Judge orders trial for ex-state mental hospital director accused of molesting adopted son

Trial ordered for ex-mental hospital director

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The former head of a Northern California state mental hospital was ordered Wednesday to stand trial on 35 charges that he molested his adopted son for more than a decade.

The ruling came after a preliminary hearing during which three men testified that defendant Claude Foulk sexually assaulted them when they were children.

Foulk, who appeared in court in an orange jail jumpsuit, showed no reaction to the decision by Superior Court Judge J.D. Lord that there was enough evidence to send him to trial.

Foulk was ordered held on $3.5 million bail pending his April 27 arraignment, when a trial date is expected to be set. He could face 280 years in prison if convicted of all counts.

Foulk will testify at the trial, said his attorney, Richard Poland.

“My client denies any of this happened,” Poland said outside court.

Foulk has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Foulk was executive director of Napa State Hospital until he was fired in February after his arrest. The last witness at the preliminary hearing was a 27-year-old man who said Foulk was his stepfather and began sexually abusing him when he was 9.

The man testified that Foulk molested him as a foster child and later when he became Foulk’s adopted son. He said the last assault took place when he was 21 and had returned to Foulk’s home after living elsewhere.

Authorities contend 13 men — including another of Foulk’s four foster sons — came forward to claim Foulk molested them as children as far back as 1965. However, all but one of the cases were too old to prosecute because of the statute of limitations.

In cross-examining the main accusing witness Wednesday, Foulk’s attorney suggested the man was not telling the whole truth.

The man acknowledged he had been sexually molested at another home before Foulk took him in, and that he had problems at some of the 10 foster homes to which he was assigned.

“During your foster life, you lied and stole and set fires?” Poland asked.

“Yes,” the witness replied.

“And had you been sexually molested before you came to Mr. Foulk’s house?” Poland asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m not saying I was the perfect child. I had problems growing up in foster homes. I never had a childhood.”

The witness said Foulk gave him hope of having a normal childhood.

Once he was assigned to Foulk, social workers stopped keeping track of him because, “Ed looked good on paper,” the witness testified.

Poland noted that at one point, Foulk took the boy to a therapist and suggested his client would not have done that if he had feared the youngster would disclose sexual abuse.

“Ed would say, ‘don’t tell anybody. This is our little secret,’” the witness said. “He said if I told anybody, I’d go back into the (foster) system.”

The foster son also acknowledged writing expressions of love and gratitude to Foulk on holiday cards.

He also said he once stole some valuable coins from Foulk that he pawned for $1,000 in order to leave home, and charged $5,000 to Foulk’s credit cards then later paid it back.

Prosecutor Danette Gomez highlighted the deprived childhood of the witness and suggested he was vulnerable to Foulk’s control.

“We’re going to show he was in mental and emotional prison from the time he was 9 years old,” Gomez said outside court. “He’d been so conditioned he felt he was the property of the defendant.”