Twisted Triangle Read online

  In March 1996, Gene finally agreed to let Lindsey have the surgery after Jennifer Levy said she couldn’t recommend postponing the operation. The procedure was scheduled for April 3.

  Betty had submitted a list of divorce-related questions, called interrogatories, for Gene to answer in writing. But when Gene didn’t answer the questions, Betty didn’t force the issue. His foot-dragging routine didn’t stop Kathy, though. She went to court and got an order to make him comply.

  Gene’s responses gave Kathy a chance to prepare a hard-hitting set of questions for Gene’s deposition in June, where he would be sworn under oath to tell the truth and she could get an idea of his position before trial in divorce court. That was the point, at least theoretically.

  The first question asked him to list the factors that had led to the dissolution of the marriage as well as the dates and descriptions of any postseparation incidents he planned to introduce as evidence.

  Gene’s responses painted Margo as a power-hungry, overambitious closet lesbian who shirked her duties as a mother and saw him as little more than a sperm bank. He said she repeatedly pushed him to watch lesbian porno and to bring other women into their marital bed. He claimed that he protested “on religious, family, moral and health grounds for Mrs. Bennett to forget about these sexually deviant behaviors.”

  As Gene described Margo’s affair with Patsy, he mixed fact with fiction: “Mrs. Bennett became totally infatuated with Patricia Cornwell. . . . Mrs. Bennett would secretly meet with Cornwell for romantic candlelight dinners, would visit Cornwell’s Richmond home, accepted expensive gifts and clothes from her and spoke with her on the phone constantly. . . . Mr. Bennett followed Mrs. Bennett to several of these rendezvous during this time and observed Mrs. Bennett and Ms. Cornwell hugging and kissing in their vehicles. Mrs. Bennett attended a book signing and dinner as Ms. Cornwell’s guest and Mr. Bennett learned that Mrs. Bennett and Ms. Cornwell had spent the night together. The next day, after Mrs. Bennett returned to the FBI academy, Mr. Bennett checked the family van and removed Mrs. Bennett’s lingerie, sex toys, lesbian pornographic material, etc. from the van for safe keeping and testing.”

  Gene later said he sent the lingerie to a forensic expert at George Washington University and then to a lab to get DNA proof of the affair. Margo told Kathy that Gene was “barking up the right tree,” but that he was making up evidence to support his claims. She said she would admit under oath that she had been with Patsy on the night in question, but she never put any lingerie, sex toys, or lesbian porno videos in the van. When Gene produced a photocopy of a photo he took before sending the panties to be tested, Margo said she’d never seen them before, so if the lab found any female secretions they weren’t hers.

  In addition, he accused her of stealing everything she could from his house while he was in prison, blaming the foreclosure on her failure to pay the mortgage. He said she “actively blocked” him from contacting their daughters by phone or by mail while he was behind bars and insisted that she “never exercised any discipline or authority over the children . . . [and] tried to be a buddy or friend to the children instead of an adult with serious parental responsibilities.” He said she frequently gave Allison and Lindsey prescription medications without sending them to a doctor and sent him notes asking him to do the same, another allegation that Margo denied.

  “Mrs. Bennett’s plan was to use their children as bargaining chips for a quiet divorce while ruining Mr. Bennett financially, emotionally and professionally,” he wrote. “Mrs. Bennett in effect wanted everything, except their joint debt, and wanted Mr. Bennett to walk away from his family and assets.”

  In late April, Margo got a call from a private investigator, another former student. When he started his own business, she’d said she would do some small jobs for him and agreed to let him list her on his brochure. He called to say that a woman named Mary Ann Khalifeh had seen the brochure at a divorce support group meeting and wanted to meet with Margo.

  Margo wasn’t interested, but she agreed to call the woman. When they talked a week later, Mary Ann said she thought her husband was cheating on her.

  “If you’ll just meet with me, maybe you can help me,” Mary Ann said.

  Margo tried to be polite but firm, saying she didn’t really want to get into this type of work and was very busy at the moment. “I’m willing to meet with you,” she said. “I just want you to know that I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you.”

  They agreed to meet a week later at a restaurant-bar called the Polo Grill in Lorton around 6 PM.

  Margo was still feeling roundly paranoid and fearful; she also felt that there was something odd about this woman. Since Gene’s attack, she’d been skeptical about anyone who came into her life for no apparent reason. She was not in a risk-taking mode and wondered if Gene could be involved somehow, so she decided to bring her sister Letta, who had come up from Tuscaloosa hoping to find a job in the area, and her neighbor Beth to the meeting. The two women followed Margo in Beth’s van, arriving fifteen minutes early so that Margo, like any good law enforcement officer, could make sure she didn’t have to sit with her back to the door.

  But when Margo walked into the dimly lit restaurant, the hostess was expecting her. Mary Ann had gotten there early, too.

  “Are you here to meet someone?” she asked.

  The hostess led her to a table where Margo was pleased to see that Mary Ann was already sitting with her back to the door. Letta and Beth got a table nearby so they could keep watch.

  Mary Ann got halfway out of her chair to shake Margo’s hand, then sat back down. She had reddish brown, shoulder-length hair, looked to be in her mid-forties, and was wearing dark slacks and a blouse, as if she had come from the office.

  They both ordered sodas. Margo hoped to keep the meeting as short as possible, so she got right to the point.

  “Why do you think your husband is cheating on you?”

  “He comes home late at night, and one night I found matchbooks from bars in his pocket.”

  “What bars?”

  “I don’t know the names of them, but I can show you the matchbooks. I thought you could go to these bars and catch him.”

  “Have you driven by the bars and seen his car there?” Margo asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Mary Ann said. “He has a bad temper.”

  “Has he hit you before?”

  “No.”

  Mary Ann said she didn’t want to go to the bars alone and asked if Margo would come with her to help catch her husband in the act.

  By this point, Margo’s initial feeling about Mary Ann was reinforced by her sense that the woman was, in essence, reading a script. She didn’t sound sincere, and her story didn’t ring true. There was no anger or fear in her voice, and she seemed to lack the conviction to go through with the plan she proposed. Margo also didn’t believe that the woman was telling the truth about who she was.

  In fact, Mary Ann was telling Margo the truth about her own marital situation. But, as Margo had picked up, she lacked conviction because the proposal her boss had told her to make seemed ludicrous. In addition, her nerves were on edge from having to carry out this exercise.

  “You have to understand—I’m going through my own divorce, and I don’t have time to take this on,” Margo said. “I can’t help you.”

  “All you need to do is go with me,” Mary Ann pleaded.

  “No, I just can’t do this for you, but I’ll help find someone to help you.”

  Mary Ann, again following her boss’s orders, told Margo that she had to have a female investigator, so Margo said she would call her in a couple of days to give her a name and phone number. Margo got the sense that Mary Ann would’ve said anything to get Margo to help her.

  What she didn’t know was that Mary Ann had been following Gene’s orders for three months now, using her personal credit card to buy a pager and a phone for herself and one each for the man she knew as Edwin Adams, the costs of which he promised to reimbur
se; that Mary Ann had also taken out the four accidental death policies and was just about to complete a sixty-hour private investigator’s training course that Gene had paid for her to take at the community college where Margo worked as a lieutenant; or that Gene had had her visit Kathy Farrell to talk about her own divorce, for which Gene said he’d pay, claiming that Kathy was involved in the scam too.

  In late May, Margo took her first formal training class on how to use pepper spray, a requirement of her Virginia peace officer certification. At the time, she had no clue what a lifesaver that class would turn out to be.

  At 10 AM on June 4, Margo and Kathy arrived at the office of Doug Bergere, Gene’s new attorney, where Margo would give her deposition. At long last, they were set to go to trial on the divorce on July 15.

  The four of them sat around a large table that could seat eight, with Margo and Gene facing each other.

  Margo averted her eyes from Gene’s, but even his presence was unnerving.

  “How long were you married when you separated, twelve years?” Doug asked.

  Gene laughed and muttered under his breath, “No, but it feels like it.”

  Margo had been prepped to give simple answers and not volunteer any information, so she ignored him. “Eight years,” she said.

  As Doug asked about the kidnapping in 1993, Margo cried as she began to recount the details, getting so emotional that she needed to take a ten-minute break partway through. She hated that her attacker was sitting across the table, probably enjoying how victimized and terrorized she still felt by what he had done.

  The deposition lasted four hours, including a lunch break. Afterward, Kathy praised her for holding up so well.

  “Every time I hear you tell that story, it’s consistently the same information,” she said. “I believe you because the story never changes.”

  They went back to Kathy’s office to prepare for the next day, when Gene would give his deposition, then Margo went home, feeling drained. Although she dreaded being in the same room with Gene for another day, she felt satisfied with her performance so far.

  The next day was gruelingly long and torturous, but at least Margo didn’t have to sit facing Gene. She sat off to one side, scribbling notes, while Gene spent a full day giving nonresponsive answers to most of Kathy’s questions. He was so uncooperative that they had to schedule a second session a week later.

  Many of his answers would provide telling contrasts to Margo’s account of why their marriage had failed, and would also show interesting conflicts with claims he and his attorneys would make in criminal court seven months later.

  Perhaps most important, Gene said he had no mental or physical condition that would impair his long- or short-term memory, had never been treated for any psychiatric problem, and did not suffer from any chronic condition. He also did not recall having any stress indicators while working undercover in the FBI other than the death of his mother and his marital discord.

  At one point, he produced a property and custody settlement agreement with Margo’s signature, whose contents were exactly opposite to those in the document they’d had notarized during the 1993 abduction. Margo realized that he had taken her signature page and tacked it onto a new document that gave him all their marital assets and sole custody of the girls.

  Among his other responses, Gene claimed he had never seen or owned a taser. He said he had learned about forensics and had worked four or five homicides while he was in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. His taste in porno movies was “a white male and a white female making love together, period.” He’d started following Margo and Patsy after going to a party at Patsy’s house in summer 1992. That September he’d uncovered physical evidence of their lesbian affair in the inscriptions Patsy had written in Margo’s books, which he photocopied in Margo’s office, where he also confiscated the photo of Patsy and Margo from her desk.

  His intent, he said, was to win sole custody of his children.

  “I didn’t want my two daughters raised by a lesbian,” he said.

  Just as he did in the first session, Gene evaded most of Kathy’s questions all day long, so they had to schedule a third session for July 1.

  On Saturday, June 22, the weather was nice and not too muggy when Margo and her neighbor Beth picked up the girls in the Food Lion parking lot. As usual, Gene stood with his arms crossed, leaning against his Dodge Dynasty, as he watched the girls walk toward Margo’s Prizm.

  Margo purposely didn’t schedule anything, so that the girls could spend a relaxing weekend playing with the neighborhood kids, while she watched them and talked to Beth. The only thing out of the ordinary was that Gene called Saturday to say goodnight to the girls and told them he missed them. This seemed a little odd, considering that he’d only just seen them. He’d never done that before on a day that Margo had the kids.

  In the back of her mind, she was thinking about the training course she would attend later that week and how it wouldn’t be too long before she and Gene would finally resolve their divorce and custody dispute in court. It was about time.

  Margo was right about one thing. Gene always had a reason for doing what he did. Only she never would have guessed what he was up to this time.

  Chapter Ten

  The Main Event

  On Saturday, June 22, after dropping off the girls with Margo, Gene met up with his assistant, Mary Ann Khalifeh, who was expecting to do a weekend of surveillance with her boss, Edwin Adams, on the insurance fraud case.

  Gene told Mary Ann to rent a room at the Holiday Inn on Dumfries Road in Manassas in the early afternoon, then told her to drive her Acura to a soccer field near the hotel, where he picked her up and took her to Dulles Airport. From there, she took a shuttle bus to the Budget rental car lot, where she picked up a tan Ford Windstar van and drove back to the hotel. She stayed the night alone.

  The next day, while Margo and the girls went to church, hung around the house, ate dinner, and watched TV, Gene kept Mary Ann busy with an elaborate series of tasks, swapping vehicles numerous times across two states.

  At 7:30 AM, he told her to follow him in his Dodge Dynasty to a mall in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where he dropped off an old Plymouth Voyager van that he said his associates needed for the surveillance. They drove back together in his Dynasty to Manassas, where he transferred two gym bags into the Windstar van, saying they contained investigative equipment they might need.

  Gene kept Mary Ann occupied running errands that afternoon while he drove to Richmond and rented a hotel room. He also leased a car and left it at the hotel, but said nothing of this trip to Mary Ann.

  As Gene instructed, Mary Ann took the rental van to Potomac Sports on Minnieville Road, where she put a $175 Taurus revolver and several rounds of ammunition on her credit card.

  “I kept telling him ‘I don’t want a gun,’” Mary Ann later recalled, saying that Gene replied, “You don’t necessarily have to use it, but it’s good to have.”

  Next, she drove to a nearby shooting range to practice using her new weapon, another task she didn’t particularly enjoy, so she was somewhat relieved to find that the range was closing when she got there at 4:30 PM. Gene told her to go back to the Holiday Inn and wait for further instructions.

  Mary Ann had been suspicious of her boss’s true intentions for months. She even had her boyfriend try to follow him, but Gene immediately caught on, lost his tail, and called Mary Ann, furious.

  “What are you doing? You’ve got somebody following me,” he snapped.

  Many of the instructions he’d been giving her seemed to conflict with what she’d learned in the training course at NOVA. But she stuck with the job because she’d already invested hundreds of dollars in the phones, pagers, gun, and various other items he’d told her to buy.

  “I wanted to make sure I got my money back,” she later said.

  Around 7:30 PM, Gene called and told her to drive her own car to meet him at a 7-11. From there, he had her follow him in her own c
ar to a number of different locations he said were important in their investigation, talking to her by cell phone as he gave her the tour. They ended up at the house of a minister he said was involved in the scam. He told her to park and keep watch, then took off in the rental van around nine.

  The Reverend Edwin Clever and his sons spent the day together, stopping at McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, and the Giant grocery store before heading home for the evening.

  At 9:45 PM, Edwin got a call from Gene, posing as a food representative who had called a week earlier and said he wanted to see the food bank at the Prince of Peace in Manassas the following Sunday; his organization was considering making an anonymous donation to Edwin’s church. At that time, Gene had suggested they meet up on Sunday afternoon, when no one else would be there, but Edwin had said it would be better to wait until the youth choir had finished, around 8:30 PM.

  When Gene called the night of June 23, he said he was close to the church with his female partner and asked if Edwin could meet them there. That way, his partner could go on to a motel while he and Edwin talked. The pastor didn’t really feel like going out that late at night on a Sunday, but he reluctantly agreed.

  Edwin unlocked the front doors of the church around ten. He picked a magazine off the floor and went to put it in the wooden rack at the other end of the room, when a man in a ski mask jumped out of the stairwell, holding a gun.

  “Do you want to live?” Gene asked, pointing the gun at Edwin’s chest.

  “Yes, everybody does,” Edwin said.

  Initially, Edwin thought the armed man was a friend with whom he’d recently had a discussion about guns, and who was now playing a joke to make his point. But Edwin soon realized that this was no joke.