Twisted Triangle Read online

  Gene spent most of their three-hour visit giving his version of what had happened between him and Margo since they first met. He described the kidnapping in 1993 as a mutual attempt to get back together, and the church incident as one big blur during which he didn’t know what he was doing and had no control over himself.

  Gene immediately followed up the visit with a letter, telling Allison how proud he was of her, how beautiful she was, how “smart, mature, so very sweet and very articulate.”

  “I enjoyed hugging you and being able to touch your hands and hold hands with you once again,” he wrote. “When you were young we held hands all the time, whether we were in the car, or at a store or in a restaurant. I am glad that we had such a strong father-daughter bond between us when you were younger and growing up. All these times are so precious to me and I was so happy to watch you grow up.”

  He said he was very pleased to learn that Allison had the trial transcripts at her house and suggested that she read and compare them to what they discussed during her visit. He also encouraged her to read the entire criminal and divorce files to answer any further questions she might have.

  “I know you were and probably are still angry and frustrated with me. That may never go away or it may soften or lessen over time. My love for you is total and I will always be your father, even though it is hard for me to be a parent under these circumstances.”

  Four months later, Gene wrote her a fourteen-page letter, saying he was perplexed that he hadn’t heard from her since her visit. He said he was going to contact his lawyer and ask him to arrange a court hearing to determine what the problem was. He said there was “an obvious choke point that needs to be addressed,” implying that Margo was to blame.

  Allison fired back a letter, addressed to “Gene,” and blasted him for insinuating that Margo would try to keep his letters from her.

  How dare you accuse my mother of not giving me your letters. I’ve gotten every last one of them. . . . It’s MY choice not to write you back. I don’t write you because I don’t want to. You talk about being my father—yeah, and what a great one you are. What kind of “father” tries to kill the mother of his children, the one who gave them life! What kind of father rots in jail while his daughters grow up? . . . If you bring ANYTHING to court, I swear on everything I love that I will legally disown you. . . .

  You no longer have the right to try to play head games, so cut the crap. You’ll never be able to get in between this family. You can never break us; don’t waste your time trying. So don’t try to act like a father to me. You aren’t one. . . . You got too bold, Gene. You finally snapped my last nerve of patience with you.

  Gene wrote back a seventeen-page letter, waiting until the ninth page to address his daughter’s anger.

  “After I read and contemplated that letter, it occurred to me that perhaps you may not have prepared that document on your own,” he wrote. “Sometimes, when a young person is as angry as you seem to be, others prey on that anger and can easily take advantage of that emotion, that vulnerability, and seize the opportunity to manipulate and plant negative ideas very easily.”

  Even though he was in prison, he wrote, he’d done many positive things with his life, which should not be negated by the incident in 1996. He said he once loved Margo “very deeply and completely,” and that Allison and Lindsey “were born out of that intense period of love.” When Allison reached her early twenties, he said, he believed that she would see the world in a totally different light, “possibly even me, too.” But nothing could ever break the bonds they’d formed when she was growing up.

  At that point, Allison quit writing him back.

  Allison met her boyfriend Tom*, who was three years her senior, in late 2001. Allison asked Margo if Tom could move in with them for a month because his father had moved in with a girlfriend and Tom’s mother lived a couple of hours away.

  Initially, Margo wanted to help the young man, but she soon came to feel that he was taking advantage of the situation. One month had turned into three, and Allison, who had been earning A’s and B’s and taking advanced placement courses, was skipping school, smoking pot, lying around in bed all day with Tom, and arguing more and more with Margo.

  “I felt that she was under his spell,” Margo said later. “She was not thinking about what she was doing and how it was impacting her future. She was escaping the reality of our lives through this guy.”

  One morning, Margo dropped Allison at the bus stop for school, then doubled back and caught her hiding behind some bushes so that the bus would go by and she could hang out with her boyfriend.

  “That’s when I said enough,” Margo said, and kicked Tom out for good.

  But that didn’t stop Allison.

  About a month later, Margo went out of town and left the girls in the care of a friend. Allison said she was going to stay with a girlfriend, but actually went to Virginia Beach with Tom, where they stayed in a hotel for four or five days.

  After Margo returned from her trip, Allison left again for a couple of days, sleeping with Tom in his car or on friends’ couches. Margo lay down the law when Allison came home.

  “You live by my rules if you’re going to be here,” she said.

  “So, I guess I won’t be here then,” Allison replied.

  Allison wrote her mother a letter before taking off again with Tom in early July 2002, explaining that Margo’s perception of her was all wrong.

  “She thought I was in a downward spiral, doing a ton of drugs. She was worried about me smoking weed,” Allison later said.

  Margo reported Allison as a runaway to police and reported Tom for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, so a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was picked up on the delinquency warrant when he went to court on another offense and was taken to jail.

  Meanwhile, Margo was so concerned about Allison’s emotional state that she read her daughter’s diary. It was worse than she’d suspected. Allison was expressing suicidal thoughts. She was severely allergic to ibuprofen, yet Margo found a new, unopened bottle of it in Allison’s bedroom.

  Margo immediately began researching drug rehab programs and made arrangements to take Allison to the Aspen Achievement Academy in Utah as soon as she could find her.

  About a week later, Allison called Margo from a friend’s house to let her know she was safe.

  “Where are you?” Margo asked.

  Within fifteen minutes, Margo showed up with two law enforcement officer friends, Cindy and Karen. Margo grabbed Allison by the elbow and put her in the backseat of the car between the off-duty officers. Allison was high on marijuana.

  When they got back to the house, Margo went upstairs to make final arrangements with the Aspen program. Margo heard the phone ring and came downstairs, where she could hear Allison talking to Tom, who had called from jail.

  Margo grabbed the receiver.

  “Leave her alone,” she said, and hung up.

  Allison started screaming at Margo and ran for the front door, hitting Cindy when she tried to stop her. Karen grabbed Allison and put her in a headlock, while Cindy and Margo held her legs down and Lindsey stood, watching. They finally got Allison into a chair, where Karen pressed her shoulders down so that she couldn’t hit anyone again.

  On the way to the airport, Margo called the airport police to caution them that she was taking Allison to rehab in Utah and that Allison might cause a scene. When they got there, three officers were waiting to escort them to the gate.

  Once they arrived in Utah, Margo and Cindy marched Allison into the hotel room, took the phone apart, put a mattress on the floor against the door, and slept on either side of her so that she couldn’t escape in the middle of the night. As Margo lay on the mattress, she remembered how Gene had made her sleep in the closet back in 1993, while he slept on the other side of the door.

  The next morning, on July 16, 2002, an elderly couple came to take Allison to the Aspen program, in the small town of Loa. When Allison burst into
tears, crumbling into the little girl she once was, Margo wondered if she was doing the right thing. But by the time she got home, she was comfortable with her decision.

  The insurance company announced that it wouldn’t cover the Aspen program after all, suggesting that Margo bring Allison home and take her to a local outpatient clinic. But Margo refused.

  “I told them that was not a choice,” she later said, explaining that she used the Nasser movie money to pay for the program.

  Margo learned about Allison’s cutting in one of the weekly conference calls she had with the counselors, and mentioned it to Lindsey. But Margo didn’t fully understand the extent of Allison’s problems until she received her daughter’s thirteen-page psychological evaluation, which came a month into the program.

  Among its findings, the report said that Allison’s verbal reasoning abilities were in the “superior range,” but she suffered from depression and anxiety. She had reported drinking alcohol since the eighth grade, and at one point, was drinking before, during, and after school, twice to the point of alcohol poisoning. She also reported smoking marijuana regularly and that she’d used Ecstasy, mushrooms, and painkillers.

  Margo thought back to her own troubles with her father and her subsequent self-destructive sexual promiscuity, and realized that the damage Allison must have suffered was far more significant.

  Margo started looking to leave NOVA in June 2002. She was finally making ends meet, but working two jobs and picking up training courses here and there had left her exhausted.

  “I was looking for a clean break, an opportunity to start a new life,” she said recently.

  After teaching some courses on the West Coast each year, Margo had set her sights on California. She applied for a captain’s position in the campus police department at the University of California, Berkeley, and was thrilled when she got it.

  In August, as she was packing her belongings, she tried to cull the unnecessary remnants of the past. She came across her stack of Patsy’s novels and decided she didn’t want them around as a reminder anymore. It seemed like a waste to toss them, but rather than give them away and take the chance that Patsy’s personal inscriptions could end up on eBay, she sent the books to Dianna to hold for her.

  Margo decided to keep the three silk ties that Patsy had given her. She later tried to give them to Allison, when she got a job at Safeway that required a tie. But Allison said they weren’t her style and put them away with the stuffed animals in her closet.

  Margo and Lindsey started heading west to California in early September, picking up Allison from rehab in Utah along the way and driving straight through to the Bay Area.

  When Margo started her new job, there was a controversy among some of her new coworkers, who were upset that the chief had hired someone who had lied under oath. However, no one but a female sergeant asked Margo about it directly.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I thought my children were going to die,” Margo said, explaining the situation.

  “Well, what else could you do?”

  That controversy has since died, and Margo is happy to continue to work in community policing, where she’d started back in college. Margo said that the UC Berkeley police department is considered to be among the best in the country because it got so much practice dealing with the riots in the 1960s.

  She still shoots her gun every few months for quarterly qualifications, but, she said, “As a manager, my weapons of choice are now a pen and paper.”

  Within three weeks of moving to the Bay Area, Allison met a girl who introduced her to methamphetamine. She started snorting it, then switched to smoking it.

  At a family gathering on her sixteenth birthday, Allison made an unexpected announcement.

  “I need to leave,” she declared. “I’m hurting you all too much by staying.”

  Margo was well aware of the post-rehab tension in the house, but she had no idea that this was addict talk from a teenager who had started doing drugs again.

  Given Allison’s past habit of running away, Margo reluctantly chose to let her go. It was the only way she thought she could keep the lines of communication open with her troubled daughter if something should go wrong.

  A week or two later, Allison moved in with her friend, then into a former warehouse in Oakland that she called “a crack shack,” where she had her own floor.

  One day, Margo picked Allison up from the Sizzler restaurant, where she’d gotten a job on her recent birthday, and noticed she was covered with red sores that looked like bug bites. Margo also saw how skinny Allison was.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, if it’s coke or heroin or meth, but look at you, it’s killing you,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Allison replied.

  Allison moved back in with Margo around Christmastime and stopped using meth shortly thereafter. She was tired of feeling as if she had the flu, only ten times worse, having no appetite, going for four days at a time with no sleep, and having the light hurt her eyes.

  “It kills you,” she later said. “It’s poison.”

  Margo hadn’t known exactly what drug Allison was taking, but she could clearly see that her daughter had stopped using it. Margo was pleased that the $18,000-plus she’d spent on the Aspen program had done some good after all.

  She’s never had to worry about Lindsey doing drugs or getting into trouble. If Margo ever questioned Lindsey’s after-school activities, Lindsey would gently remind her mother, “Mom, I’m the good kid, remember?”

  Margo’s father died in December 2000, and her mother followed in February 2003.

  Soon afterward, Margo dreamed that her mother was lying next to her on the pillow, smiling, happy, and peaceful. When Margo woke up, it occurred to her that her father was probably somewhere in between here and Heaven, unable to get to that peaceful place. She was certain that he was waiting for his children to forgive him for the way he’d treated them.

  “He’d never asked for that forgiveness, but I felt we needed to give it,” she said.

  Margo talked to both of her sisters, separately, about her dream and the need to forgive their father for his abusive behavior toward them and their mother. Jackie, who shared with Margo that he had groped her in bed too, said she was probably on target. Letta just nodded and said, “You may be right.”

  Allison was alarmed to see some cuts on Lindsey’s upper arm in 2003.

  “What’s that?” Allison asked. “Did you do this to yourself?”

  “Yes,” Lindsay said, then started crying.

  Allison asked Lindsey what prompted the cutting, but Lindsey wouldn’t elaborate. Lindsey didn’t want to tell her sister that it was Allison herself. Allison, feeling protective, told her little sister that she had to stop, or it would only get worse. She continued to check Lindsey’s arm periodically and was relieved that there were no more cuts.

  “I knew I wasn’t going to hurt myself, but with her, she’s not unstable or anything, she’s just very emotional,” Allison said later. “And that made me worry a little more.”

  Lindsey later said that she’d cut herself after getting into a fight with Allison for inviting her friends over to smoke pot. This was the second and final time that she’d cut herself—on the left arm and leg—because she found that it helped only temporarily. She felt guilty and even worse afterward, so she stopped, worrying that this would become an addictive cycle.

  In 2004, Lindsey asked Margo if she could see a therapist for some problems dealing with a close friend at school. Margo was immediately concerned because Lindsey had expressed self-destructive thoughts shortly after they’d moved to the Bay Area.

  “Are you having feelings like you want to hurt yourself?” Margo asked.

  “No,” Lindsey said.

  “Have you ever cut yourself?” Margo asked, bracing for the answer.

  Lindsey said yes, and explained that Allison had already talked to her about it.

  Knowing that Allison had do
ne the same thing, this shocking development made Margo feel even more guilty that she hadn’t given her daughters enough care and support.

  “They had been through a tremendous trauma, and I had obviously overlooked something,” she said later. “I didn’t do it right.”

  When Gene was first incarcerated, he sent letters to the girls through a social worker, who forwarded them to Margo via a private P.O. box she’d rented in Woodbridge. But when the social worker retired in early 2004, the courts didn’t appoint another one because Allison and Lindsey were teenagers by then, so Gene had no way to reach them.

  About a year went by before Gene started sending the letters to Margo’s office at UC Berkeley. Then, several months later, he sent them directly to the house she’d purchased in July 2006, saying a friend had done some research to find out where they lived.

  Seventeen-year-old Lindsey took particular umbrage at this, viewing it as an invasion of their privacy. Gene’s move seemed like one big head game to her, so she began returning his letters to him, unopened.

  “I just didn’t want to deal with his crap anymore,” she later said. “It’s, like, he doesn’t know me. What could he say that would interest me?”

  Gene responded by leaving the return address off his letters.

  The last letter Lindsey remembers reading was one addressed to her and Allison; Gene had enclosed an article contending that girls with absent fathers were statistically more likely to lose their virginity early and get pregnant.

  “He still tries to, like, parent,” Lindsey said.

  Eventually Gene got the message and stopped writing letters to Lindsey for the most part, although he continued to send her Christmas and birthday cards with money orders enclosed.

  At first, Margo always opened Gene’s letters and read them before giving them to the girls, but when Allison and Lindsey stopped wanting to read them, Margo decided simply to leave them unopened, regardless of what money orders they might contain. Allison still reads some of her father’s letters and cashes the money orders.