06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (15 page)

What nagged at Wheeler most was that the interloper was becoming increasingly bold. He knew that it wasn’t unusual for a rapist to begin as a voyeur. In fact, one FBI study estimated 68 percent of all serial rapists began as Peeping Toms. “It felt to me like the thing was going to escalate,” said Wheeler later. “That this guy wouldn’t be satisfied just looking in windows for very long.”

Since they only had one car, most mornings James dropped Linda at work at the day-care center at six and picked her up after she helped feed the children lunch and put them down for their naps. As far as she knew, James spent the hours they were separated working on base. That he seemed so changed worried her, but she still made excuses for him. “I figured it all had something to do with the navy and the pressure they were putting him under,” she said later. “I couldn’t believe James meant to treat me like he was. I was just there, handy for him to blow up at.”

Winter came and it snowed, a rather infrequent occurrence in Seattle. Linda built a snowman with the three-year-olds at the center. Sometimes, when things were the worst between her and James, the only ones who could cheer her up were the children. They’d call her Miss Linda and pull her hand until she bent down, then they’d plant firm if sloppy kisses on her cheeks. She began to feel as if these children, the offspring of strangers, depended on her. It made her proud that she was responsible for their care.

When December came around, James was home more than usual. There was little to do on the base with the
Ohio
still out and his classes over for the holidays. Often she’d come home to find he had rearranged everything in the apartment, including her closet and her clothes. Linda noticed some of her things were missing, especially her belts, which James meticulously coiled in a blue plastic laundry basket. First it was the one from her white terry cloth robe. A few days later, the cloth sash to one of her favorite dresses was gone. When she asked James about it, he shrugged. “I don’t know where it is,” he’d say. “If you took care of your stuff, they wouldn’t be missing.”

It bothered Linda that James went through her things while she was gone, but she dared not complain. James was too volatile now, becoming angry at the slightest affront. Many times her mother’s words came back to her. “James reminds me of your father,” Santos Martinez had said. The thought made Linda shudder. She could never have imagined anything worse.

One day while she was at work and not there to see, James watched a movie on television,
Jagged Edge,
the 1985 thriller staring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges. In it, Bridges played a homicidal husband who enters his own home in a mask one night with a knife and in a bloody rampage ties down, gags, then eviscerates his wife. “It was after that movie that I started thinking about going in houses,” Bergstrom would later say. “About how easy it was to get in through an unlocked door or window.”

The first article in the
Bremerton Sun,
Kitsap County’s daily newspaper, about an attempted rape in the Parkwood East area appeared on December 21, 1988. Under the headline “Man enters house, tries to rape Bremerton woman,” the story detailed how a thirty-six-year-old woman fought off a ski-masked assailant in her home. The would-be rapist entered through an unlocked garage door and an unlocked connecting door. She was alone.

“The woman struggled with her assailant, and when she partially removed his ski mask, he fled,” according to the newspaper. “The victim was not injured.”

The victim gave police a description. Her attacker, she said, was a white man, nineteen to twenty years old, approximately five feet nine inches and weighing 150 to 160 pounds. He had brown eyes and wore blue jeans.

The next morning another article ran under the headline “Sheriff fears serial rapist after second attack.” A man wearing a red ski mask had broken into the second home in two days, this time in a mobile home development on Old Military Road, within a half mile of the first attack and a mile of the Bergstroms’ new apartment. Again the victim was a woman home alone in the morning. Suggesting the women had been watched, the paper quoted a “very concerned” Kitsap County Undersheriff Chuck Wheeler as surmising, “It’s unlikely the targets were chosen at random.”

As in the previous attack, the would-be rapist entered through an unlocked door or window, attacking the woman from behind in her bedroom. She struggled and he eventually gave up and ran, but not before injuring the woman’s face in the fight. “Wheeler urged all residents to keep doors and windows locked and to call 911 if they saw anyone suspicious,” the article concluded.

Privately Wheeler was even more worried. His gut instinct told him this guy was one and the same with “the lowlife” who’d been peeping in windows. Wheeler felt certain his prediction had come true. He knew the guy wouldn’t be satisfied just looking and not touching for long. Even
more troubling was that with the second attack, the would-be rapist had come later in the morning than usual and changed the location, choosing an area near but not in Parkwood East. “It was like he was branching out. He knew we were watching for him,” Wheeler explained later. “The guy was smart. He’d changed his MO.”

Linda never saw the newspaper articles, but the “Parkwood Rapist” was all the women at work wanted to talk about. Carmen, Patricia, and Linda all lived within blocks of the subdivision, and at lunch the other women gave them pointers on avoiding attack, especially about locking their doors and keeping their windows secure. Carmen pulled Linda to the side that afternoon. “You’d better be careful,” she said. “It’s young, pretty girls like you he’s after.”

But despite her history, Linda wasn’t too frightened. On James’s orders, she always kept their doors and windows locked. “I’ll be all right,” she assured the older woman. “I’ll be careful.”

That night, James asked Linda if she’d read the articles about the attempted rapes in the paper. “No,” she answered. “But I’ve heard about it.”

“You’d better be careful,” he cautioned. “Sounds like this guy is crazy.”

A few nights later, when James was in an uncharacteristically good mood and agreed to stop for drinks with Monique, one of the women from the day-care center, and her husband, the subject came up again. It started with James and Monique arguing about abortion.

“Are you for it or against it?” Monique challenged.

“Against it,” James countered.

“What would you say if this son of a bitch who’s raping women raped Linda and got her pregnant? Wouldn’t you want her to abort it?” Monique challenged, not knowing Linda had lived through a rape years earlier.

“First of all, no one will rape Linda. I won’t let that happen,” he said, firmly, covering Linda’s hand protectively
with his own. “Secondly, if that did happen, my sole purpose in life would be to kill the SOB. He’d better be looking in all directions, because I would be after him.”

The next morning at the day-care center, Monique whispered in Linda’s ear, “James is a nice guy. You’re lucky. He really wants to take care of you.”

Though she said nothing, Linda was having many doubts. She didn’t tell Monique about her husband’s violent temper or how much she feared him. The only thing that made their marriage tolerable anymore was that James would be leaving for sea in just a few days. “I’d grown to believe it was possible,” Linda would say later. “James could kill me. He could throw my body into the woods, and no one would ever find it. I would just have disappeared. And I understood that if I ever tried to run—no matter where I went—he would find me.”

Linda felt trapped. It didn’t help that in the past weeks, James had repeatedly gone to Holy Trinity to talk to Father Erny about marrying Linda in the Catholic church. Whenever he brought up the subject of a church wedding, Linda tried to deflect the conversation. There was too much happening in their marriage and she was too uncertain to take what seemed such a permanent step. James had always been the churchy one, the religious one, but Linda felt her faith deeply. A Catholic wedding was a commitment she wasn’t sure she wanted to make.

“We have to do it the right way. If we’re going to have children and a family, we need to get married in the church,” he insisted. “I want to be married to you, forever and in the eyes of God.”

January 30, 1989: The
Ohio
pulled out of Puget Sound. It was James Bergstrom’s fifth patrol. Though he’d been irritable in the weeks before he sailed, James seemed to dread this particular voyage less than the others. In fact, he said he was anxious to go and get it over with. He was counting down. There would only be one more patrol the following summer and his commitment to the navy would be over. He would be discharged and free to return to Houston in the following winter.

Linda, too, had been counting down the days until James left. “I was having a tough time even being around him,” she said later, recalling how James would indiscriminately push and shove her against the apartment walls. “I didn’t know what would set him off.”

When Penny and Gayle dropped in unexpectedly to see Linda at her new apartment on Fairgrounds one afternoon not long after the
Ohio
sailed, they caught her cleaning. “James is a neat freak.” Linda shrugged. “I’ve got to keep things up.” The apartment was spotless and airy. Linda had already furnished much of it out of her earnings from the day-care center: a dinette set, country French furniture in the bedroom, and tables in the living room. The two women sat on her beige overstuffed couch talking, but instead of admiring their friend’s new furniture, they stared at her legs. Linda had on shorts and her flesh was mottled with fading bruises. Linda never acknowledged their stares and her friends left
without asking, but from that afternoon on, they were both certain their suspicions had been right. James Bergstrom was battering Linda.

Though she had always tried to hide her marital problems from her family, she called her mother that February and complained bitterly that marriage to James had not turned out as she’d imagined. “She said James would get mad all the time and hit her,” Santos remembered later. “I told her, ‘Why don’t you come home?’ But she said maybe it would get better once he was out of the service. She told me, ‘Mama, I’m all right. Don’t worry. I’ll see what I’m going to do.’”

Then she called her oldest brother, Gino. “James and I fight all the time. He’s jealous,” she complained. “Every time he goes out to sea, he figures I’m home seeing someone else.”

“Come home, Lily,” Gino urged.

“I’m not sure what to do,” Linda admitted. “I’m going to try to work it out.”

Gino hung up the phone and had the unmistakable impression that his sister was frightened.

The only one Linda was truly open and honest with was her friend from the day-care center, Grandma. One night as the two women met over pizza at a little restaurant on Silverdale’s main drag, Linda showed the older woman her bruises and told her about her husband’s violent temper.

“It’s bad when a man beats a woman,” Grandma advised. “Why do you let him do this to you?”

“I don’t know how to stop it,” Linda said, her eyes wet with tears.

“Why don’t you just leave him?” she asked.

“He’d find me,” Linda said, resolutely. “I couldn’t run far enough to get away.”

For the most part, Linda was trying to live day to day, waiting for James’s time in the service to end. “The last hope I had was that once he was out of the service, things
would change,” she’d say later. “Part of me still believed that what was happening to us was because of the pressure James was under.”

The one decision she had made, however, was that this was not the time to get pregnant. The base doctors had wanted to do more tests, including assessing James’s sperm count and inserting a tube through Linda’s abdomen to examine her fallopian tubes. James, as always, refused to be involved. “It’s your body that’s screwed up, not mine,” he’d insisted. Without discussing it with him, Linda silently dropped the entire pursuit.

Months passed. Easter approached and Linda surprised the children at the center by dressing as the Easter Bunny. The little ones took turns sitting on her lap, tweaking her nose and pulling her whiskers. She felt happy and content. With James gone, these were the quiet days. Until the
Ohio
pulled into port in mid-April, Linda had time alone to think and recharge.

The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department was also rethinking during an unexpected quiet time. The complaints in Parkwood East had died down shortly after last December’s attempted rapes. Some detectives wondered if the “Parkwood Rapist,” as he was being called in the papers, had moved on to other hunting grounds. Wheeler didn’t think so. “I figured he was out at sea again,” he’d later say. “I figured this was just a pause and then he’d be back, probably more dangerous than before. After all, he would have had three months to think over why he had failed to rape those women, and how to get what he wanted next time around.”

The
Ohio
pulled into Puget Sound on April 11, and Linda tried to make the best of it. Since James was out to sea on his birthday, she baked him a cake. For fun, she used trick candles that relit when he blew them out. Even James laughed when the candles kept relighting until the frosting caught on
fire. In desperation, he finally threw the cake in the sink and turned on the faucet. For his present, she gave him something he’d often talked about, a graphite tennis racket, along with a small color television and some clothes.

Forms Father Erny had given James to send to their families’ parishes in Houston were waiting for him when he returned from sea. Santos Martinez and her pastor had signed one verifying Linda was a practicing Catholic. The second form, from St. Helen’s Parish in Pearland, bore the signature of that church’s pastor and those of James C. and Irene Bergstrom. James talked incessantly about setting up a wedding ceremony at Holy Trinity. The one time Linda said she’d really prefer just renewing their vows at the chapel on base, James was furious. “That’s not a real church,” he scolded. “We’re going to do this the right way, so it sticks.”

Most mornings, as before, James would drop Linda at the day-care center and then drive off, ostensibly to work on the base. But rather than be there to pick her up, he often ran up to an hour late in the afternoons. Linda concluded the only sensible thing to do, now that she had an income of her own, was to buy another car. James was against it but soon agreed. On April 20, 1989, she signed loan papers and drove home in her new light blue Mitsubishi Precis. It was the first time she’d had a car of her own and she loved it.

At home, James was as demanding as ever. When he watched television, he insisted she sit beside him on the couch holding hands. If she refused, preferring to read a magazine, he’d become incensed and scream obscenities until she gave in. The only time she had any real peace was when he disappeared on and off during the day for his regular jogs. In a sweat suit, he left the apartment for nearly an hour each night. “I was so grateful he was gone for a little while,” she said later. “It never occurred to me to wonder what he might be doing.”

One evening he came up to her while she stirred a pot of spaghetti sauce, put his arms around her, and affectionately
nuzzled the back of her neck. Linda sensed immediately that James wanted something.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, cautiously. “You know that tennis racket you gave me for my birthday?”

Linda nodded, yes.

“Well, I really don’t need it,” he said. “I’ve thought it over and there’s something I’d rather have.”

Linda turned and scrutinized his face. “What?”

“A gun,” James answered.

“A gun?” she repeated.

“Yeah, a gun,” James said, smiling.

“Why?”

“For protection,” he answered.

The gun became the topic of conversation in their apartment from that day forward. James had a friend who owned a nine-millimeter Beretta he wanted to sell for three hundred dollars. “It’s a steal,” James said. “A real bargain.”

Linda was against it. They didn’t have the money right now, she argued. They’d just bought the new car and his birthday gifts.

“I understand a gun can be protection,” Linda argued. “But one of us will end up getting mad and using it against the other. Having a gun in the house, James, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

But James would tolerate no arguments. The gun was for sport, to practice at the range, and for protection. “What about that rapist?” he asked Linda. “Wouldn’t you feel better having something here with you the next time I go out to sea?”

“I don’t like it, James,” she said.

“Why not?” he shouted, walking to the television set and picking up a crystal bowl he knew Linda loved. It was one of his latest tricks, circling the apartment during an argument looking for something she cherished to destroy.

“Not the crystal, James,” Linda pleaded. “Don’t break it. It was a gift from Gayle.”

“I’ve never asked for anything,” he said, fingering the deep grooves in the bowl’s pattern. “Now that I want something, really want something, you won’t get it?” he shouted.

As Linda knew he would, he smashed the bowl against the wall, where it splintered into hundreds of pieces.

Days later, Linda finally acquiesced. Not because her gut instincts had changed, but because she could no longer tolerate the continual arguments. They agreed that on May 15, when he was next paid, he would take three hundred dollars to his friend and purchase the nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol.

James was thrilled.

The switchboard at the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department began lighting up with calls from women in and around Parkwood East again the last two weeks of April. “Our guy’s home,” Wheeler told his deputies and detectives. In a
Bremerton Sun
article that ran on Monday the seventeenth, Wheeler cautioned residents: “We’re certain this is the same guy. Keep your doors locked and be alert.”

The last week in April, Linda and James were out driving after church when he insisted they stop at Chris and Tina’s house. While the two men talked in the bedroom, Linda went in the kitchen to visit Tina. “What made James buy a gun?” Tina asked.

“James hasn’t bought it yet,” Linda corrected her.

“Sure he has. He told Chris about it,” her sister-in-law insisted.

The two women walked toward the bedroom, and Linda found James and Chris inspecting something. When she got a clear look, she realized James was holding a nine-millimeter in his hands, turning it from side to side so his brother could admire it.

“Nice gun,” Chris said, taking it from him and holding it up to look through the sights. “Feels good.”

Linda was stunned, but Tina patted her on the back.
“You’re lucky to have a gun in the house with that rapist on the loose,” she said. “Chris and I were talking about buying a house, but now I’m glad we’re still living on base. That guy scares me.”

James, Linda realized, was smiling and nodding in agreement.