06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (16 page)

Thursday, May 4, 1989,
Bremerton Sun:

Wheeler was plainly worried. He had reason to be. Like any officer who had been around for a while, he knew about rapists, understood their learning curve. This rapist was following a familiar pattern of trial and error. He’d started with the peeping, then moved into entering houses. He knew how to watch to know when a woman was alone. He knew how to get inside. The first two attempts hadn’t worked because the women had fought him off. This time he was armed—with a gun—and he’d succeeded. “If you cooperate, I won’t hurt you,” he’d told the victim, a young wife who cried throughout her interview with detectives. The Parkwood Rapist was now a very dangerous man.

The next day, all of Central Kitsap County buzzed about the rape. It was the topic of conversation in homes, offices, and restaurants, in grocery store checkout lines, and over the whine of dryers and the swoosh of washers in local Laundromats.

Even more residents learned of the rapist that night when the
Bremerton Sun
carried a feature on the women of Parkwood East under the headline “I’m going to kill this guy.” In the doorway of her meticulously kept home surrounded by flowers, one mother of two told reporter Jack Swanson how, on four occasions since last Christmas, a man who fit the description of the rapist had tried to break into her house. “My stupid ex-husband has my .357 or I’d have shot him [the intruder] the last time he tried to break in,” she said. “As soon as I have money, I’m going to buy another gun and, Lord forgive me, I’m going to kill this guy.”

Two navy wives in shorts jogging up a hill told Swanson they, too, were armed and ready. One woman’s husband conducted nightly emergency drills in which he attempted to break into their home while she reached for her revolver and dialed 911. “I’ve got a snub-nosed .38 and an NRA certificate that shows I know how to use it,” she warned. “Anybody trying to break into my house is going to get stiffed [sic] in the face.”

Underneath all the bravado, the women of Parkwood East were clearly shaken. “I didn’t know what would happen
next,” one later said. “I was living in fear that he would come after me. I had all the doors and windows locked, the drapes closed. I wouldn’t even let my children go out and play. I hate guns, but for the first time in my life, I thought seriously about buying one.”

At the sheriff’s office, phones rang continually with nervous women reporting unexplained noises, strange cars on the streets, or just wanting reassurance that if they needed help, the deputies would be there. “We had everything we could spare in Parkwood East,” one detective who worked on the patrol later said. “If we’d had a helicopter, it would have been hovering over that subdivision.”

But in truth, there was little concrete for police to build a case on. They had Wheeler’s gut telling him the rapist was a navy submariner, and they had residents who thought they’d noticed a man who fit the general description of the rapist—white, early twenties, five feet nine inches, 150 to 160 pounds—jogging in a sweat suit with a towel over his neck in the area near the time of the rape. But though they arrived at the scene within minutes of the victim’s call and brought police dogs to assist in the search, they uncovered no real physical evidence. The Parkwood East victim had reportedly showered before police arrived, but even if she hadn’t, it might not have mattered. In Kitsap County in 1989 police didn’t yet have the capability of matching suspects’ DNA. “That was still a year away,” explained Wheeler later. “God, I wish we’d had it then.”

The sobering fact was that Wheeler and his staff needed a break. Without it, there was a good chance the Parkwood Rapist might just get away.

If a furor over the rape preoccupied Silverdale and Bremerton, Linda was oblivious to much of it. She had other, more personal troubles to deal with. James, though his remaining months in the navy dwindled, was becoming increasingly violent. It was commonplace for him to respond to any perceived slight from her with a barrage of obscenities and threats,
throwing her against the apartment walls, or destroying something she loved. In the blink of an eye, he could change from the gentle man she married to a raving and bitter madman.

The many friends she had made in Washington stood back, not knowing how to help. Most were beginning to suspect just how tight a rope Linda walked. When Grandma invited her to stop at her house one afternoon after work, Linda refused. “I can’t risk it,” she told the older woman. “If James gets home before I do, he’ll be angry. And I don’t want to give him any reason to hit me.”

Others around the Central Park Apartments noticed the young husband in apartment number eleven seemed exceptionally on edge. An engineer who lived alone in the unit directly above the Bergstroms saw James outside washing the Grand Prix one afternoon. He’d heard loud arguments and shouting from the Bergstroms’ unit since they’d moved in the previous summer, but had never actually met either James or Linda. “I figured it would be a good time to introduce myself,” he’d later recall. “So as I walked past, I said, ‘Hi.’ The guy must have jumped two feet. He looked startled, jittery.”

Much of the quarreling filtering up through heating ducts concerned the nine-millimeter Beretta. If they owned a gun, Linda wanted it registered. James agreed, but never did it. Day after day, he invoked the same excuse: His work kept him too busy on base, and he just didn’t have time to get it done. Once he insisted the gun didn’t need to be registered to be legal. Calling his bluff, Linda dialed a nearby police station.

“Do we have to register a gun in the state of Washington?” she asked.

“All right, so it has to be registered,” James admitted after she hung up the phone. “But I don’t feel good about it. What if somebody used this gun to commit a crime? I could get in trouble for just trying to register it.”

“James, you know the guy you bought the gun from and you’ve got the receipt showing when you bought it,” Linda assured him. “Get the gun registered.”

As always, James nodded in agreement, but when he came home the following night, the gun was still unregistered and the argument was replayed.

The night of May 17, 1989, was an exceptionally quiet night for the Bergstroms. Weary of the continual haggling, Linda never mentioned the gun. For dinner, she ordered a pizza. For once, James skipped his nightly jog and they both went to bed early.

That calm, however, didn’t last through the next morning. As always, the alarm went off at five and Linda reached over and clicked it off. James was already awake.

“You were on the other side of the bed last night,” he said, reproaching Linda for not sleeping draped across him as he demanded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sensing from the flat tone of his voice that he’d awakened angry. “I must have rolled over.”

“Sure,” he said, sullenly as a spoiled child. “You haven’t hugged me. Kissed me. You never pay a minute’s attention to me.”

Linda leaned over and gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. “I’m really sorry, James,” she said, gently. “I guess I just got preoccupied with getting to work.”

In the bathroom, she turned the radio on softly and then showered and dressed. She was putting on makeup when James thrust his arm through the bathroom door and switched off the radio.

“What the hell are you doing to your face?” he demanded. “Why are you wearing all that stuff? You looking for somebody?”

Linda, who routinely dressed in the dark to avoid waking her husband, knew she was in trouble. Without saying a word, she picked up her purse and walked outside to the car.

“You sorry bitch,” James bellowed as he shadowed her outside. “I can smell the goddamn perfume. Who the hell are you wearing perfume for, anyway?”

Linda said nothing. She knew there was no way to reason with him. She’d seen James like this too often. His jaw set, his dark eyes flashing with anger. The veins on either side of his neck stood out and his fists were clenched. Saying nothing, Linda opened the car door and sat down behind the wheel.

“You sorry bitch,” he said again, then pulled back his foot and kicked the back fender of her new car.

Fearing he would destroy the new car as he had everything else she held dear, Linda returned to the apartment. She wasn’t crying. She knew better. If she cried, it would only get worse. “What do you want James?” she asked, once they were inside. “Do you want me to quit my job? Is that it?”

James silently turned toward the bathroom and stalked inside, stripped and turned the water on in the shower. He glared at her before stepping inside. To Linda he looked as detached as he had that first day he returned from the second patrol, the time she’d had to take him to the psychiatric unit at the naval hospital. She sat down on the couch and tried to concentrate enough to rethink the morning, all the time fighting back the fear congealed inside her chest.

“James, the kids count on me,” Linda shouted nervously over the hot running water, steam billowing from the bathroom door. “I love what I’m doing. Please don’t take it away from me.”

The pounding of the water stopped and James walked out, blotting himself with a towel. “Okay, Linda. Go to work,” he said, evenly. “I’ll go to work. Everything is okay.”

He appeared cool and remote, as if his attention had drifted off to other matters. Linda sensed he barely noticed her.

“Are you sure?” she asked, fighting a disquieting apprehension.

“Yeah,” he ordered. “Go. Everything is just fine.”

The morning at the day-care center went quickly. Since she’d arrived late, Linda had to work hard to catch up on her rounds. At ten she was called to the phone; it was James.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the blowup,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she answered. “You didn’t even dent the car.”

“Good,” he said before hanging up. “I’ll see you when I get home from work.”

Linda left the PSNS day-care center at one-thirty that afternoon. She was happy if tired, an effect the children often had on her, and she was again wondering if she should reconsider her decision to postpone having children. “I wanted a baby so much,” she said later. “But I just knew I had to get things straightened out with James first.”

When she pulled into the apartment parking lot she noticed James’s Grand Prix near the walk-through to their apartment. Since she planned to pick up license plates for her new car that afternoon, she went inside to ask James if he wanted to drive across town to the dealership with her. But though she called out his name, he didn’t answer. He wasn’t inside. In the kitchen she noticed the bag from inside the wastebasket was missing.
This must be another of his daily disappearances
, Linda thought. She checked outside at the apartment mailboxes to see if he was picking up mail. He wasn’t. She decided to go on without him.

Linda drove off, but a few miles down on Fairgrounds Road, she passed Steve and Mitzi Swartz driving in the opposite direction. Though both appeared to see her, neither smiled or waved. Later Linda would describe her instincts after she saw the Swartzes as a premonition, the distinct impression that something was terribly wrong. She thought again about the argument they’d had that morning, and dread settled over her when she recalled her husband’s strange aloofness when she’d left for work. Though she was within a mile of the dealership, she swung an abrupt U-turn and rushed back to the apartment.
I’m sure everything is fine,
she told herself.
I’ll just go back and get James.

But when she pulled into the apartment parking lot for the second time that afternoon, Linda saw two men, strangers in suits, standing outside her door. At first she thought maybe they were friends of James’s, although she’d never met them before, and they didn’t have the look of someone paying a social call. She waited in the car for a few minutes, assuming they would leave, but instead they disappeared inside.

Moments passed. Linda eventually opened the car door and walked into the apartment, calling out, “James. James. Are you here?”

No one answered, but inside she discovered one of the men sifting through her closet as the other talked on the phone. Still certain James must be close by, Linda walked into the bedroom. He wasn’t there, or in the bathroom. When she again passed the kitchen a second time, the man talking on the phone flashed a badge at her.

“Are you Mrs. Bergstrom?” he asked, hanging up the receiver.

“Yeah,” Linda said. “Who—”

“We’re detectives,” he explained. “Have you caught your husband peeping in windows before?”

“I…Once I thought I did.”

“Your husband was arrested this afternoon,” the detective said, sympathetically. “He was watching a fifty-three-year-old woman undress.”

Linda said nothing. She was thinking back to the way James stared out the windows, the time she thought she’d seen him at the old apartment complex, looking through a bedroom window.

“Mrs. Bergstrom,” the detective said, coming forward and dropping his voice to just above a whisper. “We think there’s more to this. Can we step outside?”

Stunned, Linda followed him outdoors to an unmarked squad car parked next to the Grand Prix. Then the detective cocked his head back at the man searching inside her
apartment. “Your husband signed a consent-to-search form,” he said.

Smiling weakly, Linda nodded that she understood.

“The thing is, Mrs. Bergstrom, we don’t think your husband is just a Peeping Tom,” he said. “We believe your husband is the Parkwood Rapist.”

“How can you say that?” Linda asked.

“Mrs. Bergstrom—”

“No, no. A Peeping Tom, maybe. But a rapist?” she scoffed. “It’s not true.”

“Mrs. Bergstrom, your husband tells us he has a problem,” the detective continued. “That he likes to watch women undress. He likes watching women in lingerie.”

“That’s not possible,” she shouted. “He doesn’t even like watching me in lingerie.”

“I can’t explain that,” the detective said. “But, Mrs. Bergstrom, I’ve got one more question.”

Numb, Linda looked up at him.

“Mrs. Bergstrom,” the detective asked, “does your husband own a gun?”

The heat radiated up from the cement. Linda’s head had already begun to ache and her heart hammered in her chest, as if she’d stopped running midsprint.

“Yes,” Linda said, without hesitation. “He does.”

“Mrs. Bergstrom,” the detective said, an edge of impatience cutting his voice. “Your husband told us he didn’t own a gun. Why would he say that?”