Margo didn’t know that reporters had been calling Kathy since Monday. Kathy later told her she’d sealed the divorce records at the emergency custody hearing the day before, but it was too late to stop the media train. All they could do was try to slow it down.
Patsy had just gotten a three-book contract with Putnam, worth a reported $24 million to $27 million, and was set to release her seventh book in the Kay Scarpetta series,
Cause of Death
, in July. Patsy’s celebrity had catapulted her ties to Margo and Gene’s criminal case into an international news story with the kind of juicy hook that the media loved.
Margo was never able to determine how the fi reporter got hold of the records, but she figured Gene must have given his criminal attorneys permission to release them. His divorce attorney, Doug Bergere, told the media that he and Kathy had requested that the documents be sealed.
That same day, Gene gave a thirty-minute interview to the
Potomac News
reporter for a story that appeared the next morning. The article described Gene as tired and unshaven, wearing a short-sleeved orange jumpsuit and handcuffs as he spoke to the
reporter by telephone in the visiting room.
“I’ve been without sleep for a long, long time,” Gene said. “What day is today? . . . I don’t know what’s going on. Right now, I would just like to get some sleep.”
Gene claimed he didn’t recall abducting Edwin Clever or putting explosives in the church, only running out of the church after Margo took a shot at him.
“I would have shot back but I don’t have a gun,” he said.
Gene said he’d expected to have been granted full custody of his daughters at the July 15 divorce trial.
“I didn’t want my children raised in a lesbian household. I don’t think she’s a proper mother for them,” he said.
About a week later, movie producers started calling Kathy about doing a film on the case. But Margo wasn’t interested. She felt the best thing for her was to lay low and be quiet.
Growing up, Margo was like her mother in that she kept her emotions inside. Affl with the typical middle-child syndrome, Margo felt invisible much of the time. She didn’t try to speak up all that often, because even when she did, no one seemed to listen.
One night in Athens, Georgia, when Margo was fourteen, her family was sitting around the dinner table, talking about the activities they’d done that day, which included picking vegetables at a private garden they shared with several families.
“My favorite part was digging the potatoes,” Margo said, her soft voice drowned out by the family’s conversation.
“My favorite part was digging the potatoes,” Margo repeated a little louder.
Still, everyone kept talking.
“My favorite part was digging the potatoes,” Margo said even louder, prompting her mother to break out laughing.
But Margo was satisfi Finally someone had acknowledged
her.
Although she liked this type of positive affi Margo
didn’t much care for being the central focus. In fact, she often liked
being invisible because it meant less attention and, as a result, less discord. Shying away from confrontation, she often served as the family peacemaker and facilitator. Looking back later, she realized that she had probably cheated herself out of some much-needed nurturing and confi building.
Now that the media was exposing her most intimate secrets and highlighting her questionable choices— first marrying Gene and then having an affair with a woman who became an internationally known author—Margo had to learn a whole new way of coping with unwanted attention. This was one choice she couldn’t afford
not
to make.
Margo had to accept that her life would never be the same.
She was embarrassed that her private life was media fodder for public consumption, but she finally decided she wasn’t going to be embarrassed about who she was anymore.
“There were no secrets to be kept, and there’s a great deal of relief that goes with that,” she later recalled. “I also believed that I had done nothing wrong. I was the one wronged. People who knew me would stand by me—they knew what kind of person I was—and the people who didn’t know me didn’t matter.”
Bob DelCore, NOVA’s police chief, called Margo at home on Thursday afternoon to tell her that the investigation into the shooting was over. He said she was cleared to come back to work, but she could take all the time she needed.
Margo said she would be in the next morning. The sooner she got back to work, the sooner she hoped her life could return to some level of normality.
That same afternoon, Prince William County police offi Debra Twomey and Tom Leo went with the state police bomb squad to the Woodbridge NOVA campus—a four-story, cream-colored building surrounded by maple trees and a picturesque man-made lake. There they located the two lockers that corresponded to the numbers—4 and 28—on the keys marked “Woodbridge” that po-lice had found in Gene’s black gym bag.
With the help of a bomb-sniffi dog, they did a sweep of the campus and found that the keys unlocked padlocks hanging on lockers in the southwest corner of the building, down the hall from the student lunch area and about fi feet from Margo’s offi
But before they could go through the lockers, they had to obtain search warrants, which they finally executed just before 10 pm.
Locker 28 held another typed “Evidence—Evidence—Evidence” note, and locker 4 held another blue backpack, marked with a single vertical slash, or I.
After x-raying the pack, the police found that it contained not only more of the same carpet and towel swatches and black explosive mixture they’d seen before but also something much more ominous: a strange, foot-long contraption wrapped with shiny black electrical tape, with an on-off power switch that looked like the one from the gray bag Gene had left outside the church. They determined that it was a homemade pipe bomb, which seemed all the more peculiar because a black vibrator was attached to it. Why in the world would someone attach a sex toy to a pipe bomb?
Ron and his team of investigators would later discover that the swatches from the backpacks matched carpet and towels they’d found in Gene’s house and, when put together like a puzzle, fi into one contiguous piece of each respective material. It was curious to them that these items, which would generally be gathered as evidence to catch a criminal, were turning up in nice, neat packages at each crime scene. It looked as if Gene had purposely planted these items so that investigators would follow a road map of sorts and come to a particular conclusion. But now that they’d found this pipe bomb, the investigators scratched their heads, trying to see the big picture. If Gene’s plan had not been foiled, how would all this have ended?
It seemed from the evidence notes that Gene was trying to frame Margo for planting the bomb. The motive, they were guess-ing, was revenge.
“He had it bad for her,” Debra Twomey said later. “He was one pissed off ex-husband.”
Around 10 pm, Ron called Margo and told her about the backpacks and bomb. Given what appeared to be the sequential numbering of the packs, he said they were concerned that Gene had planted more explosives on other campuses, in other vehicles, and who knows where else.
Ron said they wanted to bring a bomb-sniffi dog to her house, but they didn’t have enough available at the moment, so he told her to take the girls to sleep somewhere else, and they would come over the next day. Ron agreed with Margo’s suggestion to stay the night at Beth’s.
Margo grabbed the girls and some clothes and knocked on her neighbor’s door with Letta.
“What is it now?” Beth’s husband, Greg, asked when he saw the four of them standing on his doorstep.
“What makes them think if there’s a bomb in your house and it explodes, it won’t hurt us, too?” Beth asked after Margo relayed the news.
The four of them spent the night in Beth’s basement.
Meanwhile, back at the college, the state bomb technicians tied a rope around the black device and dragged it down ten feet of hallway, through a set of double glass doors, and into an alcove just outside the building. Around 11 pm, they attempted to disable the bomb safely by shooting the cap off one end. Instead, they inadvertently detonated the device, which sent metal fi
and nails everywhere, shattered the glass doors and scorched the concrete walls, which were pierced with the sharp fragments. The explosion was forceful enough to shoot shrapnel through the walls and into the art classroom.
The next morning, Margo checked under the hood of her Geo Prizm to make sure it wasn’t rigged to explode before she drove to work for her fi day back.
Not long after she got to the offi she went to see David Karstens, the business manager for the Woodbridge campus and her direct supervisor. He warned her that if all the publicity surrounding the church incident caused students to feel she was unapproachable, the college might have to let her go.
Later, when Brenda Floyd, NOVA’s vice president, learned what Karstens had said, she apologized to Margo. “We’re 100 percent behind you,” Brenda said. “That was an inappropriate thing to say.”
Once the police and bomb squad determined that the keys in Gene’s black gym bag opened lockers at the Woodbridge NOVA building, they wasted no time in searching for corresponding padlocks at the Manassas, Loudoun, Annandale, and Alexandria campuses during the early morning hours of Friday, June 28.
In the two Annandale lockers, 313 and 350, they found a maroon backpack labeled IIIII, with a toothbrush that later proved to have Gene’s DNA on it, along with the usual swatches and black powder. Locker 350 contained a fi typed note that outlined a series of business transactions and was peppered with the initials “MAK.”
In the Alexandria locker, police found a backpack labeled IIII, which contained two books, titled
The 1995 National Directory of Bereavement Support Groups and Services
and
A History of Witch-craft
. In the bereavement chapter titled “It’s Not Uncommon: Nor-mal Grieving Responses After the Murder of a Loved One,” the page describing how people often act after someone they love has been murdered was marked.
They found nothing at the Manassas or Loudoun campuses, so they checked the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Academy in Ashburn, where Margo had been an instructor, then went to Dulles Airport to burn off the black powder they’d found in the vehicles and lockers.
The investigators tried contacting Patsy and her security people about the missing backpack II, but Patsy was out of the country, and her people did not want to cooperate.
Around noon on Friday, Ron went to the county jail to talk to Gene. Ron didn’t expect to get much in the way of incriminating statements— his primary intention was to see if Gene would reveal where he’d planted backpack II or any other explosive devices they hadn’t found yet.
Ron told Gene about the bomb-making materials they’d found in his car and the pipe bomb that had exploded at the Woodbridge campus.
“If you know where any of these other ones are, we need to know it.”
But Gene played dumb. “I didn’t hear about any explosive devices,” he said.
Ron told him there was at least one the police couldn’t fi
“If it goes off and somebody gets killed, you’re going to be held responsible,” he said.
“I didn’t have nothing to do with any bombs,” Gene said. Then, in a confused voice, he said. “I, I, is my car blown up, too?”
Gene said he’d never made a bomb or had any training in explosives.
“I know you’re looking at me for a lot of things, but I hope you open your eyes in those other areas that you’re looking at, too,” Gene said. “I’m talking about Mrs. Bennett.”
“What about her?”
“I, I just hope you’re not so blind sighted—focused on whatever you think I am or whatever I’ve done—that you are missing Mrs. Bennett.”
“I’m not, you know, closing my eyes to anything,” Ron said. “Well, most people do.”
“Do you think she may know where these bombs are at or where they’ve been placed?”