THE BLACK DAHLIA: SUSPECTS AND WHO DONE IT?

The "POSSESSED HOUSE" was sold to son and mother, Doug and Donna Foote in August of 1975. The Foote's were antique dealers from Oklahoma. Doug Foote in 1975, was twenty five years old and a 1973 graduate of Westminster College.

Donna Foote was born August 7th, 1915, and had visited Santa Fe as a child. She loved the area and in 1975 she and her son moved to the capital city and became Santa Feans.

While living at the "HELL HOUSE", Doug Foote experimented with LSD and other hallucinogens. Doug Foote claimed he heard voices and saw Hellish apparitions while living at the rosebush house. In June of 1976, Doug Foote sold the house and moved back to Oklahoma.

Once again the house's history is cloudy, Santa Fe lore has it that Doug Foote sold the house in 1976 to a Doctor Logan Roots. Appropriate name for a house with so many rosebushes. Santa Fe lore has the house being unocupied from late 1976 into 1977.

Eventually Doctor Roots sold the house to Bill Faurot. In 1993, Faurot found the bones under the rosebush. Prior to the unearthing of the human remains, Jenny Faurot, who is the daughter of Bill Faurot was said to have had encounters with the paranormal. Even after the remains were found, Jenny would have brushes with the metaphysical at the Fort Union Drive house. Ectoplasmic slime, unexplainable shadow figures, etc.

Could all these people over all these years be making up a whale of a yarn? Not likely, the bones under the rosebush are verification that at least one murder had happened at this house.

Who's bones were these that Faurot had found buried under and around the rosebush? Police investigators stumbled onto a lead by finding out that Doug Foote, a prior owner of the house, had for years been trying to claim his mother's estate. Doug Foote professed that his mother, Donna Foote, had passed on due to a heart attack in Maryland, in July of 1977, whereupon she was cremated. Her ashes were then scattered over Santa Fe by plane. For all that, Doug Foote's petitions were squashed in court because he did not have a proper death certificate or other evidence when it concerned his mother's expiration.

Complicating matters more so, was that Doug Foote claimed that his mother had moved from the Fort Union house before he sold it in 1976. His mother had married a man by the name of Monte Ellis.

The case soon broke, the Santa Fe Police Department charged Doug Foote with matracide. The District Attorney's office professed, Doug Foote had killed his mother, Donna Foote, sometime between 1975 and 1976 at the "HELL HOUSE" residence. Donna Foote was decapitated and her remains were buried in the backyard under and around the rosebush.

The SFPD built it's case on circumstantial evidence and DNA. The police took DNA samples from the remains and from Doug Foote's cousin. The D.A.'s office announced, the DNA was a match and Doug Foote was going to be proven that he was a murderer.

Doug Foote was arrested in Oklahoma and brought to Santa Fe, he would stand trial for murder. According to the D.A.'s office there is only a .07 percentage of the DNA being wrong when concerning itself with the Doug Foote case. Thus it was concluded the body parts found under the rosebush was Donna Foote and Doug Foote was her slayer.

Murder solved! Not according to the Santa Fe jury that was in charge of dispensing justice, when it came to Doug Foote's murder trial. The Santa Fe jury found Doug Foote innocent.

The facts were; there had been a murder and parts of a body had been uncovered in the house that Doug Foote and his mother had occupied. The jury concluded, the human remains could possibly be not those of Donna Foote and there was not enough evidence to find Doug Foote guilty as charged.

With this verdict, Doug Foote left the Santa Fe District Courthouse a free man, where upon he headed back to his home in Oklahoma. At the Santa Fe Courthouse, Doug Foote's last words on the murder trial were, "Praise The Lord."

So what happened? How did the jury come to this conclusion that Doug Foote was wrongly accused and why did the D.A.'s office, according to the jury, prosecute an innocent man?

The prosecution claimed that in the history of the house at 1921 Fort Union Drive, only one inhabitant cannot be accounted for, and this Donna Foote. No death certificate was found in Maryland concerning Donna Foote's death. Baltimore's John Hopkins hospital, had no record of Donna Foote's stay at the hospital, and this medical center according to Doug Foote is where Donna Foote passed on.

The prosecution stated that they could not find any trace of a Monte Ellis in the United States, this is the man that Doug Foote claimed had married his mother. As one quipster put it, "Monte Ellis is like my inlaw brother who went off to sea, he was never heard of again."

Also there was no record that Doug Foote rented out an airplane in 1976 and scattered his mother's ashes over Santa Fe. Case closed, hardly.

To counter the prosecution claims, Doug Foote's lawyer brought forward some common sense and factual evidence. Doctor's and goverment workers are notorious for their slack wire, book keeping and file work. Thus, no evidence of Donna Foote's death certificate. (EXAMPLE: Fedral accountants can not trace where millions of $'s went in the rebuilding of Iraq).

As for records not being found, concerning cremation or ashes being scattered, Doug Foote's murder trial was held in 2003, twenty seven years after the events in question. In that time a span of twenty seven years, businesses close, paper work is lost, people die, move on, or don't remember things from decades gone by.

Police investigators at the start of the 1993 unearthing of the rosebush remains, claimed that the body parts were around fifteen years old. That means that the murder would have taken place in 1978. This would rule out Doug Foote for he was living in Oklahoma in 1978.

The anthropoligical examiner had stated at the start of the 1993 investigation, that the skull found under the rosebush was that of a "MALE". One must ask how can the skull go from being identified as a "MALE", then be reclassified as that of a "FEMALE" during the 2003 trial?

Strangely the prosecution did not use Doug Foote's volunteered DNA sample, in testing against the bones that were found under the rosebush. The prosecution chose to use Doug Foote's cousin's DNA.

Doug Foote's lawyer made a point of begging the question of why was not the suspect tested for DNA match, rather that of a cousin? After all Doug Foote is on trial for a capital crime not his cousin.

The defense also took issue with the DNA tests, in that they were questionable if not all together invalid due to the sloppy labratory work where the DNA was examined. Also parts of the body (evidence), that were found under the rosebush were lost while in police custody. In the end some people questioned, just who's skull was found under the rosebush?

Furthermore, copies of a legal document was found in a Kansas law office that had Donna Foote's legal signature, concerning her marriage to Monte Ellis. The prosecution claimed that the document was a forged legal record. In all the fairness both prosecution and defense did a bad job in trying to track down Monte ELlis.

Monte Ellis where are you? Some Santa Feans had a lot of fun theorizing about Donna Foote's purported husband. Some people insisted Monte Ellis never existed. It was a ploy by Doug Foote to cover up his murder of his mother.

A few Santa Feans speculated that Monte Ellis was probably some "Has Been" oldster who married Donna Foote because he wanted to get on the "Gravy Train". Nearly three decades after the short marriage, it was conjured, that old Monte Ellis was probably occupying a pauper's grave under another name somewhere in the USA. As in Monte Ellis, was an alias used by a "Gold Digger" who married Donna Foote for her cash.

Lastly, some parlor sleuths thought that it was Monte Ellis who killed Donna Foote. Drugged out Doug Foote did not know a thing back in 1976-1976. This resulted in Doug Foote left holding the bag, figuratively speaking.

The upshot of the month long murder trial was that the Santa Fe jury found Doug Foote innocent of matracide or of tampering with evidence. Doug Foote and the D.A. had their day in court and a jury of Doug Foote's peers pronounced him innocent.

Was the jury right, who's remains were unearthed? Or was the prosecution right, as in the house at Fort Union Drive was the end of the line for Donna Foote, courtesy of her son Doug Foote?

Weird things happened at this dwelling well before Donna Foote was murdered and mutilated. If one goes by what the prosecution stated about who's remains were found in the backyard (Donna Foote), of "THIS HOUSE POSSESED". Is it possible that when Doug Foote was under the influence of hallucenogenic drugs that he became possessed by what ever inhabited the house and thus became a murderer?

Kids who lived near the "HELL HOUSE" and are now adults, claim that decades ago, the house was an eerie place with bad vibes. Lore has it that ghostly screams or sound of a gunshot were heard by people passing by the house and by people who resided or visited the house.

A postal deliverer alleges that the area around the house was a magnet for evil and disaster. Perhaps, perhaps not, but for somebody, the house at Fort Union Drive was their tomb.

Santa Fe legend states that Doug Foote trimmed his rosebushes from the ground up, rather than from the top down. A dead give away that he was a murderer, if you are steeped in "Drive In" horror classic movies, wink, wink.

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