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Authors: Caitlin Rother

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Twisted Triangle

BOOK: Twisted Triangle
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Twisted Triangle
A Famous Crime Writer, a Lesbian Love Affair,
and the FBI Husband’s Violent Revenge

 

Caitlin Rother
with John Hess

 

 

 

Twisted Triangle

 

Twisted Triangle
A Famous Crime Writer, a Lesbian Love Affair,
and the FBI Husband’s Violent Revenge

 

Caitlin Rother
with John Hess

 

 

Copyright  2008 by Caitlin Rother and John Hess. All rights reserved.

 

Published by JosseyBass A Wiley Imprint
989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com

 

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifi disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fi for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profi or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Rother, Caitlin.
Twisted triangle : a famous crime writer, a lesbian love affair, and the FBI husband’s violent revenge / Caitlin Rother with John Hess.—1st ed.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-9585-0 (cloth)
1. Women—Crimes against—Virginia—Case studies. 2. Bennett, Marguerite, date. 3. Attempted murder—Virginia—Case studies. 4. Bennett, Eugene Allen. 5. Criminals—Virginia—Case studies.
  1. Hess, John E., date. II. Title. HV6250.W65R68 2008 364.152
    1
    3092—dc22
    2007044998
    Printed in the United States of America
    first edition
    HB Printing
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
    Contents
    Preface ix
    Foreword xv
    Margo Bennett
    1. Fighting Back 1
    2. Till Death Do Us Part 5
    3. Diamonds and Denial 15
    4. Uncomfortably Numb 31
    5. Prolonged Embraces 41
    6. The Divorce Battle Begins 65
    7. Abduction 87
    8. Mitigating Circumstances 113
    9. Paranoia 133
    10. The Main Event 153
    11. The Investigation: Gene’s Plot Unfolds 181
    12. Prosecution: Crazy Like a Fox 205
      v
      vi
      C
      ONTENTS
    13. Defense: Incompetent Evil Ed 219
    14. Vindication 235
    15. Damage and Recovery 251

 

 

 

 

About the Authors 271
Index 273

 

To Margo, for her spirit,
courage, and strength

 

Preface

 

The story of Margo and Gene Bennett has fascinated me ever since I read about it in
Vanity Fair
and the
Washington Post
in the late 1990s. I was working on my fi crime novel at the time and was an avid reader of Patricia Cornwell’s forensic thrillers. Also, as a newspaper reporter who covered sometimes dry government and politics, I enjoyed reading in-depth true crime stories.
This one had so many sexy components: two married FBI agents involved in a love triangle with a best-selling crime novelist who wrote about FBI agents and the serial killers they profi And then to find out that Cornwell’s affair was with the female agent—now
that
was intriguing.
As a budding novelist myself, I appreciated the ironic parallels
between Cornwell’s fictional and personal lives: her female protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, was having an affair with a married FBI agent, and Scarpetta’s niece was a lesbian. I still wonder whether Cornwell’s real-life affair preceded the fictional one.
Fast-forward to 2005.
Poisoned Love
, my first book, about the Kristin Rossum murder case, had just been published. Soon afterward, my agent called and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book about the Bennett case; Margo had never told her story to a reporter before. Of course I jumped at the chance.
Like Cornwell, I was seeing my own worlds intersecting. While I was covering the Rossum case for
The San Diego Union-Tribune
, Rossum, a forensic toxicologist, testifi that she, too, was a fan of Cornwell’s, a fact I included in my first book.

 

ix

The universe truly does work in strange and wonderful ways. As Margo would say, there was a reason I held on to that yellowed
Washington Post
article all those years. This was meant to be.

 

Now I’d like to explain my research methodology and how I put this book together.
At the start of this project, Margo shipped me four boxes of documents, including her FBI personnel paperwork, her divorce records, and personal papers about her family’s health, finances, and property transactions. She also sent me piles of offi documents from Gene’s two court cases, the letters he’d written to his daughters over the years, and her sizable collection of news stories. Over the next two years, Margo continued to send me extremely sensitive information, such as her and her daughters’
psychological evaluations and the diary she’d kept during her fi pregnancy. She also made sure I had access to her Cornwell novels, which included personal inscriptions, and to many of the people I interviewed who might not have talked to me otherwise. To my knowledge, Margo held nothing back because she wanted the story to be told properly.
Before I came along, former FBI agent and Quantico instructor John Hess spent a few years putting together his version of this story, interviewing his close friend Margo for many hours along the way. When he couldn’t get his manuscript published, his agent approached my agent, and I took it from there.
BOOK: Twisted Triangle
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