06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (32 page)

Carefully Bergstrom backtracked, correcting everything, apologizing over and over. In a few short hours, Gallier had
taught his prisoner to need his approval, and he wanted him to know that he couldn’t be fooled.

Before long, Bergstrom admitted all three attacks in which the officers had ID: Sandy Colyard, Andrea Hoggen, and Jenny Karr. Carefully Gallier worked the questioning around until Bergstrom admitted his intention was to rape each of the women. Always in the back of Gallier’s mind was what the prosecution would need when the case entered a courtroom.

Then, as he saw the lines of black ink collecting on Fidelibus’s typewriter, Gallier turned the conversation to a less certain subject—the rape of Maggie Heller.

“That’s the woman on Edgebrook Drive,” Gallier prompted.

“Yeah, I remember her,” Bergstrom piped in. “The woman who was washing clothes…”

At 7:30
P.M.
Linda arrived home with Ashley. She’d made it a point for weeks to stay away as much as possible, giving James ample room to trap himself. But now she walked in and found the apartment in chaos. Kitchen drawers were open and emptied onto the floor; in the bedroom, clothes were scattered about. To Linda it could only mean one thing: Somehow James had learned that she’d made plans to run the next morning, leaving him and all the pain behind. She was terrified. She half expected him to jump out at her from a closet, his fists clenched, the veins in his neck protruding in anger. Then she saw the message light flashing on the answering machine. She hit the button.

“Linda, it’s me,” said her husband’s voice. “Please call.”

Linda dialed the number James had left on the machine, her heart pounding against her eardrums.

“Clear Lake Substation,” a voice asked.

“Is James Bergstrom there?” she asked, trying not to become hopeful. “This is his wife.’

“I’ve been arrested,” James said when he answered. “Can you bring Ashley here? This may be the last time I get to
hold her. Things got out of hand. You’ll never know how bad.”

Finally,
Linda thought.
It’s over.

It was 8:45
P.M.
when Linda entered the Clear Lake Substation. Ashley on her hip, Linda found James seated with two men in the conference room.

“Are you Linda?” Frank Fidelibus asked, walking out to meet her.

“Yeah,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Rusty’s got him talking pretty good,” he said. “Come on in.”

The two cops walked to the other side of the room to watch, leaving Linda and James alone. Gallier neither looked up nor acknowledged Linda, anxious to be sure James Bergstrom never discovered she’d been the instrument of his capture. As he and Fidelibus watched, the Bergstroms talked. It was easy to sense the frigid cold that accompanied Linda into the room, but Gallier noticed James perceived none of it. It was obvious Bergstrom had no idea how his wife or any other human being besides himself felt.

James reached out for Linda, but she pulled away. Ashley ran to her father. James picked her up and held her in his arms. “What should I tell them?” he asked Linda.

“Everything,” she said. “Tell them everything.”

Before Linda arrived, James had admitted three attempted sexual assaults and one rape: that of Maggie Heller. Letting him talk to Linda was a risky call. He’d been cooperating well. They didn’t know how a meeting with Linda would affect him. Gallier and Fidelibus were both relieved when, after Linda’s departure, James talked as freely as before.

As the evening melted into night, Gallier continued to play Bergstrom like a harp, plucking each string precisely far enough to get the desired results. He worked Bergstrom’s emotions, tearing him down, then building him up. One by one, accounts of other attacks they’d suspected him of eked
out, detail by detail. Fidelibus clicked away on the typewriter, recording each word of Bergstrom’s recounting of the rape of Jesse Neal, the waitress. As the night wore on, James appeared tired yet cold and unemotional, describing in clinical terms what he did to each of the women and how they reacted. He continually maintained he hadn’t really hurt the women because he hadn’t been physically violent with them. To the two officers it sometimes seemed as if Bergstrom had thought he’d been on a date with the women. Though he’d held a gun to their heads or a knife to their throats, in his mind they were willing participants.

Sometimes when the atmosphere in the room became too heavy, Gallier sensed Bergstrom straying into his other world. The HPD sergeant let Bergstrom drift off, his eyes glazing over. Gallier knew he was recounting one of the rapes in his mind. “He kept mumbling about some woman with long red fingernails,” Gallier recalled later. “It was like he was reliving that rape in his mind. We didn’t know yet who she was.”

Always Bergstrom returned from his fantasies refreshed and eager to talk.

Led by Gallier, Bergstrom confessed to the ten cases they’d most suspected him of, including the attempted rapes of Andrea Hoggen, Sandy Colyard, and Jenny Karr, and the rapes of Jesse Neal, the waitress, and—the case that haunted Gallier the most—Maggie Heller, the Christian woman who’d cried in his office.

Then Gallier adopted a new tack. He felt certain there were other rapes out there—including the woman with the red nails. He needed to know who these women were. He needed Bergstrom to pick up the momentum of the confession on his own. “Now, James, you’re gonna get charged here tonight. You’re not getting out of this,” Gallier said. “It’s not going away. You’re going to prison.”

Bergstrom looked down at his hands.

“You’re telling me you didn’t hurt anyone. Let me explain it to you. You see these women for a few minutes. I see them
forever,” Gallier said, sternly. “They’re afraid to leave their houses or go out at night because an unknown man with a mask attacked them. Think about how they feel.”

Bergstrom looked unmoved, almost curious. He appeared as surprised as if Gallier had seriously claimed the moon was fashioned from green cheese.

“At some point, I’m going to be up on a witness stand,” Gallier went on. “What will I tell them? That you’re an arrogant son of a bitch who doesn’t care about anybody? That you didn’t think you’d done anything wrong? What will you do when you get out of jail? Do this again? Do you feel any remorse?”

Picking up on Gallier’s clue, Bergstrom looked sorrowfully down at his hands, then rubbed his eyes until they were rimmed in red. “Yes, I’m remorseful,” Bergstrom said.

“You should do something to let all these women know who you are, James, so they don’t have nightmares anymore. So that they can get on with the healing process of their lives. So that you can get on with the healing process of your life.”

James Bergstrom looked warily at Gallier. The officer had implied confession might be good for more than his soul. Then he confessed to two cases Gallier had long since written off as not his: the rapes of Cindy McKenzie, the saleswoman with the long red fingernails who’d been attacked as she packed for a routine business trip to Corpus Christi, and of Kimberly Greenmen.

“There was this woman. She had a little girl who was hiding in the kitchen. She must have been about two.” Bergstrom began talking about the attack on Greenmen. “I think she’d been paying bills…”

By the time Bergstrom finished, it was well after midnight and he’d confessed to four rapes and a string of ten specific attempted rapes. In addition, he talked of other attacks, including two rapes Gallier and Fidelibus couldn’t match up with any existing cases. The officers assumed the victims were most likely women who had never reported their assaults.

As the night drew to an end, Gallier and Fidelibus felt certain Bergstrom was undoubtedly responsible for more rapes and attempted rapes than they’d ever know. There had been so many victims that, in the muddle of his fantasy world, James Bergstrom had a difficult time sorting out the different women he’d assaulted. When Gallier asked him how many women he estimated he’d attacked in Houston during the previous two years, unblinkingly Bergstrom guessed as many as thirty. In unspecific terms, he then went on to admit committing one rape in Washington State.

Fidelibus tapped the typewritten sheets of James Bergstrom’s confession on the table and handed it to Rusty Gallier. It had come down to one final question: Would James sign it? Gallier looked the pages over. Without a signature, in a courtroom it would be the two officers’ word against Bergstrom’s. Gallier handed the stack of paper to James and waited.

“We need you to read these and then sign each page,” Gallier explained calmly.

“Should I?” Bergstrom asked.

“That’s up to you,” Gallier said. “I’m not here to give you legal advice. I’m here for your victims. Is it all true?”

“Yeah. It is.”

Bergstrom stared at the sheets a moment longer, then paged through them, reading slowly. When he was done he signed each page. Then he handed the stack to Gallier.

“Thanks,” Gallier said, smiling. It was the biggest serial rape case he’d ever helped crack. It cleared more cases than any single arrest he’d ever made. The next day Gallier and Fidelibus would videotape Bergstrom’s confession for the record, and James Bergstrom would be indicted on fifteen felony counts including four rapes.

Yet none of the officers felt like a hero. Everyone agreed that if there was credit, it belonged to Linda Bergstrom. “We probably would have gotten James eventually,” Gallier would say later. “But it may have been a long time. He was cagier than any rapist I’d tracked before. If she hadn’t alerted
us to him, there could have been a lot more victims before he ever saw the inside of a cell.”

Gallier and Fidelibus were exhausted when they checked their prisoner in for the night at the county jail. Sergeant Charles Dunn had clocked thirty-two hours overtime since his landlord had called him Sunday night; he didn’t regret an hour of it. Now all that remained was to see that Bergstrom’s confessions held up in court. Though they didn’t discuss it, each officer was aware of the revolving door of Texas prisons. It was general knowledge that the state’s parole board, under court order to stop prison overcrowding, released prisoners serving as little as a month for every year of their sentence. Unless the jury came down hard on Bergstrom, he’d be out in no time. None of them doubted that he’d soon revert to his old ways, free to rape again.

When the first newspaper account of Bergstrom’s arrest ran in the
Houston Post
on Thursday, April 2, 1992, it appeared Linda might be able to maintain the anonymity she so desired. Under the headline “Officers Hope to ID Suspect as Serial Rapist,” Gallier was quoted as saying police had known a serial rapist prowled Houston’s southern suburbs since the previous December but that they hadn’t pinned Bergstrom as the attacker until he began posing as a water tester in March.

But by the following day, the
Post
carried a new story: one of the wife who had turned in her rapist husband. Though she’d told no one, somehow there’d been a leak. The article quoted residents at Painter’s Mill, the Bergstroms’ complex, who’d connected their neighbor’s arrest with the flyer the apartment’s management had circulated after the rape of Maggie Heller.

For days, newspaper and television reporters canvassed Painter’s Mill, interviewing neighbors and apartment personnel about James and Linda Bergstrom. Some maintained James seemed a quiet, shy family man with a young daughter and wife, not the type one would imagine as a serial rapist. They pointed out that he had a good-paying job. Others mentioned fighting and shouting they’d heard emanating from the Bergstroms’ apartment.

As Linda knew it would, the phone rang in her apartment the afternoon the story broke.

“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here,” James Bergstrom said, seething from a phone at the Harris County Jail. “You did this to me. You’re the one who turned me in.”

The two camps—prosecution and defense—formed quickly after James Bergstrom’s arrest. Chuck Rosenthal, prematurely silver-haired and chronically rumpled but one of the district attorney’s most effective assistants, took over for the state. A division chief with seventeen years of experience, Rosenthal, who routinely handled high-profile homicides, just happened to be on intake at the courthouse the day the indictments against Bergstrom were filed. He’d stuck with the case after interviewing the victims. “The most difficult thing in rape cases is establishing a rapport with the victims,” Rosenthal would say later. “I didn’t want them to think they were being passed around from lawyer to lawyer.”

Still it was an uncomfortable case for the prosecutor. Rosenthal had grown up in Texas’s valley, near the Mexican border, in a family that didn’t discuss such personal matters. “I had a difficult time talking to the women about the specifics of what happened,” he’d explain later. “The way I was raised, women didn’t talk about that kind of thing unless it’s a doctor-patient relationship.”

Yet as Rosenthal investigated the case, his first prosecution of a serial rapist, he found it fascinating. “Bergstrom lacked that gene that lets him know other people hurt,” he’d say. “The one that it takes to control sexual impulses. There was just something inherently wrong with the guy.”

Danny Easterling became Rosenthal’s adversary when the court appointed him to take on Bergstrom’s case. A tall, lanky redhead who resembles a youngish Red Skelton, the thirty-seven-year-old Easterling had been a defense attorney for eleven years, handling everything from murder cases to traffic tickets. It didn’t take long for him to see that this particular client was an attorney’s nightmare. “Any competent defense attorney would not have let him give the type of statements and confessions he did,” Easterling said later. “He was talking to the police for a week before I was called in.”

Ironically, before Rosenthal and Easterling would battle it out in court, there would be another fight, one with Linda at the center. Since the day her story first hit the newspaper, she’d been besieged by requests for interviews by reporters. In fact, the story of the serial rapist turned in by his wife had made headlines off and on all spring.

For Linda, the attention was unwanted. Afraid James Bergstrom would one day want revenge, she would have preferred remaining in the background, allowing Gallier and the other officers to take the credit for her husband’s arrest. But once her story broke in the papers and that option was snatched away, she grudgingly decided to raise questions about the nightmare she’d lived. How could police have ignored her for so long? In a Sunday
Houston Chronicle
article, she asked: “Why wouldn’t they listen?” Linda appeared on “A Current Affair” questioning why not only police but James’s family had failed to come to her aide.
Ladies’ Home Journal, People,
and other magazines queued up for interviews. “The Maury Povich Show” scheduled her for a segment, and offers from TV movie producers flooded in.

Then the same criminal justice system that had failed to heed Linda’s warnings for more than two years silenced her. Easterling, arguing Linda’s interviews would taint the pool of prospective jurors, petitioned the court for a gag order.
State District Judge Carl Walker agreed with Easterling’s argument that Linda Bergstrom’s First Amendment rights had to bend to her husband’s right to a fair trial. Throughout the years of James Bergstrom’s beatings and threats, Linda had fought and refused to remain silent. It could only be described as ironic that now that she’d succeeded, the very legal system that had ignored her warnings ultimately succeeded in, at least temporarily, silencing her. She was ordered by the court not to tell her story until her husband’s trial was over.

Throughout the summer the legal finagling that surrounds a criminal trial continued. Easterling, as Gallier and the other officers knew he would, immediately filed a motion to suppress James Bergstrom’s confession, alleging it was given involuntarily “because there were promises made and inducements.” As evidence, Easterling referred to Bergstrom’s constant reference to “my problem,” and argued that police gave his client the impression that by confessing, he would be given medical care.

On September 11, 1992, three weeks before Bergstrom’s scheduled trial date, Rosenthal and Easterling, with his client in tow, stood before Judge Walker to discuss the admissibility of James Bergstrom’s confessions. It was a long afternoon. The judge, a balding man with gold-rimmed glasses, frowned from behind his bench as the argument raged. The subject of it all, James Bergstrom, sat silently by in a pale tan jail-issue jumpsuit.

One after the other, the police officers who handled Bergstrom’s arrest were called to testify.

“Did you hear Sergeant Gallier read the defendant his rights?” Rosenthal asked Fidelibus.

“Yes, I did,” the detective asserted. “Right off the Miranda card.”

“Weren’t there promises made to Mr. Bergstrom that if he cooperated, y’all would get him help for his problem?” Easterling countered.

“No, sir,” Fidelibus said. “Not that I heard.”

Dunn gave similar testimony.

“Didn’t Mr. Bergstrom tell you, ‘I need help’?” Easterling prodded.

“Yes, sir,” Dunn said. “And I said I wasn’t Monty Hall and I couldn’t make him any deals.”

Then Rosenthal played the videotaped confession. On the courtroom television screen, as a hushed audience of reporters watched, James Bergstrom, dressed in a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves and off-white pants, stared at the floor as Rusty Gallier, his back to the camera, read him his Miranda rights.

“Do you understand what I’ve read you?” Gallier asked.

“Yes,” Bergstrom said, mumbling as he would throughout the tape.

“Have you been promised anything to cooperate?”

“No.”

Throughout the rest of the hour-long tape, Bergstrom answered Gallier’s questions. He admitted how he had circulated through quiet neighborhoods in a sweat suit with a towel thrown over his shoulders. “The ropes or shoestrings were in my sock,” he said. “And the ski mask and gun were wrapped up in a towel I threw over my neck. At first I picked the women out randomly. Then I started watching them.”

When Gallier inquired about individual cases, Bergstrom acknowledged each and filled in details. At the end Gallier asked, “How many women have you attacked altogether, James?”

“In Houston?”

“Yeah,” Gallier said.

“Twenty-five, maybe thirty.”

It was damning evidence, the type nearly impossible for a defense attorney to combat.

The next witness was Detective Tonry; the final, Sergeant Rusty Gallier. Both maintained Bergstrom had been given no promises in exchange for his confession.

At the end of the day, Rosenthal was victorious. James Bergstrom was scheduled for trial September 29, and Walker ruled the videotaped confession was admissible.

Negotiations continued as the days counted down to the trial. Rosenthal offered a plea bargain, forty-five years.

Bergstrom refused.