06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (24 page)

That night Santos called Linda to check on her. Linda answered the phone, but in the background, James raged, demanding she hang up and sit beside him on the couch. Linda finally gave in. “Mama, I can’t talk now,” she said, and hung up.

Santos paced her living room, until in desperation she called her youngest daughter, Alice, and asked her to call Linda to be sure she was all right. Alice did as she was asked, but as with her mother’s call, James’s screaming ended the conversation.

After one particularly violent argument, Linda fled with Ashley to Gino’s house, knowing it would be a place James would be afraid to search for them. She slept on the couch that night, the phone ringing often with James asking Gino or his wife, Benita, if they knew where Linda had gone.

“Lily, why don’t you divorce him?” Gino asked her that night.

“I can’t,” Linda cried. “No one believes me. Not even the police. I can’t let him get Ashley. I just can’t risk it.”

Linda returned home to James.

Days later, Santos called Gino, fretting about Linda and James. “I’m worried about Lily,” she said. “I think he might hurt her.”

“Do you believe James is doing all these things?” Gino asked.

“Yes, I do,” Santos answered. “At first I wasn’t sure, but now I do.”

In May, Santos Martinez suffered a minor stroke. When Linda saw her mother, her skin was pallid and one side of her face drooped so she couldn’t close her eye. The doctor had chastised Santos about stress and told her she’d have to calm down or she could have a major stroke and be permanently paralyzed. Linda worried that she was responsible, that her mother’s concern for her had brought the stroke on.

That day Linda vowed that though her mother was the only one who truly believed in her, she would never again confide in her. “I didn’t want to be responsible for her death,” Linda said later. “I knew she worried about me, and I just couldn’t take the chance that anything else would happen.”

It was obvious that James Bergstrom had reverted back to his old ways. Later there would be questions asked. Why were there no rapes with his MO reported in Houston’s southern suburbs during the summer of 1990? Police would acknowledge that Bergstrom’s arrest had made him paranoid and compulsively careful. “He was watching his tail, leaving if anything got out of hand,” assessed one investigator. They would also label it “unlikely” that he was inactive during that period. Instead they dismissed the interruption as the reality of rape; studies show as few as 16 percent of victims report their assault to police. It wasn’t that Bergstrom was inactive, they’d theorize. It was that his victims weren’t reporting.

Linda had no doubt where her husband’s interests were that summer. She rocked Ashley in the bedroom on the white rocker that had been passed down through her family. Once, decades earlier, Linda’s grandmother had soothed her children to sleep on that very rocker. Now Linda sang to Ashley, caressing the baby’s sweet, warm forehead. In the living room she heard James flicking channels on the remote control. She knew what he was looking for, something in which a scantily clad woman danced or was pictured in danger. Maybe the actress cowered in a corner, the camera lens focusing through the eyes of an attacker.

Despite everything, Linda continued to do what she could to stop him. At eleven
A.M.
on Monday, July 30, she made an appointment for him to talk to a therapist at Belle Park Hospital. When he refused to go, Linda went instead. The doctor listened sympathetically as Linda detailed James’s history and her fears, sobbing so hard at times that she had to stop to compose herself. In the end, the doctor said there was nothing he could do to help.

“You can’t do this for him,” he said. “Your husband has to want the help and come in here himself.”

“What am I going to do?” Linda pleaded.

“Get a lawyer,” advised the doctor.

“I’ve already talked to a lawyer. He can’t do anything for me,” Linda said resentfully. “Is a lawyer going to help me get away from him? Can a lawyer keep my daughter safe?”

Never far from her thoughts were the other women, the ones in her dreams. She sometimes heard their screams in her nightmares, felt their fear as a masked stranger with a gun descended on them. To help them, she agreed when James continued to badger her to play the game.

“If you let me do it to you, I won’t have to do it to anyone else,” he insisted.

“Promise?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I won’t risk losing my family, but I’ve got these urges I have to satisfy.”

Every time he knotted the bindings on Linda’s arms and legs, tying her to the bed, panic throbbed through her. Each time, sometimes as often as twice a week, she endured it. It never felt like lovemaking. Always it felt like rape.

Helpless to change her situation, Linda tried to make what accommodations she could to live as normal a life as possible. To gain some time for herself, she initiated separate days out, alternating days when she and James would be free to do what they wanted for an afternoon. Always James was with his friends, Sam and Eddie. At one point she even called Sam and explained the situation. “We have to watch
James,” Linda told him. “Or he’s going to hurt someone else and end up in prison.”

Although she sensed Sam didn’t believe her, he agreed, saying, “I’ll do what I can to keep him out of trouble.” From that day on, when the two friends got together, Linda would call before James left the house to say he was on his way, and Sam would telephone as soon as James left him, alerting Linda that until he arrived home, he was unaccounted for.

It was on October 7, 1990—a Sunday and Linda’s day out—that James Bergstrom first came to the attention of the Pearland police. Linda had made plans to go out shopping with friends, and James and Sam were scheduled to baby-sit for Ashley. To her surprise, Sam stopped by briefly, urging James to hurry to meet him at the YMCA—Sam’s basketball team was scheduled to play, and he wanted James to substitute for an absent player. Linda blew up, insisting James and his friend live up to the bargain and relieve her from her child-care duties for the afternoon.

“It’ll only be for a couple of hours,” she said.

“You’re not going,” James announced. “I’ve got other plans.”

The phone rang and it was Irene Bergstrom. She could hear the screaming in the background.

“I want to go play ball with Sam, and Linda wants to go with her friends. There’s no one to watch Ashley,” he said, bitterly. “That fucking bitch wants to tell me what to do. I’m sick and tired of it. She’s trying to control my life.”

Linda could tell from the sound of James’s voice that his mother was agreeing with him.

“If you people raised James right, this wouldn’t be going on,” she shouted.

James waved the phone in front of her, and Linda could hear Irene Bergstrom screaming and crying. His eyes widened and fixed on her, lit up with excitement.

“You hurt my mother, you bitch.”

Ashley was on the floor shrieking as James paced the room, seizing every piece of glass and crystal he could find, smashing it against the walls. Frightened, Linda picked up a ceramic pot. Warily she came at James, who circled her in a karate stance. Then, instantly, he kicked her in the abdomen, knocking her backward, the pot falling from her hands. “You want to control my life?” he shrieked. “You fucking bitch.”

“Don’t come near me,” she ordered, running toward the cordless phone. James grabbed it before she could and threw it. It slammed into Linda’s abdomen but rebounded, striking Ashley in the head. The baby’s wails renewed, now from physical pain.

Linda fled to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, backing cautiously away from James. Again he drew near her, knees bent, hands extended, like a scene out of the karate movies he loved to watch. With a lightning-quick blow, he kicked the knife from her grasp. Fearing that this time he might hold true to his threats and kill both her and the baby, Linda ran to the bedroom and punched 911 on the phone. As James crept into the room, screaming and bellowing at her, Linda left the handset dangling.

The call came in to 911 operators, and the automatic tracking system indicated it originated at unit number 158 at 3340 East Walnut in Pearland. As operators listened, James Bergstrom pushed Linda against a wall and pressed his hands against her throat, applying pressure until she gasped for air. All the time he screamed, “You want to control me? You think you can?”

“You’re strangling me,” Linda whispered, vainly struggling to pry his hands from her neck. “Stop.”

Suddenly there was a knock at the door.

“The police,” she choked out. “I called.”

“You say everything is all right,” James ordered as he released her.

The Pearland officers already had guns drawn when Linda opened the door. One grabbed James and ordered him outside. Linda ran to pick up Ashley, sobbing on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

When Santos arrived at her daughter’s apartment, Linda was bruised and battered. The baby was quieted, but the floor was covered with jagged shards of glass. They drove to the Pearland police station, where James had already been taken, and waited in the hallway until police were ready to take Linda’s statement. Linda was weeping, her hands shaking, her face and body a patchwork of bruises. Before long, Irene Bergstrom appeared and sat down next to Linda.

“What have you told them?” James’s mother demanded.

“I haven’t gone in yet,” Linda said. “I’m still waiting.”

“Are you going to tell them everything?” Irene demanded.

“Yes,” said Linda. “I am. There are too many secrets.”

A few minutes later, Linda was called into an interview room with a large glass window and given forms and a pen to write her account of that afternoon’s blowup. “My hands were shaking so hard, I could barely hold the pen,” Linda remembered later. “I was nearly hysterical.”

Then, according to Linda, she walked over to where an officer sat at a nearby desk.

“Is there anything I can do to keep him here?” Linda beseeched him.

“We’ll do our best,” the cop said, sympathetically assessing her.

“Listen, this guy sexually molested a little girl and committed a rape in Washington State. He’s been peeping in houses here,” Linda told him, her words tumbling over each other in her urgency to make the officer understand. “In fact, he took me to see the houses. And I know he’s raping again, here in Houston. I’ve found stuff in the car.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Rope and handcuffs.”

Linda watched as the officer’s demeanor changed. Although he’d seemed genuinely compassionate about her bruises, he now appeared openly doubtful.

“You mean like these?” he asked, holding up the handcuffs he pulled from his belt, waving them in her face.

“Yeah, like those.”

To Linda’s dismay, the officer snickered at her.

“Lady, you can buy handcuffs like these at K Mart,” he said, ruefully. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

Linda felt her mind reeling, the officer’s words hitting as hard as her husband’s blows had that afternoon.

“Then I went and got my mother and left,” said Linda later. “I was like, ‘Forget it, I’m out of here.’”

Santos, who’d heard the exchange, asked Linda in the car, “Why don’t they listen? Why won’t they help you?”

“I don’t understand why they don’t believe me,” Linda answered, exhausted, the reality of another defeat overtaking her.

Unbeknownst to Linda, Santos had called Gino, and while they were at the Pearland Police Department, her brothers and sisters had moved her belongings out of the apartment she’d shared with James. Linda drove to her mother’s, convinced that whatever it took, she would not spend another night living with James Bergstrom. She simply couldn’t go back.

“Could Ashley and I stay here and live with you?” Linda asked her mother.

“As long as you want,” Santos assured her.

When Gino arrived that night, Linda told him again about all her suspicions and that she was sure James was a rapist.

“I can’t believe the police didn’t believe me,” she said. “It seems like they’ll have to catch him in the act before they’ll believe it.”

But Gino was having his own difficulties believing. After all the years Gino had worked with James, he found Linda’s
allegations hard to accept. “I didn’t think she was lying to me. I knew she believed she told the truth,” Gino said, later. “But I thought there had to be some mistake.”

James was charged with assault and endangering a child, but the next day he’d made bail and was on the phone calling Santos, looking for Linda. When Linda finally agreed to talk to him, she immediately brought up her intention to file for divorce. Rather than shouting and protesting as she expected, James was ice-cold, calm and in control.

“I’m going to give you your divorce. I’ll even pay for it,” he sneered. “But I’m going to fight you for custody of Ashley. If I can’t get that, I’ll have her on the weekends. And, Linda, remember you won’t be here to watch her.”

Dazed, Linda hung up the phone and walked back in the living room, where Santos waited. She thought about all that had happened. If she fought James for Ashley, who would win? There was no reason to assume a judge in a custody battle would find her story any more believable than the Pearland police officer had that afternoon.

She looked at her mother and said, “I’m going back.”

Two days later she agreed to drop all charges.

After that October blowup, James and Linda moved out of the Pearland apartments and into Painter’s Mill, a sprawling two-story, beige brick-and-siding complex just off Interstate 45, the main north-south artery that runs through Houston toward Dallas to the north and Galveston to the south. That winter, on February 7, 1991, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two was unloading groceries into her clean-scrubbed Friendswood ranch house, just a few miles from the home where Ann Cook had been attacked the previous year. It was a clear winter day when a ski-masked man followed Sarah Williamson through the door. He held a gun to her head, but Williamson, like Cook, screamed and cried out, shouting that her husband was on his way home. The man turned and ran. It was the third attack by a ski-masked assailant in a quiet Friendswood neighborhood in the past year.

Ashley’s first birthday was the following week, and Linda threw a party. Irene Bergstrom had wanted to have it at her house, but Linda, still upset that they continued to refuse to help her, insisted she’d rather do it herself. The Bergstroms didn’t come, but most of Linda’s family gathered in the small apartment. There were streamers, balloons, and a cake covered with pink frosting and decorated with a delicate rocking horse.

A few days later, an exterminator sprayed the apartments
in their complex for insects. Linda placed Ashley on her back sucking on a bottle on the living room couch as the man unsuccessfully pumped the sprayer holding the pesticide. It appeared jammed, and he pumped harder and harder, attempting to force the poison into the nozzle and out of the sprayer. When it kicked in, it was with a punch that sent insecticide splattering across the room, the couch, and Ashley. The baby cried, and Linda whisked her up and carried her to the kitchen sink, where she doused her tiny body in water to wash off the poison. When Ashley continued to sob, Linda called her pediatrician, who suggested she bring the baby in. Linda called James at work, and he rushed home to take them. After an examination, the pediatrician advised Linda and James that Ashley would have to be watched to determine if there was any permanent damage from the chemical spray.

Linda continued to worry about Ashley, and a few months later she picked up the yellow pages and flipped as she had once before through the listings for attorneys to look into bringing a civil suit against the exterminator. This time she called Reynaldo Ramirez, who practiced in a two-lawyer office not far from Pearland.

Over the summer, Linda and Ramirez talked on a few occasions. The attorney recommended Linda document what she could, and Linda wrote out an account of the accident and photographed James holding a tape measure to show the distance between the baby and the sprayer.

James didn’t want to help. Furious with Linda, he charged she was making trouble, and in the photographs she snapped that day, he glared into the camera with a quiet, dangerous aloofness. Linda knew why he wanted no part of anything that shone a spotlight on him. The apartment, his family, the cocoon he had so carefully spun around himself, were there, after all, to foster an air of normalcy. Anything that focused attention on him made James nervous.

Spring passed and Houston’s hot, humid summer moved in. Since the day she’d found the rope and handcuffs, Linda
methodically checked James’s clothes for clues and conducted random searches of the Grand Prix. Some days she even removed the backseat to check behind it. In the complex’s parking lot one stifling August afternoon, on a hunch, Linda announced to James that she was going to search the car.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I haven’t been doing anything.”

As James glared at her, she worked her way through the car, the front seat, the backseat, even under the hood. Her heart quickened when, in the trunk, she discovered a thin nylon rope and, under the spare tire, a ski mask and a gun, crudely constructed from pipe. James grabbed for them, and they began a tug-of-war in the parking lot. His wiry strength overpowering her, James wrenched his rape kit from Linda’s hands and announced, “I’m gonna throw these out,” and ran toward the Dumpster.

“You’re a damn rapist,” she shouted, chasing after him. “I’m going to go call the police.”

James glanced up and saw a man watching from an apartment balcony. A woman carrying in groceries in the parking lot turned and stared at him. “Here,” he said, nervously. “Take them. They won’t believe you. This doesn’t prove anything.”

Linda ran upstairs and threw the things into a box in Ashley’s closet. James never asked what happened to them. Later he would say he never believed Linda would take them to the police. The next day, Linda transferred them to a brown paper grocery bag and drove to her mother’s house.

“Don’t even look inside this, Mama,” she begged, as she gave Santos the bag. “Put it on a shelf and keep it for me, please.”

“Are you all right, Lily?” Santos asked. “What is this? What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s fine,” Linda insisted. “I just need to have you keep this for me, in case I need it later. Please don’t worry about me.”

A few days later, Linda called Ramirez when James was at work. This time she was interested in discussing, not a suit against the exterminator, but another matter: her husband. “She told me all about him,” Ramirez would say later. “What happened in Washington and what she figured he was doing in Houston. I’d been in criminal law, a public defender for a while, and what she said seemed true. It sounded right.”

Linda worked her way to the all-important question. “What about Ashley?” she asked. “If I leave him, is there any way I can keep him away from her?”

To Linda’s dismay, Ramirez confirmed what the first attorney she’d consulted had told her nearly a year earlier.

“It’s difficult to take a parent’s rights away on a mere allegation,” he advised her. “Without proof of molestation or a dangerous past history, absolutely not. That’s the law.”

When Linda said she had proof, that she’d removed a ski mask, rope, and pipe gun from the car’s trunk, Ramirez asked, “Did you touch them?”

“Sure, when I took them out.”

“Then they won’t work,” Ramirez assessed. “They’ve got your fingerprints all over them. His attorney will claim they were planted. Next time don’t touch them. Let the police be the ones to remove them from the car. In the meantime, call them and let them know what’s happening so they can be on the lookout.”

“I’ve already done that,” Linda said bitterly. “But I don’t think they’re taking it seriously.”

“I know a cop on the force in Baytown,” Ramirez offered. “I can give him a call.”

Linda agreed, and Ramirez called Baytown police that afternoon. The officer took down the information. Ramirez never heard any more about the case, but years later it would appear Baytown was one of the Houston suburbs Bergstrom missed on his marathon of terror.

“The thing I’d always remember about Linda was how hard she was trying to do the right thing for her baby,”
Ramirez would say later. “She seemed to have no concerns for herself, only that the little girl was safe.”

It was just after nine on May 6, 1991, a Monday morning, in a house off I-45’s Scarsdale exit south of Houston. Kimberly Greenmen, who’d once dreamed of being a model, sat at the kitchen table in her rented ranch house, paying bills. Her mechanic husband, whom she’d kissed good-bye as he left for work half an hour earlier, had given her two hundred dollars that morning, and she had a little extra, money she’d earned decorating wreaths with dried flowers and selling them to friends and neighbors for their front doors. She divided the money, piling enough to cover the electric bill here, the gas bill there, money for food in another stack. Kim, at twenty-six a willowy woman with shaggy brown hair and the air of a cowgirl, felt happy. Later that day she planned to buy money orders to mail, and then for another month the family would be solvent, paid up and current.

It was a quiet morning. Annie, her five-year-old, attended kindergarten at the neighborhood elementary school. Two-year-old Jenny sat near her mother in the kitchen, under a child’s folding table, drawing on an old oilskin tablecloth Kim had hung against the wall. It was her answer to Jenny’s artistic bent, which favored vertical surfaces, like freshly painted walls. Kim smiled down at her daughter. Maybe it was due to a tough pregnancy, three months on her back, but her younger daughter, blond with a slightly upturned nose, was a timid child and never ventured far from her sight.

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, Kim thought she heard the gate into the fenced backyard open. She looked up and saw no one. The family’s two white Siberian huskies lumbered unconcerned at the far end of the fenced-in yard. The dogs were so docile, the family often joked that if they were ever robbed, the two dogs would lick the burglar to death. Kim wondered if the electric or gas meter reader had
come for another look.
One bill not paid yet and another on the way,
she thought.
Oh well, that’s life.

At first Kim thought she was imagining it all, like some kind of mesmerizing daydream. Later she’d remember hearing the door between the house and garage open. She glanced up and the first thing she saw was the gun, long-barreled and black. Next it was the man in the light blue pants and dark blue striped shirt, and a strange-looking green ski mask. Always she’d remember the green ski mask.

“Get down on your knees,” the man ordered.

“Take the money,” Kim said, pointing at her neat piles.

“I don’t want it,” the man growled, pointing the gun at her chest. “Lay down on the floor and I won’t hurt you.”

“I’ve got my daughter here,” Kim pleaded.

“Lay down,” he ordered again, his voice politely cold.

Following orders, Kim lay down. Flat on her stomach, she looked over and saw Jenny scrunched against the wall under the table, panic plainly visible in her innocent blue eyes.

James Bergstrom grabbed an orange towel off the table and covered Kim’s head. Then he pulled out sections of thin nylon rope from his white athletic sock and tied her hands behind her, wrists together.

“Get up,” he ordered. “Let’s go,” he said, pointing down the hall. Grabbing her from behind, he pushed her toward the master bedroom. It occurred to Kim that the man knew her house, including where the bedrooms were. Later she’d learn James Bergstrom had watched her off and on for weeks.

In the bedroom, Bergstrom pushed her onto the bed. When he pulled out a cloth to gag her, Kim protested. “Please don’t,” she said. “I won’t scream. I wouldn’t risk having my little girl hurt.”

Reluctantly James threw the gag on the floor. Instead he pulled a pillow from the bed and placed it over her eyes.

“Put your legs through your arms,” he ordered her.

Kim tried, but the bindings were too tight.

“I can’t,” she said.

Bergstrom frowned. He turned her around on her stomach and untied her hands. He undressed her, tugging at her shorts until they fell to the floor. Ripping her T-shirt over her head. He flipped her again and this time tied her wrists, arms spread, to the bed frame. While he did the same to her legs, Kim looked up at the headboard. Behind it, she knew, was the .44 Magnum handgun her husband kept for protection. It was so close. So close yet unobtainable, useless.

Bergstrom replaced the pillow across her eyes. Kim shivered as he ran his hands over her.
It’s just a dream,
she told herself.
I’ll wake up in the kitchen, paying the bills. Everything will be fine. I’ll just fix dinner and drive to school to pick up Annie.

But it did happen. Later Kim would estimate Bergstrom spent forty-five minutes in her house, toying with her as she lay naked and trussed to the bed frame. She could see just barely under the edge of the pillow. Something inside her died when, as James Bergstrom entered her and moved above her, she wondered if her two-year-old was watching from the hallway.

Bergstrom didn’t ejaculate. It wasn’t the point. In fact, years later, he would say it wasn’t the sex at all. “It was having the woman there, tied up,” he’d say. “It was the control thing.”

When he was finished acting out his fantasies on her, James Bergstrom untied her and ordered her to stay in the bed and count to one hundred. Fearful that now that he was done with her, he might kill her, Kim Greenmen counted: “One, two, three, four…” She thought about the gun. So close. “But I couldn’t risk it,” she said later. “I couldn’t take a chance that I’d make him angry and he’d hurt my daughter.”

She heard the garage door close, and Kim jumped up and ran to the kitchen. When she saw Jenny, rolled in a fetal position under the little table, where she’d played so happily just an hour earlier, Kim scooped her toddler into her arms.

When police and Kim’s husband arrived, she was down
the block, at the home of friends. She trembled and cried, clutching her baby close to her chest and refusing to release her. That night Kim Greenmen tried to sleep, but she was afraid to close her eyes.

The following day, her husband tried to convince her to go to her mother’s house, but Kim refused. Instead she dropped Annie at school, Jenny at a neighbor’s house, and after he left for work, she took out the .44 Magnum and loaded it. Hour after hour, she sat on the living room floor, back to a wall, and watched the doors. She listened for every creak, any noise, the rustle of the trees. “I thought he’d be back,” she’d say later. “I was waiting for him. I wanted him dead.”

Six months after the rape, Kim left her husband, saying simply, “I can’t be married anymore.” She took jobs waitressing and traveled. In a box her mother found a note in Kim’s handwriting, scribbled on a sheet of paper: “Will I ever be able to sleep in my own bed again? Make love to my own husband? What does he think of me now?”

Eleven days later on a cloudy afternoon, a ski-masked man attacked again. This time the intended victim lived in a quiet residential street in Clear Lake, a suburb that surrounds the Johnson Space Center. She was lucky. Her dog chased him away.

But on May twentieth, James Bergstrom was in a quiet subdivision just across the highway from where, exactly two weeks earlier, he had raped Kimberly Greenmen. He knew why he was there. Weeks earlier he’d singled out Cindy McKenzie, an attractive, twenty-something saleswoman with flowing black curls and long red fingernails.