Chapter 41 #2
In 1990, I’d gotten to know Margo at the FBI Academy where she was an instructor.
We became close friends, our relationship crossing the line when she came to see me in Richmond.
It happened one more time when she spent the night at my house after a party that included her husband and FBI colleagues.
Afterward I ended the intimate part of our relationship, but that’s not what she wanted.
When she persisted in her attentions, I warned that she was being reckless.
Finally, I had to tell her to stop calling me.
I knew she was unhappy in her marriage, but what I’d done was stupid and not worth it, to be brutally honest.
I had cared about her as a friend and mentor.
I admired her but regretted becoming physical.
For one thing, I wasn’t in love with her.
For another, her husband wasn’t someone to trifle with.
When released from prison the first time, he filed divorce papers, naming me as the reason for his failed marriage.
It wasn’t true, and I’d not seen either of them for years. But the news was devastating.
“Best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell had a lesbian love affair with an FBI agent while doing research for one of her novels, according to court documents filed in a bizarre divorce case,” wrote The Roanoke Times on June 26, 1996.
“‘Mrs. Bennett met and became totally infatuated with Patricia Cornwell,’ said the statement filed by Eugene Bennett’s lawyer, Douglas Bergere.
‘These liaisons and this relationship was supposed to be a covert affair, but [Eugene] Bennett discovered it, the statement said.’”
When my firearms instructor friend Diane called me in Hawaii, she said that before Eugene Bennett lured Margo to the church, he’d driven a rental car to Richmond looking for me. By then I no longer lived in the house he’d visited years earlier. Had I been, I hate to think what might have happened.
I’d just gotten a Boston terrier in the spring of 1996 and imagined Margo’s husband waiting in the shadows for me to take my puppy out to potty.
The instant I was in the dark yard with the alarm off, I would have been vulnerable.
I was told that he intended to stage an elaborate murder-suicide involving Margo, me, and a woman I didn’t know.
The scenario included sex toys that would be planted at the scene.
He’d made pipe bombs, leaving one in Margo’s locker.
Another seemed to be missing, and my FBI friend Diane suggested I shouldn’t come home from Hawaii anytime soon.
I said no way that was happening. Instructing my staff to have my Richmond house and car swept for explosives, I flew back to Richmond on July 6.
I was advised to cancel the book launch for Cause of Death scheduled at Richmond’s Willow Lawn Barnes & Noble that following weekend. Instead, I hired extra security, placing off-duty officers on the store’s rooftop, making sure most of all that the people in line were safe.
Eugene Bennett was arrested for attempted murder and other charges.
He’d serve more than twenty years in prison.
Prior to that near-fatal disaster, virtually no one knew that I engaged in same-sex relationships.
Often this simply meant having intense eye contact with a female bartender or someone else I met.
It might lead to a short-term fling while publicly I was dating men.
But the incident with Margo was international news, and I was outed.
Prior to that I wasn’t hiding my sexuality.
Rather, I was trying to figure it out. I loved men but felt emotionally more connected to women.
It seemed safer when obviously it wasn’t.
Getting involved with Margo was the most unsafe thing I ever did.
When it was all over the news, I was devastated.
For weeks I barely left my house, too ashamed to be seen in public.
It crossed my mind a few times that maybe I’d be better off dead.
That would be easy. I had an entire saferoom full of guns.
Revolvers, pistols, shotguns, an assault rifle or two.
In those days, it was easy buying firearms in Virginia.
I’d collect them for research purposes but also personal protection. It wasn’t unusual for me to have a Glock 9mm concealed in a fanny pack when I was out and about. I rarely drove anywhere without a gun on the passenger’s seat, and often practiced on the firing range with cops or FBI agents.
I remembered what my detective friend Glenn Williams had done when he couldn’t take it anymore.
Then I’d think, Well, if you do that, you’ll end up on Marcella’s table.
That was a sobering image. While I was in the throes of all this, my mother called one morning.
She’d heard about my scandal and seemed more furious than anything else.
“You’ve shamed the family,” she told me over the phone.
You’re one to talk, I thought but didn’t utter.
“If you really feel that way then I have two choices,” I replied. “I can kill myself or never speak to you and my brothers after this. Which do you prefer?”
“Neither,” she admitted, never raising the subject again.