In some agents, he said, this false identity could be reactivated involuntarily, and in stressful situations, they could slip back and forth into different roles without conscious control, even more dramatically when the operation was stressful or potentially life threatening. Sometimes this could happen years after an operation was over.
He said he would have psychiatric concerns about an agent who devoted much of a ten-year career to deep undercover work and also about a highly successful operative who constantly sought out such work.
“Why is that?” Mark Hulkower asked.
“Because, after a period of time, we have the impression that people need undercover work as much as sometimes drug users need a good shot. It stimulates them. They get excited. . . . Indeed, a personality disorder associated with long undercover work called narcissistic personality disorder, one in which people are self-indulgent, feed their personality, their egos, has arisen.”
That, he added, is why undercover agents need to be very closely supervised, and because the level of supervision
varies among agencies, he recommends that agents’ time spent undercover be limited.
In the past fifteen years of his research, Michel said, he’d seen reactions to undercover work, including anxiety, depression, aches and pains, stomach problems, paranoia, phobias, and “psychotic thinking disturbances.” His research showed that these conditions occurred in an average of 20 percent of the agents he studied, compared with 12 percent of the general population.
“In the same way that undercover work is unique, there’s a tremendous paradox about it all, so absurd, that the people who are really good at this work should be prevented from doing it.”
On cross-examination, Jim asked Michel to estimate the percentage of agents he’d treated or evaluated who had later committed criminal or violent felony acts.
“A very small percentage.”
After explaining the legal standard in Virginia, Jim asked what percentage of this small group would be considered to be criminally insane.
“Given your description and given the people that I have seen, not one of them would meet those conditions,” Michel said.
Asked if these agents also engaged in a type of gamesmanship, by predicting how people would react, Michel said, “They have to be smarter than the criminals and anticipate two steps ahead of the criminal.”
“So they always try to have a backup plan?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘backup plan,’ but they think of contingencies.”
The next expert witness was psychiatrist Robert Bishop, whose diagnosis of Gene provided the backbone of the defense’s case.
Dr. Bishop said that he worked at a psychiatric hospital in Falls Church, consulted for the FBI, and had conducted sanity hearings for criminal defendants when he was a Navy psychiatrist. He said he was asked to evaluate Gene in August 1996, a process that took
ten to twelve hours, including more than three hours of interviews with Gene.
Gene told him he’d had chronic, long-term insomnia since childhood and had suffered a number of closed head injuries with some periods of memory loss. Gene said he had reported these conditions to a girlfriend.
(The doctor’s written evaluation of Gene said he was “physically disciplined” by his father, “often with a closed fi and frequently in the head. There were unprovoked beatings. He remembered fearing his father particularly when he was drinking.” However, Gene never mentioned any head injuries or abuse by his father to Margo, nor did he complain of insomnia.)
Dr. Bishop said Gene had been referred to his partner, Dr. Alen Salerian, by the FBI’s Employee Assistance Program for chronic insomnia and stress in 1993. When Gene told him about the blackouts, Dr. Salerian recommended a sleep study.
Gene told Dr. Bishop that he sometimes felt as though he could see himself from a distance, as though he were not real. He reported experiencing de´ja` vu and also jamais vu, whereby a person in a familiar situation suddenly can’t recall where he is. The latter, Dr. Bishop explained, is usually associated with serious psychopathology.
Gene told him that in late 1995 he started hearing a voice that identifi itself as “Ed,” which the doctor described as “a dark, menacing voice that would at times command him to do things that he did not want to do, or do things that were inconsistent with his behavior.” Gene also said that since 1992 or 1993, he had occasionally heard his own thoughts out loud, “as if they were coming from outside his head.”
“What kind of things did the voice tell him?” Mark asked. “The voice might tell him to shoplift something, . . . to keep
detailed records of what he was doing and his behavior, . . . [or] not to go to church.”
“Did the voice tell him to do things that Mr. Bennett didn’t do?”
“At times, he was able to resist it, other times not. In fact, very consistent with people with dissociative disorders, which is the diagnosis that Mr. Bennett has, there are times when, under stress . . . he would be more prone or more apt to either lose time or to hear the voice.”
He said Gene reported losing his memory for hours, sometimes for an entire day. During the weekend of the church incident, for
example, he said Gene recalled little after dropping off his daughters with Margo until Allison called him Saturday at 10 pm, crying, saying she’d overheard her mother talking about moving, when he “came to.” Recalling only fragments of the next day, Gene
said he remembered nothing after leaving the University of Richmond campus until he “came to” in a dark hallway, where he felt a burning sensation and his heart racing, and recognized his wife.
At the end of the day, Jim talked to Margo about Gene’s claims. “Do you know anything about Gene talking to Allison and
Allison crying, upset about moving?” he asked.
“We were planning on moving, but it was to the townhouse next door,” Margo said. “I was standing right there while Allison was talking to her father, and she wasn’t crying.”
Margo checked with Allison as soon as she got home.
“Did you think I was taking you away from him?” she asked. “No, he’s lying,” Allison said. “I did not say that.”
“Okay.”
But Allison wouldn’t let it go. “I want to go and testify and tell them he’s lying.”
Margo said she would think about it. She called Allison’s teacher and therapist, both of whom said Allison was a strong-willed girl and that if she needed to do this, Margo should let her.
Still, Margo was worried that Gene might retaliate against Allison. She was also concerned about the impact of Allison’s knowing she’d contributed to the possible conviction of her father.
But she ultimately decided that Allison should have the closure she sought.
“So much of Allison’s life had been out of her control, and this was her choice,” Margo later said.
She called Jim and filled him in.
“I don’t know if I want to use her, but can you have her at the courthouse tomorrow morning?” he asked.
The next morning, Allison got dressed in her blue denim dress, a purple turtleneck, and tennis shoes. She was a little nervous about seeing her father, but she wasn’t scared about taking the stand.
Jim introduced her to forensic psychologist Stanton Samenow, a rebuttal witness for the prosecution who would testify later that day, and the three of them chatted a bit.
Margo sat with Allison, who spent the day drawing and color-ing, waiting to be called.
“You don’t have to do this,” Margo kept saying. “I know,” Allison replied.
Dr. Bishop continued his testimony for another hour and forty minutes, during which some jury members made audible “ha” noises of disbelief.
In addition to dissociative disorder NOS (short for “not otherwise specifi meaning it was atypical or unusual), he said he had diagnosed Gene with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder with features of antisocial personality and narcissistic personality, and also with dysthymia, a chronic, smoldering depression. He explained that people with dissociative disorder could lose consciousness as if in a trance or a fugue, be rendered unable to say
who they are, or form new identities.
Using the 911 tape to illustrate, he said Gene displayed fear and confusion, used the term “we,” and spoke in a different voice when Ed was in charge.
He said Gene’s years of working undercover for long periods with little supervision, compounded with all the recent stressors in his life, primed Gene for the triggering event of his dissociative state that fi weekend—Allison’s call.
Dr. Bishop stated that the evidence that clearly linked Gene to the various crime scenes was also representative of his irrational state, describing the vibrator pipe bomb as “at the very least a cry for help.”
In conclusion, he said, “Mr. Bennett did not appreciate the nature and character of his acts at the time of the offense” or their consequences, nor could he tell right from wrong.
Under cross-examination by Jim, Dr. Bishop acknowledged that a person who was dissociating was not necessarily criminally insane.
Asked if he had verifi whether Allison’s phone call took place, Dr. Bishop said, “I am aware that that phone call took place through Mr. Bennett’s report to me.”
“Did you verify it independently?” “No.”
“Did you talk to Allison?” “No.”
“Dr. Bishop,” Jim said, “I have. Would you like to now—she’s in my offi —before you render a fi opinion in this case?”
Mark Hulkower objected, but the judge wanted to hear the answer as much as everyone else in the courtroom.
“No,” Dr. Bishop said.
Moving on, Jim noted that Gene had told psychologist Stanton Samenow that “at one point in time, he had everything; now he’s got nothing, and [Margo] was the cause. Did he express a similar sentiment to you?”
“Yes.”
“Is it fair to say that he is obsessed with his hatred for his wife?” “It’s frequently on his mind. . . . He has been obsessed about
that, yes.”
As Jim led the doctor through some of Gene’s actions, Dr. Bishop contended that Gene was in a dissociative state when he told Mary Ann to rent cars and obtain the insurance policies, cell phones, and pagers, and also when he answered each of her calls or pages as Edwin Adams. However, he said, Gene was probably coming out of it when Margo called him “Gene” in the church and he responded.
Jim handed the doctor Gene’s notepad, with the scribbled directions to the Pittsburgh airport and the notation “call 911.”
“It’s possible, is it not, doctor, that as a contingency plan, if caught, the defendant decided that he would feign insanity so that he wouldn’t go to prison?”
“That’s always possible,” Dr. Bishop said.
Reid’s next witness was Gene’s minister, the Reverend Bill Higgins, who said he fi met Gene in fall 1993 after a service at the Manassas Baptist Church.
On the Thursday before the church incident, the pastor said, he saw Gene at church, looking worse than he’d ever seen him. “His face was strained. His eyes were bloodshot. He was like a man who was caught under a tremendous, tremendous burden.”
The pastor said he arranged with police to meet Gene at the hospital that Sunday in hopes of getting him to surrender. He said Gene’s body looked like a rag doll as he was wheeled in on a gur-ney, his hand was cold to the touch, and he was mumbling under his breath.
“He talked about Ed some more. He talked about Mary. But none of it was put together in sentences that made any sense.”
With that, the defense rested its case, and prosecution began putting on its four rebuttal witnesses.
The second witness was psychologist Stanton Samenow, whose specialty was antisocial behavior. He’d spent eight and a half years at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC, doing clinical
research into criminal behavior; opened a private practice; and wrote the books,
The Criminal Personality
and
Inside the Criminal Mind
. Just as Dr. Bishop had for the defense, Stanton had interviewed and evaluated Gene for the prosecution.