Twisted Triangle

Twisted Triangle

A Famous Crime Writer, a Lesbian Love Affair,

and the FBI Husband’s Violent Revenge

Caitlin Rother

with John Hess

Twisted Triangle

Twisted Triangle

A Famous Crime Writer, a Lesbian Love Affair,

and the FBI Husband’s Violent Revenge

Caitlin Rother

with John Hess

Copyright  2008 by Caitlin Rother and John Hess. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rother, Caitlin.

Twisted triangle : a famous crime writer, a lesbian love affair, and the FBI husband’s violent revenge / Caitlin Rother with John Hess.—1st ed.

p. cm. Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7879-9585-0 (cloth)

1. Women—Crimes against—Virginia—Case studies. 2. Bennett, Marguerite, date. 3. Attempted murder—Virginia—Case studies. 4. Bennett, Eugene Allen. 5. Criminals—Virginia—Case studies.

1. Hess, John E., date. II. Title. HV6250.W65R68 2008 364.152
   ¹
   3092—dc22
   

   2007044998
   

   Printed in the United States of America
   

   first edition
   

   HB Printing
   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
   

   Contents
   

   Preface ix
   

   Foreword xv
   

   Margo Bennett
   

   1. Fighting Back 1
      
   2. Till Death Do Us Part 5
      
   3. Diamonds and Denial 15
      
   4. Uncomfortably Numb 31
      
   5. Prolonged Embraces 41
      
   6. The Divorce Battle Begins 65
      
   7. Abduction 87
      
   8. Mitigating Circumstances 113
      
   9. Paranoia 133
      
   10. The Main Event 153
       
   11. The Investigation: Gene’s Plot Unfolds 181
       
   12. Prosecution: Crazy Like a Fox 205
       

       v
       

       vi
       C
       ONTENTS
       

   13. Defense: Incompetent Evil Ed 219
       
   14. Vindication 235
       
   15. Damage and Recovery 251
       

About the Authors 271

Index 273

To Margo, for her spirit,

courage, and strength

Preface

The story of Margo and Gene Bennett has fascinated me ever since I read about it in
Vanity Fair
and the
Washington Post
in the late 1990s. I was working on my fi crime novel at the time and was an avid reader of Patricia Cornwell’s forensic thrillers. Also, as a newspaper reporter who covered sometimes dry government and politics, I enjoyed reading in-depth true crime stories.

This one had so many sexy components: two married FBI agents involved in a love triangle with a best-selling crime novelist who wrote about FBI agents and the serial killers they profi And then to find out that Cornwell’s affair was with the female agent—now
that
was intriguing.

As a budding novelist myself, I appreciated the ironic parallels

between Cornwell’s fictional and personal lives: her female protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, was having an affair with a married FBI agent, and Scarpetta’s niece was a lesbian. I still wonder whether Cornwell’s real-life affair preceded the fictional one.

Fast-forward to 2005.
Poisoned Love
, my first book, about the Kristin Rossum murder case, had just been published. Soon afterward, my agent called and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book about the Bennett case; Margo had never told her story to a reporter before. Of course I jumped at the chance.

Like Cornwell, I was seeing my own worlds intersecting. While I was covering the Rossum case for
The San Diego Union-Tribune
, Rossum, a forensic toxicologist, testifi that she, too, was a fan of Cornwell’s, a fact I included in my first book.

ix

The universe truly does work in strange and wonderful ways. As Margo would say, there was a reason I held on to that yellowed
Washington Post
article all those years. This was meant to be.

Now I’d like to explain my research methodology and how I put this book together.

At the start of this project, Margo shipped me four boxes of documents, including her FBI personnel paperwork, her divorce records, and personal papers about her family’s health, finances, and property transactions. She also sent me piles of offi documents from Gene’s two court cases, the letters he’d written to his daughters over the years, and her sizable collection of news stories. Over the next two years, Margo continued to send me extremely sensitive information, such as her and her daughters’

psychological evaluations and the diary she’d kept during her fi pregnancy. She also made sure I had access to her Cornwell novels, which included personal inscriptions, and to many of the people I interviewed who might not have talked to me otherwise. To my knowledge, Margo held nothing back because she wanted the story to be told properly.

Before I came along, former FBI agent and Quantico instructor John Hess spent a few years putting together his version of this story, interviewing his close friend Margo for many hours along the way. When he couldn’t get his manuscript published, his agent approached my agent, and I took it from there.