06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (18 page)

That Wheeler and his staff hadn’t been able to charge James with rape gave Linda no comfort. The details of the attack haunted her. The rapist had tied up his victim and placed a pillowcase over her head. “It was just like what he had done to me,” said Linda. “It just sounded like James.” Still, every time she tried to understand what had happened, what could have driven him to do such a thing, she was left without answers. And then there was James, tearful James, reassuring her that while he had “problems,” being a rapist was not one of them. “I didn’t do it,” he continually repeated. “I didn’t rape anyone.”

Linda wanted to believe he was telling the truth, that he wasn’t capable of such an attack. It was possible, after all, that this was a case of mistaken identity. “I kept looking for something to grab on to,” she said later. “Something that would prove one way or the other who was telling the truth.”

The questions occupied her mind, filling every cell, until they controlled the very fabric of her thoughts. Linda slept rarely, never well. Looking for answers, she turned to the person she believed knew James best, Steve Swartz.

“Do you think James did it?” she asked one afternoon when they were pacing the hall at the naval hospital together.

“No,” said Swartz confidently. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

In retrospect, Haberstock would wonder if Swartz might have been blinded by friendship and a sense of responsibility
for Bergstrom. “When you’ve worked with a guy, tried to help him, sometimes there’s a tendency not to want to believe the bad stuff,” he said. “You want them to do well, partly because it’s your job to see that they do.”

Whatever the reasons, Swartz’s assurances didn’t reflect the sentiments of Haberstock or others on the blue crew who gossiped about Bergstrom often that June as they readied the
Ohio
for its next patrol. “I’d have to say, the consensus was that he was guilty,” said Haberstock. “Most everybody was convinced that Bergstrom could have done it.”

Not sure what to do or where to go, Linda notified her landlords that she would move out of their apartment at the end of May. They agreed to overlook the few months remaining on her lease. Like everyone in the tightly knit community of Silverdale/Central Kitsap County, the couple who ran the Central Park Apartments knew what their tenant had been accused of. All the notoriety the case received made Linda feel tainted and ashamed. “I hid as much as I could…. I stayed away from everyone,” she said. “I was embarrassed and hurt. I’d drive to another town to shop if I needed anything. I just couldn’t face running into anyone who knew me.”

When Linda tried to work, the day-care center no longer offered the refuge it once had. She could barely function and was so preoccupied, she often struggled to remember the names of even her favorite young charges. Most of her coworkers were sympathetic. Many approached Linda to assure her that James’s arrest was undoubtedly a mistake. “I’ve seen your husband,” said one woman. “He’s not capable of doing anything like that. He’s not big and powerful enough.”

“But he had a gun,” said Linda.

“No,” insisted the woman. “It can’t be him.”

Her friend Monique, the one James had once assured he would hunt down and kill any man who raped Linda, offered a similar assessment. “Linda, it’s just not him,” she
said. “Remember what he said about rapists? He hates rapists. He couldn’t be the one. They’ve got the wrong guy.”

Still, Linda couldn’t enter a classroom without wondering what others were whispering. In the lunchroom, she felt all eyes turn and everyone stop talking when she walked through the door. One co-worker scoffed to her face, “So your husband’s a rapist, huh, Linda? What’s the matter? You weren’t giving him enough at home?”

Too confused and exhausted to even defend herself, Linda simply walked away.

Through it all, her good friends stuck by her. Patricia often slept over. When Linda woke up screaming in the night, her friend comforted her. “It’s all right, Linda,” Patricia would console. “He didn’t do it.”

Linda held on to her friend, sobbing, and wondering if she would ever know the truth.

One day at the day-care center, Grandma told Linda she worried about her. “You look so pale and nervous all the time,” said the older woman. “Linda, you don’t even eat like a bird, your stomach is always upset. Why don’t you go to the doctor? Maybe there’s more going on here. Maybe you’re pregnant.”

“I’m not pregnant,” Linda assured her. “I tried to get pregnant and I couldn’t.”

“Do me a favor,” Grandma said, placing her hand on top of Linda’s. “Take a test.”

Linda did go to the naval hospital for an exam and a pregnancy test; it was negative. While she was there, she told the doctor she suffered from anxiety attacks throughout the day and night. He listened sympathetically and pressed a prescription into Linda’s palm. A prescription for Valium.

The tranquilizer helped, but couldn’t erase her fears. For that, she needed answers. Her good friend Penny was visiting family in California, but with Diane and Gayle, Linda spent hours sifting through her memory, reconstructing her activities on the days when the two attempted rapes and the rape took place. “She kept trying to remember what she had been doing and where James was,” said Diane. “She was
looking for clues.” Sometimes Linda thought she remembered those days and that James had been with her. Other times, she’d admit she had little recollection of the exact times they had been together and whether or not the attacks occurred during one of her husband’s frequent jogs. “I just couldn’t remember,” she said later. “I tried and I tried, but I couldn’t.”

Almost every afternoon or evening, Linda drove to the naval hospital to see James. Usually she found him seated in the psychiatric unit’s dayroom. Wearing clothes she’d brought him from home, jeans or a jogging suit, James shuffled along much like the other patients who dotted the room. He often appeared dazed. Linda, always crying, would sit next to him.

“Did you do it?” she’d ask, prodding. “I’ve got to know.”

“Sure, I was watching that woman,” James pleaded with her. “But I didn’t rape anyone. I just went around looking in windows, that’s all.”

Then he droned on about his “problem,” how he couldn’t stop himself, that he was compelled to watch through windows as women dressed. “I’ve had this problem a long time,” he admitted. “I can’t control it. But maybe with therapy, if you’ll help me, I bet I can be cured. I’ll go in for counseling. You’ll see. I’ll get better and we’ll have the family you want.”

One afternoon, James shook nervously and stared around the room, pointing at other patients and the staff. “They keep trying to get me to say what I’ve done,” he told her. “But I won’t. See that nurse over there?” he whispered, indicating a uniformed woman talking to a patient on the other end of the room. “She told the doctors I was watching her, that I made her nervous. Damn bitch. Who the hell would want to watch her?”

Always the conversation turned around to the gun. Often James’s brother, Chris, would be with them, and he, too, asked question after question about the mysterious disappearance of the nine-millimeter Beretta. Linda sensed Chris
was as determined as she was to find the weapon and anything else that could be used as evidence of his brother’s guilt. While she wanted the gun to settle her own doubts and to turn over to police, she felt uncertain of her brother-in-law’s motives. “I knew he wanted it and that he was pressing James to get it,” she’d say later. “I was afraid Chris would get it and not even tell me. That I would never know for sure what to believe about James.”

Only three people know what happened next. Years later, Chris Bergstrom would refuse requests for an interview. James would continue to insist he’d disposed of the 9mm in the water. But Linda would give a very different account.

According to Linda, a few nights later, she and Chris finally persuaded James to open up about what had happened to the gun. The two brothers talked, heads together, in the antiseptic atmosphere of a hospital corridor, as she listened. James described a field minutes from the apartment. He told of a patch of bushes, a cluster of three trees, and a pole. That night, she and Chris drove in Chris’s truck to a field that matched the description. Though they searched, no gun was found.

Two nights later, Linda would later describe walking into the hospital and meeting Chris in the hallway. He gave her a thumbs-up. “I’ve got it,” he said as she followed behind him and took the elevator down to the lobby.

“You don’t have to come,” Chris told her.

“I’m coming,” she insisted.

It was a drizzly, cool night thick with the smell of forest, and the moon skirted the treetops as Chris drove back to the field, the site of their previous futile search. He pulled over, just as they had the other night. Linda watched from the truck as Chris walked perhaps a hundred yards toward a cluster of trees. Her heart pounded and her throat tightened. She at once hoped and feared he would find the gun. Since that first day, she’d decided that the gun was the key to everything.

Arms folded against the brisk night air, Linda stood near the truck, watching for Chris. It was dark, and though she sometimes thought she saw him, his figure was obscured by shadow. Suddenly she realized he was walking toward her, clutching something, she couldn’t yet make out what, against his chest. She walked out to meet him as he neared the truck. A chill ran through her when she saw he cradled something heavy in his hands. Chris hurried toward the truck, and she climbed back into the passenger seat. As Chris got inside, she looked down at what he’d retrieved. It was dark and bulky, covered with bits of leaves and dirt. She reached down and picked it up, realizing it was something rectangular tucked inside a green mask, the type used for welding onboard the sub.

“Don’t touch that,” Chris ordered.

Linda ignored him. She peeled back the mask, and found another identical one inside. When she peeled back the second mask, something jangled. She stuck her hand in and pulled out a handful of bullets.
God
, she thought.
Oh my God.

Then she turned her attention to the box. She opened it. Inside was the nine-millimeter Beretta, the one James had so proudly shown off to his brother just a few weeks earlier. Linda picked it up and held it nervously in her hands. It felt heavier and colder than she expected. It was terrifying.

Linda dropped it back inside the box, slammed the top shut, and replaced it between them. She was shaking.

“I never really believed James was guilty until I saw the gun,” Linda said later. “That he had lied about the gun meant the sheriff was right. Everything he said was true. James was the rapist.”

Linda was about to ask Chris what he was going to do with the gun and suggest they take it to the police when he turned to her, his eyes as piercing as bullets. She realized how much he resembled James, especially in the intensity of his gaze as he focused on her. She could feel every ounce of his will bearing down on her when he spoke calmly and
slowly, emphasizing every word. “He told me, ‘I’ll do whatever I have to do, no matter what,’” she later recalled. “Then he glared at me and said, ‘My brother is not going to jail. I don’t care what he did, or to who.’”

Linda maintained she never saw the handgun again. “Chris dropped me off at my car at the hospital and drove away,” she said. “I have no idea what he did with it.” For a while she considered going to the police to tell them that her brother-in-law had the weapon they so desperately sought. But without the gun, it was her word against his, and she was afraid now, not only of James, but also of his brother. She’d later say that as the days passed, she thought often of Chris’s words as he held the gun in his hands: “I’ll do whatever I have to do, no matter what. My brother is not going to jail. I don’t care what he did, or to who.”

After that night, all Linda’s doubts disappeared. In a visceral, concrete sense she accepted James was guilty of everything the undersheriff suspected—not only the peeping and the attempted rapes but the rape itself. Instead of facing uncertainty, she had to deal with a new reality: her conviction that her husband was indeed the Parkwood Rapist.

“You did it,” Linda said to James when she went to the hospital early the next day. “You raped that woman.”

“I’d be careful who you tell,” James said, smirking at her. “I’d be careful for my own good, if I was you.”

Linda looked at him sitting there in his hospital-issue bathrobe and pajamas and thought about the time he had knocked her out and she awoke to find him packing.
He could do it,
she thought again.
He could kill me.
Raw fear settled within her. After that day, it never left.

In need of help, Linda corralled the psychologist treating James and asked for a diagnosis. Afraid to tell him everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours, she said simply, “I think James needs help. I’m not sure he didn’t rape that woman.”

To her surprise, the doctor answered, “Well, we know he raped that woman, we’re sure of it. But we’ve got no way to prove it. As far as I can tell, he’ll be discharged from the hospital soon, and after that, from the navy.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do to treat him?” she begged. “Maybe he needs to be hospitalized for a while.”

“We’re not equipped to handle this,” the doctor said, dismissing her concerns. “Your husband has a problem, a serious problem, but it’s not one we can fix.”

Undersheriff Wheeler, too, followed up with navy doctors treating James Bergstrom. “They told me that they couldn’t keep him, that he was going to be released. And when I told them I was sure that without some form of treatment, he’d rape again, they said that whatever Bergstrom did, once he was out of the navy, he was no longer their concern.”

Convinced she had no decisive proof to turn over to investigators, Linda concentrated on more personal issues. James would soon be released from the hospital, and she knew he would come looking for her. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him again. The thought of his touch repulsed her. Somehow, she had to get away.

In need of a place to hide, Linda accepted an invitation from her boss at the day-care center, Jane Richards, and moved into an attic bedroom in the Richardses’ rambling ranch house across the street from the high school, where in happier days she and James had idled away long afternoons on the tennis court. She told no one where she was staying, not even her best friends. “I wanted to be out of the apartment. I didn’t want to be alone,” she said. “I was confused. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want James to be able to find me.”

Anxious to find a way out, she called Steve Swartz and asked if the navy would move her back to Houston if she and James divorced. Swartz recited the regulation answer: that the navy was only responsible for moving James to his next destination. If she wanted help moving, she would have to stay with him at least long enough to get home.

Despondent, she called her mother.

“Mama, James did it. He raped that woman,” she said.

“Oh my God,” said Santos. “How can you be sure?”

“I’m sure,” she answered.

Though she considered asking her mother for the money
she needed to move home, she knew the older woman wouldn’t have it. Santos had been sick off and on lately, keeping her from work. Linda knew her mother was having a difficult time paying her own expenses.

These days, Linda lived with a permanent knot in her chest that tightened whenever she thought of James or the previous month’s events. On the few quiet moments when she briefly buried her troubles watching television or reading, the pain would return without notice, wrenching inside her until she sometimes felt it would strangle her. “It was like I was living in a nightmare and I couldn’t wake up,” she said. “Sometimes during the day, it would pop into my mind, and just for a second I’d think,
This can’t be true. It must all be a dream. It can’t be happening
.”

As she slept alone at night in the small attic bedroom, the real nightmares came. Always she envisioned James in the distance staring through a window at the figure of a woman asleep alone in her bed. In the dream, Linda cried out to warn the stranger, but the woman slept on, oblivious to her cries. Instead James turned toward her and grinned, then opened the window and disappeared inside. Linda awoke to a shrill scream, only to realize it was her own voice that reverberated off attic walls.

“I knew what the woman James raped felt like,” she said later. “I was raped. I found myself wondering about things like whether or not that woman had screamed like I had, and what she was thinking when she saw James coming at her with the gun.”

On May 30, 1989, eleven days after he arrived at the hospital, James was discharged from the naval hospital. The attending physician noted in his chart that Bergstrom had been uncooperative throughout, barely participating in group therapy. His demeanor had been much as it was on-board the
Ohio
: He was withdrawn and uncommunicative. The doctor also noted that the then twenty-six-year-old sailor
struck him as possessing “a violent temper and episodes of uncontrolled aggressiveness,” and expressing “fear and hostility toward women” and the need to have a woman “helpless in a sexual relationship.”

A neatly typed “Narrative Summary” was attached to the front of Bergstrom’s file. It concluded:

The diagnosis: “Paranoid personality disorder and voyeurism.” And the recommendation: “Serious consideration should be given for administrative separation from the service, as expeditiously as possible consistent with the wishes of his command.”

James was dangerous, the doctor was saying. How dangerous, he didn’t speculate. Although James Bergstrom had another half year of his enlistment to serve, the captain’s only recommendation was not treatment but to quickly discharge him, making him someone else’s problem.

In early June, Linda learned James had been released from the hospital. She was still living in the Richardses’ attic and working, whenever she felt strong enough, at the day-care center. Once she knew he was free, she began taking even more precautions, like checking her rearview mirror as she drove to the Richardses’ each day after work. As she knew she would, one day she glanced back and discovered James following her in the brown Grand Prix. Her heart racing, she wove amongst the busy Silverdale traffic until she finally looked back and he was gone. Trembling, she drove on.

Despite her efforts, one afternoon she pulled into the
driveway after work and looked toward the street, drawn by the plaintive honking of a horn, only to see James driving past the house. He was staring at her, waving. Somehow he had found her hiding place. After that, she glimpsed him often, cruising leisurely up and down the busy street that ran in front of the Richardses’ house. Always she would draw the drapes and hide.

Jane Richards and her husband were good people, considerate and kind. Though they had opened their home to her, Linda tried to keep them separated from the terror that enveloped her life. She never told Jane how much she feared James, just that she wanted it to be over with him. When the phone rang at their home a few nights after James had made his reappearance, Jane answered it and looked at her expectantly.

“It’s Chris,” she said. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Okay,” Linda answered, wondering how James’s brother had tracked her down. “I guess I’d better.”

But instead of Chris, she heard James’s voice on the other end of the line.

“You think I can’t find you, can’t get to you?” he challenged. “I can find you anywhere. I can come in that house and kill you and everyone in it.”

“What do you want?” Linda implored.

“Meet me behind the high school track. Five minutes,” he said, calmly. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll be there.”

Linda drove across the street to the high school and took the road that led to the track. When she arrived, James was waiting. He walked around and got inside the passenger seat beside her.

“Drive to the park,” he snarled. “Now.” Beating the car roof with his fist, he bayed at her as she drove: “You know too much, Linda. You know too fucking much.”

“Then let’s just forget it,” she said. “You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

“Just drive, you bitch,” he hissed. “Drive.”

The park James referred to was a small, wooded area on Hood Canal, miles up the road from their first apartment. It had always been one of Linda’s favorites, a haven she sometimes ran to when she and James fought. There she had once walked and considered the dismal turnaround in her marriage. On this afternoon, the park was deserted when they arrived.

James motioned for her to follow and he led her to a picnic table near the water. Linda was terrified, her heart galloping with fear as she sat down next to him.

“What do you want?” she asked, finally. “Can’t you leave me alone? Haven’t you hurt me enough?”

“Linda, shut up,” he shouted.

“You go your way, James, and I’ll go mine,” she insisted. “This isn’t a marriage anymore. The marriage is over and finished, and I never want to see you again.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he screamed.

“I saw the gun. Chris has the gun,” she shouted. “How could you have done this? How could you have raped that woman?”

“You do what I say,” James said, pushing his face at hers, “or I’ll kill you, that man and woman you’re living with, and anyone else I have to. I’ll move to Greece and stay with my mother’s family. They’ll never find me.”

James was angry, as angry as she had ever seen him. Linda knew she was only an impulse away from violence. She surveyed the seclusion of the park, the water and the forests. When she closed her eyes, she could picture the gun in her mind.
You did it,
she kept thinking.
You raped that woman.

“I’ve told you before and I meant it,” he said, opening and closing his fists until the veins in his muscles bulged and twisted like blue highways on a map. “I could kill all of you and no one could stop me.”

“I won’t tell anyone about the gun. Just leave me alone,” she pleaded, gulping back the tears.

Then, according to Linda, James looked at her coldly and deliberately. “He said, ‘Chris says I should just get rid of you. You know too much. I could kill you right now, Linda. Right here. And no one would ever know.’”

Trying not to cry, Linda stared down at the water lapping lazily against the shore.
This can’t be happening,
she thought.
God, if I could only wake up.
Where she’d felt panic earlier, resignation now overtook her.
I’m never getting away from him.

Docilely Linda followed when James ordered her to her new car and directed her toward the driver’s seat. She got in as he rounded the car. Linda surveyed the forest, its towering, pencil-straight pines standing as if at attention all around her. She felt no hope. No escape. She reached into her purse and pulled out the Valium the navy doctor had prescribed and devoured a handful of pills, flushing them down with the bitter, warm remnants of a leftover Coke. “I figured he was going to kill me,” she said later. “I didn’t want to feel it, to feel anything, ever again.”

James didn’t appear to notice. He ordered her to drive and she did, waiting for the pills to have their deadly consequence. The rest of that afternoon she would remember through a drugged haze. She later recalled pulling to the side of the road and James loping off into the forest. Before long, he returned, put something in the trunk, and took over the driving, stopping at another spot in the woods. Later he would tell her he had been collecting evidence, ski masks and ropes he destroyed. But Linda paid no further attention. She drifted into a drugged sleep, expecting never to reawaken.

Afternoon sunlight glinted in the window when Linda awoke the following day. She had a pounding headache and her throat was raw with pain, the bitter taste of vomit coating her mouth. Squinting, she opened her eyes. It took a few seconds before her mind cleared enough to register that she
was in a motel room, alone, before she once again surrendered to unconsciousness. The second time she awoke, James was coming through the door.

The next thing she would remember was walking on rubbery legs, and James helping her to the car, as he whispered in her ear.

“Did you think I would let you get away from me?” he said, eerily calm. “You’re not ever getting away from me, Linda. Not ever.”