Twisted Triangle Read online

  “I realized that we weren’t compatible anyway, and that was OK. We could still be friends,” she said later.

  By the next morning, Patsy’s two miniature dachshunds had pulled her mink stole into their crate and shredded it, but Patsy just laughed and shrugged it off.

  In early December, Patsy brought Demi Moore to Quantico, calling Margo in advance to arrange a tour and get them single rooms in the Jefferson Building.

  They ended up in the Board Room that night, which was filled with police chiefs, lieutenants, and assistant chiefs who were attending the National Academy. After the women had been sitting in the corner for about fifteen minutes, some of the men started coming over and asking if the dark-haired woman was really Demi Moore.

  Demi was worried that she wasn’t going to be able to get out of the bar without being mobbed by drunken men, so she and Patsy sneaked out while Margo stood guard in the doorway, stopping the men and asking them to leave Demi alone. By the time she managed to leave the bar, Demi and Patsy had gotten themselves stuck in the elevator.

  Apparently, Patsy had been eager to get back to her room, so she’d hit one button at the same time that Demi, who’d wanted to wait for Margo, had hit another one.

  “We’re getting a little nervous,” Patsy said through the doors. “Demi doesn’t like being in here.”

  “It’s okay, relax, we’ll have you out of there in no time,” Margo called to them, then left to alert security.

  The women were released within ten minutes.

  Around the same time, Patsy threw out a suggestion that Margo leave the FBI to come work for her.

  “I could really use someone with your experience, taking care of my security,” she said.

  “There’s no way you could afford me,” Margo replied.

  “How much are you making?”

  “$86,000.”

  “Wow, you’re right, I can’t afford you,” Patsy said, chuckling.

  Patsy told Margo she wanted to make her a ring out of the gold coin-shaped award the bureau had given Margo in 1991 for her ten-year anniversary. Margo agreed and received the gold ring as a Christmas present from Patsy. But it felt so heavy and masculine on Margo’s hand that she couldn’t wear it.

  On March 24, 1993, Brian Gettings called Margo to tell her that a federal grand jury had indicted Gene, along with Jerry and Brenda York, in the home relocation scam. Gene, who was indicted for conspiracy and theft of government property, entered a plea of not guilty and was released on his own recognizance.

  Margo knew this was coming, but she dreaded the thought of having to get up on the stand and dredge up the whole mess in public.

  “Even though I was committed to getting all of this behind me, I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant,” she later said.

  The next day, the bureau placed Gene on administrative leave.

  Gene sought counseling for six months from psychiatrist Alen Salerian, who later mentioned his former client in an op-ed piece he wrote for the Washington Post in 2001, with the headline “Diagnosis Missing: The FBI Should Monitor Its Agents’ Mental Health.”

  “Bennett clearly knew he was in trouble,” he wrote. “Like any good spy, he had done his homework—checked out my background and security clearance, concluded that he could confide in me. Also true to form, he maintained outward control: When he called me, his voice was a monotone, his words cryptic. And during our meetings, his face would remain expressionless. . . . I can say he was a dangerously volatile character.”

  The bureau suspended Gene from its rolls on June 11, 1993.

  On the night of Thursday, June 17, Gene called Margo to say he needed to change the time for her to pick up the girls that Saturday from 9:30 AM to 7:30 AM because he had an early meeting with his attorney. His trial was set to start the following Tuesday.

  For about six weeks, Margo had been bringing Dianna along when she picked up the girls so that she didn’t have to face Gene alone. However, because 7:30 was such an early hour, she decided not to bother her friend that week.

  Later, in retrospect, she chided herself for not realizing that on this weekend, above all others, she should have had her guard up. She knew better than to forget that Gene never did anything without a reason.

  Chapter Seven

  Abduction

  Margo arrived at the Nokesville house on June 19 at 7:30 AM as arranged. The sun had already burned off the haze that often hung over the woods behind the house at daybreak, and the sky was the perfect bright blue for a lazy Saturday with no real plans.

  She was looking forward to a relaxing day with her daughters after weeks of endless meetings with prosecutors to prepare her testimony against Gene at his trial. Maybe she’d take the girls to the park or to the playground with Daisy, their new fourteen-week-old miniature dachshund. She opened the trunk of her Geo Prizm, letting Daisy roam as far as the leash would take her, and waited for Gene to come out of the garage with the girls’ backpacks.

  Some months ago, Gene had changed the Saturday pickup routine by bringing out the girls and their stuff in separate trips. He’d raise the garage door, hand the backpacks to Margo, head back into the garage, lower the door, then open it a second time to bring the girls out. This seemingly inefficient practice, she later realized, was to train her not to be surprised or alarmed when the door opened and he came out with just the backpacks.

  On this beautiful June morning, Gene opened the garage and sauntered over to her with a pack in each hand, giving off his usual air of superiority and disdain. Gene made as if he were going to hand them to her, but instead, he dropped them on the driveway, revealing a blue plastic taser, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, in his right hand. He’d shown it to her once years before, describing it as a toy dating back to his Army days, when he’d spent several years working for the Criminal Investigation Division. But she now knew what it was—a device used mostly by correctional officers to incapacitate prisoners by temporarily turning their muscles to mush.

  Margo didn’t have time to think before her body instinctively started to run up the inclined slope of the driveway toward the street, letting go of the puppy in the process. But she barely got two steps away when she felt Gene grab the back of her T-shirt and get a hold of her arm. He pulled her body against his side and dragged her into the garage as she twisted and kicked, trying to get away.

  Once he got her inside, he picked her up and slammed her body onto the cement. Her upper back and shoulders hit first, landing between his Jeep Cherokee and the garage door. With the adrenaline rushing into her system, she didn’t feel any pain from the impact, although fist-size bruises erupted later on each shoulder and smaller ones along the middle of her spine.

  Her thoughts were focused mainly on trying to escape. She wasn’t worried about the girls because she figured they weren’t home; Gene would never risk letting them see this.

  Go, go, go, she told herself. You’ve got to get out of here.

  She tried to scream, but no sound came out. It was like a bad dream, the kind where her vocal chords constricted, but her voice would not respond.

  Gene was twice her size, but she was putting up a good fight. He had to lie on top of her to pin her to the floor. As she arched up against him, he wrapped his legs over hers, shifting his upper body so that he could trap her head in the crook of his arm.

  Suddenly, Margo saw the garage door start to roll down toward the cement floor. Gene must have grabbed the remote while they were struggling. Somehow, with a Herculean twist and pull, she got one leg free of his grip and kicked wildly at the rubber safety strip on the bottom of the door. If she couldn’t get her foot on that strip, she knew she was in big trouble. With the door closed, there would be no chance for anyone to hear her calls for help, let alone see what Gene was doing to her.

  She sensed her foot making contact with the safety strip and felt a small but temporary victory as the door began inching its way back up. Finally, she found her voice.

  “Gene don’t d
o this,” she said hoarsely. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this.”

  Gene said nothing. He dropped the taser, scrambled for the remote, which had skittered across the floor, and hit the button once more. As the door started coming down again, he grabbed the taser and shot her above the right eye, sending at least fifty thousand volts through her skull.

  Margo heard a loud buzzing as the dizzying jolt shot into her brain. She felt confused and off balance as she thrashed around.

  He shot her again, twice on the crown of the head and once a little over to the side.

  She’d lost count by the fourth or fifth jolt. Her head was throbbing now, and she knew she couldn’t withstand another huge electrical charge. Finally, she let her body go limp.

  As she lay flat on her stomach, her cheek resting on the cool cement floor, Gene wrenched her arms behind her and snapped on a set of handcuffs, pinching a nerve that would cause her thumb to remain numb for six weeks. Then he rolled her over and pulled her to her feet.

  “Now we’re going to have a talk,” he said.

  Taking her by the shoulders, he lugged her up the four steps that led into the kitchen. Margo stumbled, feeling disoriented, weak-kneed, and depleted of every ounce of fight she’d once possessed. He pushed her shoulders down toward the floor and her face into the cream-colored tiles.

  “Gene, why are you doing this? Please don’t do this,” she pleaded. “Please don’t do this.”

  Gene got up and started moving around the kitchen, but all she could see were his tennis shoes and white ankle-high athletic socks.

  “There’s some people who want to talk to you,” he said. “They’re not happy with the mess you’ve caused. Ralph’s probation is going to be revoked unless his girlfriend testifies that we never lived at the house.”

  Margo assumed he meant Ralph, the boyfriend of Brenda York’s sister, Jeanette, and by “some people,” he meant Jerry York and his associates. Gene said “they” were not happy with the trouble Margo had caused over the scam involving the Lake Capri house and wanted to talk to her. He didn’t elaborate, but this gave Margo some hope. She had to be alive to talk to these people.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “They’re asleep upstairs. I’m going to bring them down here and tell them exactly what their mother has done,” he said, referring to turning him in to the FBI for fraud.

  Margo still didn’t believe he would do this to her with the girls around, so she figured they had to be somewhere else. The question was where.

  Gene was a frenzy of movement as he talked, although much of what he said made no sense. It felt like pure chaos. If he was trying to keep her off kilter, he was definitely succeeding. Gene paced from one counter to another, then stooped down and started frisking her through the side pockets of her white sweat shorts.

  “Are you trying to shoot me?” he screamed. “Where’s your gun?”

  Obviously, he could see that she had no place to put a gun. She wasn’t even wearing a fanny pack, where agents often carried their weapons. And why was he yelling at her like that? She wondered if he was going to shoot her and then tell the authorities he’d acted in self-defense because he’d thought she had a gun.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, her voice tinged with fear and bewilderment. She hoped she could reason with him, understand what he was doing. Didn’t he love her once?

  “You’re not worth killing,” he said flatly. “You’re not worth the bullet it would take to put in your head. If I was going to kill you, I would’ve done it before the indictment. In a couple hours, this will be over.”

  Gene started to calm down as he meticulously bound her ankles and knees together, first with a bandanna, next with an Ace bandage, and then with multiple layers of duct tape; she later realized that he had used the padding to avoid leaving any sticky residue on her skin as evidence of the abduction.

  “I have something pretty for you,” he said, dropping a heavy canvas belt on the floor next to her face.

  It was a yellow bellyband, a belt typically used to restrain criminal defendants for safe transport by keeping their arms secured at the hip, each wrist attached to a ring by a separate set of handcuffs. He kneeled down and rolled her over so that he could get the band under her. He attached her wrists, then closed the band in the back with a Velcro fastener.

  Unable to move, she felt completely helpless. His surprise attack had caused her to fall back into the mental space of doing what he said to avoid making him more angry.

  He’s going to kill me, she thought.

  Gene picked up the phone, which was on the kitchen counter, and punched in some numbers. It sounded like he was calling 911.

  “Somebody’s trying to kill me,” he said, his words clipped, as if he didn’t have much time to talk. “I need help.”

  It didn’t register with her at the time, but Gene was doing his usual number again, anticipating the allegations she would make against him and claiming that he was the true victim. Nonetheless, she figured she’d be safe if the police came and caught him trying to kill her.

  He paused, as if he were listening to the dispatcher, then said, “Can you send someone right away?” He paused again. “I’ll lay the phone down,” he said, setting the receiver down on the counter. He never gave the address, and Margo later realized that there probably hadn’t been anyone on the other end of the line; the “call” was just another ploy to confuse her.

  Gene wet a paper towel and wiped her forehead where he’d hit her with the taser. The spot must have been bleeding because a triangular scab eventually formed there.

  “We don’t want you to look messy,” Gene said patronizingly, as if he were getting a child ready for church.

  After that, he went into the garage, leaving the door open so that he could keep tabs on her. Margo heard scuffling sounds, as if he were trying to catch the puppy. Meanwhile, she wriggled around on the floor, testing to see if she could stand up. But it was no use.

  Gene must have heard her handcuffs rattling against the tile because he charged back into the kitchen.

  “If you try to get up again, I’ll put a bullet in your head,” he said. “Frankly, Margo, I don’t care what happens to you.”

  Margo knew there were about thirty-five guns in the house. Aside from the sixteen her father had given them for safekeeping a year before she and Gene had separated, there were the machine gun, revolvers, semiautomatic pistols, shotguns, and rifles that Gene had collected over the years. If he didn’t have a weapon within reach on the counter, all he had to do was go upstairs to the office safe and get one.

  Gene went back into the garage and returned a few minutes later to grab her car keys from her shorts pocket. He pulled her to her feet, then guided her back down the steps to the garage. She could manage only slow little hops.

  He pointed to a large sheet of plastic that was bunched up in a heap by the Jeep.

  “That’s what they wanted me to wrap you in,” he said.

  Clearly, he was talking about her dead body. The only reason he would wrap her in plastic would be to prevent her blood and other bodily fluids from making a mess.

  Gene had backed her car up so that it was parallel to the garage door. The trunk was open, and he told her he was going to put her inside. She figured he was going to take her somewhere to die. If he wasn’t going to kill her, then Jerry York would.

  Gene sat her on the back rim of the trunk, then swung her legs up and turned her body so that he could lower her in. He laid her on her side with her head facing the rear of the car, rolled up a lavender bandanna, and tied it around her mouth. Then, without another word, he slammed the trunk lid down.

  Margo’s world went completely dark, but that only heightened her other senses. The air was heavy and still and smelled of rubber from the spare tire. The carpeted floor was scratchy and rough on her face. It was going to be an eighty-degree day, and by 8:30 AM, the temperature was already well on its way up.

  Margo felt him pull out of t
he driveway and start driving as she slowly adjusted to the reality that she’d never see her children again. She’d never watch them graduate from high school, get married, or have families of their own. Not only that, but they would have to grow up without a mother.

  She started praying that God would show her a way out of this horrific situation, because she couldn’t see one for herself. She felt lost and defeated, which were new feelings for her. She’d always considered herself a pretty capable person, tough even. Certainly all her law enforcement training had instilled the technical skills to fight back, but she’d always possessed the determination and stamina not to give up. Somehow Gene had found a way to break through all that.

  At one point, she heard him open a door and drop something into the bushes, then heard the crinkling of leaves. Later, Gene told her he’d stopped to throw the puppy out into the woods. Rather than tell the girls the truth about their father, Margo would later say she’d lost Daisy.

  After driving on the highway for forty-five minutes, he pulled off, opened the trunk, and told her to roll over and face the other way.

  “Ralph’s watching the car,” he warned, then slammed the lid again.

  “If she makes any noise, drive her off a fucking cliff,” he shouted to someone, whom she figured was Ralph. Throughout her ordeal, however, she never heard another voice but Gene’s.

  He stopped a third time for gas and then, after she’d pleaded with him to stop because she was going to throw up or pass out, he pulled over one more time to give her some fresh air.

  Once they arrived at their final destination, Gene opened the trunk and pulled the gag away from her mouth. She couldn’t see anything from her vantage point but him, standing against a blue sky.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “They’ve got the kids.”

  “Who’s got the kids?”

  “Jerry and Brenda. If we don’t do exactly what they want, we’ll never see the girls again.”

  At that point he had her. She knew that Jerry was an ex-con and that he, Brenda, and Gene had been indicted in the home relocation scam, so what would the Yorks have to lose by kidnapping the girls if it saved Jerry from going back to prison? She believed Gene and was willing to do whatever he said.