The Counsel, the Cop, and the Keys
by DCDave

And so it goes daily, as any TV drama fan knows, in courtrooms all over the country. Not so when the charge in the case is self-murder and the victim/accused-perpetrator is without legal representation. Unchallenged witness-leading, in fact, is the order of the day at your typical U.S. Senatorial sham hearing/investigation. But just as some horses coaxed to the proximity of liquid refreshment can be more easily persuaded to imbibe than can others, some witnesses are more easily led in desired directions than others.

Consider the super-smooth chief minority counsel of the Senate Whitewater Committee, Richard Ben-Veniste, as he interrogates the lead U.S. Park Police investigator, John Rolla, about Rolla's work on his very first homicide case, that of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster. The exchange took place on Thursday, July 20, 1995, two years to the day after Foster's body was found on the back side of an earthen berm in the far corner of a lightly-visited, preserved leftover from the Civil War off Virginia's George Washington Parkway, Fort Marcy Park. The body, we were to learn later, had been found lying straight as a stick with both arms neatly down by the side. No blood or brain tissue was seen blown out the back of the head although the autopsy doctor would report finding an exit wound there the size of a half dollar from a high-powered .38 caliber bullet supposedly fired into the mouth. The gaping exit wound noted by the septuagenarian doctor with previous highly-dubious autopsies leading to suicide conclusions to his credit was not seen by any of the twenty-five people--by known count--who saw the body that night. The autopsy had been moved up so that, contrary to standard procedure, the investigators at the park were not able to attend. Though the revolver found in the hand, lying almost under the right leg, was said to have been pressed deep into the back of the mouth, there was no disfigurement of the mouth from the blast or the recoil. No teeth were chipped. No blow-back was on the weapon or the hand or the sleeve nor were there any fingerprints of the deceased. Neither did he leave fingerprints on either the spent shell casing or the remaining bullet in the cylinder, and no matching bullets were ever found, to mention just a few of the anomalies.

The exchange begins this way:

So far so good for the Columbia-educated New Yorker, Ben-Veniste, a man who very early in his career rose to national prominence as an assistant to the special counsel in the Watergate case and later achieved a quieter notoriety as a defense counsel for government-protected, Arkansas and likely-CIA-connected mega-drug smuggler, Barry Seal.* The curious choice of the woefully-inexperienced, diction-challenged, but talkative, Rolla had already caused problems for the government case in the hearing and deposition stage of the Foster "investigation." His very presence in such a key position certainly lends credibility to the fall-back position that the original investigation was simply botched, but his tendency to talk too much and his failure at times to see what he is expected to say have increased the need for an alternative to the simple suicide-from-depression scenario that the public has been sold from the beginning.

But at this point, Ben-Veniste must have been breathing easy. Notice that, with respect to police training and procedures, he has not elicited from Rolla that in the investigation of any violent death, the original assumption of murder is fundamental, an assumption that is to be maintained until enough evidence has been collected to rule it out. Ben-Veniste is not alone in ignoring this point. One may search the record with a fine-toothed comb and nowhere will he find the direct question put to the investigating officers, "What steps did you take to rule out murder?" Notice, too, that when Rolla, speaking of the early evidence, says that it was "all leading right to a suicide," he is not asked to elaborate. Having obtained his invited answer, Ben-Veniste then exhibits less curiosity than one would expect from a casual bystander. He has, no doubt, been warned about Rolla, and knows that it is not safe to let him talk too much about the sensitive details of the case.

We may pass over the fact that conversation with the Foster family that Ben-Veniste alludes to would not have been possible if the authorities had stuck to the story that The Washington Post had put out on July 30, 1993, and was left unchallenged for almost a year, that is that the police were turned away from the Foster house that night. Immediately after the above quoted transcript, an exchange ensued--which we shall omit--about how essential it is for the police to make the death notification to the family, and then we have this:

Woops! Sound the alarm bells! We've gone a bit too far here.

If Rolla had searched Foster's body at the scene, it certainly stands to reason that he could have hardly failed to miss the keys to Foster's car that Rolla says was there, that is, if the keys were actually there, but the record shows that no keys were found at the park, not on Foster, not in the car, not on the ground, nowhere. At the point where it dawned on the investigators that they had no car keys they surely could not have continued to think that "it was all leading right to a suicide." At the very least, a frantic search of the grounds would have ensued, that is, if anyone really seriously thought that the evidence otherwise pointed to suicide. Not many people would believe that Foster hot-wired his car to take his last drive. But no, what we have been asked to believe is that the very first, not the last thought the police had was, "Oh, we must have missed the keys when we were going through Foster's pockets looking for any evidence we could collect and put into our documented evidence collection. Let's hustle right off to the morgue and look in his pockets again."

Ben-Veniste knows how the keys turned up, with a set of house and office keys thrown in to boot, and he tries to dig himself out of this little hole, pulling on the reins of the uncomprehending witness as hard as he can:

Whew! That's a relief. But what a gift Rolla or his sidekick/trainer Sgt. Cheryl Braun must have! It must be nice to know confidently where you must look when something is missing. I guess it helps when you have been told that two White House operatives are going to the morgue to "identify the body," a body that the police have already identified perfectly well with the help of a White House photo ID. It's a good thing that, by the time Kenneth Starr looked into the matter, Rolla had got on the same page with Braun and agreed that they went to the morgue before going to the Foster home and before the White House people got to the morgue instead of after, as Rolla had clearly implied in previous testimony.***

Not yet, anyway. That would take a bit more doing. But for now, let's heave a sigh that the counsel and the cop are off a subject the counsel dearly wanted to avoid, the matter of those pesky keys.

David Martin
January 24, 1999

Addendum:  Car Keys Never Entered into Evidence

Maybe the keys that Officers Braun and Rolla say they retrieved from the morgue did not even include Foster's Honda key.   The only keys that FBI investigators ever officially entered into evidence, keys with a Cook Jeep Sales of Little Rock, Arkansas, tag attached to the ring, did not include any key that would open or start a Honda automobile.  You can see a photograph of the evidence at http://www.fbicover-up.com/photos/fosterkeys.htm.

July 31, 2006