06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (25 page)

Bergstrom had stalked her for days. He knew what car she drove and the one driven by the man she lived with. He knew on this particular morning that she was home alone. When it started to rain, Bergstrom, dressed in his jogging garb, smiled as he eased his way through the garage toward the door that led into the house. Rain was a good cover, he
knew. It would disguise the noise he’d make entering the house. James wasn’t worried. He had lots of time. Unbeknownst to Linda, he’d taken a vacation day from work.

That particular morning, Cindy was in the bedroom. Dressed in a T-shirt and silk boxer shorts, she packed for a business trip to Corpus Christi. Her suitcase lay open on the bedroom floor and her clothes were stacked around her. When she looked up, James Bergstrom, everything but his eyes and mouth concealed behind a ski mask, walked into the room.

“Get on the bed, facedown,” he ordered, pointing a gun at her.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she begged.

Bergstrom made her strip, then took his time tying her arms and legs to her four-poster bed with shoestrings he’d brought with him. Once she was secured, he played with her, fondling her breasts for what seemed like forever. Revulsion welling up inside McKenzie, she stared at him, trying to remember every detail. It made Bergstrom nervous. In a jerk of the wrist, he delivered a threat, the gun barrel thrust ominously between her legs. Then he laid an empty pillow case over her eyes.

When James Bergstrom had finished with Cindy McKenzie, he peered down at her and smiled.

“Is there anything you’d like me to do?” he asked politely.

McKenzie shook her head. “No. Just leave,” she whispered.

At the bedroom door, Bergstrom turned to her one more time.

“Who left the garage door open?” he asked.

“My fiancé,” she answered.

“Tell him to keep it locked in the future,” Bergstrom suggested blandly before he turned and left.

Living with James Bergstrom took an incredible toll on Linda. She had nightmares constantly. Always, there was the silhouette of an unidentified woman and the distant James with the cold eyes. James, too, often awoke shivering in the night, his body coated with sweat. Much later, he would admit that he had his own bad dreams, nightmares in which he’d been caught.

At home, James demanded continual attention. When she signed up for a class at a local professional school, hoping to get certified to work as a medical aide, James tore up her books and destroyed her homework, even taking the light bulbs from lamps so she couldn’t see to study at night, just as her father had done to her as a child when he turned off the electricity. Instead, James ordered her to sit next to him while he watched military shows on cable television. If she moved, if she ignored him, he’d become enraged, yelling, “I owe you, bitch.” Linda grew to believe James Bergstrom kept a tally of her supposed sins and used them as justification for his own monstrous deeds.

Despite everything, Linda hadn’t given up. She kept trying to stop him. She not only monitored his whereabouts, but put him on a strict allowance, hoping he wouldn’t have gas money to use to circle neighborhoods, stalking victims. She’d noticed how quickly the Grand Prix guzzled fuel. One day the tank would be nearly full, the next almost empty. Once when he’d stopped at a convenience store to buy milk,
Linda searched the inside of the car, knowing he wouldn’t have had time to hide anything. She discovered forty-five dollars hidden in the Grand Prix’s fuse box.

“What’s this?” she demanded when he returned.

“It’s not mine. It’s Sam’s. Go ahead and ask him.”

“I guess you’re up to no good again,” Linda said, bitterly.

“You and your damn allegations,” James shouted back. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Later Linda would learn James stole small amounts of money from some of his victims.

There were other signs. James had no vacation left that summer; he’d taken it scattered throughout the year, days Linda assumed he’d worked when he actually jogged through neighborhoods in search of potential victims. It hadn’t escaped her notice that he increasingly arrived home late at night, always blaming his tardiness on a flat tire or some minor mechanical problem with the Grand Prix.

That summer James was promoted to a daytime slot in Devoe & Raynolds’ lab, where technicians monitored quality control: the paint’s weight, viscosity, color, and texture. Linda didn’t know, but the lab was a perfect cover for James. Now that he worked on salary, no one watched his comings and goings. Often he’d arrive at work later than his eight
A.M.
starting time. In the afternoons, he returned home well past his four-thirty quitting time. Sometimes he called ahead. Other times he didn’t, like the afternoon Linda saw him drive past their apartment complex around five. Instead of turning in the parking lot, James kept driving, continuing east on Edgebrook Drive. It was nearly half an hour later when James returned home, announcing he had just gotten off work.

“No you didn’t,” Linda confronted him. “I saw you drive past a long time ago.”

As he had on so many other occasions, James answered her with profanity and his fist.

Though he still denied he had returned to his old ways, it was like an unspoken acknowledgment between them. Once
he came in the bedroom as she folded baby clothes. Ashley napped peacefully in her crib.

“Why are you doing this to Ashley and me, James?” she pleaded. “Why don’t you just let us go?”

“Because I love you and we’re a family,” he told her.

“Why don’t you do what other men do? Just go out and hire a prostitute. At least that way you won’t be hurting anyone.”

James laughed at her. “Is that what you think I want? Someone I have to pay?” he asked. “I don’t want to catch some damn disease. Prostitutes give it easy; that’s their job.”

It’s that they aren’t struggling and afraid,
Linda thought.

One afternoon during a particularly vitriolic argument, James grabbed Ashley and ran from the apartment. Dangling the baby like a paper sack, he jumped into the Grand Prix. “You’ll never see her again,” he shouted as Linda ran after him.

“What do you mean?” she yelled. “Where are you taking her?”

“I’ll hurt her,” he yelled. “You’ll never see her again.” He gunned the engine, swerving the car from side to side as she tried to jump in front of it, blocking his exit.

“She’s just a baby, leave her alone,” Linda begged. “She has nothing to do with this.”

James gunned the engine again, coming at her, then swerving to the side.

“Call the police,” Linda screamed at neighbors who’d collected outside, watching the show in the parking lot. “Please call the police.”

James looked frightened when he heard the word “police.” The door popped open and he handed Linda her daughter, then he squealed out of the parking lot as Linda watched the exhaust from the Grand Prix curl out into the street.

That September, Linda thought the stress would drive her mad. She called a local women’s help line, who referred her to
the University of Houston—Clear Lake Psychological Services. Linda spent an hour-long session recounting the horror of the past four years. The counselor listened sympathetically and then suggested she call the police or a lawyer.

“I’ve already done that.” Linda shrugged. “It didn’t help.”

For the most part, Linda sat by helplessly as the charade continued. When they were home alone, James had little time for Ashley, ignoring the toddler as she ambled around the apartment, playing with her toys. More often than not he noticed her only when she cried or got in his way. But when there was an audience, Linda watched James transformed into the perfect father, concerned and loving, fawningly showing her off to his friends and family.

Linda wasn’t surprised, then, when on Halloween 1991, her twenty-eighth birthday, James insisted they bring Ashley to the Bergstroms’ house to trick-or-treat in the Pearland neighborhood in which he’d grown up. Linda dressed the toddler as an adorable black cat with whiskers, a long tail, and an orange plastic pumpkin to hold her candy. James, as she knew he would, insisted on carrying his daughter to the front doors of his childhood neighbors. As each door swung open, he held her up like a badge of honor, shouting, “Trick or treat,” and grinning proudly. A disgusted Linda stayed in the background, taking pictures of Ashley, including one, at James’s insistence, in his arms.

“They were in their own place,” explained Adelaide later. “He could hide out. He could hide the craziness. He could hide his hitting her, his weird delusions about sex and women. So he acted really nice when he came over. But you could tell, it wasn’t real.”

In hindsight, by the fall of 1991, it was obvious James Bergstrom had learned his lessons well in Washington State. He did everything he could not to repeat old mistakes. Instead of concentrating his attacks in a single jurisdiction, he jumped boundaries between Houston, Clear Lake, and
Friendswood. Each was patrolled by a different agency with no communal data bank, so no one realized there was a pattern developing, a ski-masked assailant who tied his victims up. No one had yet discovered a serial rapist worked the southern boundaries of Houston.

He also changed his appearance. In Bremerton, the Parkwood East rapist had worn a signature red ski mask. In Houston, Bergstrom destroyed his masks after every attack, making new ones by crudely cutting them from the arms of discarded sweatshirts and sweaters. “I didn’t want them to figure out that one guy was doing all of them,” James would later explain. Then, in November, James made another change. He left behind the single-family homes and the morning attacks and turned his attention to the myriad of apartments that border Houston’s freeways and clutter the high-tech corridor near the Johnson Space Center, where mission control monitored shuttle flights. “I figured that in the single-family homes, women would be home alone during the day while their husbands worked,” he’d explain later. “But in the apartments, I knew I’d find single women alone at night.”

On November 11, 1991, Jesse Neal, a twenty-year-old waitress in a Mexican restaurant, was hitching a ride home with a friend. Just after midnight the two women drove into the parking lot of a Gulf Freeway apartment complex where Neal was apartment-sitting to care for another friend’s dog. Neal invited her friend upstairs to the apartment. As the two women walked the short distance from the parking lot, neither noticed a man lurking in the shadows.

James Bergstrom was in a desperate mood. He’d combed the streets and freeways for hours, searching for a victim. For the last fifteen minutes, he’d been jogging through this particular complex, looking in windows and watching as tenants arrived home for the night. Now he waited in the darkness between two of the complex’s buildings. He had a hunch the blond woman’s friend wouldn’t linger for very
long, that she’d soon be alone. As he’d hoped, Neal’s friend paused for less than ten minutes. Then Jesse, a short, supple woman with wispy auburn hair, walked her to the door and let the small dog she was caring for out one last time before bed. When she opened the door to call the dog back in for the night, James Bergstrom, in a yellow ski mask, pushed his way past her.

Before Neal had a chance to scream, Bergstrom slapped his hand over her mouth and poised a hunting knife with a curved blade a breath from her neck.

“Do as you’re told and don’t make any noise,” he ordered.

With shoelaces, James Bergstrom tied Neal’s hands behind her and pushed her toward the bedroom. Jesse had the stereo on, soft rock, and Bergstrom turned it off. In a deliberate, steady manner, he pushed a hodgepodge of clothes off the bed and forced her down onto it, turning off the lights. The knife still inches from her neck, he dropped his gray sweatpants, then ripped open the brightly colored uniform Neal hadn’t had time to change out of.

“Why are you doing this?” she pleaded.

“I have a sexual problem.” Bergstrom shrugged coldly. “You should have locked your doors.”

The tender indentations the shoelaces etched into Jesse Neal’s wrists were still visible two days later when Detective Robert Tonry of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department picked her up at her apartment and drove her to his office for questioning.

They talked little in the car, Tonry careful to wait until Neal was in an interrogation room where he had a tape recorder and could take notes. So they discussed the little things people do when they’ve been thrown uncomfortably together. They were both immigrants to Texas from New York: Neal had moved to Houston from Queens just that summer; Tonry had relocated from Staten Island nine years earlier.

“Do you ever get used to summers? The heat and humidity?” she asked.

“Nah, still bugs me,” he admitted.

Tonry had once been in the air force, military police. At the sheriff’s department he handled what were designated as crimes against persons: murder, kidnapping, and rape. A detective for three years, he liked it better than anything else he’d ever done. In a sense, rape cases were the hardest; working with the victims could be as tricky as walking a high wire between gaining evidence and facts to pursue the case, and doing the victim even greater psychological harm. Afterward, many of the victims were wracked with self-doubt. Those who hadn’t fought back wondered if they should have. Those who did and were beaten for their efforts wondered why they hadn’t just given in. Tonry never second-guessed a victim. Especially with a gun to her head or, like Neal, with a knife to her throat, as far as he was concerned, if a woman lived through a rape, she’d done the right thing.

On the surface, Tonry didn’t look like the kind of cop who could put rape victims at enough ease to talk about what was often the most private pain of their lives. In his early thirties, he was a bulky man, muscular, his short-sleeved shirt straining over hardened biceps. But his brown eyes, under thick, dark eyebrows, were warm and understanding.

Since he investigated five to ten rape cases a month, Tonry had learned how not to approach the victims. There was no blustering interrogation. He talked in soft, hushed tones, not pushing until he sensed a woman was ready to tell her story. He’d seen a wide range of emotions from the victims. Some were hysterical, others angry. Jesse Neal appeared neither, rather hurt and disappointed. She was quiet but polite. Only when they were seated in an empty office did Neal’s composure crack. Then the confusion and pain dripped out in her tears. She couldn’t figure out why this stranger had done it, or why he had done it to her.

“Tell me everything about what happened,” Tonry asked. “Don’t worry if there are things you can’t remember.”

“Well,” she said, “I had just gotten home from work…”

Tonry listened to every word, formulating questions for when she eventually stopped talking on her own. Neal went on for a long time, leaving nothing out: not the dog, the yellow ski mask, or the man’s curious remark about having a “sexual problem.”

“I had my tip money on the dresser,” she finally finished. “There was a bunch there, but he took only twenty dollars of it. Isn’t that odd? Why didn’t he just take it all? Take it all and leave me alone?”

Tonry knew the guy, whoever he was, wasn’t there for the money. That had been incidental.

When it came to a description, Neal was sketchy. “I couldn’t see much because of the mask,” she explained. But she said the man was white, probably in his twenties, and thin. “He had a jogger’s build,” she told him, wringing her hands as she had throughout the interview. “I bet the guy runs.”

Tonry remembered a security guard had spotted a man jogging near the complex in gray sweatpants the night Neal was raped. The detective made a mental note to bring the guard in later that day to work with one of the police artists.

After Neal left, Tonry asked around and found out there’d been other, similar assaults in the general area in the last year: principally, two rapes within two miles of Neal’s apartment just that last May—a mom at home with her two-year-old daughter, and a saleswoman who’d been home packing for a trip.