Twisted Triangle (22 page)

Paranoia

In January 1995, shortly after Dianna had moved out, Margo received a letter from the federal Bureau of Prisons, notifying her that Gene would be released on April 2. Although she still had three months to go, Margo went from feeling safe and worry free to being stricken with the nagging urge to look over her shoulder. She spent $500 to install an alarm system in her townhouse and made sure to have a gun on her at all times. A male former student who was worried about her safety had sent her a .38-caliber revolver with a three-inch barrel, slightly smaller than the four-inch-barrel revolver a law enforcement offi would normally use. Now that she was no longer a sworn peace offi , it wasn’t legal for her to carry a gun without registering it with the state, but she didn’t feel safe without it and hadn’t gotten around to filing the proper paperwork. She also kept a can of pepper spray, which a friend from Quantico’s fi range had given her, in her purse. Logically, she knew that Gene was in prison, but that didn’t stop her from feeling paranoid. He had friends and associates from his undercover days, people he could call collect from a prison pay phone to come get her. She felt that she always had to be on guard. In early March, Margo called the girls’ elementary school to let them know that Gene was getting out and might show up to see his daughters. She told them that the existing custody order was still in effect, so if he tried to take the girls on a day he was allowed

to have them, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

April 2 came and went, with no sign of Gene, but Margo’s vigilance level had kicked up a few notches. She knew he was out there, waiting. Lurking.

About a week later, Margo got a call from Melanie, a secretary in the school’s main offi

“I just want to let you know, he’s here, and Allison is talking to him right now,” she said.

Margo thanked her for the heads-up. There was nothing more she could do, really.

It’s begun
, she thought.
He’s back
.

Lindsey’s kindergarten program lasted only a half day, so Margo picked her up at the bus stop, and they ran some errands until Allison fi school at around three.

“Did you get to see your dad today?” Margo asked.

Lindsey said yes, then rattled on about something else. Margo didn’t push for more details because she didn’t want Lindsey to sense her anxiety.

Margo pulled into the parking lot at the mall, where they were going to buy some treats for Dianna’s dog at PetSmart. Margo heard Gene’s voice before she saw him.

“Lindsey!” he called out.

Margo scanned the area but didn’t recognize the new Gene, with his thick beard and long, stringy hair. Lindsey, however, had seen him only a few hours earlier, so she ran over to meet his welcoming arms.

“Daddy!” she shrieked.

Margo stayed about twenty feet away while Gene bent over and hugged Lindsey, patting her on the back and glaring over at Margo with an expression that said, “I’m back, and you’re going to have to deal with me.”

As much as she’d tried to prepare for this moment, all the ter-ror she’d experienced during his attack in 1993 came rushing back like a wave, almost knocking her over. It shook her to see him,

waiting for them like that, knowing that he must have followed them from the bus stop and that she hadn’t seen his car in her rear-view mirror. He clearly wanted her to know that he could show up at any time, anywhere, and take her by surprise.

She realized she needed to be even more vigilant as she prepared for his next attack. It wasn’t a question of if. It was a question of when.

While he chatted with Lindsey, Margo stood there as patiently as she could, determined not to let Gene sense the emotional tsunami that was raging inside her. But finally she couldn’t take it anymore.

“Lindsey, c’mon,” she called out. “We have to run our errands.”

As they fi their shopping, Margo did her best to keep her fear hidden.

After she and Lindsey got home, they walked the block and a half to meet Allison’s bus. Then, as the three of them walked home together, Allison told her mother all about her father’s visit at school that day. The experience made such an impact that Allison would write about it in a school assignment four years later.

Allison was called to the offi over the intercom by Melanie, who told her that someone was there to see her. When Allison looked around the lobby, the only person she saw was a man with a beard and long, straggly hair sitting on the couch in what she thought was a blue one-piece janitor’s jumpsuit. He didn’t get up, so she went back into the offi and told Melanie she didn’t see anyone. Melanie told her to try again, so she took a second look at the man and realized it was her father.

“Daddy!” she yelled with glee. He was crying as she jumped into his lap, her Lion King shirt flying up. He seemed a lot smaller than when she’d last seen him, when he’d weighed about 250 pounds.

She told him all about school for fi or ten minutes until he said, “Go on back to class, my big girl,” and gave her a kiss. Allison had always been Gene’s favorite.

Gene also wanted to see Lindsey, so he had Melanie call her to the lobby too.

Margo and Gene soon returned to their preprison custody arrangement. He would pick up the girls from school on Tuesday afternoon, and Margo would take them from Saturday morning until she dropped them at school on Tuesday morning. Gene also got the girls every third weekend.

The major change for Margo was that she insisted on picking them up in a very public place. Gene wanted to make the exchange in the police dispatch center parking lot in Woodbridge, but Margo refused because she knew it would be isolated on Saturday mornings. She decided on the much busier Food Lion parking lot in Manassas, where she would always park at least seven spaces away from his car. If he got there after she did and pulled up next to her, she would back out and drive to a spot further away. She wanted to be sure that the girls had to walk some distance across the lot to meet her.

Sometimes Margo brought Dianna or her neighbor Beth Carter to pick up the girls, and sometimes she didn’t, so that Gene would never know whether she would come alone.

Gene had lost his confi swagger in prison. He always had dark circles under his eyes and seemed exhausted. His body looked softer and less physically fi than before, but the anger in his eyes was fiercer than ever. Margo could see the loathing there, and it scared her.

Pat Hammond, Gene’s divorce attorney, arranged for him to live in the basement of a home in Manassas that was owned by a real estate agent she knew. Allison and Lindsey told Margo that the basement had only one large bedroom with three beds and that their father snored so loudly they had trouble sleeping.

Margo asked Betty to look into the living arrangements because she thought that the girls were old enough—Allison was now eight and Lindsey was six—to need some privacy, not to

mention a good night’s sleep. Word came back that Gene was going to be moving into a rental house after the girls’ school year had finished. In July, he moved to a quiet cul-de-sac with a ru-ral feel on Old Bushmill Court in Manassas. Margo immediately suspected they would have a problem when school started again in the fall because Gene’s new house was about seven miles away from Westridge Elementary, where the girls had been going for the past year.

That summer, Margo and the girls got a new dog, a cocker spaniel that Allison named Pellet. Margo worked out an arrangement with her neighbor Beth, who would talk to Margo through the window while she walked the dog at night.

Other than that, Margo didn’t leave the house after dark, not even if they’d run out of milk. Allison had a habit of leaving the front door unlocked, but Margo wouldn’t go in without fi yelling out her daughters’ names or using her cell phone to call the house phone to see if anyone was home.

“I lived my life and I waited,” Margo said later. “The healing time was over, and now it was time to get busy and try to watch out for myself.”

Margo had begun to apply for jobs around the area that spring. In July, she got a call from the police chief of the Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) system, who was one of her former students. “I have a position I think you’d be perfect

for,” he said. “I think you should apply.”

One of his lieutenants had just quit, and he thought Margo would be a fine replacement. She didn’t ask how much the job paid. She knew the salary wouldn’t be anywhere near as much as she’d earned at the FBI.

Margo got the $42,000-a-year job and started at the Woodbridge campus in August. It felt good to get back to her roots in campus policing.

“I needed to fi consistent, steady employment,” she later recalled. “I’d certainly been praying about it.”

Margo traded in her old can of pepper spray for a brand-new one. It could shoot about ten feet and contained a 10 percent con-centration of oleoresin capsicum, the main ingredient, versus the 2 percent a civilian could buy at a retail store. And now that she was back in law enforcement, it was legal for her to carry the gun she’d been toting around in her purse.

Meanwhile, the start of school was approaching, and Margo was growing increasingly concerned, not only because she figured Gene was up to something but also because his attorney had failed to respond to a dozen letters and inquiries from her and Betty.

Sure enough, when she picked up the girls the Saturday be-fore school started, they told her they had already visited their new school in Manassas. She also found a note in their backpacks from Gene—their usual method of exchanging information about the girls— instructing Margo to take them to the new school, which, coincidentally, was called Bennett Elementary.

Betty said there was nothing they could do on a weekend, but because the girls were still registered at Westridge Elementary, Margo should take them there on Tuesday morning.

Margo alerted Westridge that Gene had changed the girls’ reg-istration to a different school at the last minute and that he might try to take them there. On Tuesday morning, she dropped them off at 8:45, but she was not surprised when the school called to say that Gene had arrived an hour later to pick them up. Betty fi a motion in court that day, and on Friday, September 8, they had a hearing.

The fact that Gene was a convicted felon just released from prison was apparently irrelevant to the judge. He ruled that the girls should attend the school closer to Gene’s house because the existing custody order gave him the kids four nights a week versus Margo’s three.

Margo was furious with the court, Gene, and her own attorney.

“This was so stupid and so unfair to the kids,” she said later. “They did not deserve to be jerked around like pawns or yo-yos. The fact that Gene was willing to jerk them around, and waited until the last minute to do it, all showed that he didn’t care about their best interests. It was my inconvenience and pain that most interested him.”

Margo had long been troubled by the way Betty had responded to Gene’s manipulative tactics, and now that the situation was affecting the children, she could no longer stand idly by. She searched around for a new attorney, and in mid-September she went to see a woman with a reputation for being tenacious. Her name was Kathy Farrell, and she agreed to take on Margo’s case.

Allison described Gene’s behavior during his postprison period as erratic, ranging from playful and loving to just plain mean.

Some days, he seemed to be the same man who had built her and Lindsey a big wooden jungle gym in their backyard in Nokesville, where he’d pushed them on the swings and ran around with them. The same man who used to lie on the ground and pretend to be asleep, letting the girls sneak up on him so he could grab and tickle them.

On his happier days, he would keep them home from school to watch TV or play with their dolls—for no apparent reason other than that he seemed to want the company.

“You don’t seem like you’re feeling that good,” he’d say, or, “It’s a special day.”

He would take them out to the creek in the woods behind his house to collect frogs and lizards, which they would keep in jars, rubbing their fingers along the creatures’ leathery skin. Gene liked to joke that he would turn the frogs into frog legs so they could eat them as the French did.

He would also take them to Baptist Sunday school at his church, where he introduced them to the Reverend Bill Higgins.