06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (27 page)

He prowled through the apartment, grabbing her by the arm and pointing to the cabinet that housed the air-conditioning unit high on the bathroom wall.

“If the police come for me, I’m going to hide up there,” he said, sternly. “You tell them I’m not here. They’ll never find me.”

“No, I’m not going to do that,” she answered, shaking her head. “I won’t. If you have nothing to worry about, why are you acting like this?”

By Sunday night, Linda was drained. Ashley had fallen asleep on a blanket on the living room floor, and she walked toward the bedroom to change for bed. James followed immediately behind her.

“We have unfinished business,” he demanded, pointing at the bed.

She’d been deflecting his demands for sex for days and knew that if she continued, he’d subject her to an angry outburst that would awaken the baby, so, exhausted, she undressed and lay down on the bed. Her heart sank when he pulled out long strands of shoestrings knotted together.

“No,” she said, instinctively wary. “Not that.”

Grinning, James jumped on top of her on the bed, pinning her shoulders beneath his knees and binding her wrists so tightly to the bed frame, her hands ached. Then he grabbed one of her leg warmers, anchoring it around her mouth.

Terror filled her. She kicked violently, adrenaline pumping, as he seized her legs, attempting to control her long enough to finish anchoring her to the bed. Always before, James would have stopped if she’d fought back so aggressively. But when she saw his face, she knew he had no intention of stopping. There, looking down at her, she recognized the cold, distant, detached James.
He’s going to kill me,
she thought. Her heart throbbed and her hands grew numb as she pulled against the bindings. She kicked harder, dislodging the gag by pushing against it with her shoulder.

“James, stop,” she cried out. “Please stop.”

He laughed, grinning maniacally at her. Instead of stopping, he came at her with renewed relish, pushing her hair atop her head to get it out of the way, then cinching the gag more firmly into her mouth. Then he yanked the shoestrings
binding her arms. He tightened the knots until a piercing pain shot from her wrist into the length of each finger. He gazed blankly down at her and laughed, grinning as if he’d just sunk the winning basket during a high school basketball game. Instantly he returned to the task at hand, tying her legs.

He looks like he’s in a trance,
she thought, the dread within her growing.
My God, he is going to kill me.
In desperation, she kicked harder, pushing at the gag wedged in her mouth. Tears ran down her cheeks as she nudged it, finally edging it loose.

“Please, James,” she shouted, crying. “Please stop. You’re hurting me.”

Her husband’s back turned toward her, Linda saw James pause, his shoulders sag, then he sat back on his haunches and shook his head. His hands flew to his forehead and he cradled his skull as if in pain. When he turned to her, it was the old James.

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, fumbling to loosen the bindings on her hands. “I’m so sorry.”

“Cut them off,” she cried. “Please.”

He returned with a scissors and snipped the shoestrings, releasing her hands, which had turned a bright bluish purple. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, stroking the deep crevices the shoestrings left behind. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Then, before she could object, he pushed her down and mounted her. Oblivious to her pain, he satisfied himself before quickly rolling over and falling immediately to sleep.

On Monday morning, as soon as James left for work, Linda retrieved the telephone number Officer Dawson had given her and called HPD sex crimes. The woman who answered the phone listened intently as Linda explained everything, including what had happened in Washington State and the evidence she’d turned over to Dawson just the previous Friday.

“Mrs. Bergstrom,” said the woman, matter-of-factly, “I appreciate your call. One of our detectives will get back with you.”

Linda hung up the phone convinced that she would never hear from any detective at HPD. She was certain this was simply another dead end. But just in case they took her seriously, at 3:55
P.M.
Linda called the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department one more time. Detective Jim Pendergast got on the phone. Linda reminded him of her husband’s case, then filled him in on what had happened since their return to Houston. “Then she asked me if there was any way she could testify against her husband,” Pendergast, a laid-back man with soft brown hair and a full mustache, remembered later. “I told her I didn’t think so, but I’d be happy if she gave my name and number to the Houston detective when they called her.”

After he hung up the phone, Pendergast walked to the opposite side of the county building and cornered Ione George, an assistant prosecutor. He gave a synopsis of the Bergstrom case and then asked if there was any way Linda Bergstrom would be able to testify against James. As he suspected, the attorney said no. Pendergast knew that meant that unless Houston came through, there was no way to touch James Bergstrom.

That day at Devoe & Raynolds, Allen Gibson and a few of his other co-workers wanted to know why James hadn’t been in on the previous Friday. They’d noticed his tendency to arrive late and leave early, but it was unusual for Bergstrom not to come in at all.

“James, where have you been?” asked Gibson.

“Jail,” James answered. “I was out with friends and when I was riding home, I got pulled over by a cop for not signaling. They took me in because I left my proof of insurance at home. The thing is, I had some stuff in the car and they took it. A wool cap and some other stuff. They said they thought I was robbing convenience stores.”

Gibson laughed. “Well, young ’un, I guess if I was you, I’d probably grow a beard and a mustache. Sounds to me like they think you look like somebody they’re after.”

Caesar, who was listening in, elbowed James. “Yeah, they must figure they’ve got a live one, huh?”

A few days later at work, both Gibson and Caesar laughed again at Bergstrom when they noticed the shadow of a embryonic beard and mustache.

“Now, why’s he doing that?” Gibson whispered to Caesar.

“Guess we must have really shook him up,” Caesar chuckled. “You know James.”

The two men walked apart, laughing once again. After all, they both believed that for all James Bergstrom’s eccentricity, he was completely harmless.

Daniel, Linda’s youngest brother, and his wife stopped at Devoe a few days later. Gino, who was home sick, had asked them to pick up his payroll check. At the spur of the moment, Linda’s former protector decided to drop in on his brother-in-law. He asked the woman at the desk to page James, and a few minutes later Daniel noticed him peeking through a nearby window, obviously checking to see who waited for him.

When the door opened, James wore his lab attire, a blue cotton lab coat and a white hard hat. He seemed friendly, but Daniel sensed a fearfulness about him.

In the parking lot, Daniel, who’d moved to Virginia years earlier and knew nothing of Linda’s situation, turned to his wife and speculated, “You know, the way James was acting, you’d think he was afraid we were the cops. I don’t know what he’s up to, but that guy’s scared.”

“Mrs. Bergstrom,” a man with an East Texas drawl said over the phone, “I’m Sergeant Rusty Gallier, with HPD sex crimes.”

Though only days had passed since she’d spoken with the woman officer, Linda was surprised. She’d already written the call off as another useless exercise.

“I’d like to go over some information with you if you’ve got a little time,” Gallier said, immediately launching into a list of items James had pawned in the past year, including jewelry and a television set.

“I know about all those things,” Linda said, losing patience. “They are ours. They’re not stolen. My husband isn’t a burglar, he’s a rapist.”

“We just need to rule everything else out,” Gallier cautioned her. Later, he’d characterize their conversation as his mode of “feeling” out the case. He needed to know if Linda was honest. There could be any number of explanations for a wife making allegations against her husband. Perhaps it was all part of an elaborate maneuver to smear his name and win a nasty custody battle. “Now, tell me why you think he’s a rapist.”

For the second time that week, Linda told her story. When she was finished, she recited Detective Jim Pendergast’s phone number at the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department. “He can tell you I’m not lying,” Linda pleaded urgently. “But I need to know, can I remain anonymous? If James
finds out I’m helping you—if he ever finds out I turned him in—he’ll kill me.”

“Sure,” said Gallier, who sensed this wife might be telling the truth. “No problem. Listen, next time I need to talk to you, I’ll have one of the women in the office make the call and ask for Susan. If he’s there, you call back later.”

“Great,” Linda said. “And thanks.”

Linda hung up the phone in shock. For the first time, someone believed her. Something was finally happening and the misery was going to end.

Meanwhile, Gallier put through a call to Pendergast in Washington State. “We’ve got a woman here making some pretty tough accusations against her husband,” Gallier said.

“Linda Bergstrom?”

“Yeah.”

“Believe her,” Pendergast advised. “That woman knows who she’s married to.”

Gallier would later admit curiosity drew him to the Bergstrom case. When the report of Linda’s phone interview circulated through the sex crimes unit, he hurriedly volunteered to take it on. “This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill case. Usually we have a crime and we have to find the crook,” he said. “This was the reverse. We had the crook and we needed to find the crime.”

It’d been a busy week for Gallier. He’d just helped crack a celebrated Houston case, that of Gary Wayne Sheppard, a thirty-one-year-old chemical plant worker nicknamed the Ritzy Rapist. Gallier was on television news reports after the arrest of the stalker rapist who targeted rich society women, cutting their pictures from newspapers and keeping a detailed diary of his intentions. The scrapbook contained home addresses and phone numbers, along with Sheppard’s notations like, “I want her.”

Sheppard earned his nickname when police searched Sheppard’s home and found women’s lingerie: 122 pairs of panties, 24 bras, 37 teddies, 48 camisoles, 6 corsets, 57
slips, gloves, binoculars, a hunting knife, and a .357 Magnum revolver. Sheppard was eventually tried and convicted of only one rape, that of a woman whom he’d forced to wear a white bustier.

Rusty Gallier had grown up in Woodville. “So far back in East Texas, you have to pipe sunlight in,” Gallier would say. “If you blink, you miss the one red light in town.” At six feet three inches and with the body of a football player, Gallier cast an imposing presence. But at thirty-eight years old, his face was boyish, round cheeks under soft brown hair. On the surface, Gallier displayed a jovial, fun-loving exterior, soft-spoken but with a slight twinkle in his eye.

All he was certain of when he graduated from high school was that he didn’t want to be a sheet metal worker like his dad. Instead he followed a friend to HPD in January 1973, beginning as a traffic cop. Once he’d been assigned to homicide. “It was my Cajun heritage that kept me out of it,” he said. “Cajuns don’t like dead bodies.”

Gallier’s favorite story about his short stint in homicide recounted a night he answered a call to a hospital to investigate a possible murder. A man’s body lay on a table where emergency workers had unsuccessfully attempted to revive him. Everyone else left the room to take statements as Gallier photographed the wounds. Uncovering the corpse, he untied the jaw to get a better view of a neck wound, then straddled the lifeless form, high up on the examining table. To his astonishment, through the camera lens, he saw the cadaver slowly sit up, eyes open. The dead man looked at him. In Gallier’s urgency to flee, he fell from the table, bringing the body down with him. When Gallier ran from the examination room shouting, “He’s alive, he’s alive,” the dead man’s mother fell to her knees crying, “Praise the Lord.”

Of course, the man was dead, his untimely rising merely a postmortem contraction. HPD’s hierarchy quickly reassigned Gallier from homicide to sex crimes, and on the day
he spoke with Linda, he’d been there for twelve years, an unusually long time. Gallier had watched other officers come and go. Throughout the department, sex crimes was known as a tough place to work.

Over the years, Gallier came to divide his fellow officers into three groups: those who wanted to save the victims; those who wanted to catch the bad guys; those who wanted to do both. Gallier judged himself a number two. He wanted to catch the bad guys. Emotionally, the others were too hard to handle for very long. “Lots of guys get emotionally involved with the victims and take their work home at night,” he said. “There’s a high burnout rate. I like getting into the minds of the rapists. I don’t have a degree and I can’t write a book on the psychology of rapists, but I’ve learned a lot about how they think. What I do best is get a confession. I’m good at it.”

In Gallier’s experience, all rapists display two qualities: a self-centered, selfish ego that has no empathy for anyone else, and an abnormal way of relieving stress through sex. “I don’t hate the rapists,” Gallier explained. “But there’s only one place for them—prison. You’ve got to get them there and keep them there.”

To accomplish that, Gallier tried to get deep into a rapist’s psyche to understand how he chose his victims. “When you’ve got a sixteen-year-old boy raping an eighty-year-old woman, that’s a clue. Maybe the first woman the boy saw nude was his grandmother. Maybe he attached a sexual connotation to it,” Gallier said. “If I know why a rapist is doing it, chances are I can get him to talk.”

With Pendergast’s assurance and his gut feeling, Gallier decided Linda Bergstrom had probably told him the truth. Now he just had to prove it. That wouldn’t be easy. Searching for crimes James Bergstrom might be guilty of would be as hard as finding a hill in south Houston’s flat terrain. That year alone, HPD had handled 1639 reported sex crimes, including 922 rapes. To start, Sergeant Bill Dunn, the unit’s
crime analysis expert, ran a computer search for Gallier on all rape and attempted rape cases within Houston’s city limits that fit Bergstrom’s MO by punching “rapist/white/gun/duct tape/ski mask/rope” into the computer. The database pulled up literally hundreds of possible leads. Then the officers narrowed the search to an area within ten miles of the Bergstroms’ south Harris County apartment. Still, when Gallier sat down to review files, he had a conference table a foot high in possibilities.

Yet the table was not piled as high as it would have been if all the possibilities were listed in the data bank Dunn accessed for Gallier that afternoon. HPD computers only covered crimes within its jurisdiction. Gallier wouldn’t find out until much later about rapes and attempted rapes outside Houston. “We just don’t get that kind of information,” Gallier would explain later. “A community like Friendswood? For all we know about what’s going on there, it might as well be France.”

That afternoon, Gallier spent hours weeding through the HPD unsolved sexual assault cases. He began a pile of possibilities, rapes and attempted rapes that fit Bergstrom’s style. Some he’d put to the side would later prove to be Bergstrom’s, like the rapes of Kimberly Greenmen, the mother of the two-year-old, and Cindy McKenzie, the saleswoman, because his instincts didn’t immediately single them out as probables. Gallier didn’t yet understand how cagey Bergstrom had become after Washington State. He expected this rapist to act like others he’d investigated, attacking in the same area, the same way, the same time of day. That Bergstrom jumped from one area to another, in and out of jurisdictions, and varied not only his ski masks but his mode of attack and weapon, were possibilities Gallier was not yet ready to consider.

After hours of weeding through cases, Gallier settled on three possibles, all unsuccessful rape attempts within the past two months clustered in the Clear Lake area near the Johnson Space Center. It was something Pendergast had
mentioned to him that drew Gallier to the conclusion these cases especially fit Bergstrom’s MO. “The guy’s really careful, almost paranoid,” Pendergast had told him. “He runs if he can’t manage the woman, if she fights back too much. No control of the situation and he’s out of there.”

Of course, since Bergstrom carried a weapon—in Washington he’d owned a nine-millimeter Beretta—the decision of whether or not to fight was a difficult call for any woman. Many experts had cautioned for decades that fighting an armed rapist was foolhardy, only likely to incite more violence, and that the smartest course was always to give in. It was a judgment call often made while staring down the barrel of a gun. But in each of the cases Gallier pulled that afternoon, the women had fought back and the rapist had run.

On closer inspection, one of the three cases stood out. In that attack, the intended victim saw her assailant’s face. Gallier pulled the phone number out of the folder and put in a call to Andrea Hoggen.

Andrea Hoggen arrived with her mother at Rusty Gallier’s office in HPD headquarters the next morning, nearly a month after the night of her assault. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to remember his face,” she said. “I’ve been trying to forget him.”

“Just give it a try,” Gallier urged.

On his desk, Gallier fanned out eight photos of men, all white, all about the same age, all with dark hair. “Take your time,” he suggested. “Give them a good looking over.”

Hoggen assessed the photo lineup and barely hesitated. There may have been more photos there, but she saw only one—James Bergstrom’s.

“That’s him,” she said, contemptuously pointing at the photo. “That’s the guy right there.”

“Bingo,” said Gallier. “We’ve got him.”