Twisted Triangle

by Caitlin Rother

  “I really thought she was putting on an act, but it turned out not to be an act,” he later said.

  Ron soon realized that Mary Ann had no idea what she had gotten herself into. Gene had found the perfect person to help pull off his wild plan.

  Later that afternoon, Bob DelCore, the unofficial head of NOVA’s five campus police departments, called Margo to say that she was being placed on an open-ended, paid administrative leave, while campus officials investigated her use of deadly force—by shooting at Gene—the night before. He told her that no one was saying she’d done anything wrong, but they had to look into it. He sounded sympathetic and asked if it would be all right if a peer counselor from the Fairfax County Police Department came and talked to her about the incident.

  Margo wasn’t concerned about the investigation because she knew the bureaucratic process had to run its course. She was confident that they would find the shooting justified.

  She took the girls to their scheduled therapy appointment with Molly Ellsworth that evening, then spoke to the peer counselor around nine. She insisted that they talk in his car outside the townhouse because she didn’t want the girls to hear their conversation.

  “How do you feel about having shot at someone?” he asked.

  “I feel fine with what I did,” she said. “I feel I did the right thing.”

  Margo didn’t read any of the newspaper articles that had come out that day, but she did watch the TV news that evening. The church incident was featured at the top of the hour on all the local news shows, so she was able to see only one of them.

  Gene had been charged with abduction with intent to extort money, burglary while armed, making bomb threats, using a firearm while committing a felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He was being held without bond pending a psychological evaluation. Margo wondered why there was no attempted murder charge.

  It was very strange to watch her own story unfolding on television for the world to see, but all she felt was numb, as if she were watching something that had happened to someone else.

  She’d sent the kids upstairs, worried that they might be scared to see their father’s booking photo, which featured a man with tired eyes and unkempt hair and kept flashing across the screen. Thankfully, none of the news outlets had gotten a photo of her, only of her car parked outside the church, so she felt she still had some privacy and protection from the media. She had no idea how fleeting that feeling would be.

  Margo went to bed around 11 PM, comforted to have Lindsey beside her again. Margo fell asleep all right, but then she started what would become a routine—waking up and lying awake for two and half hours, trying to connect the dots of Gene’s scheme, then drifting off for maybe an hour before having to get up for work.

  On Tuesday morning, Margo got a call from Detective Sam Walker, asking if she could come down to the station to answer some questions. She certainly was not expecting to hear what he had to say in that tiny interview room.

  “Do you know a woman named Mary Ann Khalifeh?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Margo said, not remembering their meeting at the Polo Grill the month before.

  “We don’t have all the information on this yet,” Sam said, “but it looks like your husband planned to kill you for some insurance money.”

  Margo was not surprised to hear that Gene had planned to kill her, but she was puzzled by the alleged motivation.

  What insurance money? she wondered.

  “It looks like Gene hired someone to help him kill you and the reverend. We don’t know if he was acting alone. I’m telling you this now so you can be careful, but don’t tell anyone. We don’t have all the information yet.”

  Don’t tell anyone? she thought.

  Margo knew how much Gene hated her and wanted her dead, but she couldn’t believe that he would be so greedy, that he would endanger other people’s lives to get to her. She was also shocked to hear how much effort he had put into his plan.

  Dianna was waiting for her outside, but Margo told her she wanted to wait until they got to Kathy’s office to talk about her meeting with the detective.

  Once they got to Kathy’s, Margo relayed Sam’s theory and words of caution.

  “So why are you telling me about this?” Kathy asked.

  “I have to tell somebody. You’re my attorney,” Margo said, meaning that Kathy was obligated to keep her secret under attorney-client privilege.

  From there, they all headed over to the emergency custody hearing.

  As they were walking into the courtroom, Kathy couldn’t help but make a sarcastic comment to Gene’s divorce attorney, Doug Bergere.

  “Now do you believe her story?” she asked, referring to the kidnapping.

  Doug simply nodded and looked down at the floor.

  The judge granted Margo’s request for a “no contact” order, prohibiting Gene from calling the girls, but that didn’t stop him. He tried calling Allison collect a couple of days later, so Kathy notified the jail and asked them to stop Gene from calling the house.

  Later that day, the police found the Windstar rental van. It was parked on Briarmont Lane, at the end of a long driveway of an occupied house that was up for sale, about a fifty-yard walk through the woods from Gene’s house. Inside, they found a long-sleeved navy-blue work shirt, which, after undergoing forensic testing, proved to be spattered with pepper spray.

  During the search, officers brought over a note pad, which Edwin had found in his office after the police left. Two pages in Gene’s handwriting were each titled “Items To Check On.”

  The first page listed directions to the Pittsburgh airport as well as phone numbers for American Airlines and US Air, with a specific number and time for a flight from Pittsburgh to San Diego, followed by the notation “Call 911.” It also listed phone numbers for two hotels in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where Gene and Mary Ann had left the Plymouth Voyager van on Sunday morning. Pittsburgh was the closest airport to Martinsburg.

  The second page, under the initials “MAB,” appeared to be a list of places he planned to leave various items tied to Margo, including “literature in car/purse,” “keys in car/purse,” and “keys on key ring.”

  Edwin’s secretary had also found some male homosexual pornographic materials in his office safe, which was kept unlocked. These too were turned over to police.

  News reporters started calling and showing up at Margo’s townhouse that Tuesday. Letta had been handling the calls, but when she and Carly left in the late afternoon to pick up Jackie from the airport, Margo had to answer the doorbell herself. It was a young woman from the Washington Post.

  The woman apologized for having to ask for a quote, but asked nonetheless.

  Margo gave her the only comment she would make to the media until after Gene’s trial: “Time will put everything in its proper perspective.”

  Margo and Letta went to Prince of Peace that night for a service to reclaim the church after the violence that had tainted its sacred space. Margo had learned of the service when she’d tried to reach Edwin by phone in the afternoon. A message on the church answering machine announced the service and said that Edwin was doing fine, but made no mention of Margo.

  “That’s when I really started to feel left out,” she said later.

  When they first arrived, no one would look at Margo or sit in the same pew. There seemed to be an unspoken barrier of blame or some emotion that she did not understand. Only one woman came over and squeezed her hand before the associate pastor began speaking.

  “How are you doing?” the woman asked.

  “Right now I’m feeling very alone,” Margo said.

  The associate pastor spoke for half an hour about the terrible experience that Edwin had suffered, then he asked church members to give comments of thanks.

  Several people stood up and thanked God for saving Edwin before another woman pointed out that Margo had suffered and deserved their praise, too.

  “I just want to give thanks that
Margo brought her gun into this church, because if she hadn’t done that, I can only imagine what could have happened,” she said.

  After that, others started looking Margo in the eye and including her in their remarks. The barrier had been broken.

  “I was relieved that somebody was realizing that it was a horrible evening for me, my children, my sister, my family,” Margo said later.

  At the end of the service, Margo and Edwin stood in the middle of the center aisle, where church members lined up to give each of them a hug and offer their support.

  This would be the last service Margo would attend at Prince of Peace. Being there was just too emotionally difficult, not to mention that she’d been outed by the media. Instead, she attended services at Diane Lytle’s Presbyterian church, which was more accepting of her sexuality and where she was surrounded by strangers.

  “I wanted anonymity for a while,” she said.

  Margo felt a sense of satisfaction that she’d struggled against Gene and done what she’d needed to survive. She was alive, he was in jail, and she and her children were safe once again. The storm, she felt, had passed.

  She didn’t realize that this was actually the calm before another type of storm moved in.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Investigation Gene’s Plot Unfolds

  On the morning of Wednesday, June 26, Margo went to the store to buy every newspaper with a headline about her and Gene so that she could see what was being reported and also so that her daughters could read an objective account later if they so chose.

  There were three—one in the Potomac News, one in the Prince William Journal, and one in the Washington Post.

  “Ex-FBI Agent in Custody,” read the Journal headline. Margo felt her stomach drop when she got to the sixth paragraph, which said, “A copy of the divorce papers obtained Monday by The Journal include allegations by Mr. Bennett that his wife had more than one lesbian sexual relationship. Among the affairs Mr. Bennett alleged was one with a prominent author.”

  The story quoted from the interrogatory response in which Gene alleged that Margo had met Patsy for romantic candlelit dinners and that he’d seen them kissing and hugging.

  Oh, God, here it comes, she thought.

  Although the article didn’t name Patsy, Margo predicted that a media frenzy was about to begin.

  She was right. The next article was even worse.

  “Ex-Agent Alleges Wife Had Affair with Author,” read the Potomac News headline.

  Seeing Patsy named as her lover in the third paragraph sent Margo’s anxiety skyrocketing.

  Oh, my God, oh, my God, she thought. This is going to be in every newspaper and on every news channel. How am I going to protect my kids? What’s this going to mean at work?

  Things didn’t get any better from there. The Post story, which had the headline “Psychiatric Evaluation Ordered for Abduction Suspect,” named Patsy as well. It also gave Margo her first clue to what Gene’s defense was going to be, quoting one of his attorneys, Jeffrey Gans, saying that his client was disoriented, said he was hearing voices, and believed he had “an alter ego named Ed that was bad.” Gans told the Post that Gene “did not know what day it was” and also “could not account for his whereabouts during his time of the confrontation” at the church.

  Margo didn’t know that reporters had been calling Kathy since Monday. Kathy later told her she’d sealed the divorce records at the emergency custody hearing the day before, but it was too late to stop the media train. All they could do was try to slow it down.

  Patsy had just gotten a three-book contract with Putnam, worth a reported $24 million to $27 million, and was set to release her seventh book in the Kay Scarpetta series, Cause of Death, in July. Patsy’s celebrity had catapulted her ties to Margo and Gene’s criminal case into an international news story with the kind of juicy hook that the media loved.

  Margo was never able to determine how the first reporter got hold of the records, but she figured Gene must have given his criminal attorneys permission to release them. His divorce attorney, Doug Bergere, told the media that he and Kathy had requested that the documents be sealed.

  That same day, Gene gave a thirty-minute interview to the Potomac News reporter for a story that appeared the next morning.

  The article described Gene as tired and unshaven, wearing a short-sleeved orange jumpsuit and handcuffs as he spoke to the reporter by telephone in the visiting room.

  “I’ve been without sleep for a long, long time,” Gene said. “What day is today? . . . I don’t know what’s going on. Right now, I would just like to get some sleep.”

  Gene claimed he didn’t recall abducting Edwin Clever or putting explosives in the church, only running out of the church after Margo took a shot at him.

  “I would have shot back but I don’t have a gun,” he said.

  Gene said he’d expected to have been granted full custody of his daughters at the July 15 divorce trial.

  “I didn’t want my children raised in a lesbian household. I don’t think she’s a proper mother for them,” he said.

  About a week later, movie producers started calling Kathy about doing a film on the case. But Margo wasn’t interested. She felt the best thing for her was to lay low and be quiet.

  Growing up, Margo was like her mother in that she kept her emotions inside. Afflicted with the typical middle-child syndrome, Margo felt invisible much of the time. She didn’t try to speak up all that often, because even when she did, no one seemed to listen.

  One night in Athens, Georgia, when Margo was fourteen, her family was sitting around the dinner table, talking about the activities they’d done that day, which included picking vegetables at a private garden they shared with several families.

  “My favorite part was digging the potatoes,” Margo said, her soft voice drowned out by the family’s conversation.

  “My favorite part was digging the potatoes,” Margo repeated a little louder.

  Still, everyone kept talking.

  “My favorite part was digging the potatoes,” Margo said even louder, prompting her mother to break out laughing.

  But Margo was satisfied. Finally someone had acknowledged her.

  Although she liked this type of positive affirmation, Margo didn’t much care for being the central focus. In fact, she often liked being invisible because it meant less attention and, as a result, less discord. Shying away from confrontation, she often served as the family peacemaker and facilitator. Looking back later, she realized that she had probably cheated herself out of some much-needed nurturing and confidence building.

  Now that the media was exposing her most intimate secrets and highlighting her questionable choices—first marrying Gene and then having an affair with a woman who became an internationally known author—Margo had to learn a whole new way of coping with unwanted attention. This was one choice she couldn’t afford not to make.

  Margo had to accept that her life would never be the same. She was embarrassed that her private life was media fodder for public consumption, but she finally decided she wasn’t going to be embarrassed about who she was anymore.

  “There were no secrets to be kept, and there’s a great deal of relief that goes with that,” she later recalled. “I also believed that I had done nothing wrong. I was the one wronged. People who knew me would stand by me—they knew what kind of person I was—and the people who didn’t know me didn’t matter.”

  Bob DelCore, NOVA’s police chief, called Margo at home on Thursday afternoon to tell her that the investigation into the shooting was over. He said she was cleared to come back to work, but she could take all the time she needed.

  Margo said she would be in the next morning. The sooner she got back to work, the sooner she hoped her life could return to some level of normality.

  That same afternoon, Prince William County police officers Debra Twomey and Tom Leo went with the state police bomb squad to the Woodbridge NOVA campus—a four-story, cream-colored building su
rrounded by maple trees and a picturesque man-made lake. There they located the two lockers that corresponded to the numbers—4 and 28—on the keys marked “Woodbridge” that police had found in Gene’s black gym bag.

  With the help of a bomb-sniffing dog, they did a sweep of the campus and found that the keys unlocked padlocks hanging on lockers in the southwest corner of the building, down the hall from the student lunch area and about fifty feet from Margo’s office.

  But before they could go through the lockers, they had to obtain search warrants, which they finally executed just before 10 PM.

  Locker 28 held another typed “Evidence—Evidence—Evi dence” note, and locker 4 held another blue backpack, marked with a single vertical slash, or I.

  After x-raying the pack, the police found that it contained not only more of the same carpet and towel swatches and black explosive mixture they’d seen before but also something much more ominous: a strange, foot-long contraption wrapped with shiny black electrical tape, with an on-off power switch that looked like the one from the gray bag Gene had left outside the church. They determined that it was a homemade pipe bomb, which seemed all the more peculiar because a black vibrator was attached to it. Why in the world would someone attach a sex toy to a pipe bomb?

  Ron and his team of investigators would later discover that the swatches from the backpacks matched carpet and towels they’d found in Gene’s house and, when put together like a puzzle, fit into one contiguous piece of each respective material. It was curious to them that these items, which would generally be gathered as evidence to catch a criminal, were turning up in nice, neat packages at each crime scene. It looked as if Gene had purposely planted these items so that investigators would follow a road map of sorts and come to a particular conclusion. But now that they’d found this pipe bomb, the investigators scratched their heads, trying to see the big picture. If Gene’s plan had not been foiled, how would all this have ended?