Twisted Triangle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Chapter One - Fighting Back

  Chapter Two - Till Death Do Us Part

  Chapter Three - Diamonds and Denial

  Chapter Four - Uncomfortably Numb

  Chapter Five - Prolonged Embraces

  Chapter Six - The Divorce Battle Begins

  Chapter Seven - Abduction

  Chapter Eight - Mitigating Circumstances

  Chapter Nine - Paranoia

  Chapter Ten - The Main Event

  Chapter Eleven - The Investigation Gene’s Plot Unfolds

  Chapter Twelve - Prosecution Crazy Like a Fox

  Chapter Thirteen - Defense Incompetent Evil Ed

  Chapter Fourteen - Vindication

  Chapter Fifteen - Damage and Recovery

  About the Authors

  Index

  Copyright © 2008, 2009 by Caitlin Rother and John Hess. All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eISBN : 978-0-470-50564-9

  1. Women—Crimes against—Virginia—Case studies. 2. Bennett, Marguerite, date. 3. Attempted

  murder—Virginia—Case studies. 4. Bennett, Eugene Allen. 5. Criminals—Virginia—Case studies.

  I. Hess, John E., date. II. Title.

  HV6250.W65R68 2008

  364.152’ 3092—dc22

  2007044998

  To Margo,

  for her spirit,

  courage, and strength

  Preface

  The story of Margo and Gene Bennett has fascinated me ever since I read about it in Vanity Fair and the Washington Post in the late 1990s. I was working on my first crime novel at the time and was an avid reader of Patricia Cornwell’s forensic thrillers. Also, as a newspaper reporter who covered sometimes dry government and politics, I enjoyed reading in-depth true crime stories.

  This one had so many sexy components: two married FBI agents involved in a love triangle with a best-selling crime novelist who wrote about FBI agents and the serial killers they profiled. And then to find out that Cornwell’s affair was with the female agent—now that was intriguing.

  As a budding novelist myself, I appreciated the ironic parallels between Cornwell’s fictional and personal lives: her female protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, was having an affair with a married FBI agent, and Scarpetta’s niece was a lesbian. I still wonder whether Cornwell’s real-life affair preceded the fictional one.

  Fast-forward to 2005. Poisoned Love, my first book, about the Kristin Rossum murder case, had just been published. Soon afterward, my agent called and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book about the Bennett case; Margo had never told her story to a reporter before. Of course I jumped at the chance.

  Like Cornwell, I was seeing my own worlds intersecting. While I was covering the Rossum case for The San Diego Union-Tribune, Rossum, a forensic toxicologist, testified that she, too, was a fan of Cornwell’s, a fact I included in my first book.

  The universe truly does work in strange and wonderful ways. As Margo would say, there was a reason I held on to that yellowed Washington Post article all those years. This was meant to be.

  Now I’d like to explain my research methodology and how I put this book together.

  At the start of this project, Margo shipped me four boxes of documents, including her FBI personnel paperwork, her divorce records, and personal papers about her family’s health, finances, and property transactions. She also sent me piles of official documents from Gene’s two court cases, the letters he’d written to his daughters over the years, and her sizable collection of news stories.

  Over the next two years, Margo continued to send me extremely sensitive information, such as her and her daughters’ psychological evaluations and the diary she’d kept during her first pregnancy. She also made sure I had access to her Cornwell novels, which included personal inscriptions, and to many of the people I interviewed who might not have talked to me otherwise. To my knowledge, Margo held nothing back because she wanted the story to be told properly.

  Before I came along, former FBI agent and Quantico instructor John Hess spent a few years putting together his version of this story, interviewing his close friend Margo for many hours along the way. When he couldn’t get his manuscript published, his agent approached my agent, and I took it from there.

  What this meant for Margo was that she had to go over the entire story again with a stranger and in even more excruciating detail. Initially, she told me that talking about it gave her nightmares. I often heard the strain in her voice during our marathon series of phone and face-to-face interviews. Sometimes I felt awkward having to ask so many personal questions, but I pressed on. Eventually I stopped being a stranger, and Margo opened up to me more and more. It was personally fulfilling when I heard her tell a friend of mine that she felt as if I were inside her head and often could articulate what she was thinking and feeling.

  Much of the dialogue in this book was reconstructed or approximated based on Margo’s surprisingly good memory, as are many of the events that I describe. Testimony in the courtroom scenes was edited down for story-telling
purposes, however, no scene or piece of dialogue was invented or embellished in any way. I was amazed at how many times the people I interviewed said that Margo had a better memory of a particular conversation or event than they did, and that they trusted her recollections. That said, no one’s memory is perfect, so I cross-checked Margo’s recollections whenever possible with those of other people involved in those conversations or events and also with official sources, including published news reports, court transcripts, depositions, FBI-generated interview reports, memos, and letters.

  Sometimes cross-checking was not possible, as in the case of the conversations or events involving Cornwell, who refused independent requests by me, Margo, and John to be interviewed for this book. Nonetheless, Margo and I agreed that we should portray her interactions with Cornwell as sensitively and respectfully as possible.

  Gene, too, refused to do an interview with John and later declined my repeated offers as well. Nor would he allow his attorney, Reid Weingarten, to speak on his behalf. I tracked down Gene’s sister, Linda, who didn’t want to cooperate either. Gene had written many of his family members (including his daughters), some of his former colleagues, and his psychiatrist, asking them not to talk to me. Thankfully, some of the key players ignored his request.

  As I interviewed them, I uncovered things that even Margo was hearing for the first time, and vice versa, apparently sparking some interesting and healing conversations among her family members and close friends.

  Although this story is largely told from Margo’s point of view, I felt it was important to show Gene’s unique perspective on all of this, drawing from memos and letters he’d drafted, official reports detailing interviews with him, and his written and verbal statements during the divorce.

  With twenty years of experience as an investigative reporter who has covered local, state, and federal government and politics, I also made sure to ask Margo tough questions so that I could tell this story as fairly and accurately as possible. To that end, I went over each chapter with her to catch any factual errors.

  Despite Margo’s understandably negative feelings about Gene, she answered my questions as truthfully as I think she could manage, so that he would be a three-dimensional character, just as she is. During Gene’s trial in 1997, his attorney said Gene was not a monster. Like him, I believe Gene truly loves his daughters very much, just as I believe he loved Margo at one time.

  To protect the privacy of a few women with whom Margo was intimately involved or knew to be lesbians, I used a handful of pseudonyms, which, along with the name of Allison’s boyfriend in Chapter Fifteen, are marked with asterisks so that you can distinguish them from the others. Any errors in this book are completely unintentional.

  I hope, as Margo does, that this story proves inspirational for people everywhere who are living in denial about their sexuality or are tangled up with abusive and manipulative partners and, until reading this book, may have felt unmotivated or helpless to change their lives.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without Margo Bennett’s willingness to tell this story after so many years of wanting to lay low and remain quiet about it. As I told her many times, she’s a very brave woman, for it takes courage to talk about such traumatic events, not to mention one’s own flaws and mistakes, the way she has. But, as I’ve also told her, she has a story of survival and triumph to tell that could help and inspire other people. I believe it was this need to help others that kept her going. For all of this, she deserves my utmost thanks and gratitude, and John Hess’s as well.

  I also convey my appreciation to John for persuading Margo to share her story, for laying the groundwork, and then for allowing me to take this project to the next level so that we could get it published.

  Margo’s daughter Allison deserves my thanks and admiration for being so open about her feelings and experiences, as does Margo’s younger daughter, Lindsey.

  Although this book is mostly told from Margo’s perspective, I interviewed her friends, former coworkers, and family members to flesh out the details and cross-check everyone’s memory. For this, I am grateful to Margo’s sisters, Letta Akers and Jackie Standridge; her aunt Martha Coats; her former FBI colleagues George Murray, Caroll Toohey, Tony Daniels, Ed Tully, and Ed Sulzbach; her good friend Dianna Beals; and her divorce attorneys, Betty Thompson and Kathy Farrell.

  Thanks also go to others I interviewed for this story, including prosecutors Paul Ebert and Jim Willett, police officials Ron McClelland and Debra Twomey, the Reverend Edwin Clever, Judge Richard Potter, and Mary Ann Khalifeh.

  I send appreciation to those who helped me gather my research materials, including Phil Edney, John Fox, and Dan DeSimone from the FBI; former agents Joe Pistone and Steve Band; psychologist Michel Girodo; Bob Marsh and his assistant Michelle Jones from the courthouse in Manassas; Julie Linkins from Quantico; Rosemary Raeske from the Urbana Free Library; Dian Strutz, librarian for the Champaign News-Gazette; and Terry Gosa and Martha Marshall from Guin, Alabama, where Margo was born.

  Many thanks to the staff at Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons, Inc., including Seth Schwartz, Carol Hartland, Paul Foster, and Jennifer Wenzel; to Vince Cosgrove; Michele Jones; and to Alan Rinzler for editing this book and helping me develop my narrative nonfiction writing skills.

  John and I are grateful to our literary agents Rick Broadhead for his tireless efforts to sell this book and to Stephany Evans for bringing this fascinating story to me.

  Thanks also to John McCutchen for his photography advice and general support; Robert Rother for his IT efforts; Jon Sidener for his Web site and computer help; Carole Scott for her emotional support and writing advice; Anne Dierickx for her legal advice; and Bob Koven, Samuel Autman, Kathy Glass, and Susan White for their help in keeping me sane during the tough months.

  Caitlin Rother

  San Diego, California

  Foreword

  Why now? Why tell this story now, after so much time has passed?

  Some years ago, my good friend John Hess expended great effort documenting the events of my chaotic life with Gene Bennett. It was a story that he often said “needed to be told” if for no reason other than to give my children a factual account of events. I agreed and gave my approval.

  With John’s manuscript as initial background, Caitlin Rother stepped forward to research and write this book. I was not eager to pierce through the comfort created by the passage of time, but I continue to believe that this is a story that needs to be told.

  My life has been blessed with amazing events—good and not so good—and I believe they connect to something far beyond me. For that reason, I opened myself up to Caitlin so that she could tell the whole story, my flaws and all. As she rummaged through my family’s life, peeling back the layers of emotional skin that had healed over our wounds, I felt that raw pain all over again. But in the end, I think she has been able to tell a story that will reach those who need to hear that such pain can be endured and such terror can be overcome, that survival and even triumph over adversity are entirely possible.

  A lifetime ago, I was musing through one of Dear Abby’s columns in the newspaper. As I read through the heartache and pain of others’ lives, I was taken by a quotation by Harry Emerson Fosdick: “To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, . . . to endure the betrayal of false friends; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.”

  I ripped out the clipping and carried it in my wallet for years, taped it up when it tore, then finally placed it in my desk, where it gave me comfort every time I reached for a paper clip. Ultimately, the coveted scrap of newsprint got lost in a move, but the words came back to me as Caitlin led me through my life’s most difficult memories and compelling moments.

  I have two wonderful children who love me, solid friend
s who have been rocks for me, and loyal family members who have carried me through some challenging times. If telling my story allows even one person to breathe easier, then the pain, the terror, and the struggle to survive will all have been worth it.

  Margo Bennett

  Berkeley, California

  Chapter One

  Fighting Back

  Margo Bennett was barely one step inside the lobby at the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church when the door to the sanctuary burst open to her right. A man, dressed in black and a stocking cap with eye holes, leapt in front of her. He was holding a gun.

  “Margo, don’t fight me on this,” he commanded.

  She recognized the voice instantly. It was her estranged husband, Gene, a former FBI agent, just like her.

  Margo reacted instinctively, raising her hand and shooting a stream of pepper spray toward his head. As she saw him stagger backwards, she knew that she’d hit him, she hoped in the face. She also knew she had only a split second to run for cover before he’d come after her.

  Racing into the office of her minister, the Reverend Edwin Clever, she dove for his desk in the corner. She landed on her hands and knees, scrambled behind the short end, and turned her body toward the doorway.

  Still holding the pepper spray in one hand, she dug frantically in her purse for her gun. Gene, looking for an advantage, poked his head around the door frame several times. Each time he did, she sprayed him—once, twice, three more times.

  By the fifth spray, she noticed that the stream had significantly less force. She was scared that Gene had noticed, too. But by then she’d gotten her finger curled around the trigger of her .38.