Allison and Lindsey called the pastor “Rubber Chicken” because his face was so red.
But then there were the days when their father wasn’t so nice, when Lindsey and Allison cringed with fear at their father’s flaring temper. It was always worse when it involved Margo.
One night, while they were still living in the basement apartment, Allison woke up, crying, after dreaming that her mother was running away from her. Gene showed her no sympathy.
“It doesn’t matter; go back to bed,” he said.
Lindsey would always remember the times Gene yelled at her for crying. She cried on the trip they made to Kentucky for the Bennett family reunion in 1995, for example, and he said, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” then spanked her.
Among her other medical issues, Lindsey had developed a nervous bladder, which often caused her to get up fi times in the middle of the night, thinking she had to pee.
“He would yell at me [even though] the doctors had said it wasn’t my fault,” Lindsey said later.
Allison, like her mother, learned how to keep Gene’s temper at bay. “It wouldn’t be bad if we didn’t piss him off, but God forbid if one of us said something wrong,” she said.
She’d often give Lindsey a warning look, as if to say, “Stop talking.” Then later she would direct Lindsey not to do or say whatever she’d been doing that had upset their father.
Allison did not think to tell her mother until much later about Gene’s drinking or abusive behavior, how he would sometimes vomit from all the cheap wine he drank and how the recycling bin would fill up with jug wine bottles.
“He always had a glass of something, even during the day,” she said later.
One night, she remembered him throwing up in the kitchen. All the lights were off in the house, and the girls were in the living room watching TV.
“Why don’t you come over and help your father?” he screamed. “You just sit there like you don’t even see anything?”
The two girls ran to his aid in the kitchen, but they didn’t know what he wanted them to do, so they just stood there, feeling scared that he would yell at them some more.
Sometimes he told them he was happy that he was able to be there for them because he had been a teenager when his father died. But he had high standards he wanted them to meet.
“You’re going to grow up to be something,” he’d say. “No kid of mine is going to grow up to be a little half-ass.”
In November 1995, Margo went to a retreat for Stephen Ministries training, a peer counseling program for nonordained church members, and ran into a minister she’d met at a friend’s funeral a year earlier.
“How long did it take you to get your divorce?” the minister, Diane Lytle, asked.
“It’s going on four years, and I still don’t have it yet,” Margo replied.
“It sounds like you have had some interesting experiences,” Diane said. “I’d like to spend some time getting to know you. Give me a call, and we’ll get together after the first of the year.”
Margo called Diane a couple of months later, and they met at her church one evening in late January. Margo told her about all the struggles she’d been having with her sexuality, knowing deep inside that she was gay, but feeling so ashamed that she’d been living in denial. She also said she’d been realizing that she couldn’t get rid of her feelings of attraction to other women.
“Does this thing inside me make me a bad person?” Margo asked.
“Who is God to you? What is your concept of God?”
“I believe in a kind and loving God. He is a forgiving God.” “Does God make mistakes?”
“No,” Margo said.
“Do you believe God is perfect?” “Yes.”
“Then why do you think God made a mistake in creating you?”
Margo soon saw where Diane was going with this. “She was guiding me into realizing that God is loving, he is kind, and he is perfect,” she said later. “Why would he create me and make a mistake, to be wrong, to be bad? No, God doesn’t create us to be bad.”
After all her years of struggle and shame, Margo finally accepted that God loved her just the way she was. She was also able to accept herself— and the concept that she was not going to hell for being gay.
“That was truly the moment of the liberation of my soul,” she recalled a decade later, crying as she described this pivotal mo-ment. “It was a very signifi point in my life, when I realized I’m OK and no, it’s not heresy for a gay woman to say, ‘I believe in God; he made me and he loves me.’ ”
That said, Margo was still not able to share her newfound be-lief with other members of the congregation at Prince of Peace, because Methodist doctrine says that the only moral intimate relationship is between a husband and wife. For now, she felt she still needed to keep her sexuality a secret, because others would disapprove and think she was a bad person.
In November 1995, Lindsey had her annual cardiology checkup in Georgetown. As usual, they did an EKG, which showed no abnormal symptoms, and a color sonogram of her heart, which did. Her pulmonary artery had become enlarged, which suggested that a lot of blood was being recycled through her lungs.
Margo scheduled an angiogram for the following month, then put a note for Gene in Lindsey’s backpack to explain what was going on.
The angiogram showed that the hole in the ventricular wall of Lindsey’s heart had not shrunk as they had originally thought. It had grown to the size of a quarter, and a signifi amount of blood was leaking through it into the lungs and overtaxing them. The doctors said this could become a fatal condition and recommended that Lindsey see a surgeon to repair it.
Over the next few months, Margo’s battles with Gene now centered around if and when Lindsey should have open-heart surgery. Margo wanted to move ahead as soon as possible, as the doctors had advised, whereas Gene kept pushing for a delay.
He took Lindsey to a new therapist, saying she was suffering from severe anxiety and nightmares, and insisted that Lindsey was in no emotional shape to go under the knife. He also insisted on participating in the sessions with the new therapist, Jennifer Levy, and with the surgeon as well. Margo didn’t like being in the same room as Gene, but there was no way to avoid it.
In the year since Gene had been released from prison, Lindsey had gained thirty pounds, going from an outdoor sporty kid to a more rotund child. Allison told Margo that Gene had been feeding Lindsey bowls of peanut butter and ice cream. Margo could not fi out why Gene kept trying to stall the surgery and was feeding her such fattening foods, while at the same time, he was sending notes in the backpack, telling Margo to stop giving Lindsey so much “junk.” Later she realized he’d been up to his old tricks trying to make her look crazy as part of an elaborate deadly scheme to capture all the marital assets, including the girls, for himself.
On February 11, 1996, he took out an ad in the classifi section of the
Washington Post
that said, “SECURITY—FT/PT non-lic investigators for NoVA work. We will train for licensing.” (In this case, “NoVA” was an abbreviation for Northern Virginia, not the community college system.)
A woman named Mary Ann Khalifeh, a former analyst for the Internal Revenue Service, responded to the ad and was hired by Gene, who was posing as a retired FBI agent turned private investigator named Edwin Adams. Gene told Mary Ann she was going to help him investigate an insurance fraud and embezzle-ment scam and gave her detailed instructions for a number of things he wanted her to do, promising her a lump sum of $35,000 once the job was done. One of those tasks was to open four bank accounts with $50 each, then use them to take out four $250,000 accidental death policies on herself, naming Marguerite, Allison,
and Lindsey Bennett and Elizabeth Akers as benefi Marguerite Bennett, he told her, was one of the embezzlers.
In March 1996, Gene fi agreed to let Lindsey have the surgery after Jennifer Levy said she couldn’t recommend postpon-ing the operation. The procedure was scheduled for April 3.
Betty had submitted a list of divorce-related questions, called interrogatories, for Gene to answer in writing. But when Gene didn’t answer the questions, Betty didn’t force the issue. His foot-dragging routine didn’t stop Kathy, though. She went to court and got an order to make him comply.
Gene’s responses gave Kathy a chance to prepare a hard-hitting set of questions for Gene’s deposition in June, where he would be sworn under oath to tell the truth and she could get an idea of his position before trial in divorce court. That was the point, at least theoretically.
The first question asked him to list the factors that had led to the dissolution of the marriage as well as the dates and descrip-tions of any postseparation incidents he planned to introduce as evidence.
Gene’s responses painted Margo as a power-hungry, overambi-tious closet lesbian who shirked her duties as a mother and saw him as little more than a sperm bank. He said she repeatedly pushed him to watch lesbian porno and to bring other women into their marital bed. He claimed that he protested “on religious, family, moral and health grounds for Mrs. Bennett to forget about these sexually deviant behaviors.”
As Gene described Margo’s affair with Patsy, he mixed fact with fi “Mrs. Bennett became totally infatuated with Patricia Cornwell. . . . Mrs. Bennett would secretly meet with Cornwell for romantic candlelight dinners, would visit Cornwell’s Richmond home, accepted expensive gifts and clothes from her and spoke with her on the phone constantly. . . . Mr. Bennett followed Mrs. Bennett to several of these rendezvous during this time and ob-served Mrs. Bennett and Ms. Cornwell hugging and kissing in their
vehicles. Mrs. Bennett attended a book signing and dinner as Ms. Cornwell’s guest and Mr. Bennett learned that Mrs. Bennett and Ms. Cornwell had spent the night together. The next day, after Mrs. Bennett returned to the FBI academy, Mr. Bennett checked the family van and removed Mrs. Bennett’s lingerie, sex toys, lesbian pornographic material,
etc.
from the van for safe keeping and testing.”
Gene later said he sent the lingerie to a forensic expert at George Washington University and then to a lab to get DNA proof of the affair. Margo told Kathy that Gene was “barking up the right tree,” but that he was making up evidence to support his claims. She said she would admit under oath that she had been with Patsy on the night in question, but she never put any lingerie, sex toys, or lesbian porno videos in the van. When Gene produced a photocopy of a photo he took before sending the panties to be tested, Margo said she’d never seen them before, so if the lab found any female secretions they weren’t hers.
In addition, he accused her of stealing everything she could from his house while he was in prison, blaming the foreclosure on her failure to pay the mortgage. He said she “actively blocked” him from contacting their daughters by phone or by mail while he was behind bars and insisted that she “never exercised any discipline or authority over the children . . . [and] tried to be a buddy or friend to the children instead of an adult with serious parental responsibilities.” He said she frequently gave Allison and Lindsey prescription medications without sending them to a doctor and sent him notes asking him to do the same, another allegation that Margo denied. “Mrs. Bennett’s plan was to use their children as bargaining chips for a quiet divorce while ruining Mr. Bennett fi , emotionally and professionally,” he wrote. “Mrs. Bennett in effect wanted everything, except their joint debt, and wanted
Mr. Bennett to walk away from his family and assets.”
In late April, Margo got a call from a private investigator, another former student. When he started his own business, she’d said
she would do some small jobs for him and agreed to let him list her on his brochure. He called to say that a woman named Mary Ann Khalifeh had seen the brochure at a divorce support group meeting and wanted to meet with Margo.
Margo wasn’t interested, but she agreed to call the woman. When they talked a week later, Mary Ann said she thought her husband was cheating on her.
“If you’ll just meet with me, maybe you can help me,” Mary Ann said.
Margo tried to be polite but fi saying she didn’t really want to get into this type of work and was very busy at the moment. “I’m willing to meet with you,” she said. “I just want you to know that I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you.”
They agreed to meet a week later at a restaurant-bar called the Polo Grill in Lorton around 6 pm.