Doubts Linger Over Death of White House Aide Foster : Investigation: Inquiries concluded that deputy counsel killed himself. But questions fuel speculation of foul play.

The keening voices of doubt fill the nightly airwaves, bombard news organizations and echo through countless chat rooms along the information highway.

Why was the fatal bullet never found? Why did the .38-caliber revolver dangling from the dead man’s right hand bear no fingerprints--neither his nor anyone else’s? Wasn’t it odd, given the violent nature of his death, that both arms were extended neatly at his sides?

And what of the observation by paramedics that the victim had sustained a lethal head wound but there was relatively little blood at the scene? Didn’t that suggest that death had occurred somewhere else and the body had been moved to the lonely patch of grass high above the Potomac River?

To his family, the death of senior White House aide Vincent Foster was a shattering personal tragedy. To President Clinton and many others around him, it was the baffling loss of a friend they had thought they knew too well for this.

And to a succession of official investigators, including the U.S. Park Police, a congressional committee and the first Whitewater independent counsel, it was a compelling case of suicide.

But to thousands of Americans, Foster’s death in 1993 has become a mystery that only grows darker with the passage of time.

It has become a staple of radio talk shows and the subject of unending letters and telephone calls to news organizations. Congressional Republicans continue to probe it. Indeed, the Foster case has generated conspiracy theories as elaborate as any in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination--including suggestions Foster was murdered in the White House basement because he knew too much about things that could embarrass his chief.

Some who raise questions have reasons of their own for trying to keep the Foster case alive, among them political partisans who see potential gains in generating controversy. Others simply despise Clinton.

Still, even putting aside such attackers, there remain many whose questions and suspicions are not tinged with self-interest or malice.

Why, after so many investigations, do these doubts linger?

Unanswered Questions

For almost all the questions, police investigators have what they consider sufficient answers. Even where the evidence is not conclusive, they say, it lends scant support to any of the other explanations or conspiracy theories.

They acknowledge, however, that in the Foster case, as in most other instances of violent death with no known eyewitnesses, there are questions that remain unanswered--possibly unanswerable. Under such circumstances, authorities say they cannot hope to disprove all alternative hypotheses.

Moreover, the case involves no ordinary death. Foster’s portfolio at the White House included two of the Administration’s greatest political embarrassments: Whitewater and the White House travel office controversy. The senior aide’s ties to the First Family went back to the days in Arkansas when Clinton was governor and Hillary Rodham Clinton worked closely with Foster at the Rose Law Firm.

Adding to suspicions that Foster possessed secrets the White House wanted to bury, Clinton aides removed papers from Foster’s office immediately after his death and took other steps that even some high-ranking federal law enforcement officials have criticized.

“The failure of White House cooperation was unprecedented,” a veteran Justice Department investigator said.

In addition, the U.S. Park Police, who have relatively little experience investigating violent deaths, took charge of the initial investigation because Foster’s body had been found in an isolated federal park in suburban Virginia.

Park Police officials concluded that his wound was self-inflicted, but confidence in their finding diminished when, after reaching that conclusion, they subsequently asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to conduct further laboratory tests on the weapon and to analyze gunpowder residue on the victim’s white shirt.

Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel investigating the Whitewater affair, is still looking into the death, despite the fact that his predecessor, Robert B. Fiske Jr., concluded it was suicide. A federal grand jury working for Starr recently subpoenaed a witness who claims he saw an empty parked car with Arkansas license plates at the scene that differed from the car Foster was driving.

Lack of Cooperation

Beyond the questions about Foster’s death, an unresolved issue is whether the White House obstructed the investigation or improperly withheld or mishandled documents in his office--a question likely to occupy congressional committees for some weeks to come.

In his widely heard radio show early this month, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh expressed an opinion held by many when he said: “I do not and have not suggested murder or anything of the sort . . . but something about this is wrong. The White House has acted . . . from Day One like there is something they want to hide.”

The suspicious behavior following Foster’s death is still being documented by House and Senate committees, although the panels have not challenged the suicide finding itself.

Calling the lack of White House cooperation “unprecedented,” Michael E. Shaheen Jr., a career attorney who has run the Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit for nearly 20 years, said it was a unique experience for him. He said it was the first time there had been a total failure of cooperation and candor “by a group whose conduct we were asked to review.”

Shaheen said White House officials “managed to convince all of us there was something they didn’t want us to come across.”

Testifying last month before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Shaheen added that he had been “stunned and shocked” in July to learn from a magazine that Foster had compulsively maintained a daily log. He said his office had requested such information both orally and in writing for two years, but that it had not been turned over until he learned of the log’s existence through the magazine article.

Even more ominously, Shaheen noted in his House testimony that Fiske was equally surprised to learn of the existence of the Foster records from the magazine article. “There was no way of mistaking that his subpoena specifically requested precisely those documents,” Shaheen said.

He pointed out that he had investigated senior White House officials at the direction of attorneys general for nearly 20 years, and this marked “the first time we have had a failure of cooperation or candor. . . . This one was without precedent in terms of its failure of cooperation and candor.”

However, Shaheen said he did not blame the lack of cooperation entirely on “ill motive.” He noted that the Administration was “brand new” when his investigation into the White House travel office began. In addition, “we were talking about a beloved person in the White House counsel’s office . . . a close friend of many people over there who had killed himself. You had sensitivities that were raw.”

David Margolis, another career Justice Department lawyer, agreed with Shaheen that presidential aides, particularly then-White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, had improperly restricted the initial investigation into Foster’s death.

Margolis told the Senate Whitewater Committee last summer that Nussbaum violated an agreement to allow Justice Department investigators to look through papers in Foster’s office for any indications that extortion or blackmail might have figured in his death.

He said Nussbaum, who had been Foster’s immediate superior, instead kept investigators at bay while he went through the papers himself.

Nussbaum has defended his actions as necessary to protect the privacy of some of Foster’s papers. He told the Senate committee that the office contained “numerous confidential and privileged files [and] . . . extremely sensitive documents, such as briefing books on Supreme Court nominees and background reports on other high Administration officials.

“I believed there also might be national security information in the office,” Nussbaum said.

Republican members of the Whitewater Committee have raised suspicions that Hillary Clinton was behind the action, although Nussbaum has denied it. They cite telephone logs showing a cluster of 17 phone calls in the hours after Foster’s death between the First Lady and two of her closest associates: Margaret Williams, her chief of staff, and Susan Thomases, her longtime confidante and adviser.

Foster was a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s, as well as her former partner in the Rose Law Firm of Little Rock, Ark.

Questioned about the phone calls, Williams and Thomases have claimed only vague recollections of what was discussed, although Thomases, a New York lawyer, said that at the time she was trying to “reach out” to console those who knew Foster as well as she did. Williams testified she could not remember if she actually spoke with Hillary Clinton during an early-morning phone call to a home in Arkansas where the First Lady was staying.

GOP committee members said such testimony did not seem credible. Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) said “it simply fuels our suspicions” about a possible cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s role, and Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.) said the panel should demand testimony from the First Lady.

Confusion over these telephone calls may be the source of questions often raised about calls purportedly made from the White House to Arkansas hours before Foster’s body was discovered. Government investigators have reported no unusual calls made before Foster’s death was discovered.

Restricted Search

What secrets could White House aides have been fearful might fall into the wrong hands?

Stephen Neuwirth, a presidential aide and attorney, told the committee that Hillary Clinton and Thomases were concerned “about anyone having unfettered access” to Foster’s office. Nussbaum told him of this concern but did not explain what it was based on, Neuwirth said.

A uniformed Secret Service officer testified he saw Williams carrying a pile of file folders out of the White House counsel’s office suite late in the evening of the day Foster’s body was discovered. Williams has insisted she took nothing out of the office.

According to Shaheen’s testimony, Nussbaum’s actions in limiting the search suggested that he feared possible embarrassment to the President over the abrupt firing two months earlier of seven employees of the White House travel office. While the White House said mismanagement and possible wrongdoing had led to the dismissals, it later turned out that Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, a close friend of the President’s, and Catherine Cornelius, a distant cousin of Clinton’s who had handled some presidential campaign travel, had largely been behind the shake-up.

Thomason at the time was seeking a non-competitive government aviation contract for a business partner, and Cornelius wanted to help arrange White House press corps travel with the President, a lucrative business that the travel office traditionally had handled.

The Thomason and Cornelius projects both fell through, as the White House apologized for the travel office fiasco and offered jobs elsewhere in the government to most of those fired. More than 18 months later, the former office manager, Billy R. Dale, was indicted on charges he embezzled funds entrusted to him by news organizations. He has pleaded not guilty and is on trial.

Even without indications of stonewalling and a cover-up, sufficient unresolved questions about Foster’s last act remain to keep speculation alive about how he really died.

Whether he was troubled by Whitewater or the travel office debacle, or both, investigators say that Foster, 48 at the time of his death, left a morosely worded note concluding he was not meant for “the spotlight of public life in Washington,” where, the note said, “ruining people is considered sport.”

The note, handwritten on yellow paper, was belatedly found at the bottom of Foster’s leather briefcase. It had been torn into 27 pieces.

Speculation of Murder

At a recent Washington news conference, three private handwriting experts said they had concluded the note was a forgery. The three specialists, including former New York police homicide investigator Vincent Scalice, had been hired by James Davidson, who edits a financial newsletter called Strategic Investment. Davidson told reporters that “the evidence in this case overwhelmingly points to murder.”

The FBI laboratory, on the other hand, compared the handwriting on the note with that on a document that Foster’s widow, Lisa, said she knew he had written and with personal checks that she knew had been signed by him. Bureau experts concluded Foster had written the note.

In addition to Davidson and his Strategic Investment newsletter, theories of foul play have been pressed by British journalists and by Chris Ruddy, a former New York Post reporter who now works for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a small daily newspaper in Pennsylvania owned by wealthy conservative Richard M. Scaife, who has taken an interest in the case.

On the question of blood at the scene, relatively little blood was visible when Park Police and emergency medical personnel first found Foster’s body, the Fiske report noted. But when the body was rolled over, the report said, Park Police observed “a fairly large pool of blood on the ground where his head had been and further noted that the upper portion of the back of Foster’s shirt was blood-soaked.”

The pathologists’ report noted that the relative lack of blood can be explained by the position of Foster’s body and the path of the fatal bullet: He was lying on a steeply inclined slope with his feet pointing downhill; blood would have tended to remain in his body rather than flow out from the head--especially since cardiovascular activity stopped quickly after the bullet injured his brain stem.

Critics have asserted there was no dirt on Foster’s shoes, though he supposedly walked from his car to the spot where his body was found. Government investigators say traces of the mineral mica, which is present in soil at the scene, were in fact found on Foster’s shoes and socks.

In addition, the weather was very hot and dry and dense foliage covered the ground he walked over, federal investigators said, so he would not have encountered soil moist enough to cling to his shoes.

Carpet fibers found on Foster’s clothing have also been a matter of contention.

Such fibers are found on the clothing of virtually everyone, and Foster’s wife said they had recently put new carpet in their house, which normally results in more loose fiber than does worn carpet. Critics argue that investigators did not go far enough in comparing the fibers on Foster’s clothing with the rugs in his home and office.

Several efforts have been made to retrieve the bullet that killed Foster.

One of them, a close search by a team of 16 FBI lab technicians using metal detectors, turned up 12 modern-day bullets and assorted cartridges and shell casings--along with an assortment of Civil War-era ammunition and other objects--but lab tests showed none matched the pistol in Foster’s hand.

“It is impossible to determine where the bullet landed” because there is no information “on the precise angle of Foster’s head when the gun was fired,” the Fiske report said. Moreover, the park occupies a wooded area high above the Potomac River. The bullet could have traveled a considerable distance or been deflected in any direction by tree limbs.

Pathologists and FBI ballistic experts also concluded Foster himself fired the fatal shot because his thumb was trapped and compressed between the trigger and the trigger guard of the weapon.

‘A Can of Worms’

As for the FBI laboratory’s recovering no fingerprints from Foster’s gun except for a non-Foster print from the inner surface of one of the gun’s grips, the Fiske report said: “The ability to recover prints varies due to a number of factors, including the texture of the tested object and characteristics of the persons who came in contact with that object. Latent prints can be destroyed by exposure to certain elements, such as heat.”

Foster, among his other duties, had helped prepare the tax returns of Whitewater Development Corp., the Arkansas real estate venture that the Clintons had invested in as far back as 1978.

Documents made public by the White House last summer--and given to the Senate committee--show that Foster was worried about the tax treatment of this investment and whether an Internal Revenue Service audit might be launched. One of his notes describes it as “a can of worms you shouldn’t open.” This and other correspondence suggested Foster and his colleagues were concerned they could not show IRS support for assertions made during the 1992 campaign about the extent of the Clintons’ losses in the project.

Other records cited by Fiske, the first Whitewater independent counsel, showed that four days before his death Foster went to the White House medical unit to have his blood pressure checked, out of concern that his heart had been “pounding.”

Fiske’s report said that about this time Foster also telephoned his sister, Sheila, and told her he was battling depression for the first time in his life and did not know how to handle it. When she offered to set up an appointment for him with a psychiatrist, he reportedly replied he was hesitant because it could jeopardize his federal security clearance.

Summarizing his findings, Fiske said “the overwhelming weight of the evidence” compelled a determination of suicide. But he added that he was unable “to provide definitive answers to all questions” surrounding Foster’s death.