Twisted Triangle

by Caitlin Rother

  “I’ll go, but it won’t make any difference,” she said. “It’s too late.”

  Gene found a counselor, Julie Hoxie, and they saw her one evening after work. She asked them both what they hoped to get out of therapy.

  “I’m not happy, and I want to understand her needs better,” Gene said.

  He sounded genuine, but Margo sensed that his statement was more for the therapist’s benefit than hers, although he did seem to want to try to prevent Margo from leaving him.

  “I’m here because I want to be able to dismantle this relationship in a way that causes the least pain to us and our children,” she said.

  At the end of the session, Julie recommended that Margo and Gene see separate therapists and said one of them could stay with her. Gene decided to find a male therapist, while Margo continued to see Julie. Over the next eight months, Julie helped her understand that the failure of the marriage wasn’t hers alone and that it was okay for her to try to stand on her own two feet.

  About a month into the sessions, Gene suggested they go to a matinee at the mall, leaving the kids with their nanny. Afterward, they went to the food court to talk.

  “I know you’re very confused and need some time to get your thoughts straight,” he said. “If what you need is space, we can get you an apartment.”

  Margo just looked at him, so he kept talking.

  “You can move into this apartment and the kids can come visit with you, but there’s no way you’re taking the kids with you.”

  “That’s not what I want,” she said. “What I want is to share custody of the kids.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  Seeing they had reached an impasse, they got up and went home.

  “That’s when I knew this divorce was never going to happen. He was just going to jerk me around,” Margo later said.

  When Margo next met with Betty, her new divorce attorney, she told Betty about the conversation, and Betty explained that in Virginia, parties had to live apart for a year before one of them could be granted a “no fault” divorce, regardless of whether the other party wanted it. Betty said Margo could get a divorce immediately if she could prove desertion, adultery, or physical or mental cruelty, but cruelty was hard to prove.

  “If you’re waiting for your husband to give you permission to divorce him, then you’re going to wait a long time,” Betty said.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Betty told her to wait for him to go to work one day and move out.

  “I’m not leaving my kids,” Margo said.

  “Then you’ll have to take them with you. We’ll get a quick court date and have a temporary custody arrangement set up,” Betty said, adding that she would file divorce papers and send a letter notifying Gene of their actions the same day that Margo left.

  Betty reminded Margo to take anything important or that had sentimental value because she wasn’t going to get a second chance.

  Margo started looking for a rental in nearby Woodbridge, a bedroom community for government workers in DC, about seven miles from Nokesville. She also began compiling a list of items she would put in a U-Haul, such as her grandmother’s handmade quilts.

  In August, she found a townhouse and signed a lease effective September 1.

  She planned to put her belongings into temporary storage, then sneak off with the girls while Gene was at work and hide them away for a week or two in a rented trailer at Colonial Beach, a seaside resort about seventy-five miles south, until they could get a custody hearing. Gene would never think to look for them there.

  “If Gene knew where I was, then he would come and physically take the kids from me,” she later said.

  Margo told the girls’ nanny, Brenda Sue Nuss, about her plan and asked if she wanted to come along or return home to Nebraska. Brenda, who was attending the local community college, said she wanted to help the kids through the transition. While Margo was away visiting her parents in Tuscaloosa over Labor Day weekend, Brenda agreed to quietly take some of the girls’ toys and other things over to the townhouse.

  Meanwhile, Margo went to the Nations Bank branch office at Quantico, where she thought she would have some degree of privacy, and set up a new account in her name. She and Gene already had a joint account with the bank, but he did his transactions at the branch near the supermarket in Woodbridge.

  Margo set it up so that her paycheck would be directly deposited into the new account, rather than the one she shared with Gene. She asked John Hess to take that same amount from her new account and deposit it into the joint account while she was in Tuscaloosa. Figuring that Gene would freeze her out of those accounts as soon as she’d moved out, she also asked John to deposit a check for $18,000 out of one of their money market accounts, which was half the balance of their savings.

  Margo told John she didn’t think it was safe to leave the Bennetts’ financial records, which included the real estate documents Gene had dummied up for the home relocation scam, in her desk. So before she left for the weekend, she moved them into John’s filing cabinet.

  Margo and the girls arrived in Tuscaloosa the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. She and her mother talked while they were fixing dinner that night.

  “Mom, I’m not happy, and I’m going to leave Gene.”

  Dean was quiet for a minute, then said, “I want you to be happy. What are you going to do?”

  Margo laid out the escape plan for her matter-of-factly.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Dean asked.

  “Yes, I think everything is going to be fine.”

  After dinner, Margo went out to her father’s woodworking shop to fill him in, too.

  “You know, I always felt that something was missing with you and Gene,” he said.

  “Yeah, real love,” she said. “I’ve been unhappy for a long time, and I really tried to make it work.”

  “Well, baby, you do what you need to do.”

  Letta was waiting in the car to drive Margo to the airport that Sunday, when Margo came out and saw her mother crying in the driveway. She gave Dean a hug.

  “Mom, everything is going to be fine,” she said again.

  “I’m just so worried that someone’s going to get hurt.”

  Margo was puzzled. Gene had never threatened to hurt her. She figured her mother was simply being overprotective.

  Gene picked Margo up at the airport, and on the way back, he told her that Brenda had gotten a call from her brother, who was in some kind of trouble, so she’d flown out to help him. Margo saw no reason to doubt what he said and hoped that everything was okay. Brenda’s sudden departure put a crimp in her plans; she hoped Brenda would be back in time to help her slip away.

  Margo and Gene spent Monday cleaning out the garage, but there was still no sign of Brenda.

  Margo got to Quantico around 8:30 AM on Tuesday, and as soon as she sat down at her desk, she knew something was wrong.

  The framed photo of her and Patsy at the Globe & Laurel, which normally sat on the rear left side of her desk, was missing. She pulled open the top drawer and found that the Mont Blanc pen Patsy had given her was gone, too. So were the thank-you cards from her students.

  She immediately suspected that Gene had rifled through her desk over the weekend, but before she had a chance to tell anyone, her phone rang. It was Peggy, one of the tellers at her bank at Quantico, and she sounded concerned.

  “Margo, something strange is going on,” she said.

  Peggy explained that Gene had asked to speak to the Woodbridge bank manager on Friday about the new account Margo had opened. He said Margo had set it up for both of them because they’d “messed up” their joint account, but he couldn’t access it because Margo had left town without leaving the signature card for him to sign. The manager pulled up the new account, and Gene asked her how many checks had been drawn on it. When she realized she may have said too much, she told him she needed to have Margo present to say anything more, and immediately calle
d Peggy.

  “Did he get copies of the bank records?” Margo asked.

  “No.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  Margo’s stomach was in knots. She was pretty sure he’d figured out her plan, or was at least suspicious of it. The unknown factor was Brenda.

  Margo called Brenda’s mother, who had no idea where her daughter was, but said her son was not in any trouble as far as she knew. After talking to her son, she called back to say they were both worried now because neither of them had heard from Brenda.

  Margo called Gene and told him she thought something had happened to their nanny.

  “Maybe she’s in trouble and she’s off getting an abortion somewhere,” he said. “It’s not our place to get involved.”

  Learning more about Brenda’s disappearance and Gene’s meddling at the bank had only heightened Margo’s anxiety. By that point, she was scared to go home.

  Katie Land, one of her former students, who was assigned to the Richmond field office, was taking an in-service class at the academy that week, so Margo asked if she would stay the night at the Bennetts’ house. They worked out a story for Gene—that Katie was in the area working surveillance—and planned for her to arrive about an hour after Margo.

  When Margo got home, Gene was in the living room, hiding behind the newspaper in his easy chair, and didn’t look up. She went to look for the girls and started to panic when she couldn’t find them anywhere.

  “Where are the girls?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, still hiding behind the newspaper. “How does it feel not knowing where your kids are?”

  Margo finally found them laughing behind the bed in Lindsey’s room, where Gene had told them to play a game of Hide from Mommy.

  Margo took them downstairs, where she started fixing a dinner of tuna salad and rolls. Gene joined them in the kitchen.

  “How does it feel not knowing where your kids are?” he asked again.

  When Katie arrived, she put her gun on top of the fridge next to Margo’s. The Bennetts always put their weapons there, out of the children’s reach.

  They’d just sat down to eat at the kitchen table when the doorbell rang. Margo opened the door to find a man in a tacky plaid jacket, holding some folded-up papers.

  “Are you Marguerite Bennett?” he asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  The man handed her the papers and said, “Have a nice evening.”

  Gene had served her with divorce papers, accusing her of abandonment and desertion. Margo saw the girls standing on the stairs, looking at her, confused about what was going on, so she started toward them.

  Gene met her at the foot of the stairs, leaned into her face and growled, “Did you think for a minute that I was going to allow you to take my children away from me?”

  Margo took the girls upstairs, then came back to the kitchen table. She was reading the papers when Brenda knocked at the back door. Gene unlocked it, then followed Brenda into the kitchen. She looked frazzled and pale as she mouthed to Margo, “He knows everything.”

  Gene told Brenda her parents were looking for her and said she could use the phone upstairs in the bedroom to call them. Brenda did as she was told, then retreated to her basement apartment.

  Gene switched his attention back to Katie. “How dare you act like our friend and break bread at our table,” he said. “Do you think I didn’t call and check? I knew you didn’t have to be up here.”

  Katie just sat there. She correctly assumed that the best way to deal with Gene was to say nothing.

  Gene started disassembling Katie’s gun into pieces—the spring, the slide, the frame, the barrel, and the magazine—and took them into the front yard. Margo could see him through the open garage door, throwing the bullets into the surrounding wooded area. He came back inside, handed Katie the pieces of her gun, and said, “Get the hell out of my house.”

  “She doesn’t have to leave if she doesn’t want to,” Margo said. “If she wants to stay, she can stay.”

  But Margo could see that Katie was uncomfortable being in the middle of such a volatile domestic situation, especially when it involved two highly trained FBI agents who had guns within easy reach. So Margo told her she could go if she wanted, and walked her outside to her car.

  Katie sped back to the academy, where she immediately called John Hess.

  Meanwhile, Gene had taken Margo’s house keys and removed her gun from the top of the refrigerator. He told her he’d locked her weapon away in the safe upstairs, along with her FBI-issued gun, and then changed the combination so she couldn’t get into it.

  Margo went upstairs to give the girls a bath and put them to bed. Afterward, she was walking by Gene’s office and heard him talking on the phone, so she stopped to listen.

  “Your daughter was going to take my kids,” he was saying. “Can you believe that?”

  “Why are you talking to my parents?” Margo asked.

  Gene ignored her.

  “I want to talk to my parents,” she said.

  “I’ll let you talk to them when I’m done.”

  When Gene decided to give up control of the phone, Margo tried to calm her mother, who was in tears and sounded very fearful.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” she said, trying to reassure her, but the damage had already been done.

  John Hess called around nine, and Gene answered. John said he wanted to hear Gene say he wasn’t going to hurt Margo.

  “I’m not going to do anything like that,” Gene said, explaining that Margo had tried to steal his kids.

  “Can you believe what she was going to do to me?” he asked.

  John later told Margo that he thought about calling the police as soon as he hung up, but he determined it might only escalate the situation, so he didn’t.

  Gene spent the rest of the night screaming at Margo, belittling her about what a horrible mother she was, how she didn’t care about the kids, how she was a horrible housekeeper, and how bad she was in bed.

  “You’re a dried-up, flat-chested whore,” he said. “I’m going to ruin you. You will have nothing. How dare you think about taking my children! Who in the hell do you think you are, you stupid cunt?”

  Allison, who was about to turn six, and Lindsey, who was almost three, stayed upstairs, where Allison would always remember telling Lindsey to hide in her toy chest, a plastic green tub with a red top, to try to shield the toddler from all the yelling.

  Anywhere Margo went in the house that night, Gene was right there with her.

  “How stupid did you think I was?” he demanded. “And how stupid are you to think that you can get away with this?”

  Margo started washing dishes, trying to shut out Gene’s voice.

  “Now you want to clean the house?” he said.

  “I have always cleaned the house,” she said quietly.

  Margo was feeling somewhat defiant, determined not to crack. She knew he wanted her to cry and beg forgiveness, but she wasn’t going to give him that. She also knew that the less she engaged him, the better.

  After doing the dishes, she sat on the sofa, and he plopped himself down so that their bodies were touching. She scooted over, and so did he, until she was crammed into the corner, his body pushing against hers.

  “You know, you’re very lucky you brought the kids back and didn’t leave them in Alabama,” he said.

  Gene explained how he’d caught Brenda trying to move some of the kid’s things into the townhouse, how he’d figured out that Margo had set up the new checking account, and how he’d immediately called an attorney to beat her at her own game.

  After Gene’s forty-minute tirade, Margo got up to grab a pillow and blanket, then tried to curl up at the other end of the sofa so she could get some sleep. But Gene wouldn’t let up.

  “Oh no,” he said. “You’re not going to sleep tonight. I’ve been up for two nights making sure you couldn’t do this.”

  He took the remote control f
or the TV, found a war movie, and turned up the volume.

  “You’re going to wake up the kids,” Margo said.

  Gene turned it down slightly, but every time she’d start to drift off, he’d yell at her again.

  Finally, at 3 AM he went upstairs, and Margo turned off the TV, but Gene came back downstairs twice to turn it back on, taking the remote with him.

  Ultimately, Margo got a couple hours of very light sleep, and when it was time to go to work, she felt barely alive.

  Gene continued screaming obscenities as she was getting dressed. He said he was going to take off work for as long as it took to keep his daughters safe.

  “You won’t have another chance to take them,” he said.

  Margo stumbled into the office, her eyes bleary, her shoulders slumped, walking like a zombie.

  She’d already confided in John earlier that summer about the home relocation scam, the missing ring and earrings, how Gene had swapped out the vacuum cleaner and color TV, and about his general emotional abuse. So John was not surprised to hear about the Night from Hell she’d just endured.

  “Margo,” he said. “You should not be covering up for this guy anymore.”

  Margo called her divorce attorney to tell her what had happened. Betty changed course from her previous advice and told her that she now needed to stay at the house until the court settled the custody battle, or she would fall into the trap he’d set for her by filing for divorce on the grounds of abandonment. Otherwise, she’d hurt her chances of getting shared custody of the girls. In the meantime, Betty said she’d call Gene’s attorney and try to get her house keys back.

  Next, John told Margo she should go talk to Tony Daniels, the top official at Quantico, and tell him that Gene had taken her keys and FBI-issued gun.

  Margo went to Tony’s office that morning, closed the door, and sat in a chair facing him across his rather expansive desk. She explained that she was in the process of divorce and that things had gotten a little out of hand the night before.