Twisted Triangle

by Caitlin Rother

  “Is anyone there with you?”

  As the dispatcher asked her a series of questions, Margo told Edwin to stand up so she could describe the explosives around his waist. She was not going to come out from behind that desk until she was absolutely sure it was safe. She told him to check the lock on the secretary’s door to make sure that Gene couldn’t come in that way, then she asked if he could remove the fanny pack. Edwin maneuvered his cuffed hands down his back to unclasp the pack, and laid it carefully on the floor.

  Margo asked the dispatcher to call her house and tell Letta to take the kids next door to Beth’s in case Gene showed up and tried to nab them.

  A few minutes later, the dispatcher told her that the police had arrived at the church.

  “The officers are ready to come in,” she said. “Put your gun down.”

  “Tell them I’m not going to the door,” Margo said. “They can break the windows to come in as far as I care, but tell them to please hurry.”

  She didn’t know if Gene was still hiding somewhere, so she told Edwin to get down on the ground. “There may be shooting,” she said.

  The dispatcher tried again to get Margo to put her gun down, but she wouldn’t until the dispatcher had listed the names of the officers who were going to come through the door.

  Margo heard a group of officers come into the lobby and yell, “Police!” but she still refused to drop her weapon. Only after she had confirmed the officers’ identities would she lay her gun on the carpet, stand up, and put her hands in the air.

  “Edwin is in there on the ground,” she said, pointing to the secretary’s office.

  The police led Margo and Edwin, whose ankles were still shackled, out of the church and across the driveway as quickly as possible, fearful that Gene was still around and would blow up the church, taking all of them with it.

  Once they were thirty feet from the building, the police took off Edwin’s handcuffs, and Margo asked if she could remove his leg irons. Margo used her universal key, which unlocked any set of cuffs, to free Edwin.

  Detective Ron McClelland had worked the 3 PM to 11 PM shift that day and was en route to his home in Woodbridge when Margo’s 911 call came in. All he heard over the police radio was something to do with a bomb at a church and that patrol officers were responding. He was only a few minutes away, so he headed over to see if he could help.

  When he got there at 11:55, the patrol officers had already secured the scene and had separated Margo and Edwin. Ron, a redhead in his late thirties, interviewed them separately, Edwin in one police car and Margo in his vehicle.

  As Ron questioned Margo, he could see she was shaken, but she was still able to give good details about what had occurred.

  Around 12:15, Margo asked if she could use Ron’s cell phone to call Letta at Beth’s house to make sure the girls were safe. Carly, the daughter of Margo’s sister Jackie, was staying with them too.

  Letta had brought Margo’s cordless phone to Beth’s, and it rang while she was talking to Margo on Beth’s phone. Margo could hear Beth in the background, saying that Gene had just called to talk to the girls, but she told him they were asleep.

  Letta was crying and her voice was quivering as Margo told her what had just happened, but Margo had to cut the conversation short so that she could get back to the interview with Ron.

  A little while later, she called Dianna.

  “Sorry to wake you up, but Gene’s done it again,” Margo said.

  “You’re shitting me,” Dianna said.

  “Gene tried to kill me tonight. Do you remember where Prince of Peace Church is? Can you come out here? I need somebody with me.”

  “Margo, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Dianna grabbed her gun and threw a few things into a bag, not knowing how long Margo might need her to stay, but suspecting it could be up to a week. She sped up I-95 from her house in Fredericksburg and arrived about an hour later.

  Dianna parked her Lexus down the street from the church. As she went looking for Margo, the red flashing lights of law enforcement vehicles, including the state police bomb unit, lit up the black night.

  As Ron interviewed Margo, he got in and out of his car periodically to talk to the other officers, coming back with new questions and updates on the case.

  After returning from one of these breaks, he said, “We got a 911 call from Gene.”

  Ron turned up his police radio, so they could listen to the chatter. By then, the dispatchers had been handling a series of calls into the taped 911 line from Gene, who was at his house about three miles from the church. His first call came in at 12:40 AM.

  “He hung up,” the dispatcher kept saying. And then, “He’s called back.”

  Margo was having a hard time focusing on what Gene was doing, but she tried to stay engaged so that she could help police respond to the ongoing situation.

  Ron told Margo that police had evacuated some of the houses around Gene’s because they were worried he had explosives there, too. He had refused to come outside, so a hostage negotiator had been called in to talk to him.

  This was not only an unusual event for Prince William County, but it also caused a great deal of alarm about the potential public safety danger, so the police had alerted Paul Ebert, the county’s chief prosecutor, an elected official known as the commonwealth’s attorney, similar to a district attorney in other states.

  “We were very concerned about what bombs were out there,” Paul later said.

  Ron waited until Dianna arrived, then headed for Gene’s house.

  “Sit tight,” he told Margo.

  Margo was trembling, partly from the adrenaline that was still raging through her body and partly from the cool temperature of a Virginia night, so Dianna led her back to her Lexus and wrapped a blanket around Margo. Dianna didn’t really know what to say at a time like this, but she did her best to comfort her friend.

  Gene called Mary Ann at 11:44 PM and told her to meet him at the nearby 7-11. She got lost on the way, so she paged him and he called her back around midnight to give her directions. When she pulled in next to him at the 7-11, he was sitting in the van she’d rented, which he’d backed into one of the parking spots out front.

  He rolled down his window and told her to transfer all her belongings into the van and get in. She’d only handed him the bag with her new gun and ammunition when he blurted out, “Hurry up! We have to get out and follow them! We’re going to lose them!”

  Gene took off before Mary Ann even knew what was going on. She tried to get in her car fast enough to follow him, but he was long gone, so she drove back to the Holiday Inn to wait for him to call.

  From there, Gene sped home and called 911, reporting that he was hearing voices and that his estranged wife was trying to kill him.

  “She’s got my kids. She stole my money. She put me in jail. She ruined me and now she shoots at me and tries to blow me up,” he said. “. . . She’s been in my house. . . . Both of my vehicles are gone. I had to get a vehicle from a friend of mine and they probably thought I stole it.”

  Then Gene started talking about someone named Ed, who was in the house with him.

  “Ed says we’ve got to go now,” Gene said, then hung up.

  When Janice Hetzel, the police department’s hostage negotiator, called him back, Gene said, “Ed says I can’t talk to you anymore. This has gone far enough.”

  “Who is Ed?” she asked. “Please, Gene, tell me, who is Ed?”

  “Ed, Ed just comes and it is terrible,” Gene said, adding that he couldn’t come out of the house because Ed wouldn’t let him.

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause we’re afraid.”

  Gene demanded to talk to the police negotiator’s counterpart at Quantico and then, before he hung up, he said cryptically, “I grabbed a gun from some asshole, threw it down on the way out.”

  When he called back, he was speaking in a very different voice, with an aggressive, angry tone.

  “This i
s Ed. Give me that hostage negotiation bitch,” he said, then hung up again.

  The negotiator called him back, this time with Gene’s attorney Reid Weingarten on the line.

  “Gene?” Janice asked.

  “This is Ed,” Gene said. “That punk motherfucker ain’t doin’ nothin’ no more.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m in charge. You got that?”

  “Ed?” Janice asked.

  Reid jumped in. “Gene, I’m on the line, it’s Reid. Now what’s going on?”

  “What?” Gene said.

  “Can you hear us, Gene?” Janice asked.

  Gene answered in a soft, confused voice, as if he were in a dream. “What?”

  “Reid, do we know somebody named Ed?” Gene asked.

  “Huh? How does Ed fit in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  After Reid hung up, Gene told Janice he wanted help from his pastor.

  “Bill has to come and get rid of the evil,” he said. “. . . He’ll make the Ed stuff go away. . . . I think Ed’s—I hope—I think I locked Ed in the garage.”

  “You did?” Janice said. “That’s a good idea.”

  “What if Ed gets out of the garage?”

  “Gene, you know that is not going to happen.”

  Janice put the Reverend Bill Higgins on the line, who said he would meet Gene at Prince William Hospital, where Janice promised a doctor would check out Gene’s complaints of burning eyes, problems breathing, and chest pains.

  “I’m not going to hurt anybody and Ed’s not going to hurt anybody else,” Gene said. “Ed, Ed, Ed said it was OK to open the door. . . . Will you help make the evil go away?”

  “Yes,” the pastor replied.

  Ron McClelland, who was standing with the other officers outside Gene’s house during the long series of calls, said later that none of them believed Gene’s act. In fact, they were all laughing at it.

  “It was just so obvious that he was playing this role as Ed,” he said. “The role he was trying to come up with was pretty clever; it was the only chance he had, but he didn’t pull it off. . . . It was just ridiculous.”

  Gene surrendered at 4:13 AM. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance, then to jail.

  Meanwhile, Gene had left a number of items in his wake in and around the church, including a pair of leg shackles in the hallway, some handcuffs in the grass down the street, and a large black gym bag in Edwin’s office.

  Each of the bag’s four compartments was packed with a collection of obscure items, many of which were enclosed in their own plastic zipper-lock bags. Among the items was a bullet-proof vest labeled “E. A. Bennett,” a manual for a BB or pellet gun that looked like a semiautomatic pistol, and some pellets. The bag also contained a stethoscope, several syringes, four small bottles of saline solution, three costume eye masks with elastic straps, nine bandannas, two pairs of gloves, some ladies’ underwear, four drop cloths, baby wipes, a bottle of nail polish remover, a tube of Krazy Glue, two rolls of Ace bandages, some phone jacks, earplugs, a pair of handcuff keys, and a power converter cord that plugged into a car’s cigarette lighter.

  Packaged separately was a collection of matches, match heads, fish hooks, a razor blade, and detonator caps used in explosive devices. They also found keys they later learned would open a locker at the Woodbridge NOVA campus, where Margo worked, as well as lockers at the Alexandria, Manassas, and Annandale campuses.

  Outside the church, police found a backpack marked with three vertical slashes that looked like the Roman numeral III. (This was the first of five similar packs they would find in different locations. Each pack was labeled with its own set of vertical slashes from I to IIIIII, and contained its own set of particular items—swatches of tan carpet, of green-and-white striped dish towel, and of green towel. Each swatch was packaged separately in a plastic bag with strands of hair loosely attached.)

  Also in this particular pack were two pairs of latex gloves; some mail addressed to Eugene Bennett and Elizabeth Akers (Margo’s middle and maiden names); a quart-size plastic bag of a black mixture that turned out to contain ammonia-based fertilizer, fuel oil, and pyrodex, a black powder often used to make illegal pipe bombs; a set of keys marked “Reston”; and a note typed in capital letters that read, “Evidence—Evidence—Evidence. Do not disturb these items. Contact Lt. M. Bennett, NVCC Campus Police, 878-5744. Evidence—Evidence—Evidence.”

  Next to the backpack, police found a gray gym bag, which contained an on-off power switch, still in its original packaging; a pair of men’s black rain rubbers; an alarm clock; a paintbrush; and a bottle of ibuprofen.

  Over the next few weeks, as Margo heard more about the vast array of items that Gene had planted around the region, she could not help but draw on her FBI training to conjure up all kinds of theories about the horrors Gene had had in store for her, including a scenario reminiscent of a serial rapist she’d heard at Quantico that involved Krazy Glue-ing the victim’s eyelids shut. But she wouldn’t fully understand his scheme until the prosecutors pulled all the pieces together in their closing arguments at his trial seven months later.

  Around 3 AM, Margo called Kathy Farrell from Dianna’s car.

  “This is Margo; are you awake?”

  “Give me a minute,” Kathy said groggily, roused out of a deep sleep. “Yes?”

  “Gene tried to kill me tonight.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Once Kathy got her bearings, she told Margo to try to get some sleep and come to her office in the morning. By then, Kathy said she would have figured out what they should do to get a jump on the divorce and custody case.

  Ron returned briefly to tell Margo that he had gotten a search warrant for Gene’s house and to stay put for the time being. Margo climbed into the backseat and caught some light sleep for about forty-five minutes.

  Dianna was parked too far away for them to hear the loud enthusiasm of the bomb technicians and police officers who had gathered at the bottom of the hill in the church parking lot. After taking a sample of the black mixture from Gene’s bag for testing, they rendered the remaining two pounds safe by destroying it. They laid down a concrete strip, poured out the powder, lit a fuse, then whooped as they watched it go up in flames. The white doughy material in Edwin’s fanny pack turned out to be harmless Play-Doh.

  The two women had watched the sun come up before a police officer told them they were free to go.

  Back at the townhouse, Margo took a thirty-minute catnap and a shower, then called her boss to tell him she needed some time off to help the police with their investigation. He told her to take whatever time she needed.

  As Margo and Dianna were leaving for Kathy’s office, Carly and Letta came home with the girls after spending much of the night hidden away in the basement at Beth’s sister-in-law’s. Beth had taken them there so that no one, including Margo, would know where to find them.

  Lindsey was too young to understand what was going on, but Allison, who was very much aware of the danger Margo had been in, ran into her mother’s arms.

  Margo hugged each of her daughters tightly.

  “Your dad tried to hurt me last night, and now he’s in jail,” she told them.

  Allison would always remember how a female officer had come down the basement stairs in the middle of the night, silhouetted by the hallway light above, and asked if Gene had any guns in his house.

  “I know this is a big night for you,” the officer said. “I just want you to know everybody is safe, your mom is okay, and I don’t want you to worry because we’ve got more guns than he does.”

  Kathy had decided to petition the court for an emergency hearing to get temporary sole custody and a restraining order that would prevent Gene from contacting Margo or the girls until permanent custody arrangements could be made. Margo didn’t want Gene calling the house collect from jail.

  Kathy said she’d been wondering all these months why Gene had been dragging out the divorce proceedings. “I was waiting for the o
ther shoe to drop,” she said.

  “Well,” Margo replied, “it just dropped.”

  It was finally clear what Gene had been up to. His scheme would have negated the need for the three-day divorce nonjury trial, scheduled for July 15. Margo’s death would have made it irrelevant.

  Ron went to the hospital around 5 AM, where Gene kept making nonsensical statements, including a mumbled reference to room 116.

  “Don’t go there,” Gene said.

  “Why? Who’s there?” Ron asked.

  “Suzanne; it’s really bad.”

  “Where’s the room?”

  “Near I-95.”

  Ron went directly to the Holiday Inn near I-95 on Dumfries Road to see if the person registered in room 116 was okay. The front desk called the room and got Mary Ann on the phone. She’d finally fallen asleep, and now the phone had woken her up again.

  Mary Ann had called the police in the wee hours to report that her boss was missing, along with a gun she’d just purchased, which was now in his possession.

  At 8:15 that morning, when the dispatcher told Ron and his partner, Sam Walker, that Mary Ann had called, the detectives looked at each other, intrigued and yet puzzled by the new development.

  They immediately returned to the Holiday Inn and met with Mary Ann in her room. She told them her version of what had happened on Sunday, culminating with the strange meeting at 7-11 with her boss, Edwin Adams.

  Ron and Sam figured that the man she described was Gene Bennett, so they took her to the station and showed her a lineup of six male suspects’ booking photos. She pointed to Gene without hesitation.

  From there, Mary Ann took Ron to where she’d last seen Gene’s Dodge Dynasty, on Commerce Court in Manassas. After it had been impounded, investigators searched the trunk and found another blue backpack, this one labeled IIIIII.

  Ron was amazed at how easily Gene had manipulated Mary Ann into buying life insurance policies, cell phones, and a gun. She didn’t even seem shaken up. Initially, Ron thought that she was in on the scheme.