Twisted Triangle (17 page)

“Why can’t we call in the FBI?” Margo asked.

“If we call the anyone, they’ll just leave, and we’ll never see the kids again.”

They started talking about their lives together, the breakup of their marriage, and how they’d gotten into this mess.

“I don’t know how our lives got so off track when what we should have been doing is helping our kids get through this,” he said, referring to the divorce.

Margo agreed. “It’s not right that our kids are being torn apart,” she said. “They ought to have parents who can sit down and have a meal together.”

“Are you saying you want to get back together?”

“No,” she said fi . “What I want is a healthier relationship between us for the sake of the kids.”

If they both got through this ordeal alive, she thought the kids deserved better than to see their parents fi all the time.

Then Gene asked a question he’d obviously been wanting to ask for months.

“What about Patsy?”

Margo knew how jealous he’d been, but she wanted to tell him that she didn’t want a divorce so she could be with Patsy, that their affair didn’t mean she was gay, and that there weren’t going to be any other women in the future. At the time, this was what she believed.

“I was only with her twice,” she said. “Okay,” Gene said, as if he had accepted it.

Looking back later, Margo suspected that Gene had been fi ing for even the smallest confi so that he could use it against her in the divorce.

Gene told her he was going to leave the Prizm at Quantico so that it would look like she’d swapped cars. Then he was going to drive his truck to the Nokesville house and come back for her in his Jeep.

“I have to wait until dark before I can move you,” he said.

Margo hadn’t been to the bathroom all day. About three hours after he’d left, she couldn’t wait any longer. Her movement was limited because of the handcuffs, but she was able to inch her pants down slowly and bunch up the sheet so it was under her. After she

relieved herself, she pushed the sheet onto the fl so she didn’t have to lie in her own urine.

Gene fi showed up around 1 am.

“There was a bad accident that stopped traffi he said.

He cut the tape off her ankles, but left the other bindings in place. Then he put her, still blindfolded, onto the backseat of the Jeep with a water bottle and some saltine crackers, covering her with a tarp. They arrived in Nokesville about an hour later.

Gene let her go into the bathroom by herself, then took her upstairs and told her to lie on a quilt he’d laid on the closet fl . After he turned out the light and shut the door, Margo could hear him lie down just outside. She woke up every time he rolled over or her handcuffs clinked together.

The next morning, she heard Gene washing at the sink.

“My knees hurt,” she said when he opened the closet door. The Ace bandage had slipped down, and her skin had been rubb-ed raw.

Gene had her roll onto her side so that he could cut the duct tape, and in so doing scratched her on the back of her thigh with the scissors, deep enough to draw blood, which he mopped with a tissue.

“Your feet smell,” he said, coming back with clean pairs of socks.

Then he rewrapped the Ace bandage, fastened it with new tape, and put her back in the Jeep, retying the gag and blindfold. He had her back in the van before he ran off to a 9 am meeting with his attorney, leaving her a plastic water bottle with a straw and a big box of graham crackers shaped like teddy bears.

“I’ll try to get back at noon,” he said.

Gene didn’t return until six that evening, when he removed her gag so that they could talk about his upcoming trial.

“I’ll lie on the stand if you need me to,” Margo volunteered.

Gene left again briefl , then came back saying he’d just talked to “them.”

“They’ve given us three choices: we can tuck you away until the trial is over. You can get up on the stand and lie. Or I can put a bullet in your head.”

“I can lie on the stand. I know I can do that,” Margo said, trying to convince him.

Gene drove them to a smaller parking lot nearby. Then he took off all her bindings and removed the blindfold. The van clock read eight.

Gene told Margo to follow him in the van, while he drove the Jeep. He gave her only a minute or two to stretch, which wasn’t enough. It hurt just to stand up straight. After being bound, gagged, dehydrated, and starved for two days, she wasn’t sure she could move her limbs enough to drive at all.

Around eleven, they stopped at a Chevron station in Woodbridge, where Gene told Margo to withdraw $150 from the nearby ATM. From there, they went to her townhouse, where he asked whom she was planning to see the next day. He instructed her to leave messages for each of them, specifying what innocent explanations she should offer for why she was bruised, scraped, and cut up, or not coming to meet them.

Margo did as she was told; she didn’t feel that she had the freedom to question Gene’s directives. She later realized that he’d told her to make the calls so that no one would believe her if she tried to claim that he’d caused the injuries.

“I may be late for tomorrow’s meeting because I was out jogging and fell down, but I’ll be there,” she said in messages she left for her attorney Brian Gettings and prosecutor Marcia Isaacson.

“The kids aren’t going to be at school tomorrow,” she said in her message to Nancy Waugh, who ran her kids’ nursery school but was also a friend. “Gene has the kids, and we’ve swapped weekends.”

She also called and left a message for John Hess, with whom she was supposed to team-teach a course that week, then made a

reservation for that night at the Keybridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia.

Gene told her to gather up the clothes she’d need for the week. Because she thought she’d be testifying on Tuesday, she brought her best blue linen Jones New York suit and, for her meetings on Monday, a green one she also liked.

By this point, Gene apparently believed that Margo was fully buying into the plan and would heed his warning about calling in the authorities, so he felt it was safe to let her go alone to her hotel. Margo was also sure that he or Ralph would follow her there.

Before he left, Gene told her to page him from a pay phone at the Marriott at 3 pm the next day.

When Margo expressed some concern about the cost of staying there, Gene said he would look into less expensive accommoda-tions. He took off in his Jeep, and she arrived at the hotel just after midnight.

As she lay in bed, she had fl thoughts of calling the police and worried about what would happen to the girls if she couldn’t lie convincingly on the stand. She fi that the peo-ple who knew her would empathize with her reasons for lying and that the rest of her FBI colleagues would likely think the worst. But what she struggled with most was the prospect of swearing to God and then lying under oath.

“I felt that only God would understand why I was doing this. I felt like God was going to forgive me,” she later said.

On Monday morning, June 21, Margo and Brian Gettings met with prosecutors Marcia Isaacson and Bruce Reinhart. They gave her an outline of the questions they were going to ask her, which Margo tucked away to share with Gene. Marcia was still acting concerned, viewing Margo as a victim, but she had put her trial game on. Bruce, whom Margo had met a couple of times during trial preparation interviews, treated her more objectively, as a witness he needed to win his case.

After Margo called Gene’s pager from the Marriott around 2:45 pm, he told her to meet him at a Wendy’s in Alexandria, and from there, he led her to the Giant grocery store, where he told her to leave the van and get in the Jeep with him. It seemed important to make her drive around and switch cars, so she followed him, clutching Marcia’s outline. Once they got to the Old Colony Inn, he took her to his room.

“Strip down to your bra and panties. I need to check you,” he said, indicating that he wanted to see if she was wearing a wire.

Margo handed him the outline and took off her suit. After he was satisfi she dressed again, and for the next hour, he directed her how to answer questions on the stand. Gene said she should change her testimony to say that she had in fact lived in the Lake Capri house and commuted to work from there.

While they were talking, there was a knock at the door. It was a Latina hotel maid who asked if Gene wanted the room cleaned. He said no.

“That really wasn’t a housekeeper,” Gene said after the woman left. “She’s one of them. They sent her over to check on us.”

He and Margo talked a while longer about the people who had ordered the abduction of her and the kids. “They” had now become a group of Mexicans or Colombians who were somehow connected to Brenda and Jerry. Gene had mentioned the Latin connection to her on Saturday, so this provided some confi

that Jerry had other people working with him.

“Tomorrow I want you to clean the van. They want it cleaned inside and out,” Gene said, telling her to page him at noon for further instructions.

Margo left around seven that evening and headed back to the Marriott, where she went in and out of sleep all night, startled awake by the tiniest of noises.

Tuesday was the first day of Gene’s trial at the federal courthouse in Judiciary Square in DC, starting with jury selection and a

motions hearing. Gene went on his own, and because Margo was a prosecution witness, she didn’t have to go until she was called to testify.

When Margo talked to Gene around noon, he told her to go to the bank after cleaning the van, and to withdraw $3,000 by putting a cash advance on her credit card.

“We might have to leave at any moment to go and get the kids, and we need to have enough cash,” he said.

They met up again later that day at the Holiday Inn in Manassas, where he had them swap vehicles. He was wearing blue cotton gloves, which, she later fi was to keep her van free of his fi

Gene led her back to the Giant in Alexandria, where he told her to buy some wine, then they went back to the Old Colony Inn. When he opened the door to the room, Margo saw the king—

size bed and felt an immediate sense of dread.

“This was the only room they had,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

They left to get some dinner, which consisted of a chicken sandwich at Wendy’s. They both had some wine, then Gene climbed into bed with her around 9:30. So much for the fl .

“Let’s have sex,” Gene said. “No, I don’t want to.”

“C’mon, it’ll help us both relax.”

“I’m not on the pill. I don’t want to do this.”

“C’mon, help me come,” Gene said, pulling her hand under the sheets toward him.

At that point, Margo was weak and weary, and she felt she had no choice but to do what she was told. She had no idea where her children were, and she didn’t know whether she was going to be dead or alive after she testifi at Gene’s trial the next day. So she fi her task as quickly as possible. She felt sick to her stomach and a little lost as she lay there, pretending to be asleep until she fi drifted off.

On Wednesday, Margo and Gene left the hotel around 9 am so that he could get to his attorney’s offi by 9:30. She took the Metro from National Airport to Brian Gettings’s offi

Once she got there, Brian told her she wouldn’t be called to testify until after lunch, so she went to the cafeteria. Feeling nervous, she paged Gene from a pay phone. She needed him to calm her down, to tell her she was doing the right thing by lying on the stand.

“You’re okay because you have a letter of immunity. Be tough.

Don’t worry,” he said.

After lunch, Margo learned she wasn’t going to be called until Thursday, so she went back to the Old Colony Inn to wait for Gene.

He took her to Wendy’s again for dinner, then drove them to a notary at the airport. Gene said Jerry had told him to draw up some papers that promised Margo full custody of the girls and possession of the Bennetts’ co-owned property as insurance that Gene would indeed persuade Margo to lie on the stand; if he didn’t, she would get everything. As implausible as this promise may sound in hindsight, Margo didn’t question it at the time. She sim-ply signed on the dotted line.