06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (13 page)

Relieved, Linda shrugged off her apprehension. It was too glorious a day to ruin it. She felt naughty and free, so much so that she grinned with pleasure. “It was so not James. So full of fun,” she said later. “I couldn’t wait to tell Penny and the others. They talked about it all the time. How great it would be to make love to their husbands on the boat. I couldn’t believe that James and I had actually done it.”

When the
Ohio
pulled out of Puget Sound on January 22, 1988, Linda felt good about the future. She and James had made up, and he should have little reason to worry about her while he was gone. She was going to make this work. As insurance, she packed an eleven-by-fourteen-inch envelope with twenty cards for the mail drop. Each bore orders on the front, instructing James to wait until a certain Monday or Friday before opening it. Once a week, she stopped on base to send a Family Gram that always concluded with “I love you and I can’t wait until you get home.”

Certain that she had done all she could, she settled into her regular schedule, working out at the gym. She was finding navy life much as her sister-in-law had first described it: “When the guys are away you have time for yourself, and when they come back you’re always glad they’re back.” When James was gone, she was free to do as she wished, unhindered for the first time in her life by anyone or anything. She ate when she wanted to, read when she wanted to, slept in if she felt like it, didn’t clean if she had other things to do. It was heaven.

Not to mention the camaraderie of the other wives. She’d grown so close to her friends, she felt as if she could tell them almost anything. There were many of those afternoons or evenings, usually at Penny’s house, when the women just sat and talked for hours. Sometimes Diane or Gayle would pop in, but often it was just Linda and Penny, drinking
Cokes and talking about life. Like on one afternoon when the talk turned to sex, and Linda, in a hushed, embarrassed tone, told Penny something she had never revealed to anyone else.

“James has this thing he likes to do,” Linda confided.

“What?” Penny asked.

“He likes to tie me up, during sex,” she said, hesitantly, too self-conscious to go into more detail.

“Some of the guys like to do different things,” Penny said, dismissing her friend’s concerns with a wave of the hand. “They’re away so much, they get strange ideas. Don’t let it worry you.”

Unsure, Linda didn’t respond.

“There’s probably nothing to it,” Penny pressed on. “It’s like ice cream. Who wants to always eat vanilla?”

This time Linda nodded in agreement.
Penny’s probably right,
she thought.
I’m probably being a prude and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

At the first wives’ club function, Linda signed on a list of volunteers willing to help out in an emergency, and early in February she was called. Mitzi Swartz, the wife of James’s chief petty officer, Steve Swartz, suffered with asthma and needed help caring for her two young daughters, eight and eleven.

The two women hit it off almost immediately. Mitzi, a short brunette who had remained spunky despite her illness, had followed her husband from base to base during his career in the navy. She’d met many navy wives, but she particularly liked Linda. “Linda could be really outgoing and fun, if sometimes a little quiet,” explained Swartz later. “I understood she was trying really hard to keep things together.”

Linda spent days caring for the girls while Mitzi rested. Often she’d stay to cook supper. When Swartz was hospitalized for a week, Linda moved into the house to help, even taking the two girls to mass at Holy Trinity on Sunday morning.
Before long, Linda began thinking about having children of her own. “I wanted a family, and seeing Mitzi with her girls made me think more and more about having children,” she later said. “I suddenly had this overpowering urge to have a child of my own.”

Sometimes, after Mitzi returned home, the two women sat in the backyard in the early evening, drinking strawberry daiquiris. Steve had told Mitzi about James Bergstrom’s troubles, both his dismal second patrol and the beating he’d administered to Linda in the parking lot. One day when Linda revealed how much she enjoyed Washington and navy life, Mitzi cautioned her, “Steve has some doubts about James. He’s not sure James will be able to make it in the navy.”

Linda looked downcast.

“I understand you’re trying to help James,” Mitzi continued. “But you have to think about yourself, too.”

What neither woman knew was how James was faring on his third patrol. Later Steve Swartz would tell Mitzi that on-board James was withdrawn, rarely talking with anyone. Bill Haberstock, the COB who had taken over the
Ohio
from Jim Sirles, would later describe Bergstrom in even harsher terms, as almost pathologically quiet. “James always did an average job in his work. He never let it get in the way,” Haberstock, an avuncular man with a soothing manner, said later. “But he was so balled up inside himself, you never had any idea what he was thinking.”

On a team where every man counts on every other man to do his job, James didn’t seem like a team player. In fact, in many ways it was like going back to his high school years when he viewed himself as estranged from the other students. It was also similar in that James was the one who judged his situation most harshly. To the others, he was just a nondescript, shy member of the crew. In his own judgment, he was an outcast. “I knew I had failed them and that they were all talking behind my back. They all knew I wasn’t the kind that would stick in the navy,” he said later.

He would also later admit that something else changed during that third patrol. Though he had always had the urges, with little to occupy his mind, he increasingly escaped to the fantasy world of his adolescence. Whenever he was alone, even standing watch in the IC unit’s small cubicle, he would daydream about catching women unawares, watching them from a distance, and something new, entering their homes, tying them up, and forcing them to do anything he wanted.

When the
Ohio
pulled into port on March 30, Linda and Mitzi arrived at the pier late. They’d lost track of time while celebrating their husbands’ arrival with margaritas at Azteca, and James and Steve were standing side by side on the dock, obviously annoyed, when their wives drove up. All of the other wives and sailors were gone, and Linda immediately feared the reception she would get, but James was only upset for a moment before wrapping his arms around her. “Thanks for all the cards and everything,” he said. “It really helped.”

It was an auspicious homecoming when compared to the ones before it.

As always, with James home, the days returned to their routine in which he spent mornings at the base and arrived home in the early afternoons. Linda usually slept late, and once out of bed, she’d tackle the housework. In the afternoons James nearly always wanted to make love; often that included tying Linda up. Sometimes he bound her ankles together and her arms behind her, as he had that first time in Houston. Other times he ordered her to lie on her back, then he bound her carefully to the bed frame, her legs and arms spread.

Linda hated it. Each time she felt as if she were being violated and raped. She bristled at the way he glared at her while he played out his fantasies. It was humiliating and frightening. James appeared cruelly oblivious to her feelings, and she forced herself to play along, hoping that if James was happy
in bed, other aspects of their lives—including his performance in the navy—would improve. For months now, she had felt as if she were married to two men: the quiet, thoughtful, shy James she had fallen in love with, and the uncaring man with the distant eyes who haunted their bedroom and had exploded in anger that night in the parking lot.

Yet she had lived with a truly domineering man, her father, and it was hard to imagine anything James did was beyond what she had grown up knowing. Oddly, Linda felt more hopeful. James no longer mentioned getting out of the navy early. Secretly she hoped he might even decide to reenlist, giving her another two to four years of the life she’d grown to love.

Despite all the blowups, the thoughtful James, the one who wanted desperately to please her, was the one with whom she spent most of her days and nights. She never doubted how important she was to him. Though he initially balked when she broached the subject of children, James relented when he realized how desperately she wanted a baby. Excitedly she stopped taking precautions to prevent a pregnancy. But months passed. Each time her period arrived she became despondent. “James would pat me on the back and say, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll work. You’ll see,’” she’d later recall. “But I wanted a baby so much, I couldn’t think of practically anything else.”

She tried to ignore the other James, the one who held her workout tights in his hands one afternoon when he called her into the bedroom.

“All right, but no gags,” she warned him, as she always did.

She undressed and lay down on her back, and he tied her—arms and legs spread—to the bed frame. Then he retested each restraint to make sure it was tight. It was becoming almost routine for Linda now. She tried to concentrate on other things, having a baby or playing tennis, so she wouldn’t feel as vulnerable and humiliated, as he fondled
her breasts and ran his fingers over her body. And she tried not to look closely at James. She didn’t want to see that distant gaze that always shot a tremor of fear through her.

But then, to her amazement, like that one other time months earlier, James suddenly stopped. He stood above her, fully clothed, and stared down at her. “I’ll be right back,” was all he said before he turned and left.

Minutes passed. Linda tried not to panic. “I knew he’d come back like the time before; I figured it would just be a little while,” she would say later. But James didn’t return. As she watched the second hand on the clock sweep its way around and around, Linda began wondering what would happen if a fire broke out in the complex. What would happen to her.
Where can he be?
she wondered.

Later James would describe what he had done when he left Linda helplessly tied to the bed that afternoon. As she counted off the minutes, he furtively circled to the back of the apartment, peering in one window after another. Doing just that, he found Theresa George, a statuesque half-Sioux woman, in unit number four. Just emerging from the shower, she had finished her day job working as a utility clerk at a store in the nearby Silverdale Mall. In another hour, she had to report to a fast-food Chinese restaurant where she worked evenings. The apartment was quiet. As she reached down to untie her robe, she suddenly sensed something awry. She had the unmistakable impression that she wasn’t alone. George glanced up at the window and saw—frozen forever in time—the frenzied face of a man, watching her. She screamed and ran toward him to close the curtain, but by the time she’d reached the window, he’d vanished. “He had the strangest look in his eyes,” George later remembered. “They were ice-cold.”

Looking back, Linda would judge James had been gone for ten minutes when he returned to the apartment. Again she had managed to free her hands and feet from the restraints, but her wrists were sore from the strain.

“Where the hell have you been?” she asked, sobbing.

“I just had to run out,” James answered. “I see you got loose.”

“James, don’t tie me up anymore, okay?” she said. “I don’t want it. I won’t have it.”

“People do this all the time, Linda,” James scoffed, plainly irritated. “It’s no big deal. You just don’t like it because of the rape. If I could find that guy that raped you, I’d wring his neck. Because of him, we can’t have a normal sex life.”

Linda said nothing more, but held her ground a few days later when James again wanted to tie her. The truth was, she had become increasingly frightened during James’s sex games. The way he looked at her, that distant, vacant gaze. The way he insisted on putting his hand across her mouth to gag her.
If I screamed, no one would hear me
, she often thought. And then there was the way he would tickle and prod at her. Though she pushed him back, struggling against the bindings, he came at her until she thought she could take it no more and gave in to the tears. She could never have explained to anyone why it seemed so menacing: the inability to move, to get away, to make him stop. Having no control over anything once he slipped that final knot around her wrist.

At such times, Linda remembered a deer that had emerged from the darkness of the forest along the highway one night when she rode home from a gathering with her friends. She’d had to swerve to avoid hitting it, as it stood blinded by the headlights of her oncoming car.

If anyone had asked, she would have told them that was how it felt to be tied to the bed, helpless to escape, and at the mercy of the James who emerged at such times, the James with the vacant eyes and the cruel smile.

Theresa George saw that same man a few weeks later when she was again dressing in her bedroom. Unlike the first episode, this time it was early morning and she was in a
hurry to report to work at the department store. In her bedroom, she dropped her robe, slipped into her briefs, and fastened her bra. Then she stepped in her jeans and pulled a blue striped T-shirt over her head. Just as she finished dressing, she heard a low whistle from the direction of the window. George looked up and saw the dark-haired man with the frenzied expression and the haunted hazel eyes. Again she screamed and he disappeared. George slammed the window shut, locked it, and shut the curtains. “I couldn’t get over it,” she’d say later. “He wanted me to see him.”

This time, George reported her run-in with the Peeping Tom to Sally Rogers, the landlord. “He looked familiar, but I’m not sure where I’ve seen him before,” a shaken George told her.

“Is it someone who lives here?” asked Rogers.

“It’s possible.”

Sally listened calmly and tried not to reveal any undue concern. They’d had drifters make trouble off and on over the years, or it could even have just been a tramp who’d ducked behind the building to relieve himself. Rogers hated to admit it but knew that happened occasionally. But George wasn’t the first upset tenant. Others had complained of a man who hung around outside the complex, and a few had reported that their bedroom screens were bent as if someone had tried to pry them loose to get inside.

The following day something else happened, and though she couldn’t prove it, from then on Sally Rogers felt certain the man at Theresa George’s window was James Bergstrom.