Twisted Triangle (32 page)

“It was so convoluted, I was concerned whether the jury was going to be able to grasp the whole picture,” Paul later said.

Their other concern was the judge they’d been assigned. Af-ter serving in the ROTC in college, Richard Potter went to law school and was promoted to second lieutenant, working briefl

in Army intelligence during the Vietnam War before practicing law for sixteen years, including twelve representing criminal defendants. As a judge, however, he had a reputation for being unpredictable.

Margo was offi awarded full custody of the girls at the fi-nal custody hearing on November 18, when she also arranged for a social worker to review Gene’s letters to the girls before sending them on. Margo didn’t want to be accused again of blocking communication, but she also didn’t want Gene to have their address. The property portion of the divorce had been severed from the custody case because Margo was still going through bankruptcy.

Afterward, Allison wrote a pithy letter demanding account-ability from her father for what he’d done to her mother. Margo read the letter and suggested that Allison wait until after the trial to send it.

“If he’s found not guilty, he gets to come home,” Margo said. “Good point, Mom,” Allison replied.

Margo shook her head and chuckled at her precocious ten-year-old.

Later that month, Margo was still wondering why police had not filed any attempted murder charges, so she called Detective Ron McClelland.

“I realize that Gene kidnapped Edwin, but there’s nothing in this about what he intended to do to me. Is that going to be addressed?” she asked.

“We’re looking into that,” Ron said. “We’re going to do something. I just don’t know what.”

On December 2, Ron told Margo that the grand jury had indicted Gene on three new charges: the attempted murder of Margo, possession of explosive materials, and possession and/or manufacture of a bomb.

Not long after the grand jury issued its final indictment, Paul said he’d been unoffi contacted by Gene’s defense attorneys,

who were feeling him out about a plea bargain. Paul asked Margo how she felt in case they made an offi offer.

Margo wasn’t opposed to a plea, but she thought that the last agreement let Gene off far too easily. Margo was also convinced that Gene would come after her again if he could, so she wanted to make sure he was a very old man once he was released from prison.

“The only way I’d be comfortable with a plea would be if he was gone for a long time,” she said.

“I was thinking thirty years,” Paul said. “Thirty years would be okay.”

Margo was interviewed twice by the prosecution’s psychological expert, Stanton Samenow, for a total of three hours.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“I guess I’m paranoid, because it bothers me that I can’t go in a room without worrying if someone is on the other side of the door.”

“Paranoia isn’t really paranoia if it’s based in reality.” “Well, I guess I’m doing okay then.”

Margo had received a similar psychological evaluation during the custody battle, shortly before the church incident.

Clinical psychologist Gail Nelson said Margo’s paranoia registered at a level that occurred in only 10.4 percent of women. “In the context of this custody litigation, and considering Mrs. Bennett’s description of her abduction and threat by Mr. Bennett, it is my opinion that affi responses on this scale refl reality-based concerns, and not any psychopathology on Mrs. Bennett’s part,” she wrote.

“Mrs. Bennett’s liability as a primary caretaker is primarily her tendency towards submissiveness and dependency. These tendencies prevent her from making appropriate decisions and in-hibit her ability to be confrontive towards others who may attempt to infl her actions and feelings. It is probable that because her mother was in a passive role in the family, Mrs. Bennett

learned these traits early in life. They have affected her intimate relationships and her self-esteem in a negative way.”

Margo continued to work with therapist Nancy Davis to prepare herself to testify at the trial. Following Nancy’s advice to wear a new outfi that would make her feel strong and powerful, Margo bought a bright red silk blouse and a navy-blue skirt suit.

Nancy also told her to form a picture of Gene in her mind, then make him smaller and smaller. Margo visualized a tiny Gene Bennett, jumping up and down and stamping his feet, throwing a temper tantrum because he was so small.

Then Nancy told her to put him away somewhere so he couldn’t get out. Margo pictured putting a bell jar over little Gene at the defense table, where he would be contained and couldn’t bother her.

Next Nancy said, “Think about someone who is always there for you. Picture that person.”

Margo saw Jesus in her mind’s eye.

“Picture him giving you something, what you need to get through this.”

Margo visualized Jesus holding a cardboard box the size of a laptop computer. He carried it over and held it out to her with both hands. The flaps were open and the box was empty.

“You already have everything you need to get through this,” Jesus said.

And with that, Margo knew she was ready.

Chapter Twelve

Prosecution

Crazy Like a Fox

In the week before the trial started, Margo met with her daughters’ teachers, principal, and school counselor to discuss what they could do to shield the girls from publicity and taunting by their classmates. Margo told the offi quite candidly that she was prepared to testify that she’d had two intimate encounters with Patricia Cornwell. She also said she expected media scrutiny to be intense.

“Please watch out for my children,” she said.

The school offi listened to her intently and agreed to keep the newspapers out of the library during the trial. The day it started, Allison’s fourth-grade teacher promptly shut off the classroom television as soon as she saw a story about Patsy and the Bennett case featured on
Good Morning America
.

Kathy Farrell told Margo not to read the newspaper or watch

the TV news during the trial so as not to compromise her testimony, but Margo asked Letta to collect the papers every day in case she and the girls wanted to read them later. Margo stored them in her bedroom closet, out of the girls’ reach, and made sure to turn off the downstairs TV at night, although Lindsey later told her that she’d secretly sneak upstairs and turn on the TV in Margo’s bedroom. Letta videotaped all the TV news clips, but Margo couldn’t bring herself to watch any of them until 2006, during an interview for this book.

In the midst of all the stressful trial preparation, Margo crossed two other important legal milestones: her divorce decree was final-ized, and her bankruptcy petition was granted.

On Monday, January 27, 1997, Judge Richard Potter held a hearing on the defense’s eleven pretrial motions at the Prince William County Judicial Center in Manassas, a city of about thirty-fi thousand people and the site of the Civil War battle of Bull Run, thirty-fi miles southwest of Washington D C.

Gene sat at the defense table, flanked by his four attorneys: Reid Weingarten, Mark Hulkower, Jeffrey Gans, and Raymond Patricco, all of whom worked for the high-powered law firm of Steptoe & Johnson in Washington D C.

The prosecutors told Margo that she didn’t have to show up until Tuesday, when the trial offi started with jury selection, so she did not attend.

The defense motions included a request to sever the trial into three proceedings so that charges relating to the events at the church, to the explosive materials, and to the allegations related to defrauding Mary Ann Khalifeh could be heard separately.

Reid, Gene’s lead attorney, argued that these charges were un-related and prejudiced each other. But prosecutor Jim Willett maintained that they were tied into Gene’s overall plan.

The defense also requested to move the trial to another venue because of the overwhelming volume of negative publicity about Gene and, short of that, to sequester the jury.

“We’ve seen the Commonwealth proclaiming Mr. Bennett’s sane, that he’s a scam artist. We’ve seen internationally recognized author, Patricia Cornwell, saying that he’s a dangerous man, he should be locked up,” Reid said.

Of the eleven motions, the judge granted only two, including a request to cover the cost of fees for bringing in out-of-town witnesses. Reid had argued that Gene was too poor to pay for the services of his four attorneys, let alone the cost of witnesses. Apparently, Reid and his colleagues were representing Gene pro bono.

Judge Potter, noting that the news reports submitted by the defense came from such national publications as the
Wall Street Journal, Newsweek
, and
Time
, remarked, “One has to wonder where exactly the defendant would have the court transfer venue to?”

He decided the trial would proceed as scheduled the next day, Tuesday, starting with jury selection and opening statements.

Even though Margo wasn’t scheduled to testify until Wednesday, she had butterfl Monday night. Feeling apprehensive about the impending cross-examination, she slept poorly, plagued with anxiety dreams. In one of them, she was in the kitchen, where everything, including her clothes, were white. As she was going into the pantry, Gene, who was also dressed in white, popped his head out from behind the door and said, “Did you think I was going away?”

When she woke up, she followed her therapist’s advice and went back into her thought process to give the dream a good end-ing: she grabbed a knife and cut Gene’s throat.

Because she was a witness at the trial, Margo wasn’t allowed to sit in the courtroom until closing arguments, in case the prosecutors recalled her to the stand.

Nonetheless, Margo wanted—and felt she needed—to be in the courthouse so that she would be available to answer any questions Paul or Jim might have.

“If this man didn’t go to jail, I was going to die. Really quick,” Margo later said. “So it was important that I give them my total support. I really felt like they had put together a good case. The only thing I couldn’t predict was how the whole homosexual thing was going to impact the jury. You just never know when you make an emotional argument like that.”

For the duration of the trial, Margo and Dianna holed up in the commonwealth’s attorney’s lobby, one fl below the courtroom. They passed the time by talking and reading magazines, stretching their legs occasionally by walking around the courthouse.

On that fi day, Margo and Dianna got to chatting with the fi prosecution witness, David Corley, who’d found Gene’s handcuffs and mask in some grass near the church.

At one point, David came back from a walk, smiling. “You owe me,” he said to Margo.

“Why?” she asked.

“None of those people out there knows what you look like, and they kept asking me if I’d seen you,” he said, referring to the reporters. “I said nope.”

He was right. As she and Dianna wandered around, Margo was amused that no one recognized her. She no longer looked like the gaunt, dehydrated woman whom the
Washington Post
had photographed outside the federal courthouse the day of her aborted testimony in 1993. Her weight was back to normal, and her hair was shorter and much blonder.

Judge Potter’s honey-colored, wood-paneled courtroom was rather intimate, seating as many people as could squeeze into the gallery’s three rows of pewlike benches.

Despite Gene’s later attempt to claim that he was confused throughout the proceedings, the prosecutors saw Gene attentively taking notes and whispering to his attorneys, looking coherent and very much involved in his own defense.

Before the judge started jury selection, he acknowledged that one of the defense witnesses, the Reverend Bill Higgins, was his pastor at the Manassas Baptist Church. No one objected. He never mentioned whether he’d ever met Gene there, although years later, he said he had not.