Nola Foulston
In discussing her heritage, Nola Tedesco Foulston says proudly, “I’m an Italian from New York.”
This raises the obvious question: How did this daughter of an upstate New York school administrator end up in Wichita, Kansas, and eventually become a popular four-term district attorney?
It starts with Foulston’s father, Dominick “Teddy” Tedesco, child of immigrant parents from Southern Italy, where his father was a house painter and his mother worked in a lace factory to support their family of seven children. Teddy was born after the family came to America and early in life acquired the desire to achieve the American Dream.
Heeding Horace Greeley’s legendary challenge to an earlier generation to “Go west, young man,” he left Manhattan College in the 1930s and enrolled at Fort Hays State College, Kansas, (now Fort Hays State University), where he also could be closer to his older brother, who was attending medical school at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Several of Teddy’s friends from New York followed him to Fort Hays State, including a young aspiring writer named Mickey Spillane, later to create the legendary fictional character, Mike Hammer, and become a world famous literary figure.
“Dad and Mickey loved everything about Hays,” Foulston says. “The college, the small-town atmosphere, the ‘chili’ that they had never tasted in New York, and the culture of Kansas and the Midwest. After they returned to New York and Dad married my mother (who was a professional dance performance artist in New York) and started raising a family, we would take family vacation trips to Kansas. We’d drive out there in the blazing summer heat to visit Dad’s friends and attend college reunions.
“Dad wanted to engender the spirit of the Midwest in his children, and it worked. All three of his children received their undergraduate education at Fort Hays State University. My dad continued his contacts with friends from his Kansas days, including Mickey Spillane, who featured a ‘Teddy Tedesco’ character in his first literary success: a comic book story about “Teddy the Pilot,” and later as a fictional character in the successful novel, “Girl Hunters.”
Foulston says Spillane continues his interest in Fort Hays and has traveled to Wichita at her request to give the keynote address at a function of the Wichita Crime Commission.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree in speech communication and English from Fort Hays State University in 1972, Foulston—then Nola Tedesco—attended the University of Kansas graduate school of Performing Arts and completed her studies with a career change at the Washburn University School of Law, where she received her juris doctorate in 1975. She began her law career as an assistant district attorney in Kansas’s 18th Judicial District (Wichita and Sedgwick County), in the office she presently heads.
Five years later, she joined Kansas’s largest civil law firm, Foulston, Siefkin, Powers and Eberhardt, where she practiced corporate and employment law. During this period she met and married Wichita attorney Steve Foulston, who ironically was not a member of the firm although his grandfather had co-founded it in the 1930s. In 1988, Nola and Steve formed their own law firm, Foulston and Foulston, which they operated until 1988, when she was elected DA. Steve Foulston is currently associated with a large Wichita law firm, specializing in mass tort litigation and medical malpractice cases.
Now in her 14th year as DA, Nola Foulston supervises Kansas’s largest local prosecutor’s office (a staff of 110 including 50 attorneys), in a jurisdiction with close to 500,000 population which includes Wichita, the state’s largest city and the birthplace of private aviation. Industry giants William Lear (Learjet), Clyde Cessna (Cessna Aircraft) and Walter Beech (Beech Aircraft, now part of the Raytheon Company), all founded their firms in Wichita. In more recent years Wichita has grown into a Midwest center for entrepreneurship, becoming the home of other national industries, including Pizza Hut, the Coleman Corporation and Koch Industries, among others.
Wichita and Sedgwick County mirror most other American mid-sized and large metropolitan areas in the incidence and rate of crimes. While burglaries and thefts lead the numbers, violent crime has not affected Wichita.
“Our office always has been particularly interested in the reduction of violent crime,” Foulston says, “and we do this in many diverse ways. We are committed to reducing crimes of violence against women and place paramount concern on the lives of the youngest in our community. The quality of life for our citizens mandates keen attention by law enforcement and prosecution to engage in collaborative and pro-active initiatives to assure that we are getting to the root of crime problems before they escalate into more serious issues for our community.”
Foulston has personally prosecuted or has overseen the prosecution of thousands of cases, but the one that stands out in her memory, and probably always will, was State of Kansas v. Leroy Hendricks, which wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hendricks is a self-confessed sexual predator who, after serving a series of sentences for his crimes, became the first person to be confined under Kansas’s 1994 Sexually Violent Predator Act, which permits the confinement of persons who have a mental abnormality that “predisposes the person to commit sexually violent offenses” to the point of endangering others. Nola Foulston personally prosecuted the civil action under the then new law, resulting in the confinement of Hendricks as a sexual predator. Hendricks appealed the decision to the Kansas Supreme Court, which ruled that the law violated due process and therefore was unconstitutional.
Kansas Attorney General Carla J. Stovall filed a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted a temporary stay of the Kansas court ruling, relieving Kansas authorities from having to release Hendricks pending the court’s decision. During arguments before the Supreme Court, portions of the trial transcript of the examination of Hendricks by Foulston became critical. The focal point of Foulston’s questioning of Hendricks was when she asked Hendricks what it would take to make him stop molesting children. He replied that he would have a sexual interest in children until the day he died. When Foulston asked whether he expected to die soon, Hendricks replied, “I hope not.”
In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Kansas Supreme Court’s ruling, declaring that the Kansas Violent Predator Act “conforms to our precedents” and is constitutional. Today, Foulston reports, Hendricks remains confined, is still under treatment and because of this action, “children are not placed at risk by Hendricks’s uncontrolled pedophilic desires.”
“This is a large jurisdiction,” she declares, “and the office of the district attorney maintains the respect of its citizens because of the quality work that we do and the integrity and professionalism with which the tasks are performed. Citizens know that we are accessible, and they look to us as a user-friendly part of the criminal justice system. They know that we are accountable, and they can look to us for assistance information and guidance in this otherwise complex area of law. We are deeply involved with our community and have developed trust and an open relationship with the public that we serve.”
Foulston has been an active NDAA member for more than 10 years and declares that her performance as a prosecutor has been enhanced by networking with her peers in the association. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors representing Kansas, as a member of the Executive Committee under the presidency of Stu VanMeveren, and is a member of the Executive Working Group. In addition, she is a regular member of the faculty at the National College of District Attorneys and the National Advocacy Center. She has appeared frequently on national TV programs and forums, including 48 Hours and Court TV.
As for her legacy, Nola Foulston wants “more than anything to be a consummate professional within the criminal justice system, and to reflect in my life those qualities that engender professionalism, respect and ethical conduct in others. Those that follow in career prosecution should be able to say ‘I want to go where she has gone.’”
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