Kathy Farrell told Margo not to read the newspaper or watch the TV news during the trial so as not to compromise her testimony, but Margo asked Letta to collect the papers every day in case she and the girls wanted to read them later. Margo stored them in her bedroom closet, out of the girls’ reach, and made sure to turn off the downstairs TV at night, although Lindsey later told her that she’d secretly sneak upstairs and turn on the TV in Margo’s bedroom. Letta videotaped all the TV news clips, but Margo couldn’t bring herself to watch any of them until 2006, during an interview for this book.
In the midst of all the stressful trial preparation, Margo crossed two other important legal milestones: her divorce decree was finalized, and her bankruptcy petition was granted.
On Monday, January 27, 1997, Judge Richard Potter held a hearing on the defense’s eleven pretrial motions at the Prince William County Judicial Center in Manassas, a city of about thirty-five thousand people and the site of the Civil War battle of Bull Run, thirty-five miles southwest of Washington DC.
Gene sat at the defense table, flanked by his four attorneys: Reid Weingarten, Mark Hulkower, Jeffrey Gans, and Raymond Patricco, all of whom worked for the high-powered law firm of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington DC.
The prosecutors told Margo that she didn’t have to show up until Tuesday, when the trial officially started with jury selection, so she did not attend.
The defense motions included a request to sever the trial into three proceedings so that charges relating to the events at the church, to the explosive materials, and to the allegations related to defrauding Mary Ann Khalifeh could be heard separately.
Reid, Gene’s lead attorney, argued that these charges were unrelated and prejudiced each other. But prosecutor Jim Willett maintained that they were tied into Gene’s overall plan.
The defense also requested to move the trial to another venue because of the overwhelming volume of negative publicity about Gene and, short of that, to sequester the jury.
“We’ve seen the Commonwealth proclaiming Mr. Bennett’s sane, that he’s a scam artist. We’ve seen internationally recognized author, Patricia Cornwell, saying that he’s a dangerous man, he should be locked up,” Reid said.
Of the eleven motions, the judge granted only two, including a request to cover the cost of fees for bringing in out-of-town witnesses. Reid had argued that Gene was too poor to pay for the services of his four attorneys, let alone the cost of witnesses. Apparently, Reid and his colleagues were representing Gene pro bono.
Judge Potter, noting that the news reports submitted by the defense came from such national publications as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Time, remarked, “One has to wonder where exactly the defendant would have the court transfer venue to?”
He decided the trial would proceed as scheduled the next day, Tuesday, starting with jury selection and opening statements.
Even though Margo wasn’t scheduled to testify until Wednesday, she had butterflies Monday night. Feeling apprehensive about the impending cross-examination, she slept poorly, plagued with anxiety dreams. In one of them, she was in the kitchen, where everything, including her clothes, were white. As she was going into the pantry, Gene, who was also dressed in white, popped his head out from behind the door and said, “Did you think I was going away?”
When she woke up, she followed her therapist’s advice and went back into her thought process to give the dream a good ending: she grabbed a knife and cut Gene’s throat.
Because she was a witness at the trial, Margo wasn’t allowed to sit in the courtroom until closing arguments, in case the prosecutors recalled her to the stand.
Nonetheless, Margo wanted—and felt she needed—to be in the courthouse so that she would be available to answer any questions Paul or Jim might have.
“If this man didn’t go to jail, I was going to die. Really quick,” Margo later said. “So it was important that I give them my total support. I really felt like they had put together a good case. The only thing I couldn’t predict was how the whole homosexual thing was going to impact the jury. You just never know when you make an emotional argument like that.”
For the duration of the trial, Margo and Dianna holed up in the commonwealth’s attorney’s lobby, one floor below the courtroom. They passed the time by talking and reading magazines, stretching their legs occasionally by walking around the courthouse.
On that first day, Margo and Dianna got to chatting with the first prosecution witness, David Corley, who’d found Gene’s handcuffs and mask in some grass near the church.
At one point, David came back from a walk, smiling.
“You owe me,” he said to Margo.
“Why?” she asked.
“None of those people out there knows what you look like, and they kept asking me if I’d seen you,” he said, referring to the reporters. “I said nope.”
He was right. As she and Dianna wandered around, Margo was amused that no one recognized her. She no longer looked like the gaunt, dehydrated woman whom the Washington Post had photographed outside the federal courthouse the day of her aborted testimony in 1993. Her weight was back to normal, and her hair was shorter and much blonder.
Judge Potter’s honey-colored, wood-paneled courtroom was rather intimate, seating as many people as could squeeze into the gallery’s three rows of pewlike benches.
Despite Gene’s later attempt to claim that he was confused throughout the proceedings, the prosecutors saw Gene attentively taking notes and whispering to his attorneys, looking coherent and very much involved in his own defense.
Before the judge started jury selection, he acknowledged that one of the defense witnesses, the Reverend Bill Higgins, was his pastor at the Manassas Baptist Church. No one objected. He never mentioned whether he’d ever met Gene there, although years later, he said he had not.
The judge read all nine charges to the jury pool, then announced that a panel of thirteen, including one alternate, would be chosen. He estimated that the trial would take six days.
Justice moves fast in Manassas, Virginia. Unlike in California, where choosing a jury can take days, the attorneys picked a panel—with twice as many women as men—in just two hours.
Nonetheless, Reid took the opportunity to mention Patricia Cornwell’s name several times, underscoring that her “lesbian relationship” with Margo had horrified his client.
After the lunch break, attorneys for both sides gave their opening statements, which took an hour and fifteen minutes.
Prosecutor Jim Willett started off by describing Gene as a master of his art, who was “trained in deception” by the FBI and used “wicked instruments of terrorism” for his own purposes.
“It is that training, along with his motive, that makes him one of the most dangerous individuals that you’ll ever see,” he said.
Jim said that this case was not about whether Gene was insane or had mental problems. “This is a case about hatred and revenge, pure and simple.”
He quickly summarized the events leading up to the church incident, characterizing Mary Ann as the “unwitting dupe” Gene had chosen to help carry out his scheme.
Going back over the history of the Bennetts’ marriage, the fraud case, and Margo’s affair with Patsy, Jim said, “He had in his own mind great reason to hate Marguerite Bennett. She left him. She broke up their marriage. She went into the bed of another woman, humiliated him, devastated him. . . . When he got out of prison, you bet he had a motive . . . to commit that crime.”
Jim outlined the kidnapping and subsequent trial, admitting up front that Margo had given false testimony and had had sex with Gene in a hotel, but only because she thought her children’s lives were in danger.
Jim cast doubt on the qualifications of the defense’s primary psychological expert, Dr. Bishop, saying that although he was “very, very qualified as a therapist,” he was not a forensic expert. Because there was no way to test whether Gene was telling the truth, he said, Dr. Bishop had to take Gene’s wor
d about not remembering Mary Ann or that he’d been hearing voices “from somebody named Ed.”
“He has to take the word of a man who stole from the FBI, a man who abducted his wife once, tried to abduct her again, abducted a minister, planted a bomb in a college campus, and a man whose job for twelve years with the FBI was to lie, was to convince people he was something he was not, to convince criminals that he wasn’t a law enforcement agent, but a criminal like themselves. I will ask you if you do not think that a man of such capability could fake mental illness.”
In contrast, Jim told the jury, the prosecution’s psychological expert, Stanton Samenow, had examined hundreds of people, including those who were insane and those who were faking insanity. “He will tell you he saw no evidence whatsoever that the defendant was insane at the time he committed these crimes. In fact, he will tell you that he was a man who was always in control, whose ideal in life was to control people.... [He] might need therapy, but [he] is not criminally insane.”
Reid Weingarten’s oratory style was far more theatrical than Jim’s.
“By the opening statements of Mr. Willett, you would think this could be a movie. But if you went to the movie theater and you saw this, you’d say it couldn’t happen like that. Nobody acts like this.”
Reid said that the defense would spend most of the trial trying to make sense of Gene’s actions, contending that he was not guilty by reason of insanity.
“We will not prove that Gene Bennett is a drooling lunatic and we don’t have to under the law,” he said. “What we will prove is that Gene Bennett . . . suffers from a mental illness that prevented him from understanding his acts and controlling his acts.”
Reid didn’t differ with the prosecution’s characterization of his client’s success as an undercover agent; however, he used that fact to bolster his argument that slipping back and forth between undercover personalities was the ultimate cause of Gene’s mental breakdown.
Reid said there would be no “gay bashing” or criticism of Margo for being a lesbian. Nonetheless, Reid proceeded to paint her as an evil wife who secretly plotted to steal Gene’s children and then turned him into the FBI for fraud so that she could get an upper hand in the custody battle, because in Virginia, he said, courts frowned on a lesbian lifestyle.
“If she was going to keep custody of her little girls, she had to destroy him and for all intents and purposes she was successful.”
Reid claimed that the Justice Department had not believed Margo’s kidnapping story back in 1993.
“Judge, I’ll object to that, because first of all I don’t think that’s factually accurate,” Jim said.
“We can prove that, Your Honor,” Reid retorted. “. . . They accepted a plea agreement with Gene whereby he was sentenced to twelve months. To be sure, if the Justice Department had concluded at that time that Margo Bennett had been kidnapped, they would not have accepted the deal that they did.”
Reid said Gene started losing time and hearing voices in prison, “when he never slept a wink,” and his insomnia only worsened after he got out.
“He was mistreated by the system. He was separated from his kids. It was a horrible year for Gene Bennett. And when he was released . . . [he] was a shell of his former self.”
Reid said Gene’s mental health steadily deteriorated as he lost “his career, his friends, his freedom and his wife.” His so-called scheme, Reid said, was a “caricature or a cartoon of undercover activity.... Overall, this is a disorganized, patternless, pointless, irrational scheme of events that had absolutely no chance of success,” which only guaranteed that “he would lose the only thing he cared about, his little girls.”
Reid said Gene suffered from a mental condition called disassociation, whereby his personality split and he involuntarily assumed a different state of consciousness. The events leading up to the night in the church did not constitute a sophisticated plot, as the prosecution argued, but rather “a cry of desperation by a very sick man.”
“We will prove that essentially what happened was Gene was out of his mind in the church and when Margo peppered him in the face, he was shocked back into reality.... When he realized he had been shot, he took off,” leaving his paraphernalia behind and calling 911.
Reid told the jury that when they listened to the 911 tape, “You will hear Gene Bennett in his own voice and you will hear a man who is painfully exhausted . . . painfully mixed up, painfully disorganized, a man who slips in and out of reality. You will hear Ed . . . the alternative personality who gives Gene his directions, and you will hear Gene dealing with it.”
In summation, he said, this case is “basically about a man who simply couldn’t face the prospect of his little girls being raised by lesbians. This is a case about acts that are so bizarre they could not have been committed by a sane man.”
Reid asked the jury to “return a fair and just verdict that reflects this fact, and allows his poor, tortured soul to begin to heal.”
After the judge excused the jury for the day, Jim and Paul returned to their office, looking pleased.
“How’d it go?” Margo asked.
“It’s early, but we’re off to a good start,” Paul said.
That night, Margo’s minister, Diane Lytle, called after watching the TV news and expressed concern about Jim’s statement that Margo “went into the bed of another woman.”
“They’re making you look to be a tainted woman,” Diane said.
Margo called Jim to relay the concerns, but he said the news media had taken the comment totally out of context.
“I’m making you out to be a survivor in this because that’s what you are, so you have to trust me,” he said.
Margo was relieved. She spent the rest of the evening mentally preparing for her testimony.
The next morning, Margo felt strong, powerful, and ready for battle as she put on her new trial outfit.
Because the media had already exposed the intimate details of her personal life, Margo felt less scared and vulnerable about exposing them to the jury.
“It made it easier to go into court, to testify wide open, showing them my emotions, my fear, the terror I went through, exposing everything, ripping open the curtains covering my emotions and my heart,” she said later.
Finally, it was time to go. As Margo walked to the courtroom upstairs, she could feel her heart pounding against her chest.
Margo strode into the packed courtroom, confident and assured, her head high, just before 10:30 AM. She intended to kick ass, and nothing and no one was going to stop her.
“I knew that I had to give good testimony in order for them to see that what Gene did to me was wrong, that this was not my fault,” she later said.
It helped Margo to see Dianna and Kathy sitting in the gallery for moral support.
For the four hours that Margo was on the witness stand, less than ten feet away from the judge and directly in front of the defense table, she did not look at Gene once. Just as she’d practiced visualizing with her therapist, she’d put him in the bell jar. The only time she even looked over in his direction was when Paul Ebert, who led her through her testimony, asked her to identify the defendant.
As Margo gave a blow-by-blow description of the church incident, she relived those moments of terror and her fight for survival all over again. Paul had her walk over to a large diagram, which illustrated the layout of the building, so she could point to where Gene had jumped out at her and where she’d dived behind the desk for cover.
“He was holding a gun in his hands and he was saying, ‘Margo, don’t fight me on this.’ He ran toward me—I was standing in this area right here—and I immediately raised my left hand with pepper spray and started spraying toward him,” she said, extending her arm to illustrate.
The TV cameras picked up this unscripted, dramatic moment and showed it on the local news that night.
As she recalled asking Edwin to pray for them, Margo’s voice cracked, and she almost started crying. This was the on
ly time she let the story get to her. But she was able to quickly regain her composure and move on.
Paul led her through her marriage to Gene, outlining how the fraud case came about and how she’d met Patsy. Then, acknowledging that she’d had intimate contact twice with the author, Margo described her separation from Gene, his indictment, then how he’d kidnapped her.
After Margo explained that Gene had left her in the van to meet with his attorney, Reid objected to the suggestion that he was somehow complicit in Gene’s actions. This was ironic considering that he’d indicated during his opening statement that the kidnapping had never occurred.
“Could you bring up that I had nothing to do with this? I mean, this is serious,” Reid asked the judge in a bench conference. “. . . I think there’s the potential that we have to move for mistrial.”
Judge Potter denied the motion and Margo returned to her story, acknowledging that she’d had sexual relations twice with Gene that week—before the defense could bring it up on cross-examination.
“Why did you do that?” Paul asked.
“Because he wanted to.”
Similarly, she explained why she’d testified falsely during Gene’s fraud trial, and pointed out that she met with federal agents immediately afterward.
“Did your attorneys have you run under a polygraph?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” Margo replied.
This exchange triggered an objection from Reid, which was sustained by the judge. Nonetheless, Reid again moved for a mistrial. The judge denied the motion, but did not direct the jury to ignore Margo’s response.
After lunch, Mark Hulkower made the same motion again, claiming that mention of the polygraph had “irreparably tainted these proceedings” because evidence that a defendant or a witness has taken a polygraph test was not admissible in Virginia courts. The judge denied the motion again. This issue would later become part of Gene’s appeal.
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