably not a wise idea on the Denver police's part.

Local people would travel and line the wooden bridge above the creek to watch Erle and *Denver Post* writers investigate the scene. Erle had found a strange half-moon stain on the railing of the bridge. He concluded that Theresa must've bitten her killer's hand, specifically their left hand.

A sightseer had found a blood trail 2 mi (3.2 km) from the bridge. Erle described it as a "sinister train of red drops". The trail disappeared into a canyon but Erle made sure that samples were collected and rushed back to Boulder for testing. It was animal blood.

This was just the beginning of a pattern for Erle. He would find anything that could be tied to Theresa's death but ultimately were completely unrelated. *The Denver Post* would print these theories and heavily encourage readers to call the police if they'd seen "young men with wounded hands" or "neighbors washing out the trunks of their cars" just to name a few. This would result in the Denver Police Department receiving an average of 200 such calls a day.

Erle would inspect Theresa's room at the house on Spruce Street and visit her parents in Greeley. At this point, he now believed it must have required at least two men to abduct such a "husky, healthy, outdoor girl." The theory was based in part on the sleuthing of *The Denver Post's* second "crime ace", Dr Lemoyne Snyder, "the Sherlock Holmes of Michigan." Erle had convinced Lemoyne to be retained by the newspaper because of his history in criminology and forensics.

Lemoyne theorised that due to the amount of blood on the bridge, Theresa was still alive when she was thrown off the bridge—and could have been raped there instead of on Lee Hill Road.

However, this conflicted directly with the official autopsy findings by the Denver medical examiner Angelo Lapi. Given the scarcity of blood along the stream bank where Theresa was found, it was unlikely that her heart was still pumping blood when she was thrown off the bridge. Despite the conflict, Angelo wouldn't speak up and *The Denver Post* would continue to present the two doctors' "findings" side by side, as if they were working together on the case.

### *The Denver Post* goes too far

*The Denver Post* would also reconstruct Theresa's last hours as a highly fictionalised rendition of events, accompanied by cartoonlike drawings of her abduction and assault. In response, the *Rocky Mountain News* published their own recreation of the attack, imagining Theresa's cries for help and the killer's panic. The piece featured a close-up photo of "how the frenzy-filled eyes of the killer may have looked".

Both of these papers didn't go without protest. A group of CU students wrote a letter to *The Denver Post*, expressing disgust at "the orgy of sentimentality and the picture picnic indulged in by the big city press... There never has been and there never will be an ethical basis for turning a murder into a three-ring journalistic circus." The newspaper responded, insisting that Erle and Lemoyne and the rest of the team were simply trying to catch the killer before they struck again.

### Amateur detectives

Erle's articles created amateur detectives who would go to the scenes of the murder, Lee Hill Road and the woods south of Boulder. Two of these amateurs were Patsy Heitman and Loretta Sarich. The two women had found a bloody Army surplus parka stuffed in a culvert not far from Lee Hill Road. Unfortunately for the case, Lemoyne was the first to test the coat before handing it to the Denver medical examiner. Other items uncovered by volunteer searchers, including a wrench and rope, were handled similarly.

Sarich had also found a bloody handkerchief, a hat and other clothing along with the parka, as well as a blood-soaked piece of cardboard with what appeared to be a suicide note on it. She only presented these to *Denver Post* reporters, who told her the items (excluding the parka) were useless so she threw them away.

### Person of interest: Joe Walker

On November 21, twelve days after Theresa's murder, a young bookkeeper named Eleanor Walker showed up at the Boulder sheriff's office to tell them she believed her husband had "killed that girl."

Her husband was Joe Sam Walker, a 31-year-old sheet metal worker who resided in Eldorado Springs had come home late the night Theresa disappeared. His clothes were bloody and he had a bad wound at the top of his head. Joe had told Eleanor that he'd gotten in a fight with another man. In the next few days, he burned the bloody clothes and washed out and repainted the trunk of his car. He also told his wife he'd disposed of a .45 pistol and a parka, similar to the one found by Sarich.

The newspapers described Eleanor as afraid of her husband. It was claimed that she'd been held a virtual prisoner in her house for several days and had escaped only by feigning a toothache and insisting she had to go to the dentist.

The papers went wild. Erle began writing his final article for *The Denver Post* implying Joe Walker was as good as tried and convicted. He also credited the newspaper with breaking the case wide open.

Joe's arrest "is an outstanding tribute not only to the power of the press, but to the responsibility of the press," Erle wrote. "It is no part of the duty of the press to try a case in the newspapers."

Police questioned Joe Walker for hours, only to result in a hastily put-together confession. The story Joe told ended up sounding a lot like Erle's theory of two men being involved.

Everybody knew Joe was lying. They knew it because *The Denver Post* told them so.

### Is Joe innocent?

*The Denver Post* had Leonarde Keeler conduct a Keeler Polygraph test on Joe Walker. An early version of the polygraph test, it could only be conducted by Leonarde himself. Despite not being admissible in court, the test went ahead. Leonarde asked Joe if he'd raped Theresa, if he'd put her body in his trunk, if she was still alive when he threw her off the bridge. He denied each allegation. However, Joe's head wound had become infected and he was running a 103°F (39.4°C) fever at the time of the test.

The *Rocky* reported "The unshaven suspect showed a violent emotional reaction" and *The Denver Post* referred to Joe's denials as a "confession."

He had no money to hire an attorney, but after the polygraph, James Burke, a former Denver district attorney, agreed to take the case out of concern for "fair play and justice."

*The Denver Post* discovered that Joe was arrested in Oregon in 1947 for "lewd advances" toward two young girls while driving a delivery truck for a local florist. No charges were filed in the case and no claim he'd ever touched the girls but *The Denver Post* still printed the headline, "Oregon police disclose girls, 11 & 12, molested".

Joe spent almost three months in jail and was released on a $25,000 bail, nearly $266,000 in 2019 dollars. Photographers would follow him to a barber shop, a retail store, a liquor store, and a restaurant.

The Walkers and Joe's attorneys became aware that District Attorney Chilson was planning to seek the death penalty for Joe. James Burke approached three major radio stations (KOA, KLZ, and KFEL) in an effort to advertise Joe's innocence. All three radio stations refused. James and his co-counsel were refused service in Boulder restaurants and cursed and spat upon on the street.

### Walker v. People (1949)

The case went to trial in late April of 1949. Joe Sam Walker faced a jury of twelve men and one woman who'd heard about little else for the past six months.

During the trial, DA Chilson presented hair, blood and fibre evidence that allegedly tied Joe to the scene and to Theresa. A toxicologist testified that hairs found on the bloody gun grip and in clotted blood on Theresa's hand "resembled" Joe's hair, but not that they were his. No work was done to match the semen (known as "glandular secretions" in family newspapers at the time) found in Theresa's panties to Joe's blood type. James Burke pressed for such tests, claiming that they'd prove his client didn't rape Theresa.

## News

*For news articles on Theresa Foster, see here.*

## External links

* Foster family tree • Ancestry (paywall)
* Theresa C Foster (1930-1948) • Find a Grave

### Court cases

* 1952: Walker v. People • Colorado Supreme Court
* 1969: Walker v. People • Colorado Supreme Court

## In popular media

### Podcasts

* My Favorite Murder: Episode 106: Courage Shoulders (1 Feb 2018)

## Sources

1. ↑ Greeley, Colorado Population 2019 • World Population Review
2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 13 Dec 2011: The case of the kidnapped coed • Westword
3. ↑ Theresa C Foster (1930-1948) • Find a Grave
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Inflation Calculator • US Inflation Calculator
5. ↑ *Perry Mason* (TV series) • Wikipedia