Where is Donald Fosters Killer Jean Sinclair Now? The Talks Today

Publish date: 2024-05-08

The show “Deadly Women: Jilted and Jealous” on Investigation Discovery is about how Jean Sinclair killed Donald Foster in Salt Lake City, Utah, in January 1963 because she was jealous of him.

She killed the ex-lover of the woman she said she loved, and after being found guilty, she was sentenced to life in prison. Are you curious about Jean and want to learn more? Then let’s find out.

Jean Sinclair

What’s Jean Sinclair’s name?

Peter Lamond Sinclair and Ollie Jennie Hooker Sinclair had Isabelle Geraldine Sinclair on May 28, 1917. After she graduated from high school, she began to call herself Geraldine. At some point, she changed her name to Jean M. Sinclair. Jean ran a nursing home in Salt Lake City when she was about 45 years old. According to court records, she was a strong-willed person who seemed to like men more than women. She dressed like a man, and because she was so strong-willed, her friends and acquaintances called her “King.”

Court records also say that most people thought she had a relationship with LaRae Peterson and was jealous of Donald Leroy “Don” Foster because of it. Even though Don was already married, he had an affair with LaRae, which her fan and alleged lover, Jean, did not like. Several people who knew her well testified in court that she had a violent grudge against Don. She wanted to get them apart by any means necessary and even suggested doing things that were against the law.

Vaughn Humphries and Karl Kuehne, two of her friends, said that Jean had planned to “drug her (LaRae), strip her, and put on “the lesbian act” in front of Foster to try to stop the affair. She had also suggested that they try to scare Don away by putting a knife to his private parts and threatening to cut off his testicles or by pretending to be a group of early Utahans called Danites and cutting off his testicles. Karl said that Jean had said that Don “ought to be killed” and offered $500 more than once to kill Don in the fall of 1962.

Karl refused to take her up on her offer over and over, so Jean made him drive around looking for Don so she could supposedly kill him. In the last week of December 1962, she told him she was going to shoot on a farm and got him to buy her a 12-gauge shotgun and some shells. On January 4, 1963, Jean gave him the gun, told him to cut the barrel off, and sent him home with the gun and ammunition at around 11:00 a.m. According to reports, she was wearing boots and gray pants for men, and she had a tan trench coat wrapped around the shotgun.

In the early hours of January 5, 1963, Don and LaRae had just come back from a movie. They pulled into the parking lot behind the Don’s Susan Kay Arms apartments in Salt Lake City, which is between 5th and 6th North on 2nd West. Jean shot him in the neck and face with a shotgun as he reached back to get his coat from the back seat. He had just gotten out of the car. Then, around 1:00 am, she went back to Karl’s house and said, “Well, I killed the son of a b*tch.”

Jean then tried to scare Karl into getting rid of the murder weapon. She threatened to make him an accomplice in the murder if he didn’t do what she said or didn’t keep quiet. But detectives looking into Don’s murder quickly caught Jean. This was because different witnesses said they saw her kill Don and run away from the crime scene.

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Is Jean Sinclair still alive?

Jean Sinclair was then arrested and charged with first-degree murder. At her trial in April 1963 in the Third District Court, Karl was the main witness for the prosecution. She supposedly had an all-male jury, and the prosecution said that the main reason she killed LaRae was that she was gay and had a relationship with him. On May 3, 1963, after 17 hours of deliberation, the jury found the defendant guilty and asked the judge to be easy on him. Jean’s lawyer got her out of jail on a $100 appeal bond less than half an hour after she was sentenced.

The court gave her a life sentence, and in April 1964, she went back to the Utah State Prison. Jean served about 9 years of her sentence before she had a stroke while she was in Weber County Jail. She had to stay in a Weber County rest home for a few months. She was out on parole because of health problems on May 15, 1973. But Jean died on July 3, 1973, when she was 56 years old.

Jean Sinclair was born in 1908. She got involved in politics after the Springbok Legion protested the National Party’s segregationist bills.

She was against all kinds of unfairness, especially the Group Areas Act of 1950, which let the apartheid government force racial segregation in certain areas, and the Senate Bill of 1955, which let the government remove colored people from the common voters’ roll.

She quit the United Party because she thought the government was being unfair. In 1955, she started the Women’s Defence of the Constitution League (Black Sash), of which she became the first president.

This group was against group areas, resettlements, and discrimination. It was called the “Black Sash” because the women wore black sashes to show that the constitution had “died.”

She and the other members of the league set up marches to the City Hall in Johannesburg, vigils in front of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, and even a convoy trip to Cape Town to deliver petitions to Parliament. People who didn’t agree with them would often make fun of them and bother them.

When apartheid was at its worst and there didn’t seem to be much hope for change, Sinclair’s leadership and courage encouraged thousands of women to keep working for change. They worked hard to get rid of the pass laws and helped people who had been hurt by the system and their families.

Sinclair has been recognized by the public for her work, and the University of Witwatersrand has given her an honorary doctorate.

In 2005, after Jean Sinclair had died, her family gave her the Order of the Baobab in Silver award. Sheena Duncan, who took over from her mother as leader of the Black Sash in 1975, was also given the Order of Baobab.

On January 4, 2016, Jackie Biskupski became Salt Lake City’s first lesbian mayor. Almost 53 years ago, almost to the day, there was a shocking murder.

Don Foster, a 33-year-old married man who was having an affair with 32-year-old LaRae Peterson, a “divorcee,” was killed in an ambush in the parking lot of the Susan Kay Arms apartment complex, between 5th and 6th North on 2nd West (which, since street numbers were changed in 1973, is now between 6th and 7th North, Third West, the Marmalade Square condos). After a movie date, the couple pulled into the Susan Kay Arms just after midnight to continue their romantic tryst.

Foster, who was six feet tall, got out of the car on the driver’s side and turned to get his coat from the back seat when he heard a short-range gunshot from behind some parked cars. Peterson watched in horror as the bullet hit him in the face and neck. He yelled, “Oh God, she killed him!” When the noise and calls for help woke people up, they called the police. When they got there, Peterson was sitting on the ground with the head of the victim in her lap. Foster was taken to a hospital in Salt Lake City, but when they got there, they said he was dead. A person who saw what happened told police that he saw a man run out of the parking lot, get into a late-model white or light-tan sedan, and drive north on 2nd West. When LaRae was asked who Foster might have made an enemy of, Jean Sinclair’s name came up.

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Jean Sinclair was 44 years old and lived alone. She ran a nursing home in Salt Lake City. People who knew her said that she seemed “perverted toward the masculine side; she acted and looked like a man and wore clothes that men would wear.” “She was a strong-willed person who usually got her way,” they said. Her friends called her “King.”

The people looking into Foster’s death quickly came to the conclusion that Sinclair had a “unnatural relationship” with Petersen, whom she cared too much about. The police officers thought that Sinclair was very jealous of Foster and “held a violent grudge against him.” Detectives did more research and found that Sinclair had talked to friends about “different ways to get Foster to leave Peterson alone.” She even came up with a plan to give Peterson drugs, strip her, and make her do a “lesbian act” in front of Foster. Sinclair hoped that this would make them stop seeing each other. Sinclair was said to have suggested to two men she knew, Vaughn Humphries and Karl Kuehne, that they all dress up as Mormon “Danites,” kidnap Foster, and castrate him or at least put a knife blade to his testicles and “threaten to castrate him to scare him into staying away from Peterson.”

Kuehne, a former prisoner, said that Sinclair told him, “I think the son-of-a-bitch should be killed,” in the fall of 1962. Around December 28, 1962, Sinclair got Kuehne to buy her a 12-gauge shotgun and some shells by saying she needed it to shoot pheasants on a farm in Sandy. Kuehne said that Sinclair brought the shotgun to his house on the evening of January 4, 1963, the night before the crime, and asked him to cut the barrel off. Kuehne did this. He said she left his house around 11 p.m. with the gun, shells, and a tan trench coat wrapped around the gun. She was wearing gray men’s pants, boots, and a tan trench coat. Sinclair was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree based mostly on what Kuehne said.

Sinclair was tried on April 13, 1963, in the Third District Court. Judge Marcellus K. Snow was in charge, and the jury was made up of only men. The state said that Sinclair killed Foster because she had a “unnatural relationship” with Peterson and was so attached to Peterson and angry at Foster that she wanted to kill him to get rid of his competition for her attention. District Attorney Jay E. Banks told the jury that the defendant killed Mr. Foster because there was evidence that he was gay. “We’re not putting Jean Sinclair on trial because she had a relationship with Mrs. Peterson, but it does show why she killed her.” He then told the jury, “The love between women is a jealous love, and there is no wrath like a woman’s.”

Over the next 16 days, witnesses told the court that Sinclair was jealous of Peterson, who she had been with for seven years. Peterson had opened a beauty salon in Sinclair’s retirement home at 2300 S. State St., which she ran.

The prosecutors were interested in how Sinclair dressed, so they had Kermit Dubois testify that he had sold Sinclair two suits and helped her get them to fit just right. “I thought she was a man,” he said.

Other witnesses said they saw a person who looked like Sinclair in the parking lot near where Foster was killed. This person ran from the apartment into 5th North Street carrying something 18 to 24 inches above the right hand, then got into a two-toned car and drove away. Sinclair had a car that was kind of like this. The district attorney showed proof that Sinclair had taken a trench coat and some slacks with grease spots and dirt on them to a cleaners the morning after the murder.

Peterson was asked to testify in the case, but she refused to answer any questions about her relationship with Sinclair during the trial, even when the court told her to do so. Her lawyer, Jim Mitsunga, told her not to answer the prosecutor’s questions because they could be used against her and make her look bad. After the trial, Judge Snow gave Peterson a “contempt of court” sentence of five days in jail because she wouldn’t say whether she had a lesbian relationship with Sinclair.

Sinclair’s brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Lamond Sinclair, were called to the stand by the defense. They said that Jean Sinclair was at their house the night she was killed. Mrs. Lamond Sinclair said, “I didn’t lose sight of Jean for more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

Even so, on May 4, 1963, a jury found Jean Sinclair guilty of first-degree murder for killing “Don Leroy Foster.” The all-male jury took 17 hours to decide that Sinclair was guilty. As the judge read the verdict and the clerk said the sentence, Sinclair sat “poker-faced” and “one woman in the court gasped.” Judge Snow gave Sinclair a life sentence even though the jury had asked for leniency. In April 1964, she was taken to the Utah State Prison. Sinclair spent many years appealing her conviction, even after the Utah State Supreme Court upheld it in 1967.

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