Chapter 50: Have you ever had to stand up for your principles? What was the outcome?

Originally written November 29, 2021

My predicament made the World Wide Web!

I was driving to work on the morning of Friday, March 28, 2003. Unlike most work days, this day I’d brought along a toothbrush and a stick of deodorant.

I was afraid I’d be spending the night, and possibly the weekend in jail … and possibly even longer for contempt of court.

At the time, I was working at The New Mexican covering the murder trial of an Oklahoma man accused of murdering his mother in Santa Fe when both were living here nearly 30 years before.

This was a strange story known as the “Rosebush Case.” I first stumbled on to it back in 1993 when checking the daily hot sheets at the Santa Fe Police Department.

A man on Santa Fe’s east side had been working in his garden, digging up a rosebush that was dying when he uncovered a human skull. At first the gardener assumed that this was a skull from ancient times.

But, digging a little deeper he uncovered a garbage bag full of human bones, teeth, hair and what authorities said was a woman's nightgown. So instead of calling an anthropologist, he called the police.

Lynn Anderson knew …

As I sat at the police station reading this rudimentary report, I knew this was going to be a big story. I didn’t realize that I’d be writing about it for a full decade.

Santa Fe Police actually did a good job of investigating the case. Police began searching for every resident of the house, which had been constructed in the 1960s. (I talked to several of these folks myself.)

Police were able to account for every resident except one: Donna Foote, a woman from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, who lived there with her grown son for about a year in the late ‘70s.

A trio of Santa Fe police detectives traveled to Sapulpa, Oklahoma to interview Donna Foote’s son, Doug Foote, who lived in Santa Fe briefly during 1975 and 1976.

Doug’s story he related to police was full of holes. He said that after he left Santa Fe, his mom had married a man named Montie Ellis and had moved with him to Maryland shortly after. She died there in 1977, he told detectives.

He said that his mother’s husband took Donna’s remains back to Santa Fe, rented a small airplane in Santa Fe and scattered her ashes over the city.

But police were never able to locate Ellis and expressed doubts about his existence. Also, a supposed death certificate for Donna, which police found was located not in Maryland, but in a file with the Oklahoma Tax Commission.

A registrar for the vital statistics department in Maryland would later testify that the document presented did not have the department's numerical filing code attached to the top of death certificates, which had been requited in Maryland since before Donna Foote's reported death.

The registrar also said she’d checked with Johns Hopkins Hospital — where Doug Foote told police his mother died — as well as the funeral home and crematorium that allegedly handled her body.

None of the three had any record of Donna Foote.

And a handwriting expert would verify that Donna Foote's alleged signature on the deed when her Santa Fe house was sold in 1976 is not hers.

During that interview, Foote told the Santa Fe detectives said that he and his mother had had some kind of falling out in Santa Fe. He said was doing a large amount of hallucinogenic drugs, including taking part in a peyote ritual while living in Santa Fe.

He told police that he had a hard time distinguishing dreams from reality during that time. He said he often blacked out while living in Santa Fe but he knew that "something real bad happened."

(Confession: I’ve done peyote a few times myself, but I’ve never killed anyone.)

Fortunately for Doug, by the time his case went to trial the judge did not allow a tape of that interview to be played to the jury because it happened after Doug had asked to see a lawyer.

A couple who lived next to the Footes told police that in late 1975 Doug told them that he was taking his mother to visit a sick friend in Albuquerque. The couple saw Doug Foote — but not his mother — leave in a van. The neighbors said Doug called twice in the next six days, saying he had been delayed in Albuquerque.

During this time, one of those neighbors noticed the door to the Foote house was ajar. She went in but found nobody there, but she saw a revolver on the kitchen table.

The neighbors told detectives that Doug eventually returned in a different vehicle and told them that his mother had gotten homesick, so he put her on a plane to Oklahoma. Soon afterward, the neighbors saw Foote loading a U-Haul trailer. They never saw him again.

Soon after the Rosebush story broke and some of these details began to emerge, my editor told me to get my ass to Sapulpa to find out everything I could about Doug and Donna Foote.

So I did.

From the “See Sapulpa” Facebook page

That was the first of two trips I’d make to Sapulpa, a little Mayberry-esque town near Tulsa.

That first trip didn’t produce any startling news. Doug wouldn’t talk to me and most the people who knew him said they couldn’t imagine a nice guy like Doug Foote killing and mutilating his mom.

And not that this means anything, but I did drive by Doug’s house and noticed rose bushes in the front yard.

After those early weeks following the discovery of those remains, the case seemed to hit a dead end. Doug refused to give police DNA samples, so they were not able to prove the bones belonged to Donna Foote.

But police detectives didn’t let it go.

Years later, police found a cousin of Donna’s who agreed to provide samples and their DNA showed that they were related to the victim. Soon after, Doug was indicted and eventually extradited to New Mexico for trial. In 2000 I was sent back to Oklahoma to attend a court hearing and poke around for any other information I could get.

I located a woman who had been Doug’s secretary at his appraisal business in Sapulpa for many years. I went to her house to interview her.

The secretary, who had been fired in 1999, was reluctant to go on the record, so I agreed to keep the interview “on background.”

She told me how Doug often got depressed and in 1993, had threatened to kill his wife and bury her under a bush at his house. This, she said happened a few months after the remains were found at his old house in Santa Fe.

For many months afterwards the secretary and I kept in contact via email. And by the time Doug went to trial in 2003, those emails became an issue.

Doug’s lawyer, Garvin Issacs of Oklahoma City tried to make me an issue during his trial.

He even made fun of my website from that era, mocking my dancing Potatohead gifs and my photo “of the famous day” that I met Bo Diddley, which graced the home page.

Screenshot of my old website, which started on AOL then moved to a weird site called “Dreamwater.” Courtesy the Wayback Machine

But more relevant to his client, he called my stories about the Foote case “sensationalistic” and even claimed that I had "programmed" the secretary to believe the cops’ theory that Foote killed his mother.

Jeepers, I’ve never programmed anyone! Was there subliminal hypnotic messages in those dancing Potatoheads?

“You will do what I command!

But things got serious when the son of a bitch subpoenaed my emails with the secretary and moved to call me as a witness.

This happened in the middle of the trial, which took about a month (very long for Santa Fe trials). On that Friday morning, when I brought my toothbrush with me, the first thing on my schedule was a hearing to see whether I would be required to hand over my emails to the defense.

Walking into the courtroom I did kind of feel like this…

For those who don’t know handing over confidential correspondence with news sources or interview notes would be a major breach of journalistic ethics. We do not normally give this stuff to the authorities — or anyone.

I had given the secretary my word that our conversations were not on the record. And even though it was she who told Issacs of these emails, I still intended to keep my word.

So, while I didn’t want to go to jail, there was no way I was going to give up my emails.

At the hearing (held without the jury present), Judge Michael Vigil ruled he would personally review the emails and decide if there was anything pertinent there.

I was hesitant, but I knew Judge Vigil well for years and trusted him. He’s one of the most honest and serious public servants I know. My lawyer, on retainer with my paper, told me it was a good solution.

One person who disagreed was the editor of the Sapulpa Daily Herald.

He was a crusty old archetypal small-town newspaper editor who I got to know during my two trips to Sapulpa. We were in frequent contact over the years.

Though his paper didn’t have the money or manpower to send a reporter to Foote’s trial in Santa Fe, this editor was following the trial closely from afar. When he learned that I’d been subpoenaed he called and urged me not to let the judge look at my emails under any circumstances.

However, by then it was too late. Mike Vigil was probably halfway through the correspondence.

Later that day, the judge ruled the correspondence was not only protected under state shield laws but the e-mails in question contained no information the secretary did not later disclose to Santa Fe police.

So when I brushed my teeth that night, I was at home.

The trial went on and at the end Doug Foote was found not guilty on all charges.

The killer of Donna Foote has never been punished — at least not by the courts.

Doug Foote is in his 70s now and still living in Sapulpa, last I heard. His appraisal is still operating as far as I can tell. And it looks like he’s stayed out of trouble since then.

Ironically the previous time a lawyer had subpoenaed me, back in the late ‘80s, it was Michael Vigil. This was in the late 80s or early 90s when he was still a lawyer in private practice.

I’d written some story about one of his clients, who was facing burglary charges. But he worked out some agreement with The New Mexican’s lawyers where I wouldn’t have to testify in the burglary trial.

And to his credit, Vigil didn’t tried to subpoena my notes or anything.

Now this is nifty! Thanks to the fabulous Wayback Machine, you can read my old website posts about the Rosebush case. And the links seem to be working here, and they go to some of my actual stories about the case in the New Mexican — some going back to the early ‘90s. CLICK HERE

If anyone wants to make a movie about this case, this should be the opening music: