Twisted Triangle (14 page)

At fi the counselor tried to get Margo to live in the basement, but she refused to be relegated to servant’s quarters. Instead, she agreed to sleep on the couch in the living room, but to shower and get ready for work in the basement apartment.

While Gene was with the kids in the evening, Margo often went for a run, which she would spend praying, crying, and begging God for the strength to get through this ordeal. Once, when she returned from her run, she found that Gene had removed the last check out of her checkbook. She fi this was retaliation for withdrawing the $18,000 from their savings.

Margo and Gene had registered Allison at the local public school, but he wouldn’t let her go because he thought Margo was going to steal her away while he was at work. For that matter, Gene refused to go to work for the next three weeks, telling his supervisor that he needed to stay home so Margo couldn’t abscond with his daughters.

Margo called the school to tell them Allison would not be attending after all, which ultimately resulted in a truant offi s coming to the house and informing Gene that he could not keep Allison at home. Gene finally relented and enrolled both girls at the private Appletree Preschool, where Allison had gone the previous year. Every day, he sat outside in his car for the duration of the four-hour program.

At a September 18 hearing, a judge ordered a temporary custody arrangement that gave the girls to Margo from Saturday morning until she dropped them at school on Monday and to Gene for the rest of the week.

Margo’s attorney thought it would be better not to fi Gene on this arrangement and to try to get through the divorce as quickly and with as little rancor as possible. But Margo knew that nothing was ever easy with Gene Bennett, who was taking even more joy in playing head games these days.

“I don’t think any court’s going to give a cunt-sucking whore like you custody of those kids,” he said to her one morning, revealing for the first time his strategy to paint her as a lesbian so that he could get full custody of the girls.

“What are you talking about?” Margo asked. Gene just smiled and walked away.

Another morning, he stood watching as she filled her travel mug with coffee. Margo noticed that it had an odd chemical smell, so she didn’t drink it. She asked her colleagues to sniff it, and although they, too, noticed the strange odor, some could not accept that Gene would intentionally try to poison her.

Next, Gene complained that his Jeep wouldn’t start because someone had been messing with it, and he accused her of unhook-ing his distributor cables to harass him. One morning she got in her car and found that someone had turned up the volume full blast on her radio, which gave her a jolt when she fi up the motor. Gene had the only other set of keys.

All these psychological tactics kept Margo off balance.

As soon as the custody arrangement went into effect in mid-October, Margo moved into the townhouse she’d rented in Woodbridge, ending thirty-seven days of domestic battle. But because she had to leave the girls with Gene, the war was far from over.

On October 22, 1992, Margo had her first interview with two agents from OPR, John Roberts and Phillip Reid, in DC.

At fi it seemed like an informal meeting, not an interrogation. She sat on a couch as the agents asked her to clarify the allegations in Tony’s memo and to walk them through the home relocation scam.

“You realize you have exposure in this case,” John Roberts said. After he’d issued this warning for the third time, Margo suddenly realized what he was saying— that the bureau was not going to be as understanding as she’d initially anticipated and that she

probably should talk to a lawyer.

“Look, this interview is over,” she said. “I want you to understand that I am fully committed to telling the truth, but I need to seek guidance from someone first.”

Margo immediately called Betty.

“I think I need an attorney,” Margo said. “I think you do too.”

Betty gave Margo the name of a criminal defense attorney, but he was too busy to take her case, so he referred her to another lawyer, Brian Gettings.

Brian was in his late fifties and, after smoking for most of his life, had developed throat cancer. He’d recently undergone surgery that left a hole in his throat, which he sometimes covered with his hand when he talked. His voice always sounded hoarse, as the air whistled through his windpipe, even more so when he was tired.

When they fi discussed her case, Brian was frustrated because she refused to take his advice and stop talking to the investigators.

But Margo felt that she was in a no-win situation. She’d made a commitment to herself that she wasn’t going to lie anymore, and now telling the truth was causing her problems as well.

Brian finally accepted her position.

“Okay,” he said. “But if this is the route you want to take, you have to let me help you.”

Brian negotiated an immunity deal with OPR so that nothing Margo said during her interviews could be used against her in court as long as she agreed to help them build a case and testify

against Gene if necessary. Margo fully cooperated with the investigators, providing copious documentation, much of which would have disappeared when Gene raided her desk if she hadn’t moved the materials to John’s filing cabinet.

Brian accompanied Margo on the three interviews she had with investigators. Federal prosecutor Marcia Isaacson also attended the interviews, which took place in the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section in DC. Marcia, who looked slightly younger than Margo, seemed to empathize with her plight.

On December 23, Gene sent an eleven-page memo to Robert Bryant, the special agent in charge of the Washington fi offi launching a counteroffensive against Margo and giving the FBI a very different version of events.

He accused her of exhibiting “peculiar behavior, odd personality swings and medical abnormalities.” He also claimed she’d accused him of being “a psychotic undercover agent with multiple personalities,” a claim that would prove to be wholly ironic three and a half years later.

Margo did not see this memo until her attorney gave it to her several years later as part of the divorce proceedings, but she was not surprised by its contents.

In his memo, Gene said he felt required to report a number of illegal or actionable activities on Margo’s part. (He would be found guilty of committing at least two of these himself in the coming year, and, according to Margo, committed some of the others as well.) Gene accused her of falsifying bureau documents, having lesbian affairs with women in and out of the bureau before and after she joined its ranks, failing to notify the bureau that she had mononucleosis and bulimia, committing insurance fraud, stealing bureau funds, abusing illegally obtained prescription drugs, illegally wiretapping their house using FBI equipment, stealing things from their home, and failing to pay off debts.

“I approached this situation from the beginning by being honest and upfront with everyone about my personal and family

situation, as I knew it would be foolish to try to handle this situation alone,” Gene wrote, commending his counselor Steve Spruill for helping him through it.

In the midst of all this nastiness, Margo managed to have a bit of fun on a girls’ night out in November with her friend Dianna, Patsy Cornwell, an agent who worked in the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico, and a Richmond police offi .

Since the night of Patsy’s book party in July, she and Margo had been chatting once or twice a month, either by phone or when they’d run into each other at Quantico.

Patsy wanted to do something nice for Margo’s birthday, so she had them all meet at her house, where she had each of them wear something of hers. One wore her mink stole, Margo sported one of her jackets, and Dianna put on her sapphire necklace.

Patsy had rented a limo for the night and poured each of them a glass of champagne as they were driving to dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

“You deserve to have a good time tonight,” she said to Margo. “You’ve been through so much crap.”

Patsy had just returned from a trip to Hollywood, where she’d been trying to drum up interest in making a movie based on her books. Patsy suggested they stop at Blockbuster Video to rent
Eyes of Laura Mars
, starring Faye Dunaway, whom Patsy was courting to play the role of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, along with Demi Moore and Jodie Foster. Patsy really had a thing for Jodie Foster and was frustrated that she couldn’t seem to fi a meeting with the two-time Oscar winner.

Patsy, who was in a bit of a manic mood that night, decided to call Faye Dunaway from the limo. She couldn’t reach her, so she left her a message.

When Margo first met Patsy, she seemed down to earth. But Margo sensed that her friend was getting caught up in a frenzy and was losing her equilibrium, which sometimes caused bizarre behavior. Several months later, Patsy told her about the day she

drank Bloody Marys, followed by wine with dinner, then fl

her Mercedes on the Pacifi Coast Highway in Malibu. Margo was worried that her friend was spinning out of control, with no one to ground her. Patsy was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar.

After dinner and more drinks on Margo’s birthday, they piled back into the limo and went to a nightclub, where they danced with each other and puffed on the little cigars that Patsy liked to smoke, another affectation of the Greta Garbo image she was cultivating at the time.

They stayed over at Patsy’s, where Margo slept on the large U-shaped couch. Patsy left for a while, then came back with a woman and waved at Margo in the darkness as the two of them went into her bedroom.

Margo felt no jealousy. She and Patsy had turned the corner and were comfortable being just friends. She was happy for Patsy that she was so successful and had so much money to spend on limos and the best steak house, and to lease cars and buy clothes for her friends. But Margo had come to realize that they wanted different things out of life. Margo didn’t want or need all that flash. She also didn’t want to be one of the leeches she saw clinging to Patsy.

“I realized that we weren’t compatible anyway, and that was OK. We could still be friends,” she said later.

By the next morning, Patsy’s two miniature dachshunds had pulled her mink stole into their crate and shredded it, but Patsy just laughed and shrugged it off.

In early December, Patsy brought Demi Moore to Quantico, calling Margo in advance to arrange a tour and get them single rooms in the Jefferson Building.

They ended up in the Board Room that night, which was fi with police chiefs, lieutenants, and assistant chiefs who were attending the National Academy. After the women had been sitting

in the corner for about fi minutes, some of the men started coming over and asking if the dark-haired woman was really Demi Moore.

Demi was worried that she wasn’t going to be able to get out of the bar without being mobbed by drunken men, so she and Patsy sneaked out while Margo stood guard in the doorway, stopping the men and asking them to leave Demi alone. By the time she managed to leave the bar, Demi and Patsy had gotten themselves stuck in the elevator.

Apparently, Patsy had been eager to get back to her room, so she’d hit one button at the same time that Demi, who’d wanted to wait for Margo, had hit another one.

“We’re getting a little nervous,” Patsy said through the doors. “Demi doesn’t like being in here.”

“It’s okay, relax, we’ll have you out of there in no time,” Margo called to them, then left to alert security.

The women were released within ten minutes.

Around the same time, Patsy threw out a suggestion that Margo leave the FBI to come work for her.

“I could really use someone with your experience, taking care of my security,” she said.

“There’s no way you could afford me,” Margo replied. “How much are you making?”

“$86,000.”

“Wow, you’re right, I can’t afford you,” Patsy said, chuckling.

Patsy told Margo she wanted to make her a ring out of the gold coin-shaped award the bureau had given Margo in 1991 for her ten-year anniversary. Margo agreed and received the gold ring as a Christmas present from Patsy. But it felt so heavy and masculine on Margo’s hand that she couldn’t wear it.