When Gene called the night of June 23, he said he was close to the church with his female partner and asked if Edwin could meet them there. That way, his partner could go on to a motel while he and Edwin talked. The pastor didn’t really feel like going out that late at night on a Sunday, but he reluctantly agreed.
Edwin unlocked the front doors of the church around ten. He picked a magazine off the fl and went to put it in the wooden rack at the other end of the room, when a man in a ski mask jumped out of the stairwell, holding a gun.
“Do you want to live?” Gene asked, pointing the gun at Edwin’s chest.
“Yes, everybody does,” Edwin said.
Initially, Edwin thought the armed man was a friend with whom he’d recently had a discussion about guns, and who was now playing a joke to make his point. But Edwin soon realized that this was no joke.
Gene turned him around, jabbed the gun into his back, and told him to lie on the fl . He put his knee in Edwin’s spine, cuffed his hands behind him, and shackled his ankles together.
“Are you by yourself?” Gene asked.
“Yes, I’m supposed to be meeting someone else, two other people.”
Gene put a porous cloth bag with a drawstring over Edwin’s head and pulled it closed. The bag was somewhat transparent, so Edwin could see shapes moving against the light.
“Well, there isn’t going to be anyone else coming. My boss made the call to you to set this up.”
Gene sat Edwin in a chair in the hallway, then started asking him about the church bank accounts. When Edwin said there were some accounts he didn’t know anything about, Gene struck him in the back of the head.
Gene said someone had been embezzling money from his boss and laundering it through Edwin’s church. He wanted to know if Edwin was part of the scam.
“You’re going to help me,” Gene said. “Do you know why?” “No.”
“Because I have someone watching your children,” he said, adding that he could’ve “taken” Edwin and his kids at the Giant or Dairy Queen earlier that day.
“Do you know a Marguerite Bennett, a.k.a. Elizabeth Akers?” he asked.
“Yes, I know a Margo Bennett.”
“Did you know that she is an embezzler and a lesbian?” “No, I didn’t know that.”
By this point, Edwin realized that the masked man must be Gene Bennett, Margo’s crazy estranged husband who had kidnapped her in 1993 and then went to prison. He’d run into Gene briefl three times before, once in the early 1990s, then twice only two months earlier at the hospital when Lindsey was having heart surgery. After praying with Margo, her friends, and family in the waiting area, Edwin went to check on Gene, who was sitting by himself in another room. Gene seemed to appreciate the gesture and was very friendly. Edwin felt that Gene’s mood was kind of “blank,” though, so it was hard to tell if he was hiding his emotions or didn’t have any.
Gene moved Edwin into an offi then back into the hallway, where he strapped a fanny pack around the minister’s waist. After establishing that Edwin had not been in the military and knew nothing about plastic explosives, Gene said he’d loaded up the pack with C-4.
“I’m putting enough explosives around your waist to blow up this church and flatten all the trees around it,” he said.
Edwin heard Gene talking to someone on a cell phone several times in an adjoining room, so he figured Gene had associates who were watching Edwin’s kids at the house. He was right. Sort of.
One of those calls, around 10:15, was to answer a page from Mary Ann, who was still parked outside Edwin’s. She told Gene she was nervous because one of the elderly neighbors was looking suspiciously at her and her car. Gene told her to wait while he called the minister, then called back and instructed her to drive to the Catholic church across the street from Prince of Peace and to park next to the rental van.
She stayed at the church lot for about an hour until Gene called again. This time, he told her to go to the Giant parking lot and look for a Jeep Cherokee, another car involved in the surveillance.
Gene disappeared for a while, leaving Edwin to sit in fear, wondering about the pack strapped to his belly. He was sure Gene planned to kill him and Margo and harm his children.
Next, Gene told Edwin to call Margo and lure her to the church with the ruse that he needed her help dealing with an abused wife. But he told Edwin to pick the name of someone who was no longer a church member, someone Margo didn’t know. Ed-win wracked his brain to think of a family whose names Margo would recognize so that he could tip her off covertly.
Gene had Edwin practice what he was going to say and struck him in the back of the head again when he fumbled. Finally, af-ter Gene was satisfi Edwin made the call to Margo around 11 pm.
Margo had just drifted off to sleep when the phone rang. She reached over her seven-year-old daughter, Lindsey, to pick up the receiver, but heard only dead air.
Lindsey had trouble falling asleep, so she would often curl up in bed with Margo at night, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder.
The phone rang a second time. Margo still heard nothing on the other end.
The third time, she heard her pastor’s voice.
“Hi, Edwin,” she said. It was hard enough to get Lindsey to fall asleep without all this disruption.
“I’ve gotten a call about domestic abuse—Tammy and Clarence Johnson, one of the families in our church,” Edwin said fl . “Do you remember them?”
Edwin sounded tired. His voice was not as animated as usual. But he always talked a little fast, so Margo had no way of knowing that something was wrong.
“Yes, I know Tammy,” she said.
Margo didn’t know the family well enough to understand that Edwin was trying to warn her by using a different last name for Tammy and Clarence Batchelett and by calling Clarence by his full name rather than C.E., his usual nickname.
“They’ve been fi Edwin said.
“Fighting?” Margo asked, thinking that the police would be better equipped to handle a domestic violence case.
“They’ve been yelling and arguing,” he said. “The children were scared, so they’ve gone to Tammy’s mother’s. I thought it would be a good idea to take a woman along. Can you help me?”
Margo had been studying to be a peer counselor at the church, which was about fi minutes from her townhouse in Woodbridge. It was a little inconvenient to be running out in the middle of the night when she had to be at work early the next morning, but this was all part of the volunteer counseling job.
“Of course I’ll help you,” she said. “Do you want me to meet you at their house?”
“No, I’m at the church. I’ll wait for you here.”
Margo moved carefully away from Lindsey and out of her bed, then went to tell her sister Letta, who was staying in the basement apartment, where she was going. The kids were asleep, Margo said, and she’d call in a little while to tell her how long she’d be.
“Okay, be careful,” Letta replied.
Margo got her purse and packed her .38 revolver, fully loaded with six bullets. Only now that she was in a hurry, she couldn’t seem to fi her can of pepper spray on the bookshelf in the living room where she usually left it, out of the girls’ reach. At first, she decided to go without it. But by the time she got out to the car, an inner voice told her to go back and search again. This time she found it, right where she’d tried looking the first time.
That’s when she saw Allison standing on the stairs, holding her favorite green blanket. She couldn’t sleep either.
Margo hugged Allison, kissed her goodnight, and told her to go back to bed.
“I love you,” she said. “I’m going to the church. I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Allison was afraid. She felt something was wrong.
Margo had quit smoking in college, but she’d secretly picked up the habit again after Gene’s release from prison a little more than a year ago, when she’d seen him following her—stalking her, really— making sure she saw him watching her.
Margo grabbed a pack of Winston 100s from her purse and lit one, stopping at a red light near a 7-11 to throw out the butt. It was a comfortable night, warm enough to wear a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.
As she sped through the night, Margo went over in her head what she was going to say to the couple. This peer counseling program was one of the few activities that provided her with some relief from her nagging paranoia and fear of Gene. It also felt good to practice some of the hostage negotiation and counseling skills she’d learned over the years.
When she pulled up to the church around 11:25 pm, she recognized Edwin’s Isuzu SUV parked near the entrance, but the building was dark. She pulled around the truck and parked in front, noticing that the door was propped open with a half-dead potted fern.
As she stepped through the fi set of double doors into the foyer, where parishioners would leave their wet umbrellas, she started feeling a heaviness, a sense that something wasn’t right. She gripped her pepper spray tightly in her left hand, her thumb on the button as she’d just been trained, apprehensive about what might be waiting for her inside.
“Margo,” Edwin called out. “Edwin, are you there?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice muffl through a wall to her left. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the secretary’s offi he said, referring to the room connected to his offi which was off the lobby ahead. His voice sounded off. Unusually serious.
“Are you all right?” “No, not really.”
She opened the second set of double doors into the dark lobby area, which was steeped in the faint pink glow of the Exit sign at the far end of the room. A low light was coming through an open door a few feet ahead and to the left, which led to Edwin’s offi and then dog-legged into his secretary’s offi
Suddenly, a door to the sanctuary burst open about ten feet ahead and to the right of her. A man in a ski mask jumped out with a gun and started coming toward her.
“Margo, don’t fight me on this,” he ordered.
Margo knew that voice almost as well as her own, and she recognized the bulky frame. It was Gene.
Margo immediately raised her hand and pushed the button on the pepper spray, aiming for his face. It was too dark to see much, but she saw him take a few steps quickly back, trying to get out of her range. Her survival instinct kicked in and she was airborne, plunging into Edwin’s offi where she dove for cover behind the desk in the corner.
“Gene, no!” she yelled. “You’re not going to do this!”
Margo dug around in her purse for her gun with her right hand, spraying Gene with her other hand every time he poked his head around the doorjamb.
“Margo, do you want to die?”
“You’re not going to kill me, Gene. I am not going to let this happen. I am not going to let you do this.”
“I don’t want to kill you,” Gene said. “I just want to talk to you. If I’d wanted to kill you, I could have had you any time.”
“If you wanted to talk to me, you could’ve called me on the phone,” Margo said. “I’m not coming out. You are not going to do this.”
By her fifth spray, her can was out of power and barely spurted a few inches out. But by that point, she’d found her gun and had her trigger fi right where it needed to be. Margo knocked a stack of letter trays off the desk so that she had an unobstructed view of the doorway she’d just dived through. She balanced the gun on the corner of the desk, where Gene could plainly see it, aimed at his head.
“What do you want to do, get into a shootout right now, right here?” he taunted. “Let’s just end it all right now. We can get in a shootout and see who’s the best shot.”
“I don’t care, Gene; I am not coming out there.”
“Edwin has got explosives around his waist. I’ll kill us all. Come on, let’s talk, or we’ll all die. Do you want to die?”
“I don’t care. You want to blow us up, blow us up, but I’m not coming out there.”
Although it hadn’t during the kidnapping, Margo’s training had kicked in by now, and Gene could do nothing to override it. This time, she intuitively reacted with a game right out of Gene’s own playbook, knowing that as long as she could keep the chaos going, he would not have the chance to come up with Plan B. Or so she thought.