In early September 2009, Rick W., an area director for a northern California provider of healthcare personnel, was making calls in Napa Valley to drum up business for his company. Having 40 minutes to kill before his next appointment, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to stop by Napa State Hospital. Despite having no appointment, he was hoping the director of nursing would squeeze him in.
Claude Edward Foulk, the 62-year-old former executive director of the state's largest mental health facility in Napa, California, is arraigned on Feb. 26, 2010 in Long Beach, California. (Photo: Brittany Murray / AP Photo)Rick drove his blue Volvo 940 turbo sports car onto Napa State Hospital’s sprawling grounds, past cottage-style bungalows, a defunct post office, and dilapidated employee lodgings—some of which had old signs reading, “single nurse’s home “and “married nurse’s home”—to the administration building. Five minutes later, he was standing in line at the front desk. It was then that he noticed a man who looked to be in his early 60s, dressed in a wool vest and bow tie, walking down the hallway. The man glanced in Rick’s direction before ducking into an office. A short time later, the man reappeared, then stepped out of view again. Rick was immediately struck with the feeling of déjà vu. Why did the man look so familiar?
Overwhelmed with curiosity, Rick asked a nurse who the man was. Ed Foulk, she responded—the hospital’s executive director. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Rick recalls. He vaguely remembers thanking the nurse, walking quickly out of the hospital and getting back into his car. “I put the Vulcan death grip on my leather steering wheel,” he says. “The name hit me. I repeated it to myself a couple of times. I got chills down my spine. I said to myself: ‘This is the guy who molested me.’ ”
Rick W., who is 46, a 260-pound former high school football star and the married father of four boys and one girl, recalls that he began to tremble uncontrollably. “I had never thought about it, never thought about him,” until that day in 2009, he says. “It was the first time in 34 years I had thought about it.”
He drove back to his office and didn’t say another word about what had happened to anyone—not even his wife—for a week. “It was eating me up inside, and I needed to tell someone,” he says. “I wanted to drive back to Napa and pull him out of his office and start wailing on him.”
“The name hit me. I repeated it to myself a couple of times. I got chills down my spine. I said to myself: ‘This is the guy who molested me.’ ” —Rick W.
Rick realized that fate had delivered him an awful opportunity. He called an old high school friend who was now a police officer in Long Beach, where Rick grew up and where the abuse occurred. His cop friend told him he needed to report the abuse, even all these decades later, because child molesters don’t stop. “Don’t you want to protect other kids?” the cop asked.
The following month, Rick was sitting in the office of Long Beach Police Department sex crimes detective Jennifer Kearns. Although the statute of limitations had run out, Kearns listened to his terrifying tale.
So began a police investigation that would cover four decades and become one of the most notorious cases in Long Beach history. It is notable in the annals of law enforcement because of the determination of Rick W. to seek justice for others, if not himself; the determination of Kearns in pursuit of other victims; and the eventual decision of one of these victims, Foulk’s adopted son, Jonathan, to bring charges.
Abandoned by his schizophrenic mother at birth, Jonathan lived in 15 different foster homes, witnessed the murder of his foster brother, and had already been sexually abused by another foster-care father by the time he met Foulk at the age of 8.“There was someone interested in me,” he testified about Foulk. “None of my foster parents wanted to adopt me. No one bought me a toy growing up.”
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