06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (29 page)

How she could help police move in on James Bergstrom was a puzzle that had dominated Linda’s thoughts for the past two years. Since Gallier’s apparent abandonment, she’d concluded the only way James would ever be arrested and stopped was if he was actually caught in the act. Often she thought back to Washington State and how James had successfully eluded police for months before becoming careless. In Linda’s mind, the determining factor had been that she had bought the car—the blue Precis that was later repossessed. When
James had the Grand Prix at his disposal and she was distracted with her work at the day-care center, he’d attacked at such a rate that the police increased their efforts and eventually caught him. As painful as the thought of turning James loose and unhampered to terrorize other women was, Linda had grown to believe it was the only way he would ever be stopped.

So when Colt Hargraves asked Linda one afternoon, “Is there anything I can do to at least make things a little easier for you?” she didn’t hesitate.

“I could use a car,” she said. “At least that might get him off my back. Now he’s always yelling at me about working and taking the Grand Prix.”

Colt hesitated for only a minute. “I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll buy you a car. Hell, I’ve got plenty of money. Someday you can pay me back.”

“Really?” Linda asked.

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

No one had ever been that kind to her before, and Linda began crying.

“None of that,” Hargraves said, laughing.

At the end of January, Colt Hargraves paid ninety-five-hundred dollars to buy Linda Bergstrom a used two-door car.

Now they’ll get him,
Linda thought on the day they picked it up.
I know James is just going to lose it and make a mistake.

When James asked, “What’d you have to do to earn that?” Linda told him that Hargraves had just wanted to be sure she’d arrive at work on time. “It’s a company car,” she said. “He’s sick of hearing you yelling on the phone.” James didn’t press the point. Perhaps he was already fantasizing about the future—with Linda preoccupied and total access to the Grand Prix, there would be nothing to stop him.

By February 1992, fantasy ruled James Bergstrom’s life. The dark urges controlled every desire. When he wasn’t stalking, he was fantasizing about it as he meticulously constructed ski masks from the sleeves of old shirts. Exactingly he cut the eyes, trying it on over and over, slicing off slivers at a time, calculating how to make the openings just wide enough to see through without exposing any of his face. “I was always thinking about doing it,” he’d say later. “I thought about it constantly. I couldn’t help myself. It was more important than anything else. Once Linda stopped watching me, I blamed it on her. She didn’t care enough, so I was teaching her a lesson. Sometimes I would drive around or jog for hours looking for the right opportunity. I’d be so tired, but that was a relief, because it meant I was too tired to do anything and I could go home.”

On February 7 a woman in her mid-forties was attacked as she got out of her car in front of her Clear Lake apartment complex. The assailant wore sweats and a ski mask, and, as in the two November 1991 cases, carried a hunting knife. It was two-thirty in the afternoon in broad daylight, and when the woman screamed her son’s name, the man ran. The file landed on Detective Robert Tonry’s desk. He now had at least one rape he and Gallier suspected Bergstrom of—that of Jesse Neal, the waitress—and five attempted rapes, and nothing solid tying the ex-submariner to any of them. Tonry called Gallier, who told him he’d circulated Bergstrom’s
description and MO to HPD patrols working Houston’s southern limits. “We’ll get him,” Gallier said, hopefully. “He can’t continue to be this careful.”

In mid-February, Bergstrom’s high school basketball buddy, Eddie Smith, was home one morning after working the night in the parts department of a plant near the Johnson Space Center. He sat in the dark, drapes pulled, in his small, second-floor apartment, considering sleeping the afternoon away when he heard a frantic banging on his door. Smith, assuming it was his girlfriend angry with him again, ignored it and sat on the couch waiting for the commotion to stop. Moments passed. Smith heard someone leap from his doorway, over the five-foot gap between his porch and balcony. Smith stood up. Whoever it was had just jumped the balcony’s railing. “I was thinking, man, that can’t be her,” Smith said later.

Before he had time to react, Smith heard the patio-style door slide open and saw the curtains part. “This real scary-looking face came at me,” Smith said later. “The guy looked like an animal, a wolf.”

Suddenly Smith recognized the man.

“James, what’re you doing?” he demanded.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Bergstrom said, his expression softening. “I just wanted to see if you had time for a swim.”

James apologized until Smith finally told him to shut up. “Just don’t do it again,” he said. “You looked so damn weird, if I’d had a gun, I would have shot you.”

Before James left, he talked Smith into lending him a pair of shorts and T-shirt, ostensibly to change into after his swim. Later James would admit that he was on the run. He’d circled back to the Grand Prix after stalking an apartment complex and noticed a squad car with two cops parked suspiciously nearby. The clothes Smith lent him were a precaution. He changed into them before returning to the car, in case someone had spotted him circulating through the complex, looking in windows.

Bergstrom had sensed for weeks that he was being watched. Sometimes he’d drive down the street and notice a squad car pull up behind him and follow for a few blocks. He talked often to Linda about wanting to paint the Grand Prix white, but she—certain it was to hide from police—wouldn’t hear of it.

James wasn’t the only Bergstrom who caught the eye of the authorities that February. On the eighth, James C., drunk and disagreeable, chased his wife and youngest daughter around the house until Adelaide took refuge in her locked bedroom. Flushed with liquor, he got a gun and shot through the door, the bullet’s ricochet barely missing his daughter. The two women eventually escaped through windows, and police were called. Pearland’s SWAT team moved in for a three-hour standoff, before James C. relinquished his gun to police. Arrested, he was later allowed to plead to a misdemeanor and sentenced to two years’ probation. As part of his plea bargain, he agreed to attend counseling for alcoholism.

The following week, Linda, James, and the Martinez family went to the Bergstroms’ as planned for Ashley’s second birthday party. Linda decorated with purple streamers and bought a cake topped with Sesame Street characters. Afterward Irene Bergstrom walked her to the car. “People in the neighborhood think we’re crazy,” the older woman told her, shrugging. “Last week we had the police here, now it’s a party.” Then Irene Bergstrom leaned closer to her and whispered, “You know, what you’re going through isn’t half of what I’ve been through. But I don’t complain. And I don’t take it outside the family.”

Irene Bergstrom, of course, couldn’t imagine what Linda went through when she was alone with James. “I was there for one reason, to get him caught,” she said later. “I was on a mission. He wanted to get close to me, and I would never let him. Never. I never let him know who I was or what I was thinking anymore.”

Though they’d grown increasingly apart, James continued to watch her every move, wiping her lipstick or makeup off on his shirtsleeve when she went out shopping with a friend. She looked for small opportunities to strike back. When they drove together, she wore headphones and listened to tapes because she couldn’t stand the sound of his voice. Once when they drove past a county jail, she taunted, “That’s where you’re going to end up, James. Someday it’ll be your home.”

“You make me this way,” he’d barked at her one night when she pulled away from his touch. “Do I have to spend my life fighting you for some goddamn sex? You goddamn bitch. If you don’t give it to me, I’ll rape you.” Like on so many other nights, James pushed her on the bed and tore at her clothes. When it was over, Linda’s eye was swollen and her lip bleeding.

Months later, he would confess to Linda that at times he dreamed about doing just that, entering their apartment as he had so many others, his face hidden and holding a gun. He daydreamed about the expression on her face when he, an anonymous stranger, raped her.

As weeks passed without his arrest, Linda began envisioning James as invincible, a predator who could never be stopped. He sometimes startled her with his quickness, like the afternoon they locked themselves out of their apartment complex’s security gates. James easily swung over the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the grounds, as gracefully as a house cat mounts a kitchen counter. Another night she returned home from Colt’s late with Ashley and was certain she saw James pull in behind her, but by the time she ran upstairs, he was already undressed and in bed.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I was here all night,” James said, feigning a yawn. “I went to bed early.”

Linda went downstairs with James trailing behind her. She put her hand on the hood of his car. It was hot.

“I told you I can do anything, Linda,” he said, smiling smugly. “I can get into a house while the family is there and they don’t even see me. I’m just so fast.”

It was Santos who thought there was something strange about the way James always called her house when Linda was on her way over. “It’s like he’s checking on you,” Linda’s mother speculated. “You call him back when you get here and he knows he’s safe. I bet he’s up to something.”

On a hunch one afternoon, Linda left her mother’s house right after James’s call and returned to Painter’s Mill to discover her husband eating an apple and talking with a teenage girl on a nearby balcony. Linda knew the girl was moving out of the complex in a few days.
I bet he’s trying to find out where she’s moving to,
she thought.
He wants to know how to find her.

“You don’t know who you’re talking to,” she shouted up at them. “This guy’s stalking you. He’s a rapist.”

“Then why are you with him?” the girl said, contemptuously.

“Because I can’t prove it yet,” Linda answered, James’s eyes boring into her. “But when I do, I’ll be out of his life, that’s a guarantee.”

“He wouldn’t hurt me,” the girl scoffed.

“Don’t count on that,” Linda advised.

There were two more reported attacks by ski-masked intruders near Clear Lake that month, but they never made their way to Rusty Gallier’s desk. They were hasty, desperate strikes. One of the women splashed a bottle of bleach to fend off her assailant. In both cases, the women successfully fought their assailant off.
Bergstrom again,
Gallier might have thought had he known. He might have taken some comfort. At least on the surface, it looked promising. If it was James, he was becoming increasingly careless.

“The first time a guy goes out and rapes, he’s so careful. Everything’s got to be right,” Gallier would say later. “Then, after he does it, he runs home and waits for the police to kick
the door in. When it doesn’t happen, he gets bolder. As time goes by—more rapes and he’s not caught—he gets bolder and bolder and bolder, to where he’ll do it next door.”

James Bergstrom did just that.

February 22, 1992, started out pretty much like any other day for twenty-nine-year-old Maggie Heller as she walked back and forth from her second-floor apartment to the complex’s laundry room. Taking advantage of a Saturday afternoon, Heller was catching up on her household chores. A quiet woman with pale red hair and a lanky figure, Heller didn’t lock her apartment door. After all, she was just walking around the corner, less than one hundred feet away from her front door.

James Bergstrom watched from the parking lot. Months earlier, Bergstrom would never have been bold enough to stalk a victim in the apartment complex directly adjacent to the one in which he lived. But he’d gone so long without getting caught, it had become nearly habit now, nothing to worry about. His methods were even changing. Instead of acting as a jogger, he’d taken to canvassing parking lots in his white hard hat from work, toting a clipboard and acting official, as if he were an inspector searching for a certain apartment.

Maggie noticed the dark-haired man in the hard hat and approached him.

“Can I help you find someone?” she asked.

“No,” Bergstrom said, thinking the woman seemed friendly. “I’m fine.”

Heller walked away, and James scurried to his car. Thinking about what he would do to the friendly woman he’d just met, Bergstrom pulled on warm-ups and stuffed a ski mask and gun under his arm. Then he watched until Heller trudged down the stairs toward the laundry, carrying a plastic basket loaded with clothes. When she turned the corner, James made his move, walking casually toward her apartment and up the stairs.

Inside, he pulled on the ski mask and assessed the apartment. One bedroom, small, feminine. She probably lived alone. He stepped quietly into the bathroom and peered out toward the kitchen, waiting. When Maggie returned she headed for the kitchen, turned on the faucet, and ran the water in the sink. She reached into the cabinet and pulled out a glass. Heller had the glass of water to her lips when a ski-masked man lunged out at her from the apartment’s recesses, brandishing a gun.

Maggie Heller froze and screamed. Bergstrom grabbed her by the arms and yanked her hands behind her, then forced her toward the bedroom.

“Do what I say and I won’t hurt you,” he ordered in an eerily calm voice, overpowering her until she fell face down onto the bed.

“Take your blouse off.”

Heller did and felt the cold metal of the gun pressed against her back.

Then the man turned her over, tying her hands to the bed frame. He pulled off her jeans but left on her underpants, tied her ankles down and groped between her legs, fondling her.

“Do you like that?” he asked.

“Don’t hurt me,” she implored him.

James took off his sweats and ripped off her underpants.

“Do you use birth control?” he asked.

“No, I’m a Christian,” Heller said, sadly.

“I’m a Christian, too,” Bergstrom said, grinning as he climbed on top of her.

The next day, Maggie Heller was seated in Rusty Gallier’s office, crying. “She put her whole soul and emotions, everything into my hands,” he’d say later. “It was like, here I give myself to you, do something.”

Gallier, of course, immediately suspected the rapist, who had stayed in the apartment fondling and talking to Heller for nearly an hour was James Bergstrom. Although an HPD
crime scene unit had combed the apartment for evidence, they’d come up empty. At the hospital, nurses used a rape kit to take samples, but as in the other cases, the rapist left behind no semen or hair. Not knowing Heller had talked to an unmasked Bergstrom moments before the attack, Gallier decided against showing her a photo lineup. Since she insisted her rapist was masked and she would be unable to identify him, he feared it would only torment her further. “You just don’t do it when you’ve got a case like that,” he’d say later. “The woman can’t identify him. All I’d be doing is giving her six faces to haunt her dreams. She’d be sure one of them was her rapist.”

Gallier sensed how deeply Heller suffered. “I don’t usually take these cases home with me, but this one I couldn’t shake,” he’d say later. “I knew it had to be Bergstrom. I wanted to get him.” He complained so bitterly to his coworkers of Bergstrom’s protective paranoia that the office joke became “Why doesn’t somebody go over and just shoot the asshole and be done with him?”

Maggie Heller entered a psychiatric hospital just days after her rape. She spent five weeks there. “I just couldn’t seem to function,” she’d say later. “I couldn’t forget what had happened.”

The Monday after Heller’s rape, James returned home from work and found a notice from Painter’s Mill management on his doorknob. “There is a rapist working the area,” it read, then mentioned that one rape had taken place just the Saturday before in the adjacent complex. James’s eyes widened as he read the description of the man: five foot eight to ten inches, dark hair, dark eyes, thin.