Twisted Triangle

by Caitlin Rother

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ve got to get you in the van,” he said.

  She was a little perplexed because she’d left the van, which became hers in the separation, at Quantico. It hadn’t been running very well, so she preferred driving the Prizm.

  Gene looked down and noticed that she’d torn the tape around her ankles.

  “You got your ankles undone,” he said with surprise. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

  He helped her out of the trunk, feet first. Feeling light-headed, she was able to get only a quick glimpse of her surroundings. They were parked next to the van in a large, empty lot, surrounded by red brick buildings. She didn’t recognize the area, but because it was deserted, she thought they were probably somewhere in downtown DC.

  A white sheet covered the van’s back bench, where he had her lie on her side while he sat on the floor, facing her.

  For about thirty minutes, he talked and she listened. What he told her only increased her emotional buy-in that he, too, was a victim in this mess.

  He said the Yorks had come over to the house Friday night. Brenda told him she was taking the girls out for a Slurpee while Jerry took him for a ride somewhere to talk. But Brenda, he said, never came back with the girls, and he got “busted up” in the ribs and knees by two “professionals” who worked with Jerry. Considering how hard Gene had fought Margo, she figured he was exaggerating. But it sounded as if Jerry had set him up to be jumped so as to prove that “they” meant business.

  “We need to call the police,” Margo said.

  “If we call the police, they’ll walk away and we’ll never see the kids again.”

  Gene said Jerry didn’t want to hurt the kids, but he wasn’t willing to go back to jail. “Everybody” thought Margo was the key witness in the fraud case, so they didn’t want her to show up in court. If Margo wouldn’t agree not to testify, Jerry told him, “they” would have to kill her.

  “If there’s no other way to save the kids, then you should go ahead and kill me,” Margo said.

  “They said I could shoot you in the head and make it look like a suicide,” Gene said. “But now you’re all banged up, and I can’t do that. I can’t kill the mother of my children.”

  He paused. “Frankly, Margo, you can shoot me to save the kids if that’s what it takes, because they’re the most important thing.”

  At the time, Margo thought he really meant it.

  “When this is over, Jerry and Brenda are dead,” he said. “I will hunt them down.”

  “I’ll be there to help,” Margo said, exhausted and befuddled.

  Gene loosened the handcuffs because they were hurting her. Then, after rewrapping her ankles with tape, he threaded the seat belts between her legs and clicked them shut, wrapping tape around the latch. He pulled off another piece and went to put it over her eyes.

  “Please don’t do that,” she said.

  Gene reached for another bandanna instead. Then he repositioned the gag over her mouth and told her not to move around in the van.

  “If they see anything out of the ordinary, they’ll just leave, and we’ll never see the kids again,” he said.

  Gene said he was late for his appointment with his attorney and had to go. It was about 9:30 AM.

  For the next several hours, Margo felt woozy, sweating profusely as the sun beat down on the van, which grew hotter and muggier by the minute. She felt stiff and crampy from being all tied up. Her upper back hurt where Gene had thrown her down on the concrete. Her wrists were sore from the handcuffs, and her thumb had gone numb.

  As she went in and out of consciousness, she wondered what she was going to have to do to keep the kids safe. When she felt she had to shift her body, she tried to do it gently, because the handcuffs kept rattling, and she didn’t want to anger whoever was watching the van.

  Gene came back a few hours later with a hot can of Sprite, which apparently had been riding around in his car. He didn’t detach the handcuffs from her bellyband or remove her blindfold, so she had to bend over to take small sips while he told her how mad at himself he was for letting Brenda take the kids. He sounded as if he were crying.

  “I let them go,” he said, his voice cracking.

  He checked her bindings and told her that “they” had ordered him to remove her watch because it beeped on the hour. He also said they had offered him two options: he could either kill her or hide her on a boat until the trial was over.

  “You can go ahead and shoot me. Just don’t put me on a boat. I won’t make it on a boat,” she said, thinking they would leave her there to die.

  Gene tried to calm her down: “They haven’t decided what they’re going to do yet,” he said.

  Then he left.

  Ever since she’d moved out of the house, she’d gotten used to thinking of the girls as “her” daughters. But over the past few hours, the girls had become “theirs” once again because she and Gene shared the common goal of rescuing them. The soft drink seemed to have revived her a bit, and she wondered if she was going to die or if Gene was going to keep her in the van until the trial was over.

  Eight years earlier, in summer 1985, Margo had taken a two-week seminar on hostage negotiations at Quantico.

  Within a couple of weeks, she was able to exercise her new skills as the secondary, or backup, negotiator on a plane hijacking case. In such cases, the primary negotiator generally talks to the suspect, while the backup feeds him or her information and tracks what’s been said, sometimes making suggestions and also taking over when the primary negotiator needs a break.

  Judson Dean Talley had just gotten out of the military and had drunk quite a bit on the plane. He told the flight attendant he had a bomb in his carry-on bag and wanted to hijack the aircraft, but he didn’t say why. The Delta pilot landed in Atlanta as scheduled, then let the FBI take over.

  When the primary negotiator asked Talley to explain his motivation, Talley said he was upset that his girlfriend had just broken up with him. However, he didn’t make any demands that the agents could respond to, which made it more difficult to negotiate with him. He had no plan.

  The primary negotiator stirred up the hijacker by repeatedly calling him Judson, when he wanted to be called Dean. So Margo took over, used the name that he’d requested, and later earned kudos and a bonus check for her role in getting the passengers and then the flight crew safely off the plane.

  “The goal was to get him to focus on the here and now and how to resolve the issues, not to dwell on those things that made him angry or fall apart,” Margo said later.

  After double-teaming Talley, they persuaded him to surrender so that they could get him the help he needed. Talley, who was in his twenties, came down the stairs in a cocky stance. But when he reached the tarmac, a SWAT team member knocked his legs out from under him, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and took him to jail.

  During her hostage negotiations training, Margo had been taught to be aware of Stockholm syndrome, in which captives develop a bond with their captors. But while she was tied up and blindfolded in that hot van, waiting for Gene to return with news of their children, she didn’t realize that she was exhibiting textbook symptoms.

  Gene seemed to be in good spirits upon his return around six o’clock.

  This time, he brought her a hot can of Coke, but it still tasted good. He also brought her a mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and a couple of small hard candies. She wasn’t hungry for real food, even though the last thing she’d eaten was a hamburger and chips at a neighborhood cookout almost twenty-four hours earlier.

  “Two cars are in the lot watching us. They told me to keep you healthy and mark free,” he said.

  He also told her “they” had let him talk to the kids.

  Margo noticed that “they” had now become a separate and distinct entity from Jerry and Brenda. Gene said he could hear water splashing when they let him talk to Allison and Lindsey on the phone, so he thought the kids were at a pool
somewhere. Allison, he said, told him she and her sister were “on vacation” and assured him that they were using plenty of sunscreen.

  Margo felt a little relief. At least the kids were okay for the moment.

  “Why can’t we call in the FBI?” Margo asked.

  “If we call the anyone, they’ll just leave, and we’ll never see the kids again.”

  They started talking about their lives together, the breakup of their marriage, and how they’d gotten into this mess.

  “I don’t know how our lives got so off track when what we should have been doing is helping our kids get through this,” he said, referring to the divorce.

  Margo agreed. “It’s not right that our kids are being torn apart,” she said. “They ought to have parents who can sit down and have a meal together.”

  “Are you saying you want to get back together?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “What I want is a healthier relationship between us for the sake of the kids.”

  If they both got through this ordeal alive, she thought the kids deserved better than to see their parents fighting all the time.

  Then Gene asked a question he’d obviously been wanting to ask for months.

  “What about Patsy?”

  Margo knew how jealous he’d been, but she wanted to tell him that she didn’t want a divorce so she could be with Patsy, that their affair didn’t mean she was gay, and that there weren’t going to be any other women in the future. At the time, this was what she believed.

  “I was only with her twice,” she said.

  “Okay,” Gene said, as if he had accepted it.

  Looking back later, Margo suspected that Gene had been fishing for even the smallest confirmation so that he could use it against her in the divorce.

  Gene told her he was going to leave the Prizm at Quantico so that it would look like she’d swapped cars. Then he was going to drive his truck to the Nokesville house and come back for her in his Jeep.

  “I have to wait until dark before I can move you,” he said.

  Margo hadn’t been to the bathroom all day. About three hours after he’d left, she couldn’t wait any longer. Her movement was limited because of the handcuffs, but she was able to inch her pants down slowly and bunch up the sheet so it was under her. After she relieved herself, she pushed the sheet onto the floor so she didn’t have to lie in her own urine.

  Gene finally showed up around 1 AM.

  “There was a bad accident that stopped traffic,” he said.

  He cut the tape off her ankles, but left the other bindings in place. Then he put her, still blindfolded, onto the backseat of the Jeep with a water bottle and some saltine crackers, covering her with a tarp. They arrived in Nokesville about an hour later.

  Gene let her go into the bathroom by herself, then took her upstairs and told her to lie on a quilt he’d laid on the closet floor. After he turned out the light and shut the door, Margo could hear him lie down just outside. She woke up every time he rolled over or her handcuffs clinked together.

  The next morning, she heard Gene washing at the sink.

  “My knees hurt,” she said when he opened the closet door. The Ace bandage had slipped down, and her skin had been rubbed raw.

  Gene had her roll onto her side so that he could cut the duct tape, and in so doing scratched her on the back of her thigh with the scissors, deep enough to draw blood, which he mopped with a tissue.

  “Your feet smell,” he said, coming back with clean pairs of socks.

  Then he rewrapped the Ace bandage, fastened it with new tape, and put her back in the Jeep, retying the gag and blindfold. He had her back in the van before he ran off to a 9 AM meeting with his attorney, leaving her a plastic water bottle with a straw and a big box of graham crackers shaped like teddy bears.

  “I’ll try to get back at noon,” he said.

  Gene didn’t return until six that evening, when he removed her gag so that they could talk about his upcoming trial.

  “I’ll lie on the stand if you need me to,” Margo volunteered.

  Gene left again briefly, then came back saying he’d just talked to “them.”

  “They’ve given us three choices: we can tuck you away until the trial is over. You can get up on the stand and lie. Or I can put a bullet in your head.”

  “I can lie on the stand. I know I can do that,” Margo said, trying to convince him.

  Gene drove them to a smaller parking lot nearby. Then he took off all her bindings and removed the blindfold. The van clock read eight.

  Gene told Margo to follow him in the van, while he drove the Jeep. He gave her only a minute or two to stretch, which wasn’t enough. It hurt just to stand up straight. After being bound, gagged, dehydrated, and starved for two days, she wasn’t sure she could move her limbs enough to drive at all.

  Around eleven, they stopped at a Chevron station in Woodbridge, where Gene told Margo to withdraw $150 from the nearby ATM. From there, they went to her townhouse, where he asked whom she was planning to see the next day. He instructed her to leave messages for each of them, specifying what innocent explanations she should offer for why she was bruised, scraped, and cut up, or not coming to meet them.

  Margo did as she was told; she didn’t feel that she had the freedom to question Gene’s directives. She later realized that he’d told her to make the calls so that no one would believe her if she tried to claim that he’d caused the injuries.

  “I may be late for tomorrow’s meeting because I was out jogging and fell down, but I’ll be there,” she said in messages she left for her attorney Brian Gettings and prosecutor Marcia Isaacson.

  “The kids aren’t going to be at school tomorrow,” she said in her message to Nancy Waugh, who ran her kids’ nursery school but was also a friend. “Gene has the kids, and we’ve swapped weekends.”

  She also called and left a message for John Hess, with whom she was supposed to team-teach a course that week, then made a reservation for that night at the Keybridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia.

  Gene told her to gather up the clothes she’d need for the week. Because she thought she’d be testifying on Tuesday, she brought her best blue linen Jones New York suit and, for her meetings on Monday, a green one she also liked.

  By this point, Gene apparently believed that Margo was fully buying into the plan and would heed his warning about calling in the authorities, so he felt it was safe to let her go alone to her hotel. Margo was also sure that he or Ralph would follow her there.

  Before he left, Gene told her to page him from a pay phone at the Marriott at 3 PM the next day.

  When Margo expressed some concern about the cost of staying there, Gene said he would look into less expensive accommodations. He took off in his Jeep, and she arrived at the hotel just after midnight.

  As she lay in bed, she had fleeting thoughts of calling the police and worried about what would happen to the girls if she couldn’t lie convincingly on the stand. She figured that the people who knew her would empathize with her reasons for lying and that the rest of her FBI colleagues would likely think the worst. But what she struggled with most was the prospect of swearing to God and then lying under oath.

  “I felt that only God would understand why I was doing this. I felt like God was going to forgive me,” she later said.

  On Monday morning, June 21, Margo and Brian Gettings met with prosecutors Marcia Isaacson and Bruce Reinhart. They gave her an outline of the questions they were going to ask her, which Margo tucked away to share with Gene. Marcia was still acting concerned, viewing Margo as a victim, but she had put her trial game on. Bruce, whom Margo had met a couple of times during trial preparation interviews, treated her more objectively, as a witness he needed to win his case.

  After Margo called Gene’s pager from the Marriott around 2:45 PM, he told her to meet him at a Wendy’s in Alexandria, and from there, he led her to the Giant grocery store, where he told her to leave the van and get in the Jeep with him. It seemed important to m
ake her drive around and switch cars, so she followed him, clutching Marcia’s outline. Once they got to the Old Colony Inn, he took her to his room.

  “Strip down to your bra and panties. I need to check you,” he said, indicating that he wanted to see if she was wearing a wire.

  Margo handed him the outline and took off her suit. After he was satisfied, she dressed again, and for the next hour, he directed her how to answer questions on the stand. Gene said she should change her testimony to say that she had in fact lived in the Lake Capri house and commuted to work from there.

  While they were talking, there was a knock at the door. It was a Latina hotel maid who asked if Gene wanted the room cleaned. He said no.

  “That really wasn’t a housekeeper,” Gene said after the woman left. “She’s one of them. They sent her over to check on us.”

  He and Margo talked a while longer about the people who had ordered the abduction of her and the kids. “They” had now become a group of Mexicans or Colombians who were somehow connected to Brenda and Jerry. Gene had mentioned the Latin connection to her on Saturday, so this provided some confirmation that Jerry had other people working with him.

  “Tomorrow I want you to clean the van. They want it cleaned inside and out,” Gene said, telling her to page him at noon for further instructions.

  Margo left around seven that evening and headed back to the Marriott, where she went in and out of sleep all night, startled awake by the tiniest of noises.

  Tuesday was the first day of Gene’s trial at the federal courthouse in Judiciary Square in DC, starting with jury selection and a motions hearing. Gene went on his own, and because Margo was a prosecution witness, she didn’t have to go until she was called to testify.