Twisted Triangle Page 2

  “You’re not going to kill me, Gene,” she said. “I am not going to let this happen.”

  Gene stuck his head around the doorway again. “I don’t want to kill you, I just want to talk to you,” he said, as if he were trying to sound sincere. “If I’d wanted to kill you, I could have had you any time.”

  “If you wanted to talk to me,” she snapped, “you could have called me on the phone. I’m not coming out. You are not going to do this.”

  Crouched behind the desk, Margo pointed her gun at the spot where she’d last seen Gene’s head. A stack of letter trays was partially obstructing her view, so she knocked them onto the floor with one swipe.

  “What do you want to do, get into a shootout?” Gene asked. The feigned sincerity had evolved into irritation that his ploy wasn’t working. “We can get in a shootout and see who’s the best shot.”

  “I don’t care Gene, I am not coming out there.”

  “Edwin has got explosives around his waist. I’ll kill us all. Come on, let’s talk, or we’ll all die,” he said, the frustration in his voice rising. “Do you want to die?”

  “You want to blow us up, blow us up,” she said. “But I’m not coming out there.”

  She could see her minister in his secretary’s office, sitting in a green leather chair with a beige cloth bag over his head, his hands cuffed behind him, shackles around his ankles, and a bulging fanny pack around his waist.

  “Edwin, are you all right?”

  “I think so,” he replied, his voice quiet and shaky.

  Margo’s adrenaline was high, and her fear had been overtaken by a clear focus and the drive to survive. Her choices would not be clouded as they were when Gene had attacked and abducted her three years earlier, in 1993. He could kill her as far as she was concerned, but she wasn’t going to let him break her like he had the last time. She’d rather die than let him touch her again.

  “You know I’m going to leave here and go and get the kids,” he said. “You know I’m going to have to go through Letta. Is that what you want?”

  Gene had already shown that he would use their two daughters to get to her during the last attack. That’s what had made her cave in. But she didn’t believe that he’d hurt her sister, Letta. The risk was too great that he’d get caught.

  Even so, she didn’t want to call his bluff. If she could keep him yelling and screaming, she figured he wouldn’t have time to think. If she could keep him off guard, she and Edwin would have a chance to make it out alive. She was determined not to let Gene violate her or her girls again.

  “Gene, just do what you have to do,” she said, stalling for time. “Get out of here. Just leave. I’m not coming out.”

  Truth be told, she saw no way out. Gene was blocking the only door out of the office. And there were no windows. She knew he wasn’t going to leave, no matter what he said.

  “Edwin, are you ready to die?” she shouted. “ ’Cause I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this.”

  Edwin sighed. “I was afraid of that,” he said.

  “Are you praying?”

  “I’ve been praying,” Edwin said.

  “Pray for me too,” she said. “I’m a little busy right now.”

  Gene poked his head and his gun around the doorframe once more. Margo wondered why he didn’t pull the trigger. He’d have such an easy shot at her. Her only choice, she decided, was to fire first. With any luck, she would hit the sliver of pale forehead he kept showing her like a target.

  And that, she hoped, would be that.

  Chapter Two

  Till Death Do Us Part

  Margo Akers had just finished her sixteen weeks of FBI training and started working as an agent when she met Gene Bennett at the Atlanta field office in February 1982. He was a big man—six feet two inches and two hundred pounds—with steely light-blue eyes, a full head of brown hair, and a confident swagger. She was a slender five feet six inches, with blond hair and hazel eyes, and spoke with a soft voice.

  “Stay away from him,” her training agent, Pat Johnson, warned her. “He’ll try to get into your pants.”

  The scuttlebutt around the office was that Gene had been with the bureau for only ten months, and at twenty-seven he was already considered a boy wonder, working his first undercover case.

  A few days later, Gene called Margo at home, and despite her initial refusal, he persuaded her to go out with him. She’d already had her share of self-destructive sexual flings with both male and female coworkers at the campus police department where she’d worked during college and graduate school. She wasn’t looking for another one.

  But Pat was right. She and Gene went out for lunch and to a movie, then spent the night at his house on Lake Lanier, having the best sex she’d ever had.

  When Margo was transferred to the Kansas City office, she and Gene continued to date long-distance. In October 1983, she wrote him a letter proposing marriage, not just because they loved each other, but also so that they could work in the same city again.

  “I want to be your wife and I want you for my husband and the father of my children,” she wrote. “The very thought of getting orders for the West Coast makes me have nightmares about what it could do to our relationship. . . . This way we stand a better chance of getting as close together as possible.”

  Even though she’d had her first sexual experience and a year-long relationship with a female student named Donna Thompson* in college, Margo had convinced herself that it didn’t define her sexuality; she had just been exploring and experimenting. Dismissing the connection with Donna as purely situational, she had no second thoughts about committing herself to a heterosexual relationship. Being gay wasn’t something people really talked about when she was growing up in Alabama and Georgia. It was a secretive type of lifestyle. And if it was a secret, then it couldn’t be good.

  Besides, her Methodist upbringing had taught her that the only sexual union of which God approved was between a man and his wife. And Margo believed that she and Gene would live happily ever after, till death do us part.

  “He was very in charge, charming, full of life, and had ambition in what he wanted to achieve personally, in the sense that he wasn’t satisfied with life getting stale,” she said later. “When you look at my family’s life of constantly moving, ongoing financial instability and never knowing if success was ever going to be achieved, Gene had control of his life and calmed those stressors that I grew up with.”

  Margo and Gene were married in a Methodist church in Atlanta in February 1984. About half of their two hundred guests were friends from the bureau, who wore the telltale sunglasses, dark suits, and short hair, and who got very drunk. The rest were family and friends from Alabama, Kentucky, and Illinois. Gene even invited the father of his first wife, Karen, the high school sweetheart whom he’d divorced after only a few years, soon after he finished his six-year enlistment in the Army.

  As Margo waited with her own father just outside the sanctuary, he pointed to a door to their right, smiled, and said, “You could leave now. It’s not too late.”

  Margo appreciated his attempt at levity, but she said, “No, we’re doing this.”

  Looking back later, she said, “It was almost prophetic.”

  In September 1986, Margo was eight months pregnant. For the moment, she and Gene were both working in Atlanta, waiting for their unwanted yet unavoidable transfer orders to come through. They hoped they wouldn’t be sent to the huge office in New York City, known as the black hole, but rather to the one in Washington DC, where they could afford to buy a home and raise a family.

  Margo had her eye on a teaching job at Quantico, the FBI academy, where there were only a few female instructors. When Margo had joined the bureau in 1981, she was one of about 350 female agents—less than 5 percent of the total number. All of these women had been hired after Director J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972.

  One night, Gene took a call from Jerry York in the kitchen of their house in Marietta, which was un
usual because he typically talked to Jerry in his office upstairs. Margo later realized that Gene had done this on purpose so that she could overhear their conversation. It didn’t matter, though, because she hadn’t been listening.

  Jerry had started out as Gene’s informant in his first undercover gig, Operation Forscore, which began with a stolen truckload of Oscar Mayer meat. Over the years, they’d become friends, and together they’d come up with a money-making scheme that involved jewelry, completely independent of any undercover operation. Gene started bringing home little black velvet bags of diamonds, but all he’d tell Margo was that he and Jerry were trying to build a business with a jewelry dealer in Atlanta.

  Margo never liked this arrangement. The bureau had strict rules prohibiting outside employment because of the potential conflict of interest. She thought it was an unusual and risky way to invest their money. She was also concerned about the ramifications such a pursuit would have on his FBI job.

  When Gene got off the phone, he told her that Jerry had recently bought a cheap house on Lake Capri Drive in Lithonia, a suburb of Atlanta, and had put some cosmetic work into it.

  “Jerry had this crazy idea of having us use the Lake Capri house as our primary residence in the Home Relocation Program,” Gene said.

  “What?” Margo asked, confused.

  Essentially, Gene was saying that Jerry had come up with a way for them all to make some easy money off his new house by having Gene and Margo use it to apply to an FBI program designed to help agents who needed to sell their homes because they were being transferred.

  The FBI had recently instituted this program in response to the depressed real estate market, providing an immediate equity pay-out rather than making agents wait to collect that money in a sale that could take months. The FBI had agents’ homes appraised at fair market value, then issued payments equal to the difference between that value and the outstanding balance on their mortgages.

  “Yeah, he put some money into fixing the house up, and there should be some immediate equity in the house,” Gene said. “If we claim it as our primary residence, it would be a quick turnover of profit.”

  Gene didn’t mention this to Margo at the time, but he and Jerry had figured they could make a $100,000 profit from this scheme, which they would then split.

  What Gene was proposing was clearly not the purpose of the program. What he was proposing was fraud. Gene and Margo did not own the Lake Capri house, nor had they ever lived in it, so they would have to submit a false claim, supported by phony documentation that Jerry had sold the house to them.

  “That’s crazy,” Margo said. “No way.”

  “Yeah, Jerry’s crazy.”

  Later, Margo figured that Gene had posed the scenario to feel out her reaction. Despite her refusal, Gene continued to work on the idea with his informant friend.

  “Jerry wanted to get instant gratification, too,” Margo said later.

  This new scheme notwithstanding, life with Gene had been growing increasingly stressful over the past year. He’d been attempting to do what he’d previously done to set up his first two undercover operations, Forscore and Nickelride, and obtain funding for them—he was taking criminal leads from a previous operation and trying to use them to launch a new one, a practice known in the bureau as spinning. Only this time the bureau wasn’t biting, and he was frustrated.

  Margo was concerned about Gene’s state of mind and the unease his undercover work had been causing at home.

  “I saw him needing that constant high, focusing more and more on using an undercover operation to make himself feel good,” she said later. “Gene was developing a sense of entitlement to working undercover operations, which I felt was unhealthy and inappropriate.”

  One day, Margo broached the idea of going to see a marriage counselor.

  “You and I are not communicating well, and I’d like to go see someone who can help us,” she said. But Gene didn’t want any part of it.

  “If you need somebody to talk to, you go right ahead, but I’m not going,” he said.

  Margo wasn’t surprised by his response, but she felt that going alone wouldn’t do much good, so she didn’t bring up the subject again.

  The Bennetts’ transfer orders came on October 6, three days before their baby was born. They were both relieved to learn they were being sent to Washington.

  As Margo’s frustrations with Gene and their marriage grew, she clung to his softer side and their common goal of starting a family. When it came time to go to the hospital, Gene brought a video camera to capture every moment of the birth for posterity. At one point, Gene, dressed in scrubs, pointed the camera at the mirrored wall of the delivery room, peeking out from behind the lens and waving.

  Because Margo had some medical complications, she stayed in the hospital for five days. Every night, Gene slept in a cot next to her bed.

  Margo kept a diary of the birth so that their child could later read a blow-by-blow description. In the little blue hardback book, she explained that Daddy Gene was very attentive. “He kept rubbing my forehead as if I needed comforting,” Margo wrote. “I really think it did more to comfort him.” After the delivery, she wrote, “They finally gave you to him and he began strutting around the delivery room like a proud papa. . . . Dad leaned you over to me and I kissed your cheek. . . . Dad sat down next to me, held you out and asked me what I thought of the name Allison for our little girl. I thought it was beautiful, just like you, and he named you Allison Akers Bennett there in the delivery room.”

  After Allison’s first bowel movement, Margo wrote, “We called the nurse to show your dad how to clean you up and change your diapers. From that point on, your dad became an expert in taking care of you. He wouldn’t hardly let me have you. I remember waking up and seeing him in the chair, holding you, and just looking at you like you were the miracle that we believe you to be.”

  One evening in mid-November, Gene pitched the home relocation fraud scheme to Margo for the second time while she was preparing dinner, with Allison sitting in her carrier on the countertop. Gene explained once again what he and Jerry wanted to do, only this time he wasn’t backing down. He told her he was moving on with his plan, whether she liked it or not.

  “This isn’t right,” Margo said. “This is not what we are supposed to be doing.”

  “I’m sick of your holier-than-thou attitude,” Gene said.

  He looked at Allison and then back at Margo, his voice dripping with contempt.

  “Do you want to raise her by yourself? Because if you do, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  By this point, Margo felt that she had no choice but to give in. She wasn’t ready to give up everything she’d worked for all these years, and she didn’t feel she could raise a baby on her own. Gene had also worn her down over the years with his head games, embarrassing and humiliating her in front of their friends and colleagues, constantly exerting his very strong will. All of this had eaten away at Margo’s already fragile self-esteem, so she let Gene persuade her to bend the rules, a decision she would regret for the rest of her life.

  Gene must have seen from her expression that he had won. He nodded, and it was a done deal.

  The deeper they got into the scheme in the coming months, the worse Margo felt about it. But Gene was driving this train, and she didn’t know how to get off.

  “I felt I had sold my soul to the devil, and I couldn’t get out of this,” she said later.

  When things got bad with Gene, Margo often looked back and thought to herself, “If my mom could put up with her life with Dad, then I, too, can do this.”

  Margo came into the world as Marguerite Elizabeth Akers on November 16, 1953, in the tiny rural town of Guin in northwestern Alabama. Later nicknamed Margo by her older sister, Letta, she was the third of four children born to Ed and Gerthaldean “Dean” Akers.

  Margo, her brother, and two sisters were raised in an atmosphere of denial, perpetuated by her mother, who reinf
orced the principle that “we don’t talk about things.” Ed, who liked his Jim Beam and Cokes, ruled the roost with his dominant personality, leaving Dean beaten down and unwilling or unable to stand up for herself. With this dynamic as a model, Margo learned early on to accept that keeping the peace in an unhappy marriage, even amid verbal abuse, was the right thing to do.

  One adolescent experience in particular left Margo emotionally scarred for years and sent long-lasting ripples of confusion through her sexual development.

  When she was thirteen, Margo and her father were lying in bed, reading the Sunday paper together, when he reached around without warning, stuck his hand up her pajama top, and squeezed her budding breast.

  “It feels like you might be growing a little bit,” he said.

  Margo was stunned, ashamed, and embarrassed that he had violated her this way, then mocked her to boot.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, surprised, when she started to crawl out of bed.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she lied.

  She never went back to that bed and, following the tradition set by her mother, never said a word to anyone about that morning until both her parents were dead.

  Years later, Margo learned that he had touched her younger sister, Jackie, the same way. Margo didn’t know until she asked Jackie about it in an e-mail after their father had died.

  “Oh, that,” Jackie wrote dismissively, explaining that she’d been able to shake off the episode long ago.

  But this was not the case for Margo. The experience marked a dramatic shift in the way she perceived her own body, making her feel inadequate, that she was lacking somehow. It also made her feel self-conscious, that her body wasn’t developing the way it should. Before that fateful morning, she’d never even considered how her body looked or that her breasts were small. She’d always seen herself as just a regular girl who liked to play kickball or ride bikes with the neighborhood kids.