06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (14 page)

It was the following morning when another tenant knocked on Rogers’s door. This time it was Shane, a young sailor who had moved into unit seventeen two months earlier. Heather, his seventeen-year-old wife, Shane told Rogers, was being harassed. “The guy in unit nine—James Bergstrom. He’s coming around knocking on our windows and our doors. I’m afraid to leave her home alone,” he said.
“She talked to him at first, to be neighborly, but now he’s coming around all the time, knocking on the window and asking to come in. He says his wife doesn’t have enough time for him, that she ignores him, and that he’s lonely.”

That afternoon, James came home from the base raving angry. One of their neighbors, he said, had filed a complaint with central command about his behavior. Before long, word got back to the officers on the
Ohio
, and Bill Haberstock called James in to get his side of the story. James denied everything.

“That bastard got me called on the carpet,” James grumbled to Linda. “I haven’t done a damn thing to that woman. She’s just using me to make her husband jealous.”

Not sure what to believe, Linda questioned James repeatedly about what the man and his wife were claiming. Through it all, James kept insisting the woman was crazy. “I wouldn’t even look at another woman,” he maintained. “I love you so much, I even hate to leave you to go on patrol. We’re trying to have a baby. We’re a family. I wouldn’t risk that.”

Linda then telephoned next door to ask Rogers where Shane lived, but before she could say much of anything, the landlord informed her that Shane had made similar accusations—charging James was harassing his wife—to her. “How can that be?” Linda asked, incredulously. “James has always been obsessive about me. He almost got thrown out of the navy because he didn’t want to go to sea and leave me alone.”

Rogers said nothing, but she was predisposed to believe Shane and his young wife. The Bergstroms’ loud arguments and James’s mournful cries had often disturbed both her afternoons and her nights, and her husband, Bill, mentioned when she’d relayed Shane’s complaint to him that he’d sometimes noticed James Bergstrom’s Grand Prix parked behind the complex. “It’s like he doesn’t want his wife to know he’s home,” Bill had said. “Maybe he has reasons.”

As Sally Rogers listened, Linda kept going over Shane’s
charges one by one. “Why would James do that?” she asked. Rogers understood Linda was groping for answers but felt unable to help her. She pitied Linda. Lately she’d noticed that whenever she saw James and Linda walking together, Linda always stared down at the ground. “It was like she was afraid to look at anybody,” said Rogers. “Afraid he’d get mad if she did.”

With James peering nervously from the balcony, Linda walked down to unit number seventeen. Shane answered the door and she introduced herself. “I’m having a hard time believing this,” Linda said. “Is it possible your wife is lying?”

“I guess it’s possible,” Shane mused. “But I think she’s telling the truth.”

When Heather arrived home later that afternoon, she called Linda. “I am telling the truth,” she maintained. “There’s something wrong with that husband of yours. I want him to leave me alone.”

Linda was in a quandary, not knowing what to think.

That night, James was despondent. She had to believe him, he insisted. Wasn’t she
his
wife? Shouldn’t she take
his
side? Why would he bother with Heather when Linda knew how much he loved her? “I’m not getting in trouble because of that lying bitch,” James shouted. “I’m tired of her lies.”

By the next day on base the situation had escalated. Shane refused to back down from his complaints, and Haberstock issued an order; James and Linda had to move from the apartment by the end of the week. Not sure why she was the one being uprooted, Linda called Steve Swartz and asked if he thought James was guilty of Shane and Heather’s charges. “Steve told her no, and later, when she asked me, I told her I didn’t believe James had done it either,” said Haberstock. “The guy was just too quiet. It was hard to imagine.”

Feeling somewhat reassured by Swartz’s and Haberstock’s certainty that the charges against James were trumped up, Linda began to see a bright side to the situation. She’d wanted to move from the Silverdale Apartments since the
day they’d moved in. They were cramped and run-down. Only James’s refusal to spend money kept them there. Now she had a week to find a new place. With no time to spare, Linda settled on the Central Park Apartments, a sprawling complex on a bucolic setting in a suburban area of Central Kitsap County, on the corner of Fairgrounds and Central Valley Roads. Like surrounding subdivisions of ranch-style houses and a small shopping area across the street, the apartment complex was carved out of the forest, each unit overlooking a parklike setting with a gazebo.

That Saturday, Steve and Mitzi Swartz pulled up into the parking lot of the Silverdale Apartments in their van, and Bill Haberstock arrived in his truck, all intent on moving the Bergstroms to their new apartment without further incident. Linda had everything packed and ready, and since they had little furniture, it took only two trips to move their possessions. Then, in Haberstock’s truck, Linda and James drove from the parking lot of the Silverdale Apartments one last time. Heather and Shane were outside their apartment, watching.

“As we passed them, James slipped his arm over my shoulders,” remembered Linda later. “He gave them this defiant look. It was like he was telling them he had won.”

The next Sunday, as always, James and Linda drove the short distance to Holy Trinity Church. Reverend Joseph P. Erny was saying mass that morning. Father Erny, with soft white hair and glasses, was known throughout the congregation for his sermons utilizing Charlie Brown comic strips. Snoopy, the good father maintained, was an acute observer of life.

After mass, James pulled Linda toward the priest, who shook hands with parishioners in the vestibule.

“I want to set my wife’s mind at ease,” James said nervously to the priest, with Linda listening. “We’ve been going through a lot. A girl who lives in our apartment complex made allegations that I was pursuing her. I want you and
Linda to know that I don’t care about that person. I don’t know her. She’s lying. I love my wife.”

The priest looked sympathetically at Linda. “Does this clear your mind and take care of it for you?” he asked her.

Linda considered James and the way he idealized the church, quoting prayers to her and talking about his faith in God. She couldn’t believe he would lie to a priest. “Yes, Father,” she said. “It does.”

Father Erny made the sign of the cross over their heads—in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

“Then bless you both,” he said. “And may God be with you.”

A month after their hasty move, James was on patrol again and Linda tried to put all the summer’s pieces into a pattern that made sense. That James had sworn in front of a priest that Heather had lied made her confident he was telling the truth, but not confident enough to forget what the seventeen-year-old had alleged. “If there was a scale of one to ten to measure how much you loved someone, before that incident, I loved James a ten,” Linda would say later. “After that summer, it was never more than a six. I just couldn’t forget.”

Still, even if it was true, it wasn’t something she wanted to break up the marriage over. She, after all, had not been raised to expect an untroubled life, and she had known all along that as time passed, she might have to make some adjustments. The important things were still there; James loved her and they were building a family together, the kind of life she had always wanted.

To keep busy and take her mind off the past, she applied for a part-time job at the day-care center in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. If it had been up to her, she would have worked years earlier, but James always wanted her home and accessible. In fact, when she told him she planned to look for work, he was not pleased. Linda persisted, pointing out their new apartment needed furniture and came with a higher rent, until he reluctantly gave in. But his approval came with strings. James ticked off a list of three acceptable
occupations—jobs with little contact with men: Linda could work in a fabric store, a women’s gym, or a day-care center. Because she yearned to have a child of her own, Linda decided on day care.

It was everything she’d hoped.

On the outskirts of the shipyard, the PSNS day-care center was housed in a converted brick barracks, one story with a newly added annex. It was always noisy and hectic, with as many as two hundred children divided by age into sixteen rooms. Each morning when parents dropped their young charges off, the halls filled with the squeal of laughter and the pounding of sturdy young feet. As a floater, Linda rotated between rooms. Sometimes she helped in the kitchen or the office, or with diaper changes in the baby room. There she met Carmen Mirano, whom Linda nicknamed “Grandma.” At forty-nine, Grandma, a diminutive woman who’d emigrated from the Philippines and still spoke with a heavy accent despite decades in the States, was the wife of a retired navy man and the mother of two teenage children.

The other friend she made at the day-care center was Patricia Ingersoll, heavyset with long, straight, dark brown hair and glasses. Pat had a self-deprecating sense of humor and was always overly solicitous, speaking with a steady, thoughtful tone.

But more than anything, Linda enjoyed the children. Especially the toddlers. She’d roll the ball across the floor to one, with another tucked securely under her arm, as a third hugged her from behind. How she wished to have one of her own.

More and more, however, Linda feared that might never materialize. Now that she was ready to raise a child, it just wasn’t happening. In the past six months, she’d been in and out of the base hospital consulting one doctor after another. They had her taking her temperature and charting her menstrual cycle, but to no avail. James was sympathetic but uninvolved. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m fully stocked,” he’d say brusquely, whenever she mentioned the subject of their infertility.

“He knew how desperately I wanted a baby,” she’d later say. “I don’t think he ever cared himself. He agreed to make me happy. To give me whatever I wanted.”

Unexpectedly, for the first time since James had started making patrols, the
Ohio
surfaced that October in Hawaii, docking in Pearl Harbor for its biennial torpedo reidentification, a series of exercises and exams in which the crew practiced firing the boat’s MK 48 torpedoes at dummy targets.

A ringing phone woke Linda’s friend Gayle from a deep sleep at two
A.M.
the first night the ship pulled into port. It was James looking for Linda. “He sounded frantic, like he had to talk to her immediately,” Gayle said later. “James was always that way. He obsessed about her.” Gayle said she’d left Linda at Penny’s earlier that evening. When she asked how he’d gotten her number, he said, “I copied the numbers of all Linda’s friends out of her telephone book before we sailed,” as if it were a natural thing for him to have done.

When James finally reached Linda at home later that night, he demanded to know where she had been and with whom. She told him about her night with her friends and that Gayle had left earlier than the rest. “I didn’t do anything special, James,” she said. “We just sat around and talked.”

“I worry about you, Linda,” he said. “Everybody on the boat is talking about some guy running around wearing a ski mask, peeping in windows. Maybe he’s even a rapist. You’ve got to be careful, lock your doors and windows. Be on the lookout for him.”

James then kept her on the phone—long-distance from Hawaii—for what seemed like hours, talking about nothing in particular. When she was too tired to talk and wanted to hang up, he refused, saying, “I just want to hear you breathe.”

There had, in fact, been complaints pouring into the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department since June about just such a dark-haired man in a red ski mask plaguing subdivisions surrounding the Bergstroms’ new apartment. It would be
many months until the police discovered the sightings began just after James Bergstrom moved into the neighborhood and until Linda realized that the night James called from Hawaii, he had warned her about himself.

As James’s fourth patrol drew to a close, Linda found her emotions about his return mixed. “I was happy, sad, excited, and scared all at the same time,” she’d later remember. “I didn’t know what to expect when he got home. All I was certain of was that our marriage was in trouble.”

To do what she could, Linda read books and watched “Oprah,” “Donahue,” and “Sally Jessy Raphael” every time the talk shows centered on how to breathe life into a foundering marriage. She took some of the money she was making at the day-care center and bought herself lingerie, and then had Patricia take provocative Polaroids of her, including one in filmy white baby-dolls with a telephone to her ear. At the last minute, Linda bought a
Playboy
magazine and included it with the Polaroids in James’s mail drop. “I wanted to spice things up,” she explained later, almost defiantly. “I didn’t know if James would like it, but it was something all the other wives were doing. I did it for fun.”

But when Linda met the
Ohio
with the other wives on September 28, 1988, her husband’s reaction wasn’t what she had hoped. She knew from the minute she saw him walking toward her—from his jutting chin and the glare in his eyes—that James was angry. As soon as he reached her, he grabbed her by the arm. “What the hell was the magazine and those pictures for?” he demanded. “You looked like a goddamn whore. I don’t know what you’ve been up to, Linda, but I’ll pay you back. I owe you one.”

Linda swallowed her tears as they drove back to the apartment. She’d suspected James would react just as he did, but she’d wished for it to be different. More than anything she wanted the type of relationships she saw her friends having with their husbands, playfully sexual and carefree. She didn’t understand that the pictures weren’t sensual for James.
It would be years before she finally realized he didn’t want her willing participation. What stimulated James Bergstrom’s sexual appetite wasn’t love but humiliation and fear.

As she suspected he would, James demanded almost immediately after he returned home that she quit her job at the day-care center. “I want you here when I’m here. You’re ignoring me,” he insisted. “I’m making money. We ought to be able to live off what I make.”

Though in the past she had always given in to James, agreeing to everything he wanted, she now refused. “It’s wonderful. I love working,” she told him. “There is nothing you can do to make me quit. We need the money and I’m staying.”

In truth, the money had little if anything to do with Linda’s determination to work outside the home. Seeing other people every day, playing with the children, made her focus on something other than her growing doubts about their marriage. “The truth is, working gave me some control over my life,” she’d later say.

James was angry when she refused to adhere to his mandates, but then, he was often angry those days. In the back of her mind, Linda wondered how much of his anger stemmed from her refusal to play his “game,” since that last afternoon when he left her tied to the bed. Whenever she refused to submit, he became furious, often accusing her of being unfaithful.

Everyone, including James’s superiors on the ship, had heard him complain that Linda took him for granted, spent too much money, and ran around with other men when he was on patrol. Those who knew Linda discounted it as James raving. “James always thought Linda was fooling around,” said Mitzi Swartz, his chief’s wife. “And she never was. He never really had anything to worry about. I’ve known navy wives who play around while their husbands are off at sea, but Linda wasn’t that type.”

One day James came home early from the base on Linda’s day off. She was cleaning, as she often did in the afternoons.
It was one of the ways she tried to keep the peace in the house, although it was often fruitless. James was even more compulsive than in the past, requiring that everything in the apartment be arranged just so. If a knick-knack was turned differently from usual, he’d immediately reposition it. His fetish with neatness was a nearly superstitious preoccupation. This day, however, he stormed into the apartment and flung open closet doors. He searched the bathroom and under the bed.

“Where is he?” he screamed.

“Who?” Linda asked.

“Chris,” James persisted. “Where are you hiding Chris?”

Linda was shocked. She hadn’t even heard from Chris or Tina.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted, disgustedly. “All of this with Chris isn’t real. It’s just in your mind.”

With the turn of his head, James was furious. He grabbed her arm, forcing her from the living room into the bedroom, where he shoved her against the wall. When she swung at him, he knocked her in the chest so hard, she fell to the ground. The last thing she would remember hearing as she collapsed was the sickening thud of her head hitting the corner of their new dresser.

When Linda came to, she wasn’t sure how long she’d been unconscious. She ached all over, and she had a tender knot the size of a half dollar on the back of her head. She looked around in a daze. There was James, in a frenzy, muttering to himself and stalking around the room. His suitcase was open on the bed and he had armfuls of clothes piled about him. In a haze, Linda felt confused but suddenly understood.
He thinks he’s killed me. That I’m dead
, she thought.
He’s packing to run away.

When James noticed her watching, he seemed relieved. But instead of comforting her or apologizing, he simply unpacked, as calmly as if he’d just returned from a weekend away. Then he strolled into the living room and turned on the television,
as if nothing of importance had occurred. An old “Happy Days” rerun was playing and Richie and the Fonz were kibitzing in the auto shop when Linda entered the room. She ran cold water onto a washcloth in the kitchen and pressed it against the throbbing bump on the back of her head. She was standing in the kitchen doorway when James turned to her, his voice dead calm. “You know, Linda,” he said, “I could kill you. I could throw your body out into the woods, and no one would ever find it. No one would ever know. I’ll never let you leave me, Linda. I’ll see you dead first.”

Linda leaned against the wall for support, afraid her legs would buckle beneath her.

Complaints about a Peeping Tom from women in Central Kitsap had died down for nearly three months, but in late October, after the
Ohio
pulled into port, the switchboard at the sheriff’s office lit up with reports that the man in a ski mask had again been spotted peering into homes.

Undersheriff Chuck Wheeler was stunned. When the first wave of sightings stopped last summer, he’d hoped whomever was behind it was a drifter who had moved on. Now he was back. Red ski mask and all.
Damn,
thought Wheeler,
this isn’t good.

When Wheeler, who’d worked his way up through the ranks, considered the almost three-month lull, his instincts after twenty-two years in law enforcement clicked in. “I knew most of the boats went out on patrol for seventy days,” he explained later. “I figured there was a pretty good chance we were dealing with a guy on a sub.” Wheeler lived near the Parkwood East, where the voyeur was seen. The subdivision, with its rambling streets of modest one-story wood and brick homes, had been settled twenty years earlier by retirees, but now many of the homes were owned by young navy couples, families in which husbands went on patrol for months at a time, leaving their wives and children home alone. With a wife and two daughters of his own, Wheeler took the case seriously. “It was personal,” he said later.

Working his hunch, Wheeler called an acquaintance, a master chief who worked in Bangor Base’s central command.

“Have you got any guys there, someone who just recently came back from being at sea—someone you’ve had problems with?” asked Wheeler. “I’ve got a feeling this Peeping Tom we’re after is a navy guy.”

“Not that I know of,” the master chief answered. “But it’s possible. I’ll ask around.”

As days passed and no one on the base called with any leads, Wheeler grew impatient. He’d already assigned extra deputies to patrol the area each morning between six-thirty and seven-thirty, the hour the incidents all took place. He even routinely drove the streets of Parkwood East himself each morning in his unmarked squad car before coming to work. It was the most Wheeler could do. Kitsap County, like many sheriffs’ departments, was understaffed and overworked. The county’s population had nearly doubled in the past two decades, and when a carrier docked at the shipyard, it could mean an influx of thousands of sailors.