“Margo, you know he’s in jail,” Nancy said.
“I know that, but I’m still scared. I’m too afraid to go upstairs in my own house.”
“He’s not there. He’s not going to hurt you. We will deal with your fears, but you are safe in your own house right now.”
Margo’s panic eased after they agreed to meet the following Tuesday morning for two hours. She trusted Nancy as a professional and was relieved that she didn’t have to cope with this by herself any longer.
On the morning of her appointment, Patsy’s latest novel, Cause of Death, had just hit the stands. Margo faxed a copy of a New York Daily News story about the whole mess to Kathy Farrell with a wry note: “It’s a sensation-seeking rag article. Nonetheless, it’s fun to read over a cup of coffee. The only way I can get over this is to plow straight ahead. I see the shrink this morning from 9 AM to 11 AM. If she keeps me/commits me, I’ll have them call you.”
The story was mostly about Patsy and how “getting to be famous and very rich did her no favors,” according to Dot Jackson, an old friend of Patsy’s from the Charlotte Observer. Dot was quoted as saying, “I remember seeing Margo Bennett once in Patsy’s company, and Margo seemed to be a plain, quiet person, not the sort that you would associate with scandal.”
Margo vaguely remembered the name Dot Jackson and linked it to the woman who dreamed about the blood in Patsy’s bed. She didn’t appreciate being described that way, but she shrugged it off, thinking, “This woman doesn’t know me.”
Nancy quickly determined that Gene’s assault on Margo in 1993 had left her with more emotional damage than his most recent attack.
As Margo described the first incident, she could still see the taser in his hand and remember kicking at the strip on the garage door, fighting for her life while he held her down. But Nancy helped her realize the important difference between the two events.
“The first time, he had me A to Z. I had no control,” Margo said later. “He used everything he knew about me against me, totally violated any sense of trust I had in him. The second time, I was able to fight back and I won. I lived through it. I was able to protect myself. I was able to protect Edwin. I saved us. I was strong enough to come out of it. He didn’t get me in ’96.”
After the People magazine reporter showed up in the neighborhood, Margo called her parents to give them an idea of what to expect from the national media.
“You’re going to hear a lot of stuff,” she told her father. “Gene is making accusations that I was with another woman and, Dad, it’s true. It happened.”
Ed’s response surprised her: “Well, things happen in our lives,” he said. A decade earlier, he would have been shocked and appalled, but Margo figured that at sixty-nine, he’d gained a new perspective.
That said, after the tabloids got hold of the story a couple of weeks later, Ed wouldn’t let his wife, Dean, talk to anyone outside the family about the situation. In fact, Dean told Margo that he wouldn’t even let her talk about it to Dean’s youngest sister, Martha, who had read about the whole thing in the Star. After talking to her mother, Margo became worried that Dean wasn’t handling all the publicity well, so she called Martha to get her assessment.
Martha said that when she saw Gene’s booking photo, she thought, “My lord, he looks like a crazy man.”
Then Martha started choking up. “I don’t care who you sleep with, and you don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I am your aunt, you are my niece, and I love you and I will support you in anything that you want to do.”
“It means a lot to me to hear you say that,” Margo replied. After they hung up, she called her mother back and urged her to confide in Martha, regardless of what Ed had said.
Margo went to pick up the girls in Tuscaloosa on July 12 and stayed a few days. The People magazine story came out midway through her trip, so Margo bought a copy at the grocery store to show her parents. Referring to the love triangle with Patsy, the headline read, “Stranger Than Fiction.”
While her mother was getting her hair done on Saturday morning, July 13, Margo sat talking with her father in his truck outside the beauty shop.
“I don’t know how you have survived through this,” he told her.
“I guess I came from sturdy stock,” she said, which made her father chuckle.
That same week, an article came out in Newsweek about Patsy, noting that her new book was debuting at number one on the New York Times best-seller list. The second paragraph included the inevitable mention of their affair, saying Patsy was “in the middle of a made-for-tabloid scandal.”
Patsy told Newsweek she didn’t want to talk about the “alleged relationship with Marguerite,” saying, “My personal life is not anybody else’s business. . . . I don’t believe people should be defined by their sexuality. People can think what they want. There’s nothing I can do.”
The article said Newsweek “could not locate Marguerite,” which amused Margo. However, that fleeting comfort lasted only until she saw the huge story splashed across the Style section front of the Washington Post on July 28, with a headline that read, “The Ex Files: Here’s What Can Happen When Two Heavily Armed People Fall Out of Love. A Story of Sex, Guns and a Crime Novelist’s Nightmare.”
“Margo pulled out a gat and squeezed off a round. Damn near winged the sumbitch, too,” the article said to describe her actions in the church. “The story is all tabloid. In fact, for a respectable national newspaper like this one to dignify it with a big feature story containing mugshots and everything—well, for that to happen, the story would have to have a sophisticated theme featuring timeless universal truths and, ideally, Greek or Latin phrases. Here, then is the theme: Sometimes, homo sapiens behave very, very badly.”
Margo thought that the writer, Karl Vick, made light of the trauma she’d been through, as if she were a character in a theatrical farce. But she was most hurt by the way he’d made her look like such a terrible mother. “It made me seem very careless, uncaring, and crazy on my own,” she later said. The only redeeming thing she could say about the article was that it didn’t portray her as a victim.
Margo was never tempted to call the newspapers to tell her side of the story. “I felt that truly, in time, the information would get out, and I believed I’d be vindicated,” she said.
Gene’s preliminary hearing was scheduled for August 13. Margo met with Jim Willett and his boss, Paul Ebert, for the first time about two weeks before the hearing.
Paul had the corner office, which was much larger than all the other prosecutors’, and was strewn with piles of papers and books. Margo had to fight back laughter when she saw a joke sign on his desk, featuring a phony classified ad that read, “Woman that can cook and clean fish, tie flies, and owns boat and motor. Please send picture of boat and motor.”
At first she thought he was a sexist old Southern redneck, but she soon learned that he was just a boating enthusiast with a playful sense of humor. Jim was far more straitlaced, but they both took their jobs very seriously.
The two prosecutors reassured Margo that they believed her story. They thought Gene was very dangerous, and they were going to do their best to put him away for a long time. It seemed important to them that she trust them to handle this case, because they obviously needed her to be a strong prosecution witness. As they asked her a series of questions, they gained her trust in short order.
“How would you answer if we asked you, ‘Have you ever committed perjury?’ ” Paul asked.
“I would tell you no.”
Jim and Paul both looked surprised.
“I would tell you no because by law I never have. My testimony was coerced, and that’s not perjury.”
After the two prosecutors exchanged glances, Margo could perceive their heightened sense of respect for her. Yes, she did know her stuff.
“What would you say if I asked you, ‘Have you ever lied under oath?’ ” Paul asked.
“I would say yes, I have.”
“W
hy?”
“Because I thought my children’s lives depended on it.”
“What would you say if we asked you if you’d ever had a homosexual relationship?”
“I would tell you no, I haven’t had a relationship, but I have had two intimate encounters with Patricia Cornwell.”
“You’re prepared to admit that?” Paul asked.
“Yes, I am.”
Paul and Jim started talking as if Margo weren’t there, saying they didn’t want to divert the judge’s attention with the divorce and the emotionally charged nature of her homosexual affair because they felt it would be a diversion from the central issue—the crimes Gene had just committed. For that reason, they thought Margo shouldn’t testify at the preliminary hearing, only at the trial.
“I think you’re right,” she interjected.
After that, the three of them discussed how best to bring out the homosexuality issue in court at trial.
“Let us be the ones to bring this issue out, take the wind out of their sails, and make sure the jury understands that we’re not trying to hide anything,” Jim said.
When the meeting was over, Margo felt relieved that she didn’t have to testify at the hearing and would be able to put off being grilled by Gene’s attorneys. She also felt reassured to have such competent and dedicated lawyers on her side.
During the ninety-minute preliminary hearing before Judge Thomas Gallagher, the prosecutors called Edwin to testify and laid out the skeleton of their abduction and explosives case, which was enough to certify the five felony charges against Gene and send the case to the grand jury for a possible indictment.
Gene’s attorney Reid Weingarten spoke to reporters after the hearing. “The center of this case is Gene Bennett’s effort to protect his children,” Reid said. “Twenty years in the FBI did not prepare him for his wife’s alternative lifestyle, a lifestyle he believed to be abnormal and presented a danger to his little girls.”
On September 3, the grand jury indicted Gene on six charges, after adding a new one—that he had obtained more than $200 under “false pretenses” from Mary Ann.
Despite this good news, Margo’s financial house imploded in October, when a creditor sent an order to NOVA to garnishee her wages. She immediately met with an attorney and filed for Chapter 7 personal bankruptcy in Alexandria. Her total debt was approaching $500,000, including more than $150,000 in attorneys’ fees. Despite the bankruptcy filing, she continued to make small payments to Brian Gettings, Frank Dunham, and Kathy Farrell, and before she was done paying them, she’d spent all her retirement money.
That fall, Margo met about a dozen times with Jim Willett, often together with Paul, as they built their case for trial in January.
In the beginning, Margo talked to Jim with her arms crossed, her body language self-protective and her voice timid. Jim saw before him a very frightened woman who was trying to be brave and do what she could to help them.
“Her life was on the edge, and she was holding on as best she could. She wasn’t going to give up, but it was an extremely precarious position,” Jim later said. “She had to put her faith in the system, in me, and in the jury, and the system isn’t perfect.”
Paul and Jim both came to respect and admire her courage and self-discipline as she tried to hold her family together amid the media onslaught.
“She was really, really alone at that place in her life at that time,” Jim said. “I’ve told her on more than one occasion how great she did, how courageous she was, and how valuable her contribution to the success of the prosecution was.”
Paul, who had tried the John and Lorena Bobbitt penis-severing case in the same courthouse three years earlier, felt that the Bennett case was more complex than any other he’d prosecuted. One of the biggest challenges was to decide which of the several hundred pieces of physical evidence should be presented to the jury, and in what order, so as not to cause confusion.
“It was so convoluted, I was concerned whether the jury was going to be able to grasp the whole picture,” Paul later said.
Their other concern was the judge they’d been assigned. After serving in the ROTC in college, Richard Potter went to law school and was promoted to second lieutenant, working briefly in Army intelligence during the Vietnam War before practicing law for sixteen years, including twelve representing criminal defendants. As a judge, however, he had a reputation for being unpredictable.
Margo was officially awarded full custody of the girls at the final custody hearing on November 18, when she also arranged for a social worker to review Gene’s letters to the girls before sending them on. Margo didn’t want to be accused again of blocking communication, but she also didn’t want Gene to have their address. The property portion of the divorce had been severed from the custody case because Margo was still going through bankruptcy.
Afterward, Allison wrote a pithy letter demanding accountability from her father for what he’d done to her mother. Margo read the letter and suggested that Allison wait until after the trial to send it.
“If he’s found not guilty, he gets to come home,” Margo said.
“Good point, Mom,” Allison replied.
Margo shook her head and chuckled at her precocious ten-year-old.
Later that month, Margo was still wondering why police had not filed any attempted murder charges, so she called Detective Ron McClelland.
“I realize that Gene kidnapped Edwin, but there’s nothing in this about what he intended to do to me. Is that going to be addressed?” she asked.
“We’re looking into that,” Ron said. “We’re going to do something. I just don’t know what.”
On December 2, Ron told Margo that the grand jury had indicted Gene on three new charges: the attempted murder of Margo, possession of explosive materials, and possession and/or manufacture of a bomb.
Not long after the grand jury issued its final indictment, Paul said he’d been unofficially contacted by Gene’s defense attorneys, who were feeling him out about a plea bargain. Paul asked Margo how she felt in case they made an official offer.
Margo wasn’t opposed to a plea, but she thought that the last agreement let Gene off far too easily. Margo was also convinced that Gene would come after her again if he could, so she wanted to make sure he was a very old man once he was released from prison.
“The only way I’d be comfortable with a plea would be if he was gone for a long time,” she said.
“I was thinking thirty years,” Paul said.
“Thirty years would be okay.”
Margo was interviewed twice by the prosecution’s psychological expert, Stanton Samenow, for a total of three hours.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“I guess I’m paranoid, because it bothers me that I can’t go in a room without worrying if someone is on the other side of the door.”
“Paranoia isn’t really paranoia if it’s based in reality.”
“Well, I guess I’m doing okay then.”
Margo had received a similar psychological evaluation during the custody battle, shortly before the church incident.
Clinical psychologist Gail Nelson said Margo’s paranoia registered at a level that occurred in only 10.4 percent of women. “In the context of this custody litigation, and considering Mrs. Bennett’s description of her abduction and threat by Mr. Bennett, it is my opinion that affirmative responses on this scale reflect reality-based concerns, and not any psychopathology on Mrs. Bennett’s part,” she wrote.
“Mrs. Bennett’s liability as a primary caretaker is primarily her tendency towards submissiveness and dependency. These tendencies prevent her from making appropriate decisions and inhibit her ability to be confrontive towards others who may attempt to influence her actions and feelings. It is probable that because her mother was in a passive role in the family, Mrs. Bennett learned these traits early in life. They have affected her intimate relationships and her self-esteem in a negative way.”
Margo continued to work with
therapist Nancy Davis to prepare herself to testify at the trial. Following Nancy’s advice to wear a new outfit that would make her feel strong and powerful, Margo bought a bright red silk blouse and a navy-blue skirt suit.
Nancy also told her to form a picture of Gene in her mind, then make him smaller and smaller. Margo visualized a tiny Gene Bennett, jumping up and down and stamping his feet, throwing a temper tantrum because he was so small.
Then Nancy told her to put him away somewhere so he couldn’t get out. Margo pictured putting a bell jar over little Gene at the defense table, where he would be contained and couldn’t bother her.
Next Nancy said, “Think about someone who is always there for you. Picture that person.”
Margo saw Jesus in her mind’s eye.
“Picture him giving you something, what you need to get through this.”
Margo visualized Jesus holding a cardboard box the size of a laptop computer. He carried it over and held it out to her with both hands. The flaps were open and the box was empty.
“You already have everything you need to get through this,” Jesus said.
And with that, Margo knew she was ready.
Chapter Twelve
Prosecution Crazy Like a Fox
In the week before the trial started, Margo met with her daughters’ teachers, principal, and school counselor to discuss what they could do to shield the girls from publicity and taunting by their classmates. Margo told the officials quite candidly that she was prepared to testify that she’d had two intimate encounters with Patricia Cornwell. She also said she expected media scrutiny to be intense.
“Please watch out for my children,” she said.
The school officials listened to her intently and agreed to keep the newspapers out of the library during the trial. The day it started, Allison’s fourth-grade teacher promptly shut off the classroom television as soon as she saw a story about Patsy and the Bennett case featured on Good Morning America.
Twisted Triangle Page 21
