Twisted Triangle Read online

  “Do you know anything about Gene talking to Allison and Allison crying, upset about moving?” he asked.

  “We were planning on moving, but it was to the townhouse next door,” Margo said. “I was standing right there while Allison was talking to her father, and she wasn’t crying.”

  Margo checked with Allison as soon as she got home.

  “Did you think I was taking you away from him?” she asked.

  “No, he’s lying,” Allison said. “I did not say that.”

  “Okay.”

  But Allison wouldn’t let it go. “I want to go and testify and tell them he’s lying.”

  Margo said she would think about it. She called Allison’s teacher and therapist, both of whom said Allison was a strong-willed girl and that if she needed to do this, Margo should let her.

  Still, Margo was worried that Gene might retaliate against Allison. She was also concerned about the impact of Allison’s knowing she’d contributed to the possible conviction of her father. But she ultimately decided that Allison should have the closure she sought.

  “So much of Allison’s life had been out of her control, and this was her choice,” Margo later said.

  She called Jim and filled him in.

  “I don’t know if I want to use her, but can you have her at the courthouse tomorrow morning?” he asked.

  The next morning, Allison got dressed in her blue denim dress, a purple turtleneck, and tennis shoes. She was a little nervous about seeing her father, but she wasn’t scared about taking the stand.

  Jim introduced her to forensic psychologist Stanton Samenow, a rebuttal witness for the prosecution who would testify later that day, and the three of them chatted a bit.

  Margo sat with Allison, who spent the day drawing and coloring, waiting to be called.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Margo kept saying.

  “I know,” Allison replied.

  Dr. Bishop continued his testimony for another hour and forty minutes, during which some jury members made audible “ha” noises of disbelief.

  In addition to dissociative disorder NOS (short for “not otherwise specified,” meaning it was atypical or unusual), he said he had diagnosed Gene with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with features of antisocial personality and narcissistic personality, and also with dysthymia, a chronic, smoldering depression.

  He explained that people with dissociative disorder could lose consciousness as if in a trance or a fugue, be rendered unable to say who they are, or form new identities.

  Using the 911 tape to illustrate, he said Gene displayed fear and confusion, used the term “we,” and spoke in a different voice when Ed was in charge.

  He said Gene’s years of working undercover for long periods with little supervision, compounded with all the recent stressors in his life, primed Gene for the triggering event of his dissociative state that final weekend—Allison’s call.

  Dr. Bishop stated that the evidence that clearly linked Gene to the various crime scenes was also representative of his irrational state, describing the vibrator pipe bomb as “at the very least a cry for help.”

  In conclusion, he said, “Mr. Bennett did not appreciate the nature and character of his acts at the time of the offense” or their consequences, nor could he tell right from wrong.

  Under cross-examination by Jim, Dr. Bishop acknowledged that a person who was dissociating was not necessarily criminally insane.

  Asked if he had verified whether Allison’s phone call took place, Dr. Bishop said, “I am aware that that phone call took place through Mr. Bennett’s report to me.”

  “Did you verify it independently?”

  “No.”

  “Did you talk to Allison?”

  “No.”

  “Dr. Bishop,” Jim said, “I have. Would you like to now—she’s in my office—before you render a final opinion in this case?”

  Mark Hulkower objected, but the judge wanted to hear the answer as much as everyone else in the courtroom.

  “No,” Dr. Bishop said.

  Moving on, Jim noted that Gene had told psychologist Stanton Samenow that “at one point in time, he had everything; now he’s got nothing, and [Margo] was the cause. Did he express a similar sentiment to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it fair to say that he is obsessed with his hatred for his wife?”

  “It’s frequently on his mind. . . . He has been obsessed about that, yes.”

  As Jim led the doctor through some of Gene’s actions, Dr. Bishop contended that Gene was in a dissociative state when he told Mary Ann to rent cars and obtain the insurance policies, cell phones, and pagers, and also when he answered each of her calls or pages as Edwin Adams. However, he said, Gene was probably coming out of it when Margo called him “Gene” in the church and he responded.

  Jim handed the doctor Gene’s notepad, with the scribbled directions to the Pittsburgh airport and the notation “call 911.”

  “It’s possible, is it not, doctor, that as a contingency plan, if caught, the defendant decided that he would feign insanity so that he wouldn’t go to prison?”

  “That’s always possible,” Dr. Bishop said.

  Reid’s next witness was Gene’s minister, the Reverend Bill Higgins, who said he first met Gene in fall 1993 after a service at the Manassas Baptist Church.

  On the Thursday before the church incident, the pastor said, he saw Gene at church, looking worse than he’d ever seen him. “His face was strained. His eyes were bloodshot. He was like a man who was caught under a tremendous, tremendous burden.”

  The pastor said he arranged with police to meet Gene at the hospital that Sunday in hopes of getting him to surrender. He said Gene’s body looked like a rag doll as he was wheeled in on a gurney, his hand was cold to the touch, and he was mumbling under his breath.

  “He talked about Ed some more. He talked about Mary. But none of it was put together in sentences that made any sense.”

  With that, the defense rested its case, and prosecution began putting on its four rebuttal witnesses.

  The second witness was psychologist Stanton Samenow, whose specialty was antisocial behavior. He’d spent eight and a half years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, doing clinical research into criminal behavior; opened a private practice; and wrote the books, The Criminal Personality and Inside the Criminal Mind. Just as Dr. Bishop had for the defense, Stanton had interviewed and evaluated Gene for the prosecution.

  Stanton testified that he spent eight and a half hours interviewing Gene—two or three times longer than the defense’s expert. He also conducted interviews with Margo and Allison, listened to Gene’s 911 tape, and reviewed a voluminous number of documents pertaining to Gene’s fraud case, including Margo’s interviews with federal investigators about the kidnapping.

  “Now, sir, did you in fact reach a conclusion as to whether or not the defendant was insane in your opinion on the day of the alleged crime?” Paul asked.

  “I did reach such a conclusion.”

  “And what was that conclusion?”

  “That Eugene Bennett was not legally insane at the time of the crime.”

  The psychologist explained that during their interviews, Gene was “lucid, straightforward, very clear and very organized in telling me about his life. . . . There was a lot of pressure, and this is a man that rose to pressure and welcomed it.”

  He noted that, in many cases, Margo and Gene gave completely different versions of events. But given the allegations of abusive treatment made by Margo and her former nanny, Stanton concluded, “This is a man who was going to get things the way he wanted them, whatever the means were, whatever it took. This is a person who always had a plan. . . . This is a person who was deliberate, who was calculating, and who was rational.”

  Gene told Stanton that Allison’s call the night before the church incident “got him tremendously upset.” However, Stanton told the jury that he’d talked to Allison himself and heard a very dif
ferent story.

  “Allison told me this morning that she never told her father on the phone that she was going to move, . . . that she did tell her father several weeks before that they might move to, I think it was a town house next door, and that his reaction was, ‘Well, I don’t understand why you’re going to move from one house to another,’ but that he wasn’t particularly upset.”

  Stanton found it curious that Gene said he’d lost all this time and forgot placing the ad in the Washington Post.

  “This is a man who had a very good memory,” he said. “This is a man who, for many hours, went into tremendous detail with me about the things he did remember about so many aspects of his life, and he was extremely clear. And he said to me that I knew more about the crimes that occurred on June 23 than he did.”

  But Stanton said the events of that night required “a very organized mind, a very ingenious mind, a creative mind, a mind that can plot, plan, and deliberate. . . . Once you understand it, you see that a person who’s insane is not going to be able to do this.”

  He noted that it was very convenient for someone who committed a crime to try to avoid the consequences by claiming memory loss. “But there was nothing I could find in the eight and a half hours that I spent with [Gene], or the collateral interviews, or the documents I read, that said to me that this man was insane other than that he said, ‘I don’t remember.’ ”

  He noted that Gene issued a number of conditions to police during the 911 call, clearly illustrating that he was “a man who is in control and he knows what he’s doing.” He demanded to know that his children were safe and to talk to people he knew from the FBI, to his lawyer, and to his minister. “At the very end, he even wants to be sure that his house is locked up after he leaves it.”

  Asked if he thought that Gene had been malingering—another term for faking—during the interviews, Stanton said, “I think the whole thing is malingering.”

  Dismantling Dr. Bishop’s diagnoses one at a time, he said that if someone were truly disassociating, it was not probable that he would snap into another personality when the phone rang.

  He said he also did not agree with the doctor that Gene had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, although he did concur that Gene had antisocial and narcissistic personality features.

  “In your professional opinion, did he understand the difference between right and wrong?”

  “I think so.”

  “Was he able to understand the nature and consequences of his act?”

  “Yes.”

  During the lunch recess, Jim asked Margo and Allison to hang around a while longer. Once Stanton Samenow finished testifying, Jim said he would know whether he would call Allison to the stand.

  Judge Potter called a short recess after Reid was done cross-examining Stanton, during which Jim ran up to Paul’s office to talk to Margo and Allison.

  “Stanton’s testimony went well,” he said. “I’m not going to need Allison. Take her home.”

  Jim had two kids himself, including a daughter around Allison’s age. Looking down at Margo’s daughter, he said, “Allison, you’re a brave girl.”

  Last up was Evan Stuart Nelson, a forensic psychologist who specialized in assessing whether criminal defendants were malingering. He had treated and assessed people with dissociative disorder, specifically multiple personality disorder, at the Indiana School of Medicine and was now in private practice.

  “Why is it important to be—have expertise in malingering in making an assessment for the courts in a criminal proceeding?” Paul asked.

  “When somebody is charged with a crime or when they’re interested in receiving financial damages in exchange for mental illness that they incurred because of some traumatic incident, there are strong motivations to be seen as mentally ill and . . . to fake symptoms or exaggerate symptoms.”

  In his experience, Evan said, it was rare that someone with this disorder could stay lucid, focused, and organized for a two- to three-hour interview.

  “This hearing voices, being psychotic—the whole realm of ‘I feel out of my mind, my mind is controlled, I’m hearing voices,’ are the most frequent malingering symptoms in a criminal forensic context in every study that I have ever looked at.”

  Paul asked for Evan’s opinion on the likelihood that a hypothetical person who had committed the crimes of which Gene was accused would meet Virginia’s test for legal insanity.

  “It sounds really unlikely,” Evan said. “You’re talking about a sequence of rather unusual but highly organized behaviors toward a specific goal. . . . Unless there is some indication of a delusional understanding of what that goal is, it doesn’t sound at all like somebody who is out of control or doesn’t understand what they’re doing or that it’s wrong to them.”

  “When you assess for this disorder, are there any other diagnoses you consider?” Paul asked.

  Evan said he would consider schizophrenia, but said malingering was “really high on the list,” because people had heard a lot about this particular disorder in the media. But for him, behaviors such as committing illegal acts and lying, then claiming to have no memory and showing no remorse, more aptly fit the description of a psychopath.

  By the time Evan was finished, he and Stanton had successfully poked holes through Dr. Bishop’s diagnoses, methods, and testimony. But Jim and Paul knew no case was won until a jury delivered a guilty verdict.

  When Margo later learned about testimony from defense witnesses that Gene had claimed that he’d had insomnia and blackouts back in 1993, she figured he’d been planning for years to use this insanity defense—probably even prior to kidnapping her.

  Margo remembered how Gene had planned the Nickelride raid at Tony’s down to the minute and figured he had done the same thing with this murder plan of his. Unlike Nickelride, however, this one turned out to have a fatal flaw.

  “This one would’ve been foolproof if I hadn’t had the pepper spray,” she said. “I was the unpredictable factor.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Vindication

  Monday, February 10, was day seven of the trial, which was starting its third and final week.

  Judge Potter had given the prosecution an hour and the defense ninety minutes for their closing arguments, and thirty minutes to the prosecution for its rebuttal.

  In their closings, Jim and Reid summed up their cases, highlighting their best witness testimony and trying to undermine that of the other side.

  Paul got to have the last word in his rebuttal argument before the jury began deliberating.

  Paul said he took no pleasure in asking the jury to convict a former law enforcement officer who had done so much good for his country. He contended that Gene didn’t kill Edwin Clever before Margo arrived or knife her in the church parking lot, because he knew he would go down for murder. So instead he came up with a plan “that defies imagination.”

  “I asked you folks on voir dire if any of you couldn’t accept that there are times when the truth is crazier than fiction and all of you said you could accept that premise. Well, folks, this is a case where the truth, perhaps, is stranger than fiction.”

  Paul had been saving one piece of evidence for this very moment, as the pièce de résistance of the prosecution’s case, when the defense could no longer offer some crazy explanation.

  “I think it tied everything together. It told its own story,” Paul said later. “I thought it was going to kill the defense. They kind of skimmed over it and they thought we were going to overlook it. . . . When the jury got the full flavor of it, I think that was the end of the case.”

  Paul began to read aloud part of the five-page typed note that Gene had planted in the Annandale campus locker, explaining that it was a business plan Gene had drafted to read as if Margo had written it.

  “ ‘I will control the finances, clients, and business money concerns as required. . . . She will obtain life insurance in the amount equal to four times the amount of financing that I provide
or arrange.’ This is ostensibly Margo’s notes about her business arrangements with Mary Ann, prepared by that man,” Paul said, pointing at Gene.

  “ ‘I will hold the policies and she will name the beneficiaries that I direct,’ ” he said, pointing again, “prepared by that man. ‘I will use my alias/DBA name of Elizabeth Akers with no questions asked by MAK.’ ”

  Then, turning to the jury, Paul said, “almost like Ed Adams, isn’t it?

  “ ‘Convince MAK to take a job at McDonald’s. Convince her to work a demeaning job when not in class and convince her that it is an assignment for a client.’

  “This, I should say, takes it all: ‘MAK, Mary Ann Khalifeh, will always refer to me as Edwin Adams to friends, family, etcetera as her boss, partner, associate, etcetera. . . . It’s much safer this way now. I can work several [angles] all at once with little risk of exposure. [I will win at all levels.]’

  “ ‘Have MAK rent van and room for dry run on 6/22, 23. Run through all phases. Use this time to teach her some surveillance work. . . . Get her weapon[s training and certification] in order.’

  “That will answer for you, I believe,” Paul said, “and I can’t speak for you folks, some of the questions you might have as to why in the name of God would somebody do what he did.”

  If Gene had pulled off his scheme, Paul said, he would have been a hero, “the person who was wrongfully convicted in the first instance, and Margo would have been the crazy, dingbat lesbian who put pornographic material in her lockers along with all of this other evidence.” Mary Ann, a “blind little lamb,” he said, would have ended up dead as well.

  Paul told the jury that Gene had already manipulated Margo, the family’s nanny, Edwin, Mary Ann, even Dr. Bishop, his own attorney, and the police.

  “Don’t let him manipulate you,” he said. “Don’t let him manipulate the system. Hold him to the burden that the law holds him to.”

  Jim and Paul had successfully tied all the evidence together so that for the first time in Margo’s mind—and, she hoped, the jury’s as well—she could see how the dots in Gene’s cunning scheme were connected. Finally, she understood.