06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (28 page)

In the rush from Hoggen’s unequivocal identification, Gallier had a woman officer in the unit telephone Linda Bergstrom.

“Is Susan there?” the woman asked.

“This is Linda. My husband’s not here,” she said. “I can talk.”

Since she’d last spoken with Gallier, Linda felt as if she were living in a bubble that could burst at any moment. One minute she was thrilled; the next, frightened about what lay ahead. Deciding she needed to do what she could to help, she’d searched James’s clothes every night after he went to bed for evidence, anything that might tie him to a rape. She’d uncovered nothing.

Convinced he must be hiding something behind it, she even stripped off the sheet James had meticulously arranged as a bedroom curtain. He’d hung it while mouthing epithets, when Linda, weary of carrying on the charade of being a real family, defiantly refused to decorate the apartment or buy a curtain for the window. Over the last year, Linda had suffered more than one beating when his makeshift curtain appeared out of place. “He was obsessive about it,” Linda said later. “I was sure that meant he had something there.” She found nothing. The drape, it appeared, was merely another manifestation of her husband’s compulsiveness.

When days passed with no word from Gallier, she sank back into doubt. Why hope when she’d been disappointed so
often in the past? It was almost too much to expose herself to any more frustration. “Any news?” she asked excitedly when Gallier’s familiar voice said, “Hello.”

“We’ve got a positive identification in an attempted sexual assault,” he told her. “We’re going to pick him up at work this Friday, the twentieth.”

“Thank God,” Linda sighed, untold weight slipping from her shoulders.

Friday morning, December 20, 1991, arrived, and Linda dropped James at work. She did her best to act as if nothing unusual were about to happen, but feared James was becoming suspicious when she insisted on keeping the car that day.

“Why do you want it?” he demanded.

“To do a little shopping,” she lied.

She couldn’t tell him it was so she wouldn’t have to bail it out of the impound lot when he was arrested later that afternoon.

The minutes clicked off the clock. In the apartment, Linda paced, nervously watching Ashley, sometimes trying to lose herself in a talk show or soap opera. At noon, she called James at the plant. He answered the phone, and she knew Gallier hadn’t yet come. She expected the phone to ring all afternoon, James with his one phone call. But it didn’t. It was unusually quiet. Finally, at nearly 5:00
P.M.
, the phone rang.

“Aren’t you going to pick me up from work?” James demanded, angrily. “I suppose you forgot about coming for me.”

Gallier never called Linda to say the arrest had been called off. In fact, it would be months before she heard from Sergeant Rusty Gallier again.

For a short time, Gallier thought he’d been lucky, that the Bergstrom case would be one of the rare ones that fell together quickly and easily. He had a positive ID from Andrea Hoggen. All that remained was to file charges. But when he
approached an assistant DA with the file, he was turned down flat. There was no way to use Hoggen’s case to file anything other than a misdemeanor trespass charge, he was told. Bergstrom hadn’t threatened the girl with rape. There was no evidence he intended to do any more to her than he did that night. No way to prove attempted sexual assault.

That put Gallier in an untenable position. “I could have gone in and filed on Andrea Hoggen’s case immediately. We had him on that,” he’d explain later. “But it would have been nothing. He would have been out on the street again in less than twenty-four hours, and we would have blown any element of surprise. Or we could wait, risk having more women hurt, and try to get him on a more serious charge.”

When Hoggen called to check on the progress of the case later that week, Gallier was unable to give any guarantees.

“We haven’t been able to arrest him,” he told her. “We’re going to try to group your case with others. Is that okay?”

“Sure, anything to keep him in jail,” she said. “Just let me know what you want me to do.”

“We think this guy may be responsible for other attacks. We want to get him good,” said Gallier. “Put him away for a long time.”

Hoggen didn’t mention to Gallier the nightmares she’d had since that day in his office when she’d again seen James Bergstrom’s face. In them, Bergstrom chased her and she ran and ran until she awoke, shaking and bathed in perspiration. There wasn’t a day that passed without her fearfully considering the reality that he was still on the streets, free to do whatever he wished. Any unexpected sound frightened her. One night, a friend came to her door after dark. Andrea Hoggen, afraid to answer, hid in her bedroom closet.

As Gallier saw it, his only hope was to tie Bergstrom to another case, one in which he’d actually attempted or committed a rape. That way he might be able to group the cases on a warrant and show intention in Hoggen’s case. He put out feelers, including notices to other agencies in the area
describing Bergstrom as a possible suspect in skimask rapes, especially those involving bondage. When no one called with any leads, Gallier asked around and found a SWAT unit with enough manpower and overtime to keep an occasional eye out for Bergstrom.

For the veteran cop, it was maddening. “Pendergast was right. Bergstrom was careful to the extent of being paranoid,” he said later. “I was worried. If he didn’t get careless, he might just get away.”

Depression had toyed with Linda Bergstrom over the years, but it never clenched her in its heavy fist more than after Rusty Gallier failed to arrest James Bergstrom that December 1991 afternoon. She had never come so close or been so sorely disappointed. Perhaps if Gallier had contacted her to explain he had not given up on the case, she might have reacted differently. Later he would label it “against his instincts” to let a wife know any more about an investigation into her husband. “She might have changed her mind and decided not to cooperate,” he said. “Maybe she’d even tip him off. Linda’d shot straight with us, but I didn’t figure I could take the chance.”

To Linda, Gallier’s silence felt like abandonment. “I knew there was nothing I could do,” she’d say later. “It was out of my hands. I did everything I could to help James realize it had to stop, but you can’t help somebody like that. No one else appeared to care. Not James’s family, the navy, the police, no one. It was hopeless.”

Going through the daily motions of living continued to extract a higher and higher toll. James, as ever, was obsessively demanding. Determined to control her every move, at night he held a fold of her nightgown so he would know if she left the bed. Once, in a fit of unexplained anger, he exploded when she carried groceries into the apartment, throwing food against the walls until they were as splattered as a painter’s drop cloth. Linda guessed part of his frustration built from
her refusal to play his games of bondage since the night in which she’d so feared he would kill her.

After all, she’d grown certain that James had continued to rape and that her sacrifice had protected no one. “Nothing I’d done or tried to do had stopped him,” she’d say later. Any sex with James was repugnant enough. It was always demeaning and humiliating. In his latest trick, he’d taken to mimicking a drill instructor. “Get into the bedroom and assume the position,” he’d order, meaning flat on her back, naked, with her legs spread. Sometimes when he demanded sex, she could successfully distract him, but before long he insisted on his “rights.” To keep the peace and not upset Ashley, who sobbed through every one of their arguments, Linda eventually gave in. Those endless minutes she endured staring at a corner of the ceiling while he moved on top of her would live with her forever. She felt humiliated, used, and powerless. “Sometimes I wanted to cry, but I’d try to wipe the tears away and wait until he fell asleep before I cried,” Linda would recount later. “Or he’d get mad and then things would only get worse.”

That December, Linda knew she had to make changes. It had been more than two years since their return from Washington State, and she had to find a way out of the marriage. The first step was to gain some independence. Answering an advertisement in a free weekly paper, she applied for a day position caring for Colt Hargraves, a sandy-haired twenty-nine-year-old quadriplegic. Hargraves, paralyzed from the shoulders down, interviewed Linda in his Clear Lake area home. During the interview, Linda recounted how she had “always wanted to be a nurse,” and that she had once taken classes in hopes of becoming a medical assistant.

“Why didn’t you finish?” he asked.

Linda fought the memory of James destroying her books so she couldn’t study. “It just didn’t work out,” she said.

Despite what he sensed was a sadness about her, Hargraves liked what he saw in Linda. She seemed straightfor
ward, concerned, and enthusiastic. When he offered her two hundred dollars a week and asked if she could start the following Monday, Linda Bergstrom jumped at it.

Colt Hargraves, once a six-foot, two-hundred-pound, hot-shot, barrel-racer working the rodeo circuit, had been dealt a paralyzing blow by the boot of a honkey-tonk bouncer six years earlier. “I had an attitude,” he’d say later. “I was kind of a bad-ass.” The night Colt mouthed off to the brawny bouncer, he was ejected to the parking lot, his jacket jerked over his elbows, shoved on the ground, and kicked as if he were a gunnysack of grain. “The last thing I remember is laying on my back and I saw a big boot coming toward me,” said Hargraves. “I turned my head and somebody kicked me in the back of the head with a big old cowboy boot.”

After three and a half months in intensive care, Hargraves was transferred to a rehabilitation center. But the damage was permanent. Immobilized except through a mechanized chin-operated wheelchair, Hargraves sued the bar and won a hefty settlement.

With the money, Hargraves bought a home, a pick-up truck, and a sports car. But he was forever unable to move anything but his head, and he shrank down to 150 pounds. “I need people round the clock to be my right and left arms and both my legs,” Hargraves said to Linda the afternoon he hired her. “I basically need you to do everything for me.”

Hargraves fancied himself a good judge of character. After years of depending on others, he’d had a few bad experiences with aides who hadn’t worked out. He tended to watch people carefully and assess. What he saw in Linda was someone who worked hard and who genuinely seemed to care.

For Linda, Hargraves was a godsend. She found a motherly woman who ran a small day care out of her home to care for Ashley, and barely flinched when James complained bitterly about her long hours and absence from the apartment. After paying for day care, the money wasn’t
enough to matter, but her job represented freedom, and Linda grabbed it.

In mid-January, Detective Robert Tonry of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department learned through a constable who worked his district that a Sergeant Rusty Gallier in HPD sex crimes was asking questions about a ski-masked rapist who liked to tie his victims up. Tonry, remembering Jesse Neal, the waitress who’d been raped the past November, called Gallier. On the phone, Gallier filled him in on Linda Bergstrom and her allegations against her husband.

The next day in Gallier’s third-floor office at HPD headquarters, he and Tonry compared notes. The detective briefed Gallier on his cases. He’d brought along four files: the ones on the rapes of Kimberly Greenmen, Cindy McKenzie, and Jesse Neal, and one on a similar attempted rape, along with the composite sketch made from the security guard’s description of the man he’d seen jogging just before Neal’s rape. When it was his turn, Gallier detailed the cluster of three attempted rapes in Clear Lake. They compared Tonry’s charcoal sketch to the photo Linda had supplied. They looked similar, both admitted, but were far from identical. In the sketch, the man with the long face wore glasses. Bergstrom didn’t. It could be the same man. But that Bergstrom was responsible for all of the attacks seemed like a long shot.

“We tried to get prints at the waitress’s apartment,” Tonry said. “He turned off the stereo, and we thought we might get something off the button, but it was too smudged to help.”

In fact, there was no physical evidence to tie Bergstrom to any of the cases. No fingerprints, fibers, hair, or semen. In all three rape cases, the rapist hadn’t ejaculated. Of course, that wasn’t unusual. Gallier knew that rape was less about sex than violence and control. “If you filled a room with rapists and, on a scale of one to ten, had them place the actual importance of the intercourse, it would be about a two
and a half,” Gallier estimated later. “It’s not sex, but the thrill of having a woman he can totally control.”

Mentally Gallier wrote off the McKenzie and Greenmen rapes as probably not Bergstrom’s. His gut told him the MO was too different from the Andrea Hoggen assault, one in which he already had an identification. But Gallier still figured between them they were looking at one rape and a least four attempts. “If this is the same guy, he’s being damn careful,” Gallier said to Tonry that afternoon. “No telling how many rapes he’s done.”

Tonry left HPD that afternoon convinced there was a good chance “James Bergstrom was my guy.” But he had no way to prove it. After poring over the files, neither of the two officers had discovered a way to build a case against the former navy man for anything but the trespass of Andrea Hoggen’s residence.

“We agreed we were going to keep in touch and keep our eyes open for Bergstrom,” Tonry said.

According to Gallier, a week later the head of the SWAT unit that had agreed to keep an eye on Bergstrom called sex crimes. “They had to pull off of it,” Gallier said later. “They had no luck and they couldn’t justify it any longer.”

Although disappointed, Gallier wasn’t surprised. He’d expected the call. HPD had been in a budget crunch and short-staffed for the past five years. They didn’t have the money to keep the surveillance up forever on his hunch that Bergstrom would strike again. And Gallier had more than thirty other active cases on his plate, too many to devote all his time and attention to James Bergstrom. To do what he could, he called the constables and HPD stations that covered Houston’s southern fringes and cautioned them to be on the lookout for anyone fitting Bergstrom’s description or rapes with his MO.

At work, James Bergstrom looked more and more anxious. He complained constrantly to co-workers about the police and how they’d taken his “stuff” from the car and refused to return it.

“That doesn’t sound right to me,” Gibson told him one afternoon. “Seems like you ought to be able to get it back, James. What do they need it for?”

“Damn if I know,” Bergstrom said.

Gibson had grown used to Bergstrom’s bad moods and complaining. In the past weeks, he’d griped often, not only about the police, but about Linda. If you listened to James, his wife was a cold woman who prudishly refused to sleep with him.

“Is she frigid?” Gibson asked one day.

“I don’t know, but sometimes I have to force her to have sex,” Bergstrom insisted. “If she doesn’t come around, I’ll have to start getting it someplace else.”

“Well, James,” said Gibson, “you’ve got a baby now. It won’t do that baby any good if you divorce.”

“I don’t know how much more I can take,” James answered with a shrug. “If I should stay with her or not.”

Gibson suggested James rent an X-rated movie and drop Ashley at his mother’s, “so you two can heat it up.”

“Oh, Linda’s not into that stuff. She wouldn’t watch it,” James insisted, playing the victim. Then, ironically, he brought up lingerie, something Linda repeatedly tried to wear, much to his displeasure. “She won’t even wear the lingerie I buy for her.”

Gibson nodded sympathetically.

Since Linda’s car had been repossessed shortly after they returned to Houston and they were down to just the Grand Prix, mornings were hectic at the Bergstroms’ apartment. Each day on her way to work, Linda dropped James at Devoe, and Ashley at the sitter’s. In Hargraves’s view, Linda was working out well, but he had concerns. She was conscientious, yet often preoccupied and depressed. As efficient as she tried to be, constant phone calls from her husband interrupted the day. Even from across the room, Colt could hear James Bergstrom cursing.

“What’s wrong with him?” Colt asked Linda after one such call.

“James is just that way,” she answered.

Then one afternoon in January, Linda arrived at work as usual, but a few hours into the day, became tense and temperamental to the point Colt feared she might collapse in tears.

“Okay, what’s wrong?” he asked. “I need to know what’s going on.”

“I forgot my purse at home, and James didn’t go in to work today,” Linda told him. “And there’s something in there—if my husband sees it…well, it could really be bad.”

“What?”

“A phone number for a cop,” Linda admitted. “A cop in Houston’s sex crimes unit.”

Hargraves looked at her for answers, and Linda gulped hard and started talking. Tears lined her cheeks. As she had to so many others—from James’s family to the police, a doctor, a priest, a therapist, and two lawyers—Linda confided in Hargraves. It wasn’t hard. Her new boss was sympathetic, and from the beginning seemed to believe her. “You see, I know James, and I know he’ll go through my wallet,” Linda explained. “If he finds that number, he’ll know I’m trying to turn him in. He’ll kill me. Maybe even the baby. He’s threatened to often enough.”

As Hargraves listened, Linda called home. A calm and collected James answered the phone.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I forgot my purse.”

“I know,” James said. “I went through it. From the sound of your voice, it seems like you’ve got something to hide.”

“No,” she said, “I was just worried I’d lost it.”

Relieved, Linda explained to Hargraves that everything seemed to be all right.

“Well, maybe you’d better leave early anyway,” he suggested. “Get home before he decides to take another look.”

When Linda arrived home that afternoon, she found James, as usual, staring at the television. She walked into the bedroom, where she found her purse on the closet floor. Everything inside was out of place, and it was easy to see he’d rifled through it. Hands shaking, she opened her wallet and searched through one of its small compartments. Inside she found Gallier’s telephone number, just as she’d left it on a folded card tucked between her credit cards.
Thank God,
she thought.
If he’d found it, I’d be dead right now.

After that day, Linda talked openly with Hargraves about her almost seven years of marriage to James Bergstrom, her fear of him and her fears for Ashley. “I had a hard time believing her, especially when she said she’d told the police and they didn’t believe her,” Hargraves would say later. “But I told her whatever I could do to help her, I’d be happy to do.”

Before long, Linda and Colt began idling away afternoons hatching plans for Linda to escape. Often they were at the lake, sitting in his sports car looking out at the water. Downstream, Clear Lake, ringed with expensive houses, emptied into Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, but here it was brackish and calm.

“I’ll set you up in a place,” Hargraves offered on one such afternoon. “Until you could get away from him.”

“Thanks,” Linda said. “That’s really kind. But what I’d really like is for him to get caught. I hate to think about what he’s doing to those women. He has to stop. And it would be hell having to spend my life hiding out and watching over my shoulder for him.”