Twisted Triangle Read online

  It seemed from the evidence notes that Gene was trying to frame Margo for planting the bomb. The motive, they were guessing, was revenge.

  “He had it bad for her,” Debra Twomey said later. “He was one pissed off ex-husband.”

  Around 10 PM, Ron called Margo and told her about the backpacks and bomb. Given what appeared to be the sequential numbering of the packs, he said they were concerned that Gene had planted more explosives on other campuses, in other vehicles, and who knows where else.

  Ron said they wanted to bring a bomb-sniffing dog to her house, but they didn’t have enough available at the moment, so he told her to take the girls to sleep somewhere else, and they would come over the next day. Ron agreed with Margo’s suggestion to stay the night at Beth’s.

  Margo grabbed the girls and some clothes and knocked on her neighbor’s door with Letta.

  “What is it now?” Beth’s husband, Greg, asked when he saw the four of them standing on his doorstep.

  “What makes them think if there’s a bomb in your house and it explodes, it won’t hurt us, too?” Beth asked after Margo relayed the news.

  The four of them spent the night in Beth’s basement.

  Meanwhile, back at the college, the state bomb technicians tied a rope around the black device and dragged it down ten feet of hallway, through a set of double glass doors, and into an alcove just outside the building. Around 11 PM, they attempted to disable the bomb safely by shooting the cap off one end. Instead, they inadvertently detonated the device, which sent metal fishhooks and nails everywhere, shattered the glass doors and scorched the concrete walls, which were pierced with the sharp fragments. The explosion was forceful enough to shoot shrapnel through the walls and into the art classroom.

  The next morning, Margo checked under the hood of her Geo Prizm to make sure it wasn’t rigged to explode before she drove to work for her first day back.

  Not long after she got to the office, she went to see David Karstens, the business manager for the Woodbridge campus and her direct supervisor. He warned her that if all the publicity surrounding the church incident caused students to feel she was unapproachable, the college might have to let her go.

  Later, when Brenda Floyd, NOVA’s vice president, learned what Karstens had said, she apologized to Margo. “We’re 100 percent behind you,” Brenda said. “That was an inappropriate thing to say.”

  Once the police and bomb squad determined that the keys in Gene’s black gym bag opened lockers at the Woodbridge NOVA building, they wasted no time in searching for corresponding padlocks at the Manassas, Loudoun, Annandale, and Alexandria campuses during the early morning hours of Friday, June 28.

  In the two Annandale lockers, 313 and 350, they found a maroon backpack labeled IIIII, with a toothbrush that later proved to have Gene’s DNA on it, along with the usual swatches and black powder. Locker 350 contained a five-page typed note that outlined a series of business transactions and was peppered with the initials “MAK.”

  In the Alexandria locker, police found a backpack labeled IIII, which contained two books, titled The 1995 National Directory of Bereavement Support Groups and Services and A History of Witch-craft . In the bereavement chapter titled “It’s Not Uncommon: Normal Grieving Responses After the Murder of a Loved One,” the page describing how people often act after someone they love has been murdered was marked.

  They found nothing at the Manassas or Loudoun campuses, so they checked the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Academy in Ashburn, where Margo had been an instructor, then went to Dulles Airport to burn off the black powder they’d found in the vehicles and lockers.

  The investigators tried contacting Patsy and her security people about the missing backpack II, but Patsy was out of the country, and her people did not want to cooperate.

  Around noon on Friday, Ron went to the county jail to talk to Gene. Ron didn’t expect to get much in the way of incriminating statements—his primary intention was to see if Gene would reveal where he’d planted backpack II or any other explosive devices they hadn’t found yet.

  Ron told Gene about the bomb-making materials they’d found in his car and the pipe bomb that had exploded at the Woodbridge campus.

  “If you know where any of these other ones are, we need to know it.”

  But Gene played dumb. “I didn’t hear about any explosive devices,” he said.

  Ron told him there was at least one the police couldn’t find. “If it goes off and somebody gets killed, you’re going to be held responsible,” he said.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with any bombs,” Gene said. Then, in a confused voice, he said. “I, I, is my car blown up, too?”

  Gene said he’d never made a bomb or had any training in explosives.

  “I know you’re looking at me for a lot of things, but I hope you open your eyes in those other areas that you’re looking at, too,” Gene said. “I’m talking about Mrs. Bennett.”

  “What about her?”

  “I, I just hope you’re not so blind sighted—focused on whatever you think I am or whatever I’ve done—that you are missing Mrs. Bennett.”

  “I’m not, you know, closing my eyes to anything,” Ron said.

  “Well, most people do.”

  “Do you think she may know where these bombs are at or where they’ve been placed?”

  “Well, that’s what she was screaming at me, that’s all I know. That she was going to blow my ass up.”

  “Does she have experience with explosives?”

  “She has it more than I do.”

  Ron assured Gene that the police would check into his allegations. “Well, I mean, believe me, we’re looking at her,” he said.

  “There’s nothing that this woman is not capable of,” Gene said. “. . . She’s so fucked up over this lesbian shit, and anybody finding out about it. . . . She is so intelligent and so devious and can get people to do things like I’ve never seen in my life before. She can control people. She can manipulate situations. . . . She likes to be the victim. She likes to be the hero. She likes to be in the limelight. She wants to be the little princess of everybody’s eye. She feels that she was wronged by the FBI and you know she was forced to resign and the only reason she wasn’t prosecuted was because I wouldn’t testify against her. If you’ve done your research, you’ve read, you’ve seen my plea agreement. . . . They kept coming back, wanting me to testify against her and prosecute her and I said what good would that do? I’m sitting in jail for a year and she’s sitting in jail for how many years for falsifying testimony and documents, and where does that leave my kids?”

  Gene said he was unarmed at the church, yet the police kept asking where his gun was.

  “I said, if somebody shoots at me and I got a gun in my hand, I’m going to shoot back, at least until I can find cover and get the hell out of danger. I didn’t have no God damn gun, okay?”

  After that, Gene refused to say anything more without his attorney present, although he kept trying to persuade Ron to disclose more about what police had found so far.

  Because of the church incident, Margo had missed some of the classes she needed to complete her state police certification and graduate from the Rappahannock Regional Criminal Justice Academy. Nonetheless, she went to the ceremony that Friday afternoon with her boss, Bob DelCore, because one of her officers was graduating.

  Margo was wearing her navy-blue NOVA uniform, but the Prince William County sheriff clearly didn’t know whom he was talking to when he made a flip comment to her afterward.

  “The press is giving you guys a rough time,” he said, laughing. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  Five minutes later, he came back over with an apologetic expression. “I’m sorry; are you doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing fine,” she said.

  But it was the next comment, which Margo received from a female deputy in her forties—too old, she thought, to be gushing about celebrities like a teenager—that almost put her over the edge.
/>   “I’ve always admired Patricia Cornwell,” the deputy said. “Do you think you could help me meet her?”

  Margo, appalled at the woman’s lack of tact, could not believe what she’d just heard. “I haven’t talked to Patsy in years,” she said and walked away.

  When she got home around three o’clock, the bomb squad was there with a dog, sweeping the townhouse. One of her elderly neighbors was outside talking to Beth, saying he was sure the police were looking for drugs. Beth set him straight.

  The dog sniffed around and alerted in Margo’s bedroom closet, where she used to keep a shotgun. It also alerted when it sniffed the driver’s seat of her car, where she wore her uniform and gun. But the dog found no bombs.

  After the police left, Margo felt the numbness from the last five days starting to slip away and reality setting in. The strong emotional front she had worked so hard to keep up for her children was starting to crack. She didn’t want her daughters to see her that way, so she called Dianna, who invited her to stay over.

  As Margo lay awake in Dianna’s spare room, she started thinking about what could’ve happened to her at the church. Gene could have killed her, and her children could have been orphaned. The horror of what might have been, of how much Gene hated her and how trapped she felt, sent her into a vortex of fear from which she thought she’d never be able to escape.

  She started to cry, just a little at first. But then the tears came faster and harder, her body heaving as she sobbed and couldn’t stop. She got out of bed and went into her friend’s room.

  “Dianna, I can’t stay in there by myself,” she said, still sobbing.

  “That’s okay,” Dianna said. “Do you want to sleep with me?”

  Dianna held up the covers and Margo crawled in next to her. Dianna patted Margo on the back until she finally stopped crying and fell asleep. This was the second time in a week that Margo had woken her friend in the middle of the night.

  When Margo went home the next day, she learned that a People magazine reporter had been driving around the neighborhood, looking for her house. Luckily, her neighbors said they didn’t know where she lived. Margo was relieved because Allison had been playing outside, wearing the All That Remains T-shirt Patsy had given Margo at the book party in July 1992.

  After that narrow escape, she and Jackie decided it would be best if Jackie took Carly and the girls back to Tuscaloosa for a couple of weeks. Margo wanted to be strong for her daughters, but knew she couldn’t be until she had a chance to pull herself together. She also wanted to shield the girls from the media onslaught until the situation had calmed down. She had no idea that the publicity would increase even more in the coming weeks.

  Margo called to talk to the girls each evening, but Jackie never told her that Lindsey cried every night as she slept with her head on her aunt’s shoulder. Years later, when Margo learned how traumatized her daughters had been, she wondered if she’d done the wrong thing by sending them away.

  “If I’d known what they were going through, I would’ve gone down to get them or had Jackie bring them back,” she later said.

  During the two searches of Gene’s house on June 24 and 28, police found the Taurus revolver that Mary Ann had purchased, along with some loose .38-caliber cartridges and a gas mask, in his garage.

  The house was extremely clean and well organized. In the bathroom, he had carefully rolled up his tube of toothpaste, using the same type of black binder clip that police had found on the bag of explosive mixture he’d left at the church, and his towels were neatly folded. Throughout the house, he had grouped similar items, such as batteries of varying sizes, in their own separate zipper-lock plastic bags, even within the same drawer. Investigators found numerous boxes of these bags in all different sizes.

  In the pantry, they found some Play-Doh and two cloth bags similar to the one he’d placed on Edwin’s head. They found two keys on the counter, one for the Plymouth Voyager van in West Virginia and one that said “Budget Rent-A-Car,” which they later learned was for the car Gene had rented and left in Richmond. They also found an envelope of three-by-five cards that listed book titles about murder, extremist groups, and death in general, including Cause of Death: A Writer’s Guide to Death, Murder and Forensic Medicine, The Perfect Husband, and The Insider: The FBI’s Undercover Wiseguy Goes Public.

  Upstairs, they found a derringer in his briefcase and a Soldier of Fortune book called A True Story of Obsessive Love and Murder for Hire, which told the story of a murder staged as a car accident. All the books they collected during the investigation came from the county library system and were overdue by months or even years.

  They also found the missing photo of Margo and Patsy from the Globe & Laurel book party, along with several vibrators and a porno movie featuring two women having sex, with a note in Gene’s handwriting on the back saying, “from MAB’s van.”

  On July 2, Margo and Edwin met at the church with Ron and the two prosecutors who would be handling Gene’s case—Paul Ebert, who was elected the commonwealth’s attorney for Prince William County in 1968, and Jim Willett, who had been a prosecutor for about thirteen years and would handle the Beltway sniper case seven years later.

  After doing a walk-through to go over what had happened where, Margo sat in Ron’s car, where he showed her photos of the massive quantity of evidence investigators had gathered so far. Ron discussed his various theories and asked for her help and insight into what leads to pursue from there.

  Ron said he suspected that Gene was going to make it look as if Margo and Mary Ann Khalifeh were lesbian lovers by planting Allison’s and Lindsey’s hair in Mary Ann’s house, as if Margo had brought them to visit.

  A few days earlier, Ron had asked Margo if she had a P.O. box, because they had found one in the same strip mall where the Polo Grill was located, registered under the names of Edwin Adams and Elizabeth Akers. The five-page note found in the Annandale campus locker stated that Mary Ann was to call Margo by the name Edwin Adams and that Mary Ann should tell other people she was working for someone by that name.

  Ron didn’t go into great detail about everything in Gene’s black bag, which the media had dubbed his “death kit” or “murder kit,” but he told her enough to fuel her nightmares for years.

  She wondered if, for example, he was planning to mix some nasty substance with the saline solution and inject her with it. Based on what she’d learned in her FBI training, she knew that when offenders take their victims away from the initial crime scene, abuse and torture generally follow.

  “If all he’d brought was a gun, he’d have killed me,” she said later. “If I’d left that church alive, it would have been a horrible night.”

  Margo was taken aback when Ron said he had to investigate the allegations Gene had made against her during the jailhouse interview. He said he didn’t believe them, but the best way to discount such accusations was to disprove them.

  “Look all you want; you’re not going to find anything that supports that,” Margo said.

  Once she’d seen all the evidence photos, she started to get a clearer picture of what Gene had been planning to do.

  “It was very sobering to see how obsessed Gene was by creating such an intricate, elaborate plot,” she said later. “The end result that I think he strove for was vindication—that I was the terrible part of his downfall—and the secret vengeance he would have exacted on me. My reputation would have been destroyed and he would have been the sympathetic figure.”

  Still looking for backpack II, the police sent out a teletype to alert other agencies statewide about the missing Budget car Gene had rented. On July 4, Ron was notified by the Richmond Police Department that the car had been located at the local Fairfield Inn. So Ron hopped in the car with Debra Twomey and made the ninety-minute drive to Richmond to check it out.

  When they arrived, the hotel was swarming with police and local and state bomb squad technicians. The hotel staff told them that Gene had checked into room 157 on Sunda
y, June 23, after paying for four days with his credit card. He’d never checked out.

  After the fiasco at the Woodbridge campus, the bomb techs used a robot to search the room before anyone went inside.

  Inside, police found a dress shirt, tie, and jacket hung up in the closet and a pair of navy-blue work pants lying on the bed, still in their original packaging. The pants matched Gene’s long-sleeved, navy-blue shirt that was covered with pepper spray. Cologne and hairspray for men were sitting on the bathroom counter.

  In the red Ford Contour that Gene had parked outside the room, police found a map book of metropolitan Richmond, with a letter tucked in between pages 23 and 24—pages that detailed Patsy’s Windsor Farms neighborhood, which was a mere five-mile drive from the hotel. The trunk contained a hamper holding items similar to those found in the other bags and backpacks.

  Margo learned about the Richmond search on the TV news that night. If Gene had been successful in killing her and Mary Ann, she figured he would already have established an alibi and claim that he’d never left the hotel.

  The next day, Margo came home from work to an empty house and started to panic. It was still light outside, yet she stood paralyzed, too scared to climb the stairs to her bedroom to change clothes. She knew she was being irrational. Gene was behind bars, but she still feared that someone working for Gene was upstairs, waiting to jump her.

  “My brain was saying this guy is not all-powerful, yet at the same time, he had this power over me,” she said later.

  Dianna had given her the name of a counselor who specialized in posttraumatic stress disorder. Margo and the therapist, Nancy Davis, had exchanged messages but had yet to connect. Margo tried her again, and this time she reached her.