06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (23 page)

“I’m sorry about the way James acted. He should have stayed home to help you,” her mother-in-law offered, admiring Ashley on the bed. “She looks just like Adelaide,” Irene Bergstrom whispered, tears running down her cheeks. “Just like James said.”

In his 1992 book
Out of the Shadows
, Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., drew a model with two circles to depict the sexually addictive cycle. The top circle was dominated by a faulty belief system resulting in a delusional thought process that insulates the addict from reality. The second stage: a four-phase addictive system defined by preoccupation, ritualization, sexual compulsivity, and despair. Carnes went on to diagnose levels of sexual addiction. By his early teens with his sexual abuse of his young relative, James Bergstrom fit the profile Carnes labeled level three, the most deviant of actions, including child molestation, incest, and rape.

Perhaps his parents’ discovery of his actions interrupted the cycle and sent James Bergstrom temporarily back to a lower level. With the voyeurism in Washington State, he again succumbed to the downward tug of the cycle, and through his fantasies, he may have gained sufficient momentum to return to level three with the alleged attacks and rape.

If so, Bergstrom’s arrest undoubtedly was interruption number two. It gave him pause and time to reconsider his actions and their consequences. For a brief interlude, he may have actually believed that he could control his compulsions. But by early 1990, he was again caught in the addictive cycle. His fantasies preoccupied his mind and fed off his renewed voyeurism. But this wasn’t the same James
Bergstrom who had peeked at Theresa George at the Silverdale Apartments two years earlier. He’d learned much. He knew the importance of intimidation in the deadly shape of a gun.

Two weeks before Ashley was born, James, under a mandate from Kitsap County, had begun counseling sessions with a priest at a Catholic church not far from Devoe & Raynolds, a tree-shaded parish on a massive complex that encompassed a school and a community hall. The priest was in his fifties, a tall, thin man with white hair, who listened intently as James discussed “my problem.” Once a week throughout February, they met for regular sessions. “I told the priest everything,” James would later say. “Everything I had done.”

At home, Linda had sensed for months that James was worsening. Nervous and agitated, he sat for hours watching television, usually the Discovery channel with its plethora of war and armaments. He especially enjoyed a series titled “Sharks of Steel” on the nation’s nuclear submarines and taped it so he could watch it over and over.

Part of Linda was fascinated by James and what he had become. She watched him constantly, trying to understand what drove him. One afternoon as he sat transfixed in front of the television watching a World War II documentary on Hitler, Linda hid in the bedroom, peering at him through the door. As she suspected, as soon as she left the room, James flicked the remote control, flipping channels until something caught his eye. It was MTV, and Madonna, scantily clad, pulsated her hips in time to muted music. When Linda entered the room, he flicked the control again, returning to less provocative fare.

In early March, James left as usual for a church counseling session. Linda, as always, marked off the time of his departure on the calendar, 1:00
P.M.
She assumed he would return by two-thirty. At three o’clock he still hadn’t arrived.
When he finally walked in at three-thirty that afternoon, James looked sweaty and frightened, and hanging from his shirt were strips of duct tape.

“Where have you been?” Linda demanded, patting Ashley, who had just finished a bottle, on the back. “And what’s the tape for?”

“I was just fixing something on the car,” he answered. Linda didn’t believe him. She felt certain she knew what he’d intended to do with the tape. Years later James would admit he had, in fact, accosted a woman that day. James was careful, hesitant to get caught again. When he couldn’t easily subdue her, he fled, dismissing the situation as out of control.

“If you don’t believe me, call the priest,” James bluffed. “I just left there.”

After James left for work, Linda did just that.

“No,” the priest assured her. “Your husband was here just half an hour. He left a long time ago.”

“Father,” Linda asked, “I’d like to come in to talk to you.”

When she arrived at the church, the priest greeted her and escorted her into an office. “What has James told you about what he’s doing?” she asked.

“I can’t discuss that, even with his wife,” the priest said.

Then Linda told the priest about James, and his history. “I believe James is a rapist,” Linda said, finally. “I need to get away from him. He molested a little girl and I’m afraid he’ll do the same thing to my daughter.”

The priest’s eyes narrowed as he assessed Linda.

Later, when she recounted what the priest said next, Linda’s voice was thick with anger and she shook her head in disbelief. “He asked me how much James made. When I said about eleven hundred dollars a month, he said. ‘It’s hard to make money these days. Maybe you should reconsider if you’re thinking of leaving your husband.’”

From that day on, Linda stopped attending mass. James went alone. Soon after, the priest released James from coun
seling. “He told me that I needed professional help,” James would say later. “That he wasn’t equipped to handle somebody with a problem like mine.”

A series of attempted sexual assaults began in the Friendswood area, a small community adjacent to Pearland to the east, in early April 1990. Friendswood wasn’t unlike the Parkwood East area in Bremerton: middle-class and principally white, the type of neighborhood where a young, clean-cut white man jogging or driving his car wouldn’t attract any undue attention. The first attack occurred in the Forest Bend subdivision. A man in a ski mask and carrying a gun entered an immaculately kept ranch house on a street shaded by live oaks. It was early in the day, and the woman inside was dressing for work. He tried to tie her up, but she cried and fought with him, until he finally turned and left.

Blocks away on April 20, Ann Cook, a stout woman with a short pageboy and big glasses, cared for her children. It was an unusually warm spring day, and she’d been washing clothes in the garage, leaving the overhead door open as she carried baskets back and forth from the house. It was a peaceful neighborhood, bordering a park, the type that feels secluded during the day when most parents are at work, their children in day care or school.

As she carried in a basket of towels, Ann never stopped to consider whether she should lock the door that connected the garage with the house. Inside, her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter sat, legs crossed, in front of the living room television watching “Sesame Street.” Ann deposited the towels in the bathroom, then stopped in her son’s room to check on him. Just three months old, her new baby boy cooed up at her, kicking his legs and smiling in his crib. He was active for such a young age, and Ann smiled as she murmured comfortingly at him. Then she felt something odd.

“I knew he was there before I even looked up,” Ann would say later. “I sensed him.”

The man, his face obscured under a white mesh laundry bag, pointed a gun at her. “Stay where you are. Don’t move,” he ordered.

Hysteria took Ann over. Screaming, she ran toward him.

“Shut up,” the man growled, pointing the gun at her head.

But Ann didn’t stop. “I was so frightened, I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to,” she said later.

The man, whom she later identified as James Bergstrom, turned and ran. Fearing he would harm her daughter, Ann followed behind, shouting, “Get out of my house,” until he disappeared out the door and through the garage. In all, it was less than a minute since she’d first noticed him, but Ann would remember it forever. She ran back inside, locked all the doors, and called the police. As they had in Washington, the police were there quickly, but the man in the mesh mask had disappeared. They dusted the back door, the garage, and the bedroom door for fingerprints, but found nothing.

The following week, Ann’s husband erected a six-foot fence around the yard. Years later, she would still shudder at the unexpected creek of a floorboard or the flutter of a tree’s shadow against the window at night.

For Linda and James, Sundays were nearly always the same. The afternoons were spent at home, where James meticulously cleaned their apartment and then methodically washed and detailed his car. About 8:00
P.M.
they usually drove to the Bergstroms’. She knew James was eager to give his parents the impression he’d buried his past and was a changed man. Once they arrived, James disappeared into the seclusion of his parents’ bedroom with his father. Linda sat in the living room with Irene Bergstrom watching a chronically green and grainy television. She always marveled that though James C. fixed other people’s televisions to make extra money, the one in his living room was impossible to watch. Of course, she knew that in the bedroom James watched a new set James C. reserved for himself.

As the hours passed, Linda counted off the flickering minutes on the VCR until enough time had lapsed for her to remind James it was time to leave.

After one such Sunday, James drove home. Linda sat in back, and Ashley slept in her car seat in the Grand Prix’s front passenger seat. When they pulled into the parking lot of their Pearland apartment, Linda stepped out of the car and reached in to unbuckle Ashley, when something clanked to the floor. Linda glimpsed down at a pair of metal handcuffs. Rage flooded through her.

“What’s this?” she demanded.

“They’re old,” James said.

“Bullshit,” she screamed. “The cops in Washington searched the car. These weren’t there. They’re new.”

Then she bent over and ran her hand under the front seat and pulled out a rope.

“You did it in Washington and you’re doing it again,” she screamed at him.

James lunged at her, trying to grab them, but she pulled them away.

“Don’t make a scene,” he ordered. “Let’s go inside.”

Inside the house, Linda took the handcuffs and rope, and threw them under the bed, hidden by the dust ruffle.

“What are you going to do?” James asked, putting Ashley into bed.

“Get rid of them,” she said.

Linda didn’t know what to do with the evidence she’d found. On the surface, it probably wasn’t enough to get James arrested. In fact, she had no proof he had done anything illegal with the handcuffs or the rope. Though if it wasn’t enough to get James caught, she reasoned, it might be enough to persuade the Bergstroms they had to help her get their granddaughter safely away from James.

The next day, Linda tucked the evidence into a large pocket in the back of Ashley’s car seat and told James she was taking the baby to see his mother. When she arrived,
she suggested Irene Bergstrom come outside. As her mother-in-law watched, Linda reached into the back pocket.

“I want you to see something. Your son is sick. You think you can control him? See this?” she said, dangling the handcuffs and rope before her mother-in-law. “He’s doing it again. Does this prove to you that he’s doing it? That we need to turn him in?”

Irene Bergstrom appeared panicked. “Oh my God,” she said. “Leave these here so I can show his father.”

Linda left the Bergstroms’ and drove Ashley to her older sister’s house in Galveston. Mary listened as Linda recounted the weekend’s find and her morning with her mother-in-law.

“Linda, that was the dumbest thing you could have done. They’re not going to do anything,” Mary scoffed. “Why are you there with him? Why don’t you get out?”

“You’re not in my position,” Linda cried, fearing Mary was right. “It’s easier said than done. Do I just disappear and hope he never finds me? If I stay in Houston, how do I protect Ashley? Do you think I love him and that that’s why I’m there? I hate him.”

“Linda, he could kill you,” Mary pleaded.

“I know that,” she said. “But I’ve got to hold on. One day he’ll mess up and they’ll get him. I have to make sure that happens. It’s the only way Ashley and I will ever be free.”

Later that week, Irene Bergstrom called James and said his father wanted to talk with him. James returned to the apartment late at night after the meeting. Linda waited up, eager to know what was discussed. James wouldn’t tell her. Years later, James would say his father asked him if he was doing the things Linda alleged—if he was a rapist.

“I told him no,” James would say years later with a shrug. “I couldn’t admit to him what I was doing.”

Still, a few days after the family conference, Maria called James with the telephone number for counseling at Belle Park Hospital. He threw it to the side.

“I’m not going,” he told Linda. “Why should I tell them the truth? They’ll just have me locked up.”

“If you don’t get counseling, I’m going to tell the police,” Linda threatened. “I’m going to tell them about the stuff I found in your car.”

“Tell them,” James laughed. “No one will believe you. They’ll just think you’re lying against me. You’re just a damn liar.”

The Bergstroms never mentioned the handcuffs or rope to Linda again. It was as if nothing had ever happened.

Linda made her third anonymous call to the Houston police dispatch number the following week. Every time she called, someone new answered the phone. This time she gave sketchy details about the past, then identified James and told of the handcuffs and rope. “I told the dispatcher James was doing it again and that they had to watch out for him,” she said. “The guy who answered the phone said he’d file a report and they’d be on the lookout.” As James predicted, nothing further happened.

When Linda told her mother what she had found and that the Bergstroms had done nothing and were still refusing to help her gain sole custody of Ashley, Santos found it difficult to believe they could turn such a blind eye. As the months had passed, Santos’s concern for Linda had grown. Once, Linda came to her admitting she was afraid to sleep, terrified James would kill both her and Ashley in the night.

“I worry about you,” Santos said. “You’re always upset and you don’t even go to church anymore. You need your faith.”

“I don’t know if I believe in God anymore,” Linda confessed. “God? Is there a God? If there’s a God, why am I going through this? I’m in hell already.”