Twisted Triangle Page 14

  Margo had the moving crew box up Gene’s clothes, which she gave to his attorney, but she sold his tools at a church yard sale, along with much of their furniture, china, crystal, and linens, using the proceeds for living expenses or to pay off the debts with which he’d saddled her. She also got rid of a whole slew of picture frames, which she’d emptied, as if she were trying to free herself of her past life with Gene.

  All the financial records that she and Gene had kept in two filing cabinets in his office had also disappeared. He would later say that Margo stole these documents that day, using this as an excuse when he didn’t want to account for or explain certain transactions he made after he got out. He later admitted to making a number of such transactions by using the power of attorney she’d signed back in 1990, including borrowing money on the lines of credit they’d obtained before she left.

  When Gene found out about Margo’s visit to the house, he told Tracy, the baby-sitter, to call the police. After he was released from prison in April 1995, he contacted the police himself to report that Margo had stolen $15,400 worth of his property, then filed a claim with the insurance company. The police didn’t pursue the matter, and the insurance company rejected Gene’s claim after Margo explained the situation.

  For Margo, the foreclosure brought back childhood memories of her parents’ money problems back in Trussville, Alabama, when she heard her father crying to her mother in the bathroom about how he’d tried to stop the bank from taking their house. She also remembered being thirteen and seeing her mother tucking away the baby-sitting money Margo had given her, then looking embarrassed when Margo saw her pull it out of her lingerie drawer later to pay bills.

  Margo didn’t want her children to have the same kind of memories, but she didn’t know how she was going to deal with the awful financial mess that Gene had put them in.

  She felt overwhelmed as the debts began to mount. Gene had taken out loans on the van and the Jeep Cherokee, which she still co-owned, but he’d stopped making payments once he went to prison.

  The repo man called in November to tell Margo he had to take the van, so she told him where it was parked, and he picked it up. The Jeep went next.

  Margo found it strangely coincidental that on April 4, 1994, the same date that Gene reported to prison, she was informed in a letter from Ed Leary, the bureau’s personnel officer, that the agency was strongly considering firing her. She was given ten days to respond.

  Among the reasons he cited were that she was involved in a scheme to defraud the government and had filed false joint tax returns in 1986 and 1987, made false statements on joint loan applications, perjured herself at Gene’s trial, and exhibited conduct unbecoming to an agent.

  “Employees must not, at any time, engage in criminal, dishonest, immoral or disgraceful conduct prejudicial to the government,” he wrote.

  Margo felt that the bureau had used her to prosecute Gene and then discarded her. She also felt that Gene’s allegation about her homosexual activities, which had been publicized in the newspaper, was a silent but contributing factor in her current predicament.

  FBI officials today say that as late as 1991, bureau policy concerning sexual conduct was that “an applicant or an employee must be reliable, trustworthy, of good conduct and of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States,” conduct that, whether heterosexual or homosexual, would be considered in judging any applicant or employee on a case-by-case basis. Margo says she never saw a written policy explicitly about sexual conduct. All she knew was that for some time, the bureau had considered being a homosexual a security risk.

  During the spring and summer of 1994, Margo and her attorneys wrote many letters, arguing that there were mitigating circumstances to her situation. For one, she knew nothing of the couple’s tax returns and financial activities, which Gene controlled. She argued that, under the law, testifying falsely in court under duress was not considered perjury. She also claimed protection under the federal Whistleblower Act, noting that other agents hadn’t been punished as harshly for far more egregious violations. Take the husband and wife team at the Washington field office, for example. He had rammed his wife’s bureau-issued car with his own vehicle, then beat her up, and the bureau did nothing. The wife told Margo that FBI officials said, “You’re an FBI agent; you shouldn’t have let things get to this stage.”

  By that summer, Brian Gettings’s cancer had come back, so Frank Dunham took over her case and requested an extension for her appeal.

  “Ms. Bennett’s cooperation with the bureau . . . helped secure the exposure and conviction of Mr. Bennett, an FBI agent who is a sociopath,” Frank wrote. “She voluntarily came forward and blew the whistle on his conduct to the detriment of herself and her family. . . . She subjected herself to near continuous harassment from Mr. Bennett, subjected her children to an almost intolerable situation, and subjected the family to financial difficulty.”

  Margo and Frank tried pleading her case to top officials in the bureau and the Department of Justice, even to one of the congressional judiciary committees.

  To D. Jerry Rubino, security officer for the Office of Security and Emergency Planning Staff for the DOJ, Margo wrote,

  Many people question how an agent of the FBI could allow themselves to be victimized in such an abusive and controlling relationship. My only response is to urge those people to look around. This world is filled with women in successful careers who have fallen victim to this type of relationship. Carrying the credentials of an FBI agent does not make me any more immune to this type of victimization than the average female. To be told that female agents can’t be seen as victims (as one female agent was told by her SAC [Special Agent in Charge] when her agent-husband beat her) is an unbelievably insensitive position to take.

  Looking back, I can see how Gene’s control over me led me to do such stupid things, I can see how I made bad choices, and I can see why it took me so long to make the decision to get out. What I don’t understand, is why, after all the sacrifices I have made, and after the physical and emotional terror I have been through, does the bureau think that my actions call for this type of discipline?

  One of the last things Ed Tully did before he retired was to write a memo to Tony Daniels, trying to defend Margo. He felt a great deal of sympathy for her because he understood and supported her motivations.

  Ed argued that the bureau hadn’t had female agents around long enough to understand the actions of a mother who was under duress and was following the very natural instinct to protect her children from harm.

  “If I were in such a position, I’d hire her again,” he said recently.

  Margo appealed her termination on May 10. Nine days later, she was told that her “Top Secret” security clearance, “a condition of employment,” was going to be revoked.

  As she and Dianna were leaving Quantico to go to lunch one day, Margo could see her bleak future before her. She felt powerless to change it.

  “Why are they doing this to me?” she asked.

  Dianna had tears in her eyes. “Margo, I don’t know.”

  Margo’s only hope was that she could drag out the process, but even that seemed like a long shot. Louis Freeh, who had just been appointed director, had instituted a zero-tolerance approach and was taking a hard line on disciplinary issues. Some agents described him as Hoover without the compassion. Margo tried to get a meeting with him, but was unsuccessful.

  “I felt like if someone would just stop and listen to what I was saying, they’d see that I was okay, that I wasn’t a horrible person, but nobody was willing to stop and listen,” she recalled later.

  Her security clearance was finally revoked, and she was placed on administrative leave for thirty days while the bureau made its final decision about her future employment.

  Margo felt that she was losing her identity, bit by bit. But even as she beat herself up over the situation in which she found herself, she told herself she couldn’t have done anything better. Most of all, sh
e was frustrated that the FBI couldn’t or didn’t want to understand the dynamics of her marriage—that Gene was the one in control, and she couldn’t do anything about his dishonesty because she didn’t feel it was safe.

  On September 2, Margo discussed her situation with Frank Dunham.

  “I feel like I’m doomed,” she said.

  “Margo, you’ve been doomed ever since you said ‘I do’ to Gene Bennett,” he said. “We can fight this if you want to. It will involve getting all the women’s groups behind you, getting lots of publicity, and jumping on the FBI with both feet. We can fight it, and we might stand a good chance at winning, because you’ve been dealt a bum hand, but it’s going to take its toll.”

  Margo wanted very badly to get past all this stress, to live a more peaceful life. She also knew that even if she won, she couldn’t stay at the FBI.

  “I don’t know if I have the strength to get through that,” she said.

  “Then, frankly,” he said, “the best thing for you to do is cut your losses and start over.”

  Margo had to agree. So she decided to give in and give up. She resigned for “personal reasons” on September 6, 1994, forfeiting her $86,000 salary and the job she’d always loved.

  Looking back a decade later, her former colleagues Ed Sulzbach, Ed Tully, Caroll Toohey, and Tony Daniels all sympathized with her situation, although Tony said he had mixed feelings because of her involvement in the home relocation scam.

  “The overwhelming attitude was that she knew what was going on for a long time,” he said. “She benefited from it financially, materialistically. . . . If they were able, through their investigation, to find that she was coerced, she was forced, she was intimidated to participate, I would like to think they wouldn’t have [wanted to fire] . . . her.”

  Ed Sulzbach, however, felt that the bureau’s treatment of Margo was outrageous. “She was a victim of a brutal psychopath,” he said. “They should have taken care of her.”

  Gene, he said, was an embarrassment to the FBI.

  In summer 1994, Margo went on a weekend church retreat for women called Walk to Emmaus. The retreat was named after the biblical story of a three-day walk two disciples made, during which they met the resurrected Jesus Christ. He then helped them break through their own feelings of helplessness and sadness so that they could see God’s redemptive purpose in the bad things that had happened to them.

  During the retreat, the sponsors delivered letters to each participant. Margo received notes from friends, family, and total strangers offering words of hope, inspiration, and strength. Margo began to cry as she read the first letter, which was from John and said it was no coincidence that their paths had crossed; everything was going to be okay. Dianna’s letter reinforced Margo’s own belief that they were involved in something bigger than they were and that they each offered something special to one another.

  That fall, Margo went to another of the retreats, this time as an organizer. Her role was to share her own journey and what she’d learned from her experiences with Gene.

  As she spoke to fifty women in a crowded meeting room, she felt empowered, as if every word was critically important for them to hear. If any good was going to come of what she’d been through, she felt it would be by talking about it to help others.

  “God gave us the ability to make choices in our lives,” she told the group. “If you allow someone else to make your own choices, then, in fact, you have made a choice. It is a choice to not be in control of your own life. The loss of this responsibility for your own life invariably has negative consequences and requires pain and massive effort to overcome.”

  She told the group that by allowing her marriage and Gene’s activities to contaminate her, she’d made a bad choice and needed to correct it. As she described the divorce, Gene’s attack, the trial, and the loss of her job, she emphasized how difficult that correction turned out to be.

  Many of the women cried as she spoke, and at dinner that night, some came up and hugged her, saying that her words had touched and motivated them. The speech left Margo emotionally drained, but it felt good to know she’d made such an impact.

  From the time she resigned until the following summer, Margo tried to make ends meet by substitute teaching at middle schools and high schools in Prince William County and by leading training courses at a nearby police academy. She was too exhausted to get a full-time job.

  Dianna moved out in January 1995, which meant Margo no longer had help with the rent, so she cashed out her retirement account and used the $26,000 to finance her divorce and living expenses.

  Gene had racked up at least $350,000 in debts. He had maxed out the half dozen lines of credit they had taken out to invest in Jerry’s business, and now the banks were demanding payment from Margo. Gene later said he’d spent $340,000 on attorneys’ fees, after paying for Brenda and Jerry York’s legal expenses as well as his own.

  Margo tried to use this time to heal from the damage Gene had caused and from the loss of her identity as an FBI agent. She tried to focus instead on the enjoyment she received from having her kids full-time, putting them on the school bus and volunteering in their classrooms. She also became more involved at the new church her neighbor had taken her to, the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church in Manassas, where she taught vacation Bible school and helped build the membership.

  “It was repair time,” she said.

  She talked to Betty about trying to change the custody arrangement while Gene was away so that she could continue to have primary custody when he got out, but Betty discouraged it. Betty said primary custody would go to Margo by default, and it would be better to wait to try to make the arrangement permanent until after she’d had the girls for a year. Margo didn’t agree, but she deferred to Betty’s long-time experience in these matters.

  In his letters to the girls from prison, Gene described the snow and deer that frolicked in the fields around his “camp.” He told them how much he missed and loved them and how they would always be his little girls.

  By this point, Allison was in first grade, and Lindsey was in preschool. Because they couldn’t decipher his handwriting, Margo read the letters to them, suffering through the nausea and repulsion this caused, because she felt it was the right thing to do.

  Gene, who had helped out in Allison’s classroom before going to prison, had told the teacher that he was afraid Margo wasn’t going to allow his daughter to stay in touch, so once he was gone the teacher encouraged Allison to write him. When Allison told Margo about her teacher’s unsolicited and unwelcome advice, Margo was irritated that they had to deal with Gene’s manipulation even in his absence, so she told the teacher that it wasn’t her place to interfere in this; Allison would write him from home.

  Margo had never told the girls about the abduction because she didn’t want to taint their memory of their father or their relationship with him. At the time, she still thought her children deserved to have two parents, no matter what.

  “I knew he was only going to be gone a year, and I didn’t want them to have to be torn with loyalties or to fear him,” she later said. “But mostly I didn’t want them to feel guilty about enjoying time with their father, yet knowing what he had done to me.”

  “It’s time to write your dad,” she said one evening before she put the girls to bed.

  She gathered them around the small desk near her bedroom window, and as they each dictated their own letter, she typed up their sweet, innocent words.

  “I felt they needed that contact, so I made myself do it. No wonder I’m all screwed up.”

  The only way she could get through this chore was to turn herself off emotionally and distance herself from the man who she thought would be so angry when he got out of prison that he would try to kill her.

  Chapter Nine

  Paranoia

  In January 1995, shortly after Dianna had moved out, Margo received a letter from the federal Bureau of Prisons, notifying her that Gene would be released on
April 2. Although she still had three months to go, Margo went from feeling safe and worry free to being stricken with the nagging urge to look over her shoulder.

  She spent $500 to install an alarm system in her townhouse and made sure to have a gun on her at all times. A male former student who was worried about her safety had sent her a .38-caliber revolver with a three-inch barrel, slightly smaller than the four-inch-barrel revolver a law enforcement officer would normally use. Now that she was no longer a sworn peace officer, it wasn’t legal for her to carry a gun without registering it with the state, but she didn’t feel safe without it and hadn’t gotten around to filing the proper paperwork. She also kept a can of pepper spray, which a friend from Quantico’s firearms range had given her, in her purse.

  Logically, she knew that Gene was in prison, but that didn’t stop her from feeling paranoid. He had friends and associates from his undercover days, people he could call collect from a prison pay phone to come get her. She felt that she always had to be on guard.

  In early March, Margo called the girls’ elementary school to let them know that Gene was getting out and might show up to see his daughters. She told them that the existing custody order was still in effect, so if he tried to take the girls on a day he was allowed to have them, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

  April 2 came and went, with no sign of Gene, but Margo’s vigilance level had kicked up a few notches. She knew he was out there, waiting. Lurking.

  About a week later, Margo got a call from Melanie, a secretary in the school’s main office.

  “I just want to let you know, he’s here, and Allison is talking to him right now,” she said.

  Margo thanked her for the heads-up. There was nothing more she could do, really.

  It’s begun, she thought. He’s back.

  Lindsey’s kindergarten program lasted only a half day, so Margo picked her up at the bus stop, and they ran some errands until Allison finished school at around three.