“Did you get to see your dad today?” Margo asked.
Lindsey said yes, then rattled on about something else. Margo didn’t push for more details because she didn’t want Lindsey to sense her anxiety.
Margo pulled into the parking lot at the mall, where they were going to buy some treats for Dianna’s dog at PetSmart. Margo heard Gene’s voice before she saw him.
“Lindsey!” he called out.
Margo scanned the area but didn’t recognize the new Gene, with his thick beard and long, stringy hair. Lindsey, however, had seen him only a few hours earlier, so she ran over to meet his welcoming arms.
“Daddy!” she shrieked.
Margo stayed about twenty feet away while Gene bent over and hugged Lindsey, patting her on the back and glaring over at Margo with an expression that said, “I’m back, and you’re going to have to deal with me.”
As much as she’d tried to prepare for this moment, all the terror she’d experienced during his attack in 1993 came rushing back like a wave, almost knocking her over. It shook her to see him, waiting for them like that, knowing that he must have followed them from the bus stop and that she hadn’t seen his car in her rear-view mirror. He clearly wanted her to know that he could show up at any time, anywhere, and take her by surprise.
She realized she needed to be even more vigilant as she prepared for his next attack. It wasn’t a question of if. It was a question of when.
While he chatted with Lindsey, Margo stood there as patiently as she could, determined not to let Gene sense the emotional tsunami that was raging inside her. But finally she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Lindsey, c’mon,” she called out. “We have to run our errands.”
As they finished their shopping, Margo did her best to keep her fear hidden.
After she and Lindsey got home, they walked the block and a half to meet Allison’s bus. Then, as the three of them walked home together, Allison told her mother all about her father’s visit at school that day. The experience made such an impact that Allison would write about it in a school assignment four years later.
Allison was called to the office over the intercom by Melanie, who told her that someone was there to see her. When Allison looked around the lobby, the only person she saw was a man with a beard and long, straggly hair sitting on the couch in what she thought was a blue one-piece janitor’s jumpsuit. He didn’t get up, so she went back into the office and told Melanie she didn’t see anyone. Melanie told her to try again, so she took a second look at the man and realized it was her father.
“Daddy!” she yelled with glee. He was crying as she jumped into his lap, her Lion King shirt flying up. He seemed a lot smaller than when she’d last seen him, when he’d weighed about 250 pounds.
She told him all about school for five or ten minutes until he said, “Go on back to class, my big girl,” and gave her a kiss. Allison had always been Gene’s favorite.
Gene also wanted to see Lindsey, so he had Melanie call her to the lobby too.
Margo and Gene soon returned to their preprison custody arrangement. He would pick up the girls from school on Tuesday afternoon, and Margo would take them from Saturday morning until she dropped them at school on Tuesday morning. Gene also got the girls every third weekend.
The major change for Margo was that she insisted on picking them up in a very public place. Gene wanted to make the exchange in the police dispatch center parking lot in Woodbridge, but Margo refused because she knew it would be isolated on Saturday mornings. She decided on the much busier Food Lion parking lot in Manassas, where she would always park at least seven spaces away from his car. If he got there after she did and pulled up next to her, she would back out and drive to a spot further away. She wanted to be sure that the girls had to walk some distance across the lot to meet her.
Sometimes Margo brought Dianna or her neighbor Beth Carter to pick up the girls, and sometimes she didn’t, so that Gene would never know whether she would come alone.
Gene had lost his confident swagger in prison. He always had dark circles under his eyes and seemed exhausted. His body looked softer and less physically fit than before, but the anger in his eyes was fiercer than ever. Margo could see the loathing there, and it scared her.
Pat Hammond, Gene’s divorce attorney, arranged for him to live in the basement of a home in Manassas that was owned by a real estate agent she knew. Allison and Lindsey told Margo that the basement had only one large bedroom with three beds and that their father snored so loudly they had trouble sleeping.
Margo asked Betty to look into the living arrangements because she thought that the girls were old enough—Allison was now eight and Lindsey was six—to need some privacy, not to mention a good night’s sleep. Word came back that Gene was going to be moving into a rental house after the girls’ school year had finished. In July, he moved to a quiet cul-de-sac with a rural feel on Old Bushmill Court in Manassas. Margo immediately suspected they would have a problem when school started again in the fall because Gene’s new house was about seven miles away from Westridge Elementary, where the girls had been going for the past year.
That summer, Margo and the girls got a new dog, a cocker spaniel that Allison named Pellet. Margo worked out an arrangement with her neighbor Beth, who would talk to Margo through the window while she walked the dog at night.
Other than that, Margo didn’t leave the house after dark, not even if they’d run out of milk. Allison had a habit of leaving the front door unlocked, but Margo wouldn’t go in without first yelling out her daughters’ names or using her cell phone to call the house phone to see if anyone was home.
“I lived my life and I waited,” Margo said later. “The healing time was over, and now it was time to get busy and try to watch out for myself.”
Margo had begun to apply for jobs around the area that spring.
In July, she got a call from the police chief of the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) system, who was one of her former students. “I have a position I think you’d be perfect for,” he said. “I think you should apply.”
One of his lieutenants had just quit, and he thought Margo would be a fine replacement. She didn’t ask how much the job paid. She knew the salary wouldn’t be anywhere near as much as she’d earned at the FBI.
Margo got the $42,000-a-year job and started at the Woodbridge campus in August. It felt good to get back to her roots in campus policing.
“I needed to find consistent, steady employment,” she later recalled. “I’d certainly been praying about it.”
Margo traded in her old can of pepper spray for a brand-new one. It could shoot about ten feet and contained a 10 percent concentration of oleoresin capsicum, the main ingredient, versus the 2 percent a civilian could buy at a retail store. And now that she was back in law enforcement, it was legal for her to carry the gun she’d been toting around in her purse.
Meanwhile, the start of school was approaching, and Margo was growing increasingly concerned, not only because she figured Gene was up to something but also because his attorney had failed to respond to a dozen letters and inquiries from her and Betty.
Sure enough, when she picked up the girls the Saturday before school started, they told her they had already visited their new school in Manassas. She also found a note in their backpacks from Gene—their usual method of exchanging information about the girls—instructing Margo to take them to the new school, which, coincidentally, was called Bennett Elementary.
Betty said there was nothing they could do on a weekend, but because the girls were still registered at Westridge Elementary, Margo should take them there on Tuesday morning.
Margo alerted Westridge that Gene had changed the girls’ registration to a different school at the last minute and that he might try to take them there. On Tuesday morning, she dropped them off at 8:45, but she was not surprised when the school called to say that Gene had arrived an hour later to pick them up. Betty filed a motion in court that day, and on Fr
iday, September 8, they had a hearing.
The fact that Gene was a convicted felon just released from prison was apparently irrelevant to the judge. He ruled that the girls should attend the school closer to Gene’s house because the existing custody order gave him the kids four nights a week versus Margo’s three.
Margo was furious with the court, Gene, and her own attorney.
“This was so stupid and so unfair to the kids,” she said later. “They did not deserve to be jerked around like pawns or yo-yos. The fact that Gene was willing to jerk them around, and waited until the last minute to do it, all showed that he didn’t care about their best interests. It was my inconvenience and pain that most interested him.”
Margo had long been troubled by the way Betty had responded to Gene’s manipulative tactics, and now that the situation was affecting the children, she could no longer stand idly by. She searched around for a new attorney, and in mid-September she went to see a woman with a reputation for being tenacious. Her name was Kathy Farrell, and she agreed to take on Margo’s case.
Allison described Gene’s behavior during his postprison period as erratic, ranging from playful and loving to just plain mean.
Some days, he seemed to be the same man who had built her and Lindsey a big wooden jungle gym in their backyard in Nokesville, where he’d pushed them on the swings and ran around with them. The same man who used to lie on the ground and pretend to be asleep, letting the girls sneak up on him so he could grab and tickle them.
On his happier days, he would keep them home from school to watch TV or play with their dolls—for no apparent reason other than that he seemed to want the company.
“You don’t seem like you’re feeling that good,” he’d say, or, “It’s a special day.”
He would take them out to the creek in the woods behind his house to collect frogs and lizards, which they would keep in jars, rubbing their fingers along the creatures’ leathery skin. Gene liked to joke that he would turn the frogs into frog legs so they could eat them as the French did.
He would also take them to Baptist Sunday school at his church, where he introduced them to the Reverend Bill Higgins. Allison and Lindsey called the pastor “Rubber Chicken” because his face was so red.
But then there were the days when their father wasn’t so nice, when Lindsey and Allison cringed with fear at their father’s flaring temper. It was always worse when it involved Margo.
One night, while they were still living in the basement apartment, Allison woke up, crying, after dreaming that her mother was running away from her. Gene showed her no sympathy.
“It doesn’t matter; go back to bed,” he said.
Lindsey would always remember the times Gene yelled at her for crying. She cried on the trip they made to Kentucky for the Bennett family reunion in 1995, for example, and he said, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” then spanked her.
Among her other medical issues, Lindsey had developed a nervous bladder, which often caused her to get up five times in the middle of the night, thinking she had to pee.
“He would yell at me [even though] the doctors had said it wasn’t my fault,” Lindsey said later.
Allison, like her mother, learned how to keep Gene’s temper at bay. “It wouldn’t be bad if we didn’t piss him off, but God forbid if one of us said something wrong,” she said.
She’d often give Lindsey a warning look, as if to say, “Stop talking.” Then later she would direct Lindsey not to do or say whatever she’d been doing that had upset their father.
Allison did not think to tell her mother until much later about Gene’s drinking or abusive behavior, how he would sometimes vomit from all the cheap wine he drank and how the recycling bin would fill up with jug wine bottles.
“He always had a glass of something, even during the day,” she said later.
One night, she remembered him throwing up in the kitchen. All the lights were off in the house, and the girls were in the living room watching TV.
“Why don’t you come over and help your father?” he screamed. “You just sit there like you don’t even see anything?”
The two girls ran to his aid in the kitchen, but they didn’t know what he wanted them to do, so they just stood there, feeling scared that he would yell at them some more.
Sometimes he told them he was happy that he was able to be there for them because he had been a teenager when his father died. But he had high standards he wanted them to meet.
“You’re going to grow up to be something,” he’d say. “No kid of mine is going to grow up to be a little half-ass.”
In November 1995, Margo went to a retreat for Stephen Ministries training, a peer counseling program for nonordained church members, and ran into a minister she’d met at a friend’s funeral a year earlier.
“How long did it take you to get your divorce?” the minister, Diane Lytle, asked.
“It’s going on four years, and I still don’t have it yet,” Margo replied.
“It sounds like you have had some interesting experiences,” Diane said. “I’d like to spend some time getting to know you. Give me a call, and we’ll get together after the first of the year.”
Margo called Diane a couple of months later, and they met at her church one evening in late January. Margo told her about all the struggles she’d been having with her sexuality, knowing deep inside that she was gay, but feeling so ashamed that she’d been living in denial. She also said she’d been realizing that she couldn’t get rid of her feelings of attraction to other women.
“Does this thing inside me make me a bad person?” Margo asked.
“Who is God to you? What is your concept of God?”
“I believe in a kind and loving God. He is a forgiving God.”
“Does God make mistakes?”
“No,” Margo said.
“Do you believe God is perfect?”
“Yes.”
“Then why do you think God made a mistake in creating you?”
Margo soon saw where Diane was going with this. “She was guiding me into realizing that God is loving, he is kind, and he is perfect,” she said later. “Why would he create me and make a mistake, to be wrong, to be bad? No, God doesn’t create us to be bad.”
After all her years of struggle and shame, Margo finally accepted that God loved her just the way she was. She was also able to accept herself—and the concept that she was not going to hell for being gay.
“That was truly the moment of the liberation of my soul,” she recalled a decade later, crying as she described this pivotal moment. “It was a very significant point in my life, when I realized I’m OK and no, it’s not heresy for a gay woman to say, ‘I believe in God; he made me and he loves me.’ ”
That said, Margo was still not able to share her newfound belief with other members of the congregation at Prince of Peace, because Methodist doctrine says that the only moral intimate relationship is between a husband and wife. For now, she felt she still needed to keep her sexuality a secret, because others would disapprove and think she was a bad person.
In November 1995, Lindsey had her annual cardiology checkup in Georgetown. As usual, they did an EKG, which showed no abnormal symptoms, and a color sonogram of her heart, which did. Her pulmonary artery had become enlarged, which suggested that a lot of blood was being recycled through her lungs.
Margo scheduled an angiogram for the following month, then put a note for Gene in Lindsey’s backpack to explain what was going on.
The angiogram showed that the hole in the ventricular wall of Lindsey’s heart had not shrunk as they had originally thought. It had grown to the size of a quarter, and a significant amount of blood was leaking through it into the lungs and overtaxing them. The doctors said this could become a fatal condition and recommended that Lindsey see a surgeon to repair it.
Over the next few months, Margo’s battles with Gene now centered around if and when Lindsey should have open-heart surgery. Margo wanted to move ahead as so
on as possible, as the doctors had advised, whereas Gene kept pushing for a delay.
He took Lindsey to a new therapist, saying she was suffering from severe anxiety and nightmares, and insisted that Lindsey was in no emotional shape to go under the knife. He also insisted on participating in the sessions with the new therapist, Jennifer Levy, and with the surgeon as well. Margo didn’t like being in the same room as Gene, but there was no way to avoid it.
In the year since Gene had been released from prison, Lindsey had gained thirty pounds, going from an outdoor sporty kid to a more rotund child. Allison told Margo that Gene had been feeding Lindsey bowls of peanut butter and ice cream. Margo could not figure out why Gene kept trying to stall the surgery and was feeding her such fattening foods, while at the same time, he was sending notes in the backpack, telling Margo to stop giving Lindsey so much “junk.” Later she realized he’d been up to his old tricks trying to make her look crazy as part of an elaborate deadly scheme to capture all the marital assets, including the girls, for himself.
On February 11, 1996, he took out an ad in the classified section of the Washington Post that said, “SECURITY—FT/PT non-lic investigators for NoVA work. We will train for licensing.” (In this case, “NoVA” was an abbreviation for Northern Virginia, not the community college system.)
A woman named Mary Ann Khalifeh, a former analyst for the Internal Revenue Service, responded to the ad and was hired by Gene, who was posing as a retired FBI agent turned private investigator named Edwin Adams. Gene told Mary Ann she was going to help him investigate an insurance fraud and embezzlement scam and gave her detailed instructions for a number of things he wanted her to do, promising her a lump sum of $35,000 once the job was done. One of those tasks was to open four bank accounts with $50 each, then use them to take out four $250,000 accidental death policies on herself, naming Marguerite, Allison, and Lindsey Bennett and Elizabeth Akers as beneficiaries. Marguerite Bennett, he told her, was one of the embezzlers.
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