Twisted Triangle (39 page)

Before they hung up, Patsy told Margo that if she ever wanted to write a book about her story, she would help if she could.

This was the last time she and Patsy ever spoke.

Margo, John Hess, and I each tried independently to get Patsy to do an interview for this book, but her agent’s assistants said Patsy wasn’t interested.

Chapter Fifteen

Damage and Recovery

Now that the trial was over and the publicity had abated somewhat, Margo shifted again into healing mode, focusing on her daughters, her job, and her church activities.

In spring 1997, after going fi years without a relationship while she worked through the confusion and denial about her sexuality, Margo found herself involved with a woman she’d met at a Christian weekend retreat.

“It was a convenient romance,” she later said. “It was a good chance to see if I was ready to have a relationship of this type.”

But it didn’t last long. Margo was still short on time and emotional energy after everything she’d been through, and she didn’t want to spread herself too thin. Her relationship with Joanne* lasted only a couple of months, but it threw a few challenges her way.

One day, Allison walked in on Margo and Joanne kissing. Even though Margo had discussed her sexuality with Allison soon after the church incident, it didn’t really hit home until Allison saw it with her own eyes. She ran upstairs to her room, crying, and shut the door.

Margo knocked and asked if she could come in. She lay down on the bed next to Allison, who was facing the wall, away from her mother.

“You promised you would quit,” Allison said, referring to a conversation they’d had almost a year ago. Margo remembered their talk, but she’d never said any such thing.

“Allison, I can’t help but be who I am,” she said, pausing. “Do you still love me?”

“Yes, of course I still love you.”

With that, Margo went downstairs and told Joanne she needed to leave. Joanne was irked that Margo didn’t want to show affection in front of the kids, but Margo said she had to put them fi When a similar incident occurred some weeks later, Margo ended the relationship.

At the time, Margo thought Lindsey was too young to understand so she waited another year to explain that she was gay. Her younger daughter was very supportive.

“I just want you to be happy,” Lindsey said.

Later that summer, Margo started dating Susan*, a divorced woman who worked at her daughters’ school and had two children of her own. Margo thought Susan would better understand her and her kids’ needs.

Margo, her daughters, and her sister Letta moved into Susan’s house within a few months, which, Margo realized later, was far too soon. But her lease on the townhouse was up, and she was having a tough time financially. She thought that cutting her household expenses in half would be a good thing.

“I just couldn’t make ends meet,” Margo said later. “Then I found that although I could make ends meet, I wasn’t here for the kids, and Allison started making bad choices.”

Life with Gene as a father had caused damage to her children, but Margo had no idea at the time how it would manifest itself. The bigger fallout was still to come.

On top of being teased about what had been written about her family in the papers, Allison was also given the nickname “Jolly Green Giant” for being the tallest, skinniest kid in school.

“Your mom’s a lesbian and your dad makes bombs,” the kids would say.

When she couldn’t take it anymore, she got into a fight with a boy whose taunting was relentless.

“If you say it one more time, I’m going to hit you,” Allison told him.

“Your mom is a lesbian,” he said, which got him a punch in the face.

The year after Margo and the girls moved in with Susan, Allison progressed to middle school, so she didn’t have to deal with as much teasing. Luckily, Lindsey, who was a far more emotionally sensitive child, never seemed to have that particular problem.

Around this same time, Allison started making cuts on the in-side of her forearm with a razor blade. Her sixth-grade teacher had asked her to write an autobiography, and it had triggered some disturbing memories about her father’s drinking and abusive behavior.

Allison said cutting herself provided a distraction and a release for her overwhelming frustration, “if I was real, real, real upset and didn’t know what else to do.”

She did it about ten times over a six-month period, until she scared herself with how much bleeding she’d caused. She fi broke down and confi in a teenage neighbor, crying as she poured out her woes. About a year later, she cut herself again when the stress got to be too much. Overall, however, she didn’t seem to feel the need to do it anymore.

In fall 2000, Allison’s school called Margo, asking if her absence that day was excused. Margo rattled off the names of Allison’s friends, learning that they too were absent. So Margo, dressed in her campus police uniform, went looking and quickly found them at one of the girls’ townhouses. She took them all back to class.

The summer after the trial, Margo had to take a second job at IKEA to make some extra cash. Although she’d been promoted from lieutenant to captain and was put in charge of all fi NOVA campuses, the raise she received wasn’t big enough. She was enjoying having the kids full-time, but that joy came with expenses.

The relationship with Susan went well until Susan and Allison began to argue. Margo also didn’t like the way Susan tried to discipline Allison and Lindsey as if they were her own children. Letta, who was living in the basement apartment, tried to step in, but that only made things worse.

So in spring 1999, Letta returned to Alabama, and within a couple of months, Margo and the girls moved into a house she’d just bought.

In fall 1997, Margo was invited to guest lecture on stalking at Marymount College in Arlington and George Washington University in DC. As she discussed the different types of stalkers, she wove in her own story about Gene.

After each talk, students came up to express their appreciation. Some said they’d known stalking victims, but had not understood what their friends had gone through until they heard Margo’s lecture.

“This experience gave me the opportunity to be some kind of motivation or inspiration for others,” she later said. “Granted, we all live in our own little worlds, and I haven’t had a chance to reach out and touch people beyond my little world, but the touching I’ve done has been worthwhile. And there’s more that I can do.”

It helped her feel as though her experiences had had a purpose, especially when someone would tell her, “I’m going through a tough time, and I’ve looked at you and thought, ‘If she can do it, I can do it.’ ”

In late 1997, Allison was going through her mother’s closet when she came across a shoe box containing the photos Margo and her attorneys had taken to document the injuries Gene had infl during the kidnapping.

“Mom, did Dad do this to you?” Allison asked.

“Yeah, you don’t need to be looking at that,” Margo said, try-ing to protect her daughter’s memory of her father, or whatever was left of it.

It was only after Allison read about the kidnapping in a narrative written by Margo’s friend John Hess, describing her troubled life with Gene, that Allison learned exactly how those injuries came about.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” Margo asked, after Allison had read John’s account.

Allison said no. “I was pretty mad,” she later said, but “there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. . . . My opinion of him couldn’t get much lower.”

Lindsey never wanted to hear the details of the kidnapping or, for that matter, of the church incident either.

“I’m very happy not knowing that much,” she said recently.

The entertainment industry tapped into Margo’s story almost immediately after the trial. In 1997, Margo saw an episode of
Law and Order
that seemed to be loosely based on her love triangle with Patsy and Gene.

In 1999, Margo got a call from Jack Nasser, a TV and fi producer, inquiring whether she would be interested in selling the rights to tell her story in a movie or TV series. She asked for

$100,000, thinking no one would pay that much, and about a year later, they agreed on $65,000. Margo figured she’d use the money to pay for the girls’ college education and maybe save some for a trip to Disney World.

In early 2001, a movie called
The Hostage Negotiator
aired on one of the cable networks, saying it was “inspired by a true story.” However, the story line bore little resemblance to Margo’s life. For one thing, the person with whom her FBI agent character was supposedly having an affair— or at least that’s what her unstable, corrupt FBI agent husband suspected—was a man.

In May 2002, the Discovery Channel aired a fifty-minute documentary titled
The Prosecutors: A Question of Sanity
, which reenacted the church incident and included a segment from Gene’s 911 tape, with him speaking as Ed. Because Margo had already sold the lifelong rights to her story to Nasser, who wouldn’t allow her

to be interviewed or have her name used without compensation, the producers had to use a pseudonym and an actress to play the victim’s role.

Allison was flipping through the channels with a friend when they came across the documentary. It was creepy hearing her father’s voice on TV like that, switching “personalities” on the 911 tape.

“I was like, if anybody can’t see through that, then Jesus Christ,” she later said. “He was crazy enough to think he could get away with all that, but at the same time he realized he could make himself look crazy to get away with it. There’s a lot of stuff about him that doesn’t add up, which I guess he was counting on.”

Gene sent a steady stream of letters to Allison and Lindsey from prison, always speaking to them as if they were still the same young age as when he saw them last.

Typically the letters followed the same format. They reminisced about the girls’ childhoods or his own. They described his exercise regimen, how dull his days were, how he was dealing with the diabetes he’d developed in prison, and how much he missed and loved them. He often offered parental advice, bolstered by an article he’d cut out of a magazine and enclosed, or referring to a program he’d seen on television. He asked questions about what they were doing in school and asked them to write back. He told them his love for them was unconditional and would never stop.

Allison eventually grew tired of reading Gene’s letters because they so frequently listed numbered questions, but she still cashed the $25 money orders he sent for birthdays and Christmas.

In June 2001, Allison was fourteen when she decided she wanted to visit him. Margo couldn’t bear to take her, so she asked a friend, a lieutenant who worked for her at NOVA, to accompany Allison.

Gene spent most of their three-hour visit giving his version of what had happened between him and Margo since they fi met. He described the kidnapping in 1993 as a mutual attempt to

get back together, and the church incident as one big blur during which he didn’t know what he was doing and had no control over himself.

Gene immediately followed up the visit with a letter, telling Allison how proud he was of her, how beautiful she was, how “smart, mature, so very sweet and very articulate.”

“I enjoyed hugging you and being able to touch your hands and hold hands with you once again,” he wrote. “When you were young we held hands all the time, whether we were in the car, or at a store or in a restaurant. I am glad that we had such a strong father-daughter bond between us when you were younger and growing up. All these times are so precious to me and I was so happy to watch you grow up.”

He said he was very pleased to learn that Allison had the trial transcripts at her house and suggested that she read and compare them to what they discussed during her visit. He also encouraged her to read the entire criminal and divorce fi to answer any further questions she might have.