Twisted Triangle

by Caitlin Rother

  Finally, the cross-examination Margo had been dreading began.

  After establishing that Margo had told Paul on direct that her relationship with Patsy had nothing to do with her divorce, Reid asked, “Yet you admitted to Mr. Ebert that you had an adulterous lesbian affair with Patricia Cornwell while living in that house with Mr. Bennett?”

  Margo had been analyzing each of his questions, weighing her words carefully.

  “No, I didn’t admit that to Mr. Ebert. I said I had two encounters with Ms. Cornwell.”

  This time it was Paul who asked for a bench conference. He told the judge that he didn’t believe that the details of Margo’s interaction with Patsy were material.

  “To start with, I don’t believe that a homosexual relationship is legally seen as adulterous,” Paul said. “In any event, to go into all this detail, I don’t think is appropriate.... She’s admitted she had some intimate contact with Ms. Cornwell.”

  Reid continued, asking, “Didn’t Gene complain to you that your office looked like a shrine to Patricia Cornwell?”

  Margo denied that Gene had made such a complaint and also that she’d replaced pictures of him and the children with photos of Patsy.

  “Is it your testimony that you had no idea that Gene was upset about your relationship with Patricia Cornwell?”

  “As far as I know, Gene was not aware of the contact I had with Patricia Cornwell until the criminal trial in June of 1993,” she said.

  From there, Reid attacked her motivation for reporting the home relocation scam to Tony Daniels the day after Gene served her with divorce papers.

  “Did you tell Tony Daniels that the reason you had waited so long to surface these allegations was because you were trying to ‘hold the marriage together’?”

  “Yes, I believe I told him that.”

  “And were you trying to hold the marriage together while you were having intimate contact with Patricia Cornwell?”

  The judge sustained Paul’s objection to the argumentative question.

  At this point, Reid switched his line of questioning to the kidnapping and the inevitable topic of the two nights Margo spent with Gene in the hotel, pointing out that they both drank wine, as if to imply these were romantic evenings.

  “And you prepared to make love with your husband?” he asked.

  Margo felt her blood pressure rising, but did her best to maintain her composure in front of the jury.

  “No, I did not make love with my husband,” she said, emphasizing the words “make love.”

  “Did you have intimate sexual relationship?”

  “I already testified that we had intimate contact.”

  On redirect, Paul asked Margo when Gene suggested that they have a threesome with another woman.

  “Earlier in our marriage he had indicated to me that it would be exciting for him if he watched me have sex with another woman.”

  “What was your reply to that suggestion?”

  “No way.”

  At the end of the day, the judge instructed the jury not to watch or read any news stories about the case.

  The prosecutors were grinning as Margo walked into Paul’s office.

  “You did a great job,” he said.

  Margo was all over the TV news that night, and although she didn’t watch it, a couple of her friends called to tell her how well she’d done.

  “I heard your voice crack and it sent chills up my spine,” her neighbor Beth said. “I started crying.”

  The next morning, the Washington Post article repeated Margo’s careful wording about her affair with Patsy, describing it as “two intimate encounters.” Unlike the previous feature story, which Margo had thought made her look silly, this one described her as “poised and confident” and speaking “in measured tones.” Margo was pleased when she eventually read it.

  Patsy’s agent, Esther Newberg, said only this about Margo’s testimony: “I find the whole thing typical of what’s going on in the American press today. I certainly hope this sells more books for Ms. Cornwell.”

  An editorial in the Potomac News underscored the feelings Margo experienced while she was under cross-examination. “Far too often, courts allow victims to be put on trial along with the accused. That’s what happened to Ms. Bennett when she was grilled about her intimate contact with Ms. Cornwell. . . . Criminals—not their victims—are the ones who should be on trial.”

  On day three of the trial, Monday, February 3, the Richmond Times-Dispatch put Gene and Margo into the same league “in the annals of troubled marriages” as John and Lorena Bobbitt.

  And on day four, the last seven prosecution witnesses testified before lunch.

  Among them was Jay Mason Jr., a firearms forensic scientist, whom Paul showed the same type of BB gun pictured in the manual police found in Gene’s black bag at the church. (Police never recovered the actual gun he had that night.)

  “Sir, in your expert opinion, is that weapon capable of inflicting serious bodily harm?” Paul asked.

  “Yes, it is,” the scientist said, adding that until recently the handgun, also known as an air gun, was used by the military and could fire BBs, .177-caliber pellets, or darts. “It’s designed to have the appearance of a government-model .45 pistol.”

  By the time the prosecution rested, it had successfully laid out enough evidence, tying it into Gene’s intricate and elaborate scheme, to show there was a method to his madness. The question was whether Gene’s attorneys could convince the jury that the madness was real enough—or in this case, irrational enough—to prove their insanity defense.

  At the end of the day, Margo asked Paul and Jim how they thought the prosecution’s case had gone.

  “It went as well as it possibly could have,” Jim replied. “We hit the ball, and it’s just a question of whether the jury is going to do the right thing.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Defense Incompetent Evil Ed

  Despite strenuous objections by the prosecution, which wanted to keep the defense from playing tapes of Gene’s three-plus hours of 911 calls the night of the church incident, Judge Potter decided that the jury could hear the recordings.

  Because it was already 4:30 PM, the jury heard only the first half hour of calls, finishing up the next morning. The judge cautioned that the tapes’ contents should be used only to consider Gene’s state of mind and his ability to form intent to commit the offenses for which he was on trial, not to prove the truth of his words.

  On the tapes, Gene repeatedly alternated between two conflicting personas: a confused, tired, and helpless victim and a sharp-tongued negotiator.

  Gene started off by reporting to the dispatcher, and then to Sergeant Reese, that his wife had sprayed him with Mace, shot at him, and was trying to blow him up and steal his kids.

  He volunteered to the sergeant that he was a former FBI agent who had gone to prison “for signing a false statement.”

  “You went to prison for that?”

  “Yeah, how ’bout that? They’re a little hard on FBI agents if you step on their dick, but that’s the way it goes. I fucked up so I had to pay the price. I just didn’t appreciate [my wife] rattin’ me out eight years after the fact.”

  As they were talking, one or more police cars pulled into Gene’s driveway, and he complained that someone was shining bright lights at his house.

  “Who’s here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m checking it. . . . Did you attach a bomb to the minister?”

  “No.”

  “Did you handcuff the minister to the bench?”

  “Look, I want to know who these people are in my front yard or we’re going to have a real serious problem. . . . Tell them to shut the lights off. I don’t need it.”

  Minutes later, the confused Gene was back on the line. “I can’t remember anything,” he said. “. . . I got permission to go to Richmond and I’m supposed to be there in the morning to talk to my lawyer. What the hell am I doing here? . . . I want the voices
to stop. I want some clarity. I want to talk to my babies.”

  Not long into the call, Sergeant Reese handed the phone over to the hostage negotiator, Janice Hetzel, who asked Gene what it would take to get him to come out.

  Back in negotiator mode, Gene told Janice to get a hold of his Army buddy, Donald Albracht, from the FBI’s Kansas City office and Steve Spruill from the Washington field office, “a voice I know.” Later, he said he didn’t trust that the local police weren’t amateurs or under the control of his wife, so he also demanded to talk to Dale Pruner, another Army buddy, who happened to be working as Quantico’s duty agent that night.

  When Janice said she wanted to work with Gene and get him medical attention for his respiratory problems, chest pain, and eye irritation, he snapped at her.

  “Save the bullshit, okay? I’ve been through the whole hostage negotiation thing, I’ve been through the SWAT thing. . . . If I was going to hurt somebody, I would’ve done it then, okay? . . . I’m not violent. I don’t want to hurt nobody. I don’t want to bother nobody. We just want to be left alone.”

  After Janice got Steve Spruill on the line, Steve tried to talk Gene into giving himself up, but Gene seemed more interested in complaining about Margo and her lesbian lifestyle.

  “Sounds like you’re in a jam, bud,” Steve said.

  “Nobody believed me before and nobody is going to believe me now. . . . I’m fighting, man. I’m fighting it.”

  “Who are you fighting?”

  “I’m fightin’ the demons, man. . . . She won last time, hands down, and now here we are again.”

  “You know what you’re doing right now, you’re helping her win . . . by holing yourself up in that house,” Steve said. “. . . You have caused everything that is happening to you . . . and it’s not going to go away.”

  “All right,” Gene said. “You tell your family I’m sorry we bothered you. . . . Ed says we’ve got to go now.”

  Reid talked to Gene on and off the recorded line, but the jury heard only what was on the tape.

  “Gene, I had a long talk with them,” Reid said. “They understand the background. . . . They understand the lesbian allegations and then how she’s gone berserk. They understand how manipulative she is.”

  Reid tried to defend his client to the negotiator: “Let me just say this. Ever since I have known him, and I have known him for years . . . there’s never been any indication whatsoever through this whole turmoil of him threatening anybody. This is really a function of his relationship with his wife. An unbelievably nasty dispute, but he is of no risk to anybody.”

  After Gene had hung up for the umpteenth time, Janice called back with Reid on the line. Gene’s voice was barely audible.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  “Gene, I think you’ve been drugged,” Reid said. “I think someone gave you something. . . . The guy who’s talking on the other end of the line is not the guy I know is you. . . . I have no idea about what happened tonight. I have no idea whether or not this is going to lead to a new legal predicament.”

  After putting on Gene’s former colleagues to testify what a methodical and impressive undercover agent he’d been in his prime, the defense then called its first expert, Michel Girodo, a professor from Ottawa, Canada, who had worked as a psychologist for more than twenty-five years. With a PhD in social personality psychology, he had done postdoctoral work in clinical psychology and forensic psychiatry, studied the psychological effects of undercover work on law enforcement officers, and served as a consultant for Canadian and U.S. agencies, including the FBI, where he’d worked in the same unit at Quantico with Margo for a time.

  Michel noted that undercover agents misrepresent themselves to suspects by using their personality as an “instrument” or “tool” to create a separate identity, clinically known as depersonalization or dissociation.

  “Dissociation is where you forcibly, through an act of will, decide to suppress who it is that you are for the moment and suddenly superimpose upon your sense of self a brand new identity. It occurs quickly, dramatically, and rapidly.”

  In some agents, he said, this false identity could be reactivated involuntarily, and in stressful situations, they could slip back and forth into different roles without conscious control, even more dramatically when the operation was stressful or potentially life threatening. Sometimes this could happen years after an operation was over.

  He said he would have psychiatric concerns about an agent who devoted much of a ten-year career to deep undercover work and also about a highly successful operative who constantly sought out such work.

  “Why is that?” Mark Hulkower asked.

  “Because, after a period of time, we have the impression that people need undercover work as much as sometimes drug users need a good shot. It stimulates them. They get excited. . . . Indeed, a personality disorder associated with long undercover work called narcissistic personality disorder, one in which people are self-indulgent, feed their personality, their egos, has arisen.”

  That, he added, is why undercover agents need to be very closely supervised, and because the level of supervision varies among agencies, he recommends that agents’ time spent undercover be limited.

  In the past fifteen years of his research, Michel said, he’d seen reactions to undercover work, including anxiety, depression, aches and pains, stomach problems, paranoia, phobias, and “psychotic thinking disturbances.” His research showed that these conditions occurred in an average of 20 percent of the agents he studied, compared with 12 percent of the general population.

  “In the same way that undercover work is unique, there’s a tremendous paradox about it all, so absurd, that the people who are really good at this work should be prevented from doing it.”

  On cross-examination, Jim asked Michel to estimate the percentage of agents he’d treated or evaluated who had later committed criminal or violent felony acts.

  “A very small percentage.”

  After explaining the legal standard in Virginia, Jim asked what percentage of this small group would be considered to be criminally insane.

  “Given your description and given the people that I have seen, not one of them would meet those conditions,” Michel said.

  Asked if these agents also engaged in a type of gamesmanship, by predicting how people would react, Michel said, “They have to be smarter than the criminals and anticipate two steps ahead of the criminal.”

  “So they always try to have a backup plan?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘backup plan,’ but they think of contingencies.”

  The next expert witness was psychiatrist Robert Bishop, whose diagnosis of Gene provided the backbone of the defense’s case.

  Dr. Bishop said that he worked at a psychiatric hospital in Falls Church, consulted for the FBI, and had conducted sanity hearings for criminal defendants when he was a Navy psychiatrist. He said he was asked to evaluate Gene in August 1996, a process that took ten to twelve hours, including more than three hours of interviews with Gene.

  Gene told him he’d had chronic, long-term insomnia since childhood and had suffered a number of closed head injuries with some periods of memory loss. Gene said he had reported these conditions to a girlfriend.

  (The doctor’s written evaluation of Gene said he was “physically disciplined” by his father, “often with a closed fist and frequently in the head. There were unprovoked beatings. He remembered fearing his father particularly when he was drinking.” However, Gene never mentioned any head injuries or abuse by his father to Margo, nor did he complain of insomnia.)

  Dr. Bishop said Gene had been referred to his partner, Dr. Alen Salerian, by the FBI’s Employee Assistance Program for chronic insomnia and stress in 1993. When Gene told him about the blackouts, Dr. Salerian recommended a sleep study.

  Gene told Dr. Bishop that he sometimes felt as though he could see himself from a distance, as though he were not real. He reported experiencing déjà vu and also jamais vu, wh
ereby a person in a familiar situation suddenly can’t recall where he is. The latter, Dr. Bishop explained, is usually associated with serious psychopathology.

  Gene told him that in late 1995 he started hearing a voice that identified itself as “Ed,” which the doctor described as “a dark, menacing voice that would at times command him to do things that he did not want to do, or do things that were inconsistent with his behavior.” Gene also said that since 1992 or 1993, he had occasionally heard his own thoughts out loud, “as if they were coming from outside his head.”

  “What kind of things did the voice tell him?” Mark asked.

  “The voice might tell him to shoplift something, . . . to keep detailed records of what he was doing and his behavior, . . . [or] not to go to church.”

  “Did the voice tell him to do things that Mr. Bennett didn’t do?”

  “At times, he was able to resist it, other times not. In fact, very consistent with people with dissociative disorders, which is the diagnosis that Mr. Bennett has, there are times when, under stress . . . he would be more prone or more apt to either lose time or to hear the voice.”

  He said Gene reported losing his memory for hours, sometimes for an entire day. During the weekend of the church incident, for example, he said Gene recalled little after dropping off his daughters with Margo until Allison called him Saturday at 10 PM, crying, saying she’d overheard her mother talking about moving, when he “came to.” Recalling only fragments of the next day, Gene said he remembered nothing after leaving the University of Richmond campus until he “came to” in a dark hallway, where he felt a burning sensation and his heart racing, and recognized his wife.

  At the end of the day, Jim talked to Margo about Gene’s claims.