On March 24, 1993, Brian Gettings called Margo to tell her that a federal grand jury had indicted Gene, along with Jerry and
Brenda York, in the home relocation scam. Gene, who was indicted for conspiracy and theft of government property, entered a plea of not guilty and was released on his own recognizance.
Margo knew this was coming, but she dreaded the thought of having to get up on the stand and dredge up the whole mess in public.
“Even though I was committed to getting all of this behind me, I knew it wasn’t going to be pleasant,” she later said.
The next day, the bureau placed Gene on administrative leave. Gene sought counseling for six months from psychiatrist Alen Salerian, who later mentioned his former client in an op-ed piece he wrote for the
Washington Post
in 2001, with the headline “Diagnosis Missing: The FBI Should Monitor Its Agents’ Mental
Health.”
“Bennett clearly knew he was in trouble,” he wrote. “Like any good spy, he had done his homework—checked out my background and security clearance, concluded that he could confi in me. Also true to form, he maintained outward control: When he called me, his voice was a monotone, his words cryptic. And dur-ing our meetings, his face would remain expressionless. . . . I can say he was a dangerously volatile character.”
The bureau suspended Gene from its rolls on June 11, 1993.
On the night of Thursday, June 17, Gene called Margo to say he needed to change the time for her to pick up the girls that Saturday from 9:30 am to 7:30 am because he had an early meeting with his attorney. His trial was set to start the following Tuesday.
For about six weeks, Margo had been bringing Dianna along when she picked up the girls so that she didn’t have to face Gene alone. However, because 7:30 was such an early hour, she decided not to bother her friend that week.
Later, in retrospect, she chided herself for not realizing that on this weekend, above all others, she should have had her guard up. She knew better than to forget that Gene never did anything without a reason.
Chapter Seven
Abduction
Margo arrived at the Nokesville house on June 19 at 7:30 am as arranged. The sun had already burned off the haze that often hung over the woods behind the house at daybreak, and the sky was the perfect bright blue for a lazy Saturday with no real plans.
She was looking forward to a relaxing day with her daughters after weeks of endless meetings with prosecutors to prepare her testimony against Gene at his trial. Maybe she’d take the girls to the park or to the playground with Daisy, their new fourteen-week-old miniature dachshund. She opened the trunk of her Geo Prizm, letting Daisy roam as far as the leash would take her, and waited for Gene to come out of the garage with the girls’ backpacks.
Some months ago, Gene had changed the Saturday pickup routine by bringing out the girls and their stuff in separate trips. He’d raise the garage door, hand the backpacks to Margo, head back into the garage, lower the door, then open it a second time to bring the girls out. This seemingly ineffi practice, she later realized, was to train her not to be surprised or alarmed when the door opened and he came out with just the backpacks.
On this beautiful June morning, Gene opened the garage and sauntered over to her with a pack in each hand, giving off his usual air of superiority and disdain. Gene made as if he were go-ing to hand them to her, but instead, he dropped them on the driveway, revealing a blue plastic taser, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, in his right hand. He’d shown it to her once years before, describing it as a toy dating back to his Army days, when he’d spent several years working for the Criminal Investigation
Division. But she now knew what it was—a device used mostly by correctional offi to incapacitate prisoners by temporarily turning their muscles to mush.
Margo didn’t have time to think before her body instinctively started to run up the inclined slope of the driveway toward the street, letting go of the puppy in the process. But she barely got two steps away when she felt Gene grab the back of her T-shirt and get a hold of her arm. He pulled her body against his side and dragged her into the garage as she twisted and kicked, trying to get away.
Once he got her inside, he picked her up and slammed her body onto the cement. Her upper back and shoulders hit first, landing between his Jeep Cherokee and the garage door. With the adrenaline rushing into her system, she didn’t feel any pain from the impact, although fist-size bruises erupted later on each shoulder and smaller ones along the middle of her spine.
Her thoughts were focused mainly on trying to escape. She wasn’t worried about the girls because she figured they weren’t home; Gene would never risk letting them see this.
Go, go, go
, she told herself.
You’ve got to get out of here
.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out. It was like a bad dream, the kind where her vocal chords constricted, but her voice would not respond.
Gene was twice her size, but she was putting up a good fight. He had to lie on top of her to pin her to the fl . As she arched up against him, he wrapped his legs over hers, shifting his upper body so that he could trap her head in the crook of his arm.
Suddenly, Margo saw the garage door start to roll down toward the cement fl . Gene must have grabbed the remote while they were struggling. Somehow, with a Herculean twist and pull, she got one leg free of his grip and kicked wildly at the rubber safety strip on the bottom of the door. If she couldn’t get her foot on that strip, she knew she was in big trouble. With the door closed, there would be no chance for anyone to hear her calls for help, let alone see what Gene was doing to her.
She sensed her foot making contact with the safety strip and felt a small but temporary victory as the door began inching its way back up. Finally, she found her voice.
“Gene don’t do this,” she said hoarsely. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this.”
Gene said nothing. He dropped the taser, scrambled for the remote, which had skittered across the fl , and hit the button once more. As the door started coming down again, he grabbed the taser and shot her above the right eye, sending at least fifty thousand volts through her skull.
Margo heard a loud buzzing as the dizzying jolt shot into her brain. She felt confused and off balance as she thrashed around.
He shot her again, twice on the crown of the head and once a little over to the side.
She’d lost count by the fourth or fi jolt. Her head was throb-bing now, and she knew she couldn’t withstand another huge electrical charge. Finally, she let her body go limp.
As she lay fl on her stomach, her cheek resting on the cool cement fl , Gene wrenched her arms behind her and snapped on a set of handcuffs, pinching a nerve that would cause her thumb to remain numb for six weeks. Then he rolled her over and pulled her to her feet.
“Now we’re going to have a talk,” he said.
Taking her by the shoulders, he lugged her up the four steps that led into the kitchen. Margo stumbled, feeling disoriented, weak-kneed, and depleted of every ounce of fi she’d once possessed. He pushed her shoulders down toward the fl and her face into the cream-colored tiles.
“Gene, why are you doing this? Please don’t do this,” she pleaded. “Please don’t do this.”
Gene got up and started moving around the kitchen, but all she could see were his tennis shoes and white ankle-high athletic socks.
“There’s some people who want to talk to you,” he said. “They’re not happy with the mess you’ve caused. Ralph’s probation is going
to be revoked unless his girlfriend testifi that we never lived at the house.”
Margo assumed he meant Ralph, the boyfriend of Brenda York’s sister, Jeanette, and by “some people,” he meant Jerry York and his associates. Gene said “they” were not happy with the trouble Margo had caused over the scam involving the Lake Capri house and wanted to talk to her. He didn’t elaborate, but this gave Margo some hope. She had to be alive to talk to these people.
“Where are the kids?”
“They’re asleep upstairs. I’m going to bring them down here and tell them exactly what their mother has done,” he said, referring to turning him in to the FBI for fraud.
Margo still didn’t believe he would do this to her with the girls around, so she figured they had to be somewhere else. The question was where.
Gene was a frenzy of movement as he talked, although much of what he said made no sense. It felt like pure chaos. If he was trying to keep her off kilter, he was defi succeeding. Gene paced from one counter to another, then stooped down and started frisking her through the side pockets of her white sweat shorts.
“Are you trying to shoot me?” he screamed. “Where’s your gun?”
Obviously, he could see that she had no place to put a gun. She wasn’t even wearing a fanny pack, where agents often carried their weapons. And why was he yelling at her like that? She wondered if he was going to shoot her and then tell the authorities he’d acted in self-defense because he’d thought she had a gun.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked, her voice tinged with fear and bewilderment. She hoped she could reason with him, understand what he was doing. Didn’t he love her once?
“You’re not worth killing,” he said flatly. “You’re not worth the bullet it would take to put in your head. If I was going to kill you, I would’ve done it before the indictment. In a couple hours, this will be over.”
Gene started to calm down as he meticulously bound her ankles and knees together, fi with a bandanna, next with an Ace bandage, and then with multiple layers of duct tape; she later realized that he had used the padding to avoid leaving any sticky residue on her skin as evidence of the abduction.
“I have something pretty for you,” he said, dropping a heavy canvas belt on the fl next to her face.
It was a yellow bellyband, a belt typically used to restrain criminal defendants for safe transport by keeping their arms secured at the hip, each wrist attached to a ring by a separate set of handcuffs. He kneeled down and rolled her over so that he could get the band under her. He attached her wrists, then closed the band in the back with a Velcro fastener.
Unable to move, she felt completely helpless. His surprise at-tack had caused her to fall back into the mental space of doing what he said to avoid making him more angry.
He’s going to kill me
, she thought.
Gene picked up the phone, which was on the kitchen counter, and punched in some numbers. It sounded like he was calling 911. “Somebody’s trying to kill me,” he said, his words clipped, as if
he didn’t have much time to talk. “I need help.”
It didn’t register with her at the time, but Gene was doing his usual number again, anticipating the allegations she would make against him and claiming that he was the true victim. Nonetheless, she figured she’d be safe if the police came and caught him trying to kill her.
He paused, as if he were listening to the dispatcher, then said, “Can you send someone right away?” He paused again. “I’ll lay the phone down,” he said, setting the receiver down on the counter. He never gave the address, and Margo later realized that there probably hadn’t been anyone on the other end of the line; the “call” was just another ploy to confuse her.
Gene wet a paper towel and wiped her forehead where he’d hit her with the taser. The spot must have been bleeding because a triangular scab eventually formed there.
“We don’t want you to look messy,” Gene said patronizingly, as if he were getting a child ready for church.
After that, he went into the garage, leaving the door open so that he could keep tabs on her. Margo heard scuffl sounds, as if he were trying to catch the puppy. Meanwhile, she wriggled around on the fl , testing to see if she could stand up. But it was no use.
Gene must have heard her handcuffs rattling against the tile because he charged back into the kitchen.
“If you try to get up again, I’ll put a bullet in your head,” he said. “Frankly, Margo, I don’t care what happens to you.”