Margo knew there were about thirty-fi guns in the house. Aside from the sixteen her father had given them for safekeeping a year before she and Gene had separated, there were the machine gun, revolvers, semiautomatic pistols, shotguns, and rifl that Gene had collected over the years. If he didn’t have a weapon within reach on the counter, all he had to do was go upstairs to the offi safe and get one.
Gene went back into the garage and returned a few minutes later to grab her car keys from her shorts pocket. He pulled her to her feet, then guided her back down the steps to the garage. She could manage only slow little hops.
He pointed to a large sheet of plastic that was bunched up in a heap by the Jeep.
“That’s what they wanted me to wrap you in,” he said.
Clearly, he was talking about her dead body. The only reason he would wrap her in plastic would be to prevent her blood and other bodily fl from making a mess.
Gene had backed her car up so that it was parallel to the garage door. The trunk was open, and he told her he was going to put her inside. She fi he was going to take her somewhere to die. If he wasn’t going to kill her, then Jerry York would.
Gene sat her on the back rim of the trunk, then swung her legs up and turned her body so that he could lower her in. He laid her
on her side with her head facing the rear of the car, rolled up a lavender bandanna, and tied it around her mouth. Then, without another word, he slammed the trunk lid down.
Margo’s world went completely dark, but that only heightened her other senses. The air was heavy and still and smelled of rubber from the spare tire. The carpeted fl was scratchy and rough on her face. It was going to be an eighty-degree day, and by 8:30 am, the temperature was already well on its way up.
Margo felt him pull out of the driveway and start driving as she slowly adjusted to the reality that she’d never see her children again. She’d never watch them graduate from high school, get married, or have families of their own. Not only that, but they would have to grow up without a mother.
She started praying that God would show her a way out of this horrifi situation, because she couldn’t see one for herself. She felt lost and defeated, which were new feelings for her. She’d always considered herself a pretty capable person, tough even. Certainly all her law enforcement training had instilled the technical skills to fi back, but she’d always possessed the determination and stamina not to give up. Somehow Gene had found a way to break through all that.
At one point, she heard him open a door and drop something into the bushes, then heard the crinkling of leaves. Later, Gene told her he’d stopped to throw the puppy out into the woods. Rather than tell the girls the truth about their father, Margo would later say she’d lost Daisy.
After driving on the highway for forty-fi minutes, he pulled off, opened the trunk, and told her to roll over and face the other way.
“Ralph’s watching the car,” he warned, then slammed the lid again.
“If she makes any noise, drive her off a fucking cliff,” he shouted to someone, whom she figured was Ralph. Throughout her or-deal, however, she never heard another voice but Gene’s.
He stopped a third time for gas and then, after she’d pleaded with him to stop because she was going to throw up or pass out, he pulled over one more time to give her some fresh air.
Once they arrived at their fi destination, Gene opened the trunk and pulled the gag away from her mouth. She couldn’t see anything from her vantage point but him, standing against a blue sky.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “They’ve got the kids.” “Who’s got the kids?”
“Jerry and Brenda. If we don’t do exactly what they want, we’ll never see the girls again.”
At that point he had her. She knew that Jerry was an ex-con and that he, Brenda, and Gene had been indicted in the home relocation scam, so what would the Yorks have to lose by kidnapping the girls if it saved Jerry from going back to prison? She believed Gene and was willing to do whatever he said.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’ve got to get you in the van,” he said.
She was a little perplexed because she’d left the van, which became hers in the separation, at Quantico. It hadn’t been running very well, so she preferred driving the Prizm.
Gene looked down and noticed that she’d torn the tape around her ankles.
“You got your ankles undone,” he said with surprise. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”
He helped her out of the trunk, feet fi Feeling light-headed, she was able to get only a quick glimpse of her surroundings. They were parked next to the van in a large, empty lot, surrounded by red brick buildings. She didn’t recognize the area, but because it was deserted, she thought they were probably somewhere in downtown DC.
A white sheet covered the van’s back bench, where he had her lie on her side while he sat on the fl , facing her.
For about thirty minutes, he talked and she listened. What he told her only increased her emotional buy-in that he, too, was a victim in this mess.
He said the Yorks had come over to the house Friday night. Brenda told him she was taking the girls out for a Slurpee while Jerry took him for a ride somewhere to talk. But Brenda, he said, never came back with the girls, and he got “busted up” in the ribs and knees by two “professionals” who worked with Jerry. Considering how hard Gene had fought Margo, she figured he was exaggerating. But it sounded as if Jerry had set him up to be jumped so as to prove that “they” meant business.
“We need to call the police,” Margo said.
“If we call the police, they’ll walk away and we’ll never see the kids again.”
Gene said Jerry didn’t want to hurt the kids, but he wasn’t willing to go back to jail. “Everybody” thought Margo was the key witness in the fraud case, so they didn’t want her to show up in court. If Margo wouldn’t agree not to testify, Jerry told him, “they” would have to kill her.
“If there’s no other way to save the kids, then you should go ahead and kill me,” Margo said.
“They said I could shoot you in the head and make it look like a suicide,” Gene said. “But now you’re all banged up, and I can’t do that. I can’t kill the mother of my children.”
He paused. “Frankly, Margo, you can shoot me to save the kids if that’s what it takes, because they’re the most important thing.”
At the time, Margo thought he really meant it.
“When this is over, Jerry and Brenda are dead,” he said. “I will hunt them down.”
“I’ll be there to help,” Margo said, exhausted and befuddled. Gene loosened the handcuffs because they were hurting her.
Then, after rewrapping her ankles with tape, he threaded the seat belts between her legs and clicked them shut, wrapping tape around the latch. He pulled off another piece and went to put it over her eyes.
“Please don’t do that,” she said.
Gene reached for another bandanna instead. Then he repositioned the gag over her mouth and told her not to move around in the van.
“If they see anything out of the ordinary, they’ll just leave, and we’ll never see the kids again,” he said.
Gene said he was late for his appointment with his attorney and had to go. It was about 9:30 am.
For the next several hours, Margo felt woozy, sweating pro-fusely as the sun beat down on the van, which grew hotter and muggier by the minute. She felt stiff and crampy from being all tied up. Her upper back hurt where Gene had thrown her down on the concrete. Her wrists were sore from the handcuffs, and her thumb had gone numb.
As she went in and out of consciousness, she wondered what she was going to have to do to keep the kids safe. When she felt she had to shift her body, she tried to do it gently, because the handcuffs kept rattling, and she didn’t want to anger whoever was watching the van.
Gene came back a few hours later with a hot can of Sprite, which apparently had been riding around in his car. He didn’t de-tach the handcuffs from her bellyband or remove her blindfold, so she had to bend over to take small sips while he told her how mad at himself he was for letting Brenda take the kids. He sounded as if he were crying.
“I let them go,” he said, his voice cracking.
He checked her bindings and told her that “they” had ordered him to remove her watch because it beeped on the hour. He also said they had offered him two options: he could either kill her or hide her on a boat until the trial was over.
“You can go ahead and shoot me. Just don’t put me on a boat. I won’t make it on a boat,” she said, thinking they would leave her there to die.
Gene tried to calm her down: “They haven’t decided what they’re going to do yet,” he said.
Then he left.
Ever since she’d moved out of the house, she’d gotten used to thinking of the girls as “her” daughters. But over the past few
hours, the girls had become “theirs” once again because she and Gene shared the common goal of rescuing them. The soft drink seemed to have revived her a bit, and she wondered if she was going to die or if Gene was going to keep her in the van until the trial was over.
Eight years earlier, in summer 1985, Margo had taken a two-week seminar on hostage negotiations at Quantico.
Within a couple of weeks, she was able to exercise her new skills as the secondary, or backup, negotiator on a plane hijacking case. In such cases, the primary negotiator generally talks to the suspect, while the backup feeds him or her information and tracks what’s been said, sometimes making suggestions and also taking over when the primary negotiator needs a break.
Judson Dean Talley had just gotten out of the military and had drunk quite a bit on the plane. He told the fl attendant he had a bomb in his carry-on bag and wanted to hijack the aircraft, but he didn’t say why. The Delta pilot landed in Atlanta as scheduled, then let the FBI take over.
When the primary negotiator asked Talley to explain his motivation, Talley said he was upset that his girlfriend had just broken up with him. However, he didn’t make any demands that the agents could respond to, which made it more diffi to negotiate with him. He had no plan.
The primary negotiator stirred up the hijacker by repeatedly calling him Judson, when he wanted to be called Dean. So Margo took over, used the name that he’d requested, and later earned kudos and a bonus check for her role in getting the passengers and then the flight crew safely off the plane.
“The goal was to get him to focus on the here and now and how to resolve the issues, not to dwell on those things that made him angry or fall apart,” Margo said later.
After double-teaming Talley, they persuaded him to surrender so that they could get him the help he needed. Talley, who was in his twenties, came down the stairs in a cocky stance. But when he
reached the tarmac, a SWAT team member knocked his legs out from under him, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and took him to jail.
During her hostage negotiations training, Margo had been taught to be aware of Stockholm syndrome, in which captives develop a bond with their captors. But while she was tied up and blindfolded in that hot van, waiting for Gene to return with news of their children, she didn’t realize that she was exhibiting textbook symptoms.
Gene seemed to be in good spirits upon his return around six o’clock.
This time, he brought her a hot can of Coke, but it still tasted good. He also brought her a mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and a couple of small hard candies. She wasn’t hungry for real food, even though the last thing she’d eaten was a hamburger and chips at a neighborhood cookout almost twenty-four hours earlier.
“Two cars are in the lot watching us. They told me to keep you healthy and mark free,” he said.
He also told her “they” had let him talk to the kids.
Margo noticed that “they” had now become a separate and dis-tinct entity from Jerry and Brenda. Gene said he could hear water splashing when they let him talk to Allison and Lindsey on the phone, so he thought the kids were at a pool somewhere. Allison, he said, told him she and her sister were “on vacation” and assured him that they were using plenty of sunscreen.
Margo felt a little relief. At least the kids were okay for the moment.