06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (3 page)

For months after the rape, Linda drifted, unable to concentrate or care about much of anything. In her junior year, she dropped out of school. Without a high school diploma or a car for transportation, she spent long hours at home, occasionally picking up a job baby-sitting. Later she applied at a nearby McDonald’s and was hired to work the counter part-time. When it came to the preoccupations of most girls her age, Linda had little enthusiasm. Especially when it came to dating. “I pretty much stayed off boys completely,” she said. “I stayed yards away from them.”

The truth was that Linda was never quite the same after the rape. It seemed her natural enthusiasm would be evermore underlaid with cynicism. “I felt like men wanted one thing from any woman—sex,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t trust them, any of them.”

That didn’t mean that men weren’t attracted to her. Linda
had developed into a desirable woman, and there was always one man or another expressing interest in her.

Finally, as months and then years passed, Linda relented. She did enjoy men. She enjoyed their company. They couldn’t all be bad. Assessing the situation with the same logical approach she employed to plot a way out of her family’s violence, Linda concluded the solution was really quite simple—she needed a chaperone. Her choice was easy. Her older brother, Gino, had already married and left the house. From then on, Daniel, three years her junior, became her protector. Every time she agreed to a date, she insisted on bringing her little brother along. “She’d say, ‘Come on with us. I don’t want to go out with this guy alone,’” recalled Daniel. “She was real skittish around men. She was real particular about who she saw.”

It was in January of 1984—when she was twenty—that Linda first heard the name James Bergstrom. A family friend who worked at Devoe—the same factory where her father once worked—said he wanted to introduce her to a shy co-worker. “He’s quiet, real quiet and gentlemanly,” Caesar told her. “You’ll like James.” One of Caesar’s relatives was celebrating a
quinceañeras
the following weekend, and he suggested they make that their first date.

It had been almost four years since the rape, but the nightmares still haunted her sleep, so—despite her friend’s confidence—Linda was worried. She decided to put off her decision until she had a chance to talk to her brother Gino, who had followed in his father’s footsteps and also worked at Devoe. That night she called Gino’s apartment and asked him, “Do you know James Bergstrom?”

“Sure,” said Gino. “James works at the plant. I’ve played basketball with him and had a few beers. He’s a nice guy. Quiet. But really a nice guy. You got nothin’ to worry about with him.”

The next time Caesar called, Linda said it was all right to give her telephone number to his friend.

A few days later, the phone rang. When her mother called her to answer it, Linda put the headset to her ear and said, “Hello.”

“Hi,” a soft-spoken man answered. “I’m James Bergstrom. Caesar said I should give you a call.”

That night on the phone, James told Linda a little about himself: that he was the oldest in a family of four children, that his father was once in the air force, that his mother was born in Greece, and that the Bergstroms were a staunchly Catholic family. He even mentioned that he was once an altar boy. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “I am.”

By the end of the conversation, they had agreed to a date the following Saturday night. Linda, however, preferred not to follow Caesar’s suggestion and attend the
quinceañeras
. “They’ll have Latin music, and I really like rock ’n’ roll,” she told him.

Instead, they decided, James would call for her at her home around seven and they would make plans then. “I like to be spontaneous,” Linda laughed.

“Me too,” said James, whose voice was quiet yet friendly.

After she hung up the phone, Linda realized she had forgotten to mention bringing Daniel along on the date. “Then I decided that was silly. I didn’t need Daniel. I knew where James worked, knew people who knew him,” she said. “As far as I could tell, I didn’t have any reason to be afraid.”

Of course, James Edward Bergstrom failed to mention many things that night, things that would have made Linda feel vastly less secure. For a young man—then, like Linda, just twenty—he already had many secrets.

As far as it went, all of what James said about himself and his family on the telephone that night was true. His father, James C., was born in Brooklyn, New York. He’d served in the air force from 1959 to 1971. His exploits were part of the family’s folklore: In military security, he had once traveled with a briefcase chained to his wrist, and there were still classified incidents he referred to in the obliquest terms, barred—he swore—by an oath to secrecy and national security. It was when he was stationed in Greece that James C. met his future bride, Irene Emanuel Lagoudaki, a seamstress, one afternoon when he dropped off a buddy who dated her older sister. James’s future parents kept company for about a year before they married.

Their first child, James Edward Bergstrom, was born in the 36th Tactical Hospital on the U.S. Air Force base in Bitburg, Germany, at four on a Saturday morning, April 6, 1963. A chubby infant, he was just eighteen inches long yet weighed nine pounds twelve ounces. Their second son, Christopher, came less than a year later, followed by their first daughter, Maria, in 1967, in Tripoli, Libya, where the family was then stationed. Five years later the Bergstroms moved back to the United States, where the baby of the family, Adelaide, was born.

Catholicism was the centerpiece of the Bergstrom household, but from the beginning they were far from a picture-perfect family. James C. had started drinking when he was a teenager, and when drunk, he had a blustering temper. “My father is an alcoholic. My mom was the only normal one,” said Adelaide about their family life. “She never did anything crazy, except letting it all go on.”

Unlike Linda’s father, however, James would say that when it came to their mother, his father’s rages were strictly verbal. Neither James nor Adelaide recalled an instance when their father physically abused his wife. Instead, according to James, he and his younger brother, Chris, were the prey of much of his father’s anger. Years later, he would recount how his father, with his mother screaming in the background,
would often strike him. “He hit me in the head a lot,” said James. “I remember he picked me up one time when I was five or six and he threw me on the floor from over his head. I thought I was going to die.”

When his father left the air force in 1971, the family settled in a small eastern Pennsylvania town. Handy with electronics, James C. secured a job with a local company. Later he hired on with a sign company in Peru, Indiana. One of his accounts was Notre Dame, where he was in charge of the football scoreboard. Because of his position, James C. was able to take the family to all the games. “It was great,” said James. But it was only a brief respite. Looking back, James would say that their home life was never what he would consider “quite normal.” “My father was an alcoholic, my mother is Greek, not Americanized,” said James. “All the time we were being raised, they always seemed different than other kids’ parents.”

If the Bergstroms were an odd couple, they would later insist that in the beginning their firstborn son appeared very normal. He was a good student. He loved sports, especially basketball and tennis. “James wasn’t a bad kid,” his mother lamented in her deep, brooding voice. Then she dismissed the man he became as beyond reason. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

Whatever happened, it undoubtedly had its roots in James’s early life. Looking back, he would remember it as a tumultuous and often painful time. His family moved often, never allowing him to form any long-term friendships. When he was seven he attended a parochial school in Pennsylvania where the nuns were strict and kept the girls and boys divided on opposite sides of the classrooms. That year he also became an altar boy, serving mass along with the parish’s priest.

It was when he was living in Peru, Indiana, that James would say everything began changing for him. That year he left a Catholic elementary school and enrolled in a public middle school. Immediately he felt like an outsider, as if the
other students were continually teasing and picking on him, just because he was new. “I never felt like I belonged,” he said. “I just didn’t fit in.”

Of his time at home in the Bergstrom household, James painted a portrait of an increasingly dysfunctional family. Sometimes during the summers, he would accompany his father to work. They traveled to Indianapolis and small towns around Peru where James C. rewired and repaired electrical signs. On the long drive home late at night, the older man would make James recite prayers over and over until they finally pulled into the parking lot of a tavern and James C. disappeared inside, leaving his son alone in the locked car. The then ten-year-old would wait for what felt like hours until his father returned to continue the journey home.

Along with his father’s alcoholism, many of the old-world traditions Irene Bergstrom brought with her from Greece made James feel his family was estranged from those of his friends. In their bedroom, James’s parents erected a small altar to the Virgin Mary. Every night the entire family spent twenty minutes or more saying the rosary, a ritualized link of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. “The church was always real important in our house,” said James. “And there were things you just didn’t talk about with our parents.”

In Indiana, about the time James was trying so desperately to fit in, he began sensing he was different, apart from those around him, for more personal reasons—reasons he could never discuss with his parents. There were the voices he heard in his head: “whispers, they called my name.” He would turn and no one was there. The voices made him afraid there was something wrong with him. Something bad. That fear was only reinforced when at the age of twelve he had a hallucination of a giant bat descending on him, landing on his chest and picking at his chin. He hit at it and screamed.

Sex was the other subject James Bergstrom instinctively knew he could never broach with his parents. At home his
mother would change the channel on the television if a scene became intimate. This censoring, however, only made her young son more curious. By the time he was eleven, James’s imagination of things sexual was flourishing. He found himself daydreaming often of what he knew was forbidden, and scenes on television sparked his imagination, especially depictions of women bound and gagged. One he often used as fodder for his fantasies was an episode of “It Takes a Thief” in which a woman was tied to a chair during a robbery. James never forgot how it seized his imagination as he sat mesmerized in front of the television. “That’s when I started thinking about things,” said James. “About someday doing that myself.”

At night alone in his bed, he would masturbate, envisioning images he watched on television or sometimes bra and panty models he studied on the slick pages of a Sears catalog. Each time he felt guilty, conflicted, when he thought of what his parents and the priest at church would say if they knew. While it isn’t unusual for adolescent boys to masturbate, it was what most titillated James that set him apart—fantasies of women in bondage.

Years later, a psychologist would analyze James Bergstrom and theorize that by early adolescence he had a history not unlike that of many serial rapists. He’d grown up in a middle-class family and claimed early physical and emotional abuse. He felt alienated from his family and had developed a strong imaginary world. And he had learned to rely on masturbating to deviant fantasies as a way to relieve tension.

The doctor would also speculate that more may have happened to James around the age of ten or eleven. Based on his dramatic metamorphosis, he would suggest that James—like 76 percent of all serial rapists—may have been sexually abused. If it did happen, James would maintain he had no such recollections. “I can’t remember anything,” he said later. “I’ve tried. Sometimes I think maybe, but I just don’t
know.” Of course, it would not be atypical for James, like so many other victims of abuse, to have blocked out such traumatic memories.

At the age of twelve, James Bergstrom had his first girlfriend, a pretty Catholic girl named Michelle. James threw himself into the relationship, doting on her every wish. Although they were both just children, the Bergstrom family saw it as an important relationship. “We thought he was going to marry her,” said his mother, Irene. But the following year, James’s father was laid off from his job and the family was again moving. This time to Houston. Michelle was left behind.

To James it must have felt that he had no roots: Yanked from school to school, he had no consistency; his father’s alcoholism was beyond his ability to understand or cope with it. “When he was drunk, all I could do was avoid him,” said James. “I’d hide.” By the time the Bergstroms arrived in the Houston area, James had become a reclusive adolescent, driven by the need to dominate even the smallest details, including having everything precisely in place in his room. Perhaps it was a way of building a pristine barrier to hide behind or a way to wrench some measure of restraint over his life. Whatever the case, he gradually found himself increasingly drawn to a mirage world where he—James Bergstrom—had power over another person, a woman—like those he saw on television—bound and gagged.

Pearland, Texas, where the Bergstroms settled, was founded in 1882, fifteen miles south of downtown Houston and twenty-five miles west of Galveston Bay on the original route of the Santa Fe railroad. The first streets were cut over flat ranch lands by six yoke of oxen on a grader in 1894. The first brick school was built in 1911. Like its big-city neighbor, the city is a product of aggressive land developers who advertised it as a “garden spot with Gulf breezes and no malaria.”

From the beginning, Pearland never quite lived up to its billing. The Christenson Land Corporation gave the town its name in the late 1890s when it sold off acreage hyped as pear orchards. But disease and insects continually attacked crops, and the 1900 hurricane that nearly leveled nearby Galveston ramshackled the town and ruined the orchards. A second land rush spearheaded by the Allison Richey company brought orange orchards, but those, too, failed to flourish and finally froze out in the winter of 1918. The town languished, never really taking root until it was fed, like most of Texas, by the big oil strikes of the 1930s.

Even more important for Houston’s southeast suburbs was space travel—the industry of the future—which mushroomed in the sixties when President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) mission control, south of
Houston on formerly barren acres bordering Clear Lake. Twenty-five miles in circumference, the lake empties into Galveston Bay and eventually feeds into the Gulf of Mexico. High-paying, high-tech industries blossomed, and Pearland, along with Friendswood, Clear Lake City, and the southern reaches of Houston, all profited. Prosperity brought strip shopping centers, subdivisions, honky-tonk bars, and fast-food restaurants.

In 1976 when the Bergstrom family arrived and bought a home on the west side of town, Pearland, like all of the Houston area, was entering the boom years. Oil prices were spiraling upward and the nearby Houston ship channel was thriving, annually importing and exporting millions of gallons of oil, gasoline, and petroleum-based chemicals. On brisk days when those advertised Gulf breezes did reach Pearland, they often brought with them the faint stench of the pipeline jungle of chemical plants that hug the coastline. Before long James C. had a slot at Texas Instruments in the burgeoning computer industry as a fabrication equipment engineer. Irene Bergstrom found a position as a seamstress with a chain of bridal-wear shops.

The one-story home the Bergstroms bought in August of that year was in a blue-collar yet prosperous subdivision called Corrigan. To their neighbors, the family was a quiet yet friendly addition. James’s father, who loved to work with his hands, often puttered with old televisions, phones, or small electrical appliances in the garage. More sociable than her reclusive husband, Irene Bergstrom always seemed happy to chat with neighbors. The four Bergstrom children were, from all appearances, not unlike the gang of others that lived up and down the surrounding blocks. James and his younger brother, Chris, loved sports and played often. James C. even raised a basketball backboard and hoop on the driveway for his sons. The two daughters, Maria and Adelaide, were attractive children, still in elementary school.

Few would have guessed the secrets the family hid inside their modest ranch house of off-white brick and chocolate brown trim.

One big secret, of course, was James C.’s drinking and the ways it affected all their lives. James, who was already troubled and confused, felt it continued to make a muddle of everything. As he would later describe it, the house was in continual chaos, never knowing when his father’s temper would throw everything into an uproar. Always, before bringing anyone home, he would ask his friends to wait outside while he went in to check out the current situation and to ask his mother for permission.

In the neighborhood, James developed a small clique of friends. Most were a year or two younger than he, closer to his brother, Chris’s, age, and all loved sports. They shot baskets, played baseball, sometimes tennis. A friend who grew up across the street from the Bergstroms remembers James as quiet and shy but a good athlete. Usually he would go out of his way to avoid a confrontation and rarely talked about his family, school, or anything but sports. Still there were times when the rage James was already masking inside broke loose: “James would get all hyped up. If he had a bad shot or didn’t like a call, he’d holler and get angry,” his friend remembers. “Really angry. More than the other kids. The truth was, James was competitive. He liked to win.”

At Pearland Junior High School that fall, James was a good student, yet a reserved, “kind of nerdy” teenager. He hung with a group considered out of the mainstream, and because he was so noticeably shy, he was often the target of practical jokes. One day, for instance, a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls surrounded him in the hallway, offering candies. James took one, amazed that they had sought him out. After he had eaten a few of the chocolate squares, they all giggled wildly. One girl, giddy as the rest, choked out the reason. The “candies” were actually chocolate-flavored laxatives.

James blushed, conscious of everyone in the hallway watching. Years later, his voice would take on a hard edge whenever he recounted the incident.

The following year, James entered Pearland High School, but little else changed. He was still treated as an outsider and easy prey. Later he would maintain just ambling through the hall could elicit taunts from the other students, who nicknamed him “Turtle” because a classmate announced he resembled one. Others dubbed him “Ichabod Crane” after the lanky and awkward character in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” because James was angular and thin, his acne-plagued face and neck so lean, his Adam’s apple protruded as round as a golf ball.

Though years later his fellow students would remember little of the taunts and in fact not even be able to place Bergstrom’s name, in his own mind James was notorious on the high school campus, the unpopular kid everyone made fun of. “When my name was mentioned at pep rallies, people laughed,” James said years later, his anger very near the surface. “When I walked between the buildings on campus, I’d get hit with water balloons.” There were times when he returned to his locker between classes and found his lock smeared with gum and ink.

Through all the real or imagined injustices, James Bergstrom maintained a surface of calm joviality. “He always acted real goofy and happy,” remembered one schoolmate. “James was timid. He never wanted to make anybody mad,” recalled another. Yet inside, James viewed the childish pranks as condemnation. It was as if the other students knew his secret, his belief there was something wrong with him. “They could sense I was different,” he said.

James Bergstrom’s saving grace was sports. In his sophomore year he joined the basketball team. Though only five feet ten inches and 140 pounds, James was fast and agile on the court. His teammates called him “Magic,” after Magic Johnson, because he made such improbable shots during practices. Yet Bergstrom rarely played when it counted, in the
games. Though he excelled in the seclusion of workouts, on center court with the bleachers packed, James Bergstrom was self-conscious and inhibited to the point of becoming bumbling.

“I was afraid people were watching me,” said James. “I was afraid about what they would say if I missed a shot.”

As in the past, in response to his self-doubts, James turned obsessively controlling. Everything he owned had to be precise and neat. If anything in his room or the blue 1974 Chevy Nova he bought by working part-time at Pizza Hut was out of place, he felt destined to a disappointing night on the court. “I got so superstitious that if anything wasn’t just right,” said James, “I’d just know that I wouldn’t play well in the game.”

Not unlike the other students in school, the members of the basketball team initially saw James as odd man out. With them, too, he was exceptionally quiet, never talking about anything remotely personal, like his family or what he hoped to someday do with his life. Instead, he spoke only of sports.

Still, James was eager to belong, and by his junior year, the others included him as a bona fide member of not only the team but the group of friends it encompassed. His best friends were two of the team’s outstanding players: Sam McDonald and Eddie Smith. Popular and with a bent toward girls and parties, Sam, six feet two inches and 180 pounds, came from a prominent Pearland family who ran a small grocery store not far from James’s house. Eddie, six feet five inches, had shaggy blond hair and friendly good looks. Both were sought after not only within the school but by the girls who flocked around the team. Although they were a year younger than James, they treated him like the little brother. In fact, years later Eddie would say that James was “more like the team’s mascot than one of the players.”

Despite his growing acceptance, the players, too, treated James as something of an amusement. Once Sam and a clique of others dangled him by a belt loop from a clothes hook in the locker room. It was common for other players to give James’s watch the “Timex Stress Test,” in which a team
member did everything from dropping it in a toilet, to sitting on it, to pounding it with a tennis shoe. Sometimes James would return after a game to find his locker emptied, his street clothes hidden while he was out on the court.

When Sam or Eddie had no other plans for a night out, they would often invite James. It was always understood that James would drive and buy the biggest portion of the beer or pay for more than his share of whatever expenses they incurred. “It was like everybody had girlfriends,” said Eddie. “If we weren’t going out with our girlfriends, we’d call up James.”

On the surface, Bergstrom took it all in good spirits. He never objected, never acted hurt no matter now hateful the practical joke or how humiliating the slight. “If it bothered him, he never let on,” said Eddie. But it did bother James, eating away under his skin. Inside, he kept a tally of each incident, each betrayal, and saw himself increasingly in the role of the victim. “They were supposed to be my friends,” he said, “but they never gave me any respect.”

There were, of course, perks involved in being a member of the basketball team. Principally, the players had an edge with the girls in school. Most were considered big men on the small-town high school campus. Yet here, too, Bergstrom was an exception. He rarely dated, appearing awkward and fumbling whenever a girl was around. “I was attracted to girls,” said James, sullenly. “But I never did anything. I was just such an unpopular person.”

“I never even remember James talking to or even trying to come on to a girl,” another member of the team would remark. “The thing about James was that he was just so timid,” said Eddie. “It was like he was afraid of girls or wasn’t interested in them.”

The one relationship James did have in high school was a short-lived attraction to a ninth grader while he was in the eleventh grade. James fawned over her as he had Michelle in Indiana, buying her whatever she wanted and showering her with attention. When she dropped him, James was despondent. “She was just using me,” he said, bitterly. “Because I
was on the team.” Later he would also blame his position in school as “the most unpopular guy in the class” for her defection. “She could see how everyone treated me.”

In retrospect, James would later contend that there were many in the school who undoubtedly assumed he was gay. In fact, in the ninth grade he was approached by several boys who invited him to one of their homes. Once there, one tried to corner him inside a closet and attempted to fondle him. “I ran as fast as I could and I never talked to them again,” Bergstrom would later maintain. For a fourteen-year-old boy, such an incident could provoke doubt about his masculinity. Though James maintained that didn’t happen—“I knew I was attracted to girls”—it did, however, make him envision himself as even more unappealing. “I figured there was no way I could be attractive to women if I was attractive to men.”

By the time James reached the end of his school years, he was a confused and angry teenager with many secrets: his father’s drinking; the imaginary voices that taunted him; the pain he harbored behind a smile as the school’s outcast; and the biggest secret of all—that he had already sexually molested his first victim.

The way Adelaide, his youngest sister, would recount events, it began when she was three and the youngster, a relation, was eight. It was then that James, who was thirteen, started frequent, sometimes nearly nightly, invasions of the bedroom the girls shared, right down the hall from the one in which James roomed with his brother, Chris.

“Nobody knows why we didn’t just go and tell, but we didn’t,” said Adelaide. “We just didn’t know how.”

At night, James would creep through the darkness, afraid his mother or father asleep down the hall would hear something and come to investigate. Once inside the bedroom, he inched his way toward the eight-year-old. “It went on all the time for five years,” said Adelaide, who describes James at home as so quiet and reclusive, he was nearly a ghostlike presence.

Adelaide would refuse to say just what she witnessed, but James would later tell a psychologist he had acted out his fantasies on the girl, tying her up, like the women he’d seen on television, and fondling her.

In the twisted dysfunction of her brother’s behavior, Adelaide became the girl’s guardian. It was her job to stay vigilant throughout the night, sleeping lightly and waking each time he came in. In the darkness, she moaned or rolled over, hoping James would skulk off to his own room.

“James would leave if I started to wake up,” she said. “I don’t think he wanted me to see that. I was the little sister, the one he played ball with. He was always fairly normal toward me. He never wanted me to see that side of him.”

The intrusions continued for many years. When the girl was a teenager, she and Adelaide went to the Bergstroms and asked them to install a lock on her door. Irene Bergstrom asked why, and accepted it when the girls mumbled a vague answer about wanting more privacy. “I guess we should have known something was wrong with James even then,” said Adelaide. “But you don’t want to think that your own brother is a pervert.”