Long thought to be living her best life in Maryland until her natural death in 1977, Donna Foote was actually lying dismembered in the back yard of her Santa Fe home. She had lain there since the early 1970s, with nobody looking for her. Her skull had been fractured in a manner consistent with a gunshot, and her bones bore saw marks and metal shavings consistent with dismemberment.
This is the story of Donna Walker Foote.
Ray Douglas Foote, Donna’s son, claimed that Donna had signed the house over to him in the 1970s. She was done with the house and New Mexico, so she gave everything to him and took off without looking back. He sold the house to an unsuspecting couple, who loved the roses in the back yard and did not suspect the terrible secret buried at their roots.
That is, until one of the rosebushes began to struggle in 1993, and the owner was forced to dig it up. That is when he unearthed a few black trash bags containing a nightgown, bones, hair, and fat, also known as grave wax. And thus he had uncovered a nasty decades-old homicide.
Doug Foote claimed that he can’t remember the 70s too well. But he seemed to be pretty lucid when he sold the house in 1976, loaded up a U-Haul, and drove off to start a new chapter in Sapulpa, Oklahoma. He also seemed pretty lucid as he told everyone that his mother had moved to Maryland, married a man named Monty Ellis, and then died of natural causes in 1977, after which he scattered her ashes in Santa Fe.
But after Donna was discovered buried in her Santa Fe yard in 1993, an investigation discovered that there was no death certificate or marriage certificate in Maryland for a Donna Foote. There was no record of her cremation by any mortuary. And she had had no contact with family since 1975. Not even a Monty Ellis was found, though Donna’s cousin from Oklahoma claimed that she had heard Donna talk about marrying this man.
It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Doug Foote had killed his own mother in 1976 or thereabouts and buried her in the back yard. The house and the supposedly $1 million inheritance Doug gained from his mother’s death makes a pretty sweet motive for him.
A handwriting expert testified at Doug Foote’s trial that Donna Foote’s signature on the house deed was forged. Investigators also testified that they have never been able to substantiate any of Doug Foote’s claims about his mom’s whereabouts after 1976. Many people came forward with nothing good to say about Doug Foote or his reputation. Doug’s ex-wife and his ex-secretary both accused him of “compulsive lying”.
Then there was the shocking testimony of his next-door neighbors in Santa Fe, Dorothy and John Shaw. They said that they saw Doug leave the Santa Fe house he shared with his mother in a van in 1975. Doug was alone, despite telling the Shaws that he was transporting his mother to see an ailing friend in Albuquerque. Wouldn’t his mom be in the passenger seat? Maybe she wanted to lie down in the back – OK, fair enough. After Doug Foote drove away, Dorothy Shaw noticed the front door of the home was left ajar, so she checked inside the house and saw a gun on the table.
Doug called the Shaws twice over the next six days, saying that he was held up in Albuquerque without giving a reason. Then he showed up at the house in a different vehicle, still alone, and stated that he had put his mother on a plane to Oklahoma because she was “homesick.” After that, he packed up a U-Haul and left, never to return. He sold the house and that was the last the Shaws saw of the Footes.
Yet, despite all this evidence, there was just enough doubt that Doug Foote was acquitted by a jury in 2003 and walked free, facing no consequences. That’s good for him, whether he is guilty or not. It’s not so good for his mother, whose case remains unsolved.
Despite being positively identified as Donna Foote through mitochondrial DNA extracted from her teeth, the skeletal remains don’t yield solid proof as to who killed her. Doug Foote did behave very suspiciously after her death, and he did have motive. And there is a weird 1993 interview between police and Doug Foote which paints him as very, very guilty. But a jury could be swayed to think all that evidence is circumstantial.
In other words, Doug had a hell of a good attorney.
So what’s that about a weird 1993 interview? Well, details are hard to come by. But Tulsa World reported that Doug told authorities he had been doing lots and lots of drugs in the 1970s and his recollections of that time period are quite hazy, more like dreams than reality. However, he does have a feeling that “something bad” happened in Santa Fe. This is the closest to a confession that Foote has ever made.
Because he asked for an attorney repeatedly during that interrogation, but was not allowed to see his attorney for a good two hours by the cops, Gaven Isaacs was able to get this interview suppressed in court. But this interview may have been instrumental in turning the jury toward a guilty verdict. Wow, I want Isaacs to represent me if I’m ever in any kind of trouble!
There is still the possibility that something else happened to Donna Walker Foote. But matricide seems like the most plausible explanation for her death, and I am so sorry that she had to come to such an end, at the hands of someone she knew and trusted.
Justice will likely never be brought now. If Doug was guilty, then he can never be charged again, per his double jeopardy rights. At least Donna has been found and she rests in a proper cemetery now, and her son’s lies have been exposed, providing at least some closure to her family.
Sources
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2001/05/10/son-arrested-in-mothers-murder-case/62147362007/
https://www.koat.com/article/accused-killer-returned-to-n-m/5011360#
https://www.newson6.com/story/5e367f902f69d76f62093556/jury-acquits-doug-foot-in-mothers-death