06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (26 page)

When Tonry compared the three cases, there were a lot of similarities. All the rapists were described in similar terms: five feet eight inches, white, slim, twenty-something. All had worn ski masks and tied their victims. That was unusual, but far from unheard-of. Approximately 10 percent of Tonry’s rape cases included some form of bondage. But there were also differences: The ski masks were all different colors, sometimes green, white, now yellow. The time of
day was different, the women in May in the morning, Neal at night. And the others had been in single-family homes. Neal lived in an apartment. The other women had been assaulted by a guy with a gun. Neal’s assailant had a hunting knife. All or none of it could be important. It might be the same guy or maybe it wasn’t. The thing with rapists is that they usually settled into a pattern, finding one method that worked and repeating it.
If this is the same guy,
Tonry decided,
he’s damn smart.

Five days later at seven-thirty in the evening there was another attack, this one at an apartment complex on Bay Area Boulevard. Tonry got the file and investigated. The thirty-six-year-old white woman had been accosted as she got out of the car. The ski-masked man put his hand over her mouth and carried a knife, long, thin, with a curved blade, just like the man who’d raped Neal. “But this time the woman had enough warning to hit the guy in the balls and he went running off,” Tonry said later. “I figured it might be connected.”

In none of the cases had the rapist left any physical evidence. No fingerprints, hair, or semen. Tonry figured he had a serial rapist but no clues. The files took up residence on his desk as the detective put out the word that he had a composite of a man—a charcoal sketch with a long, thin face and dark eyes—who might be a rapist, a rapist who wore a ski mask and tied his victims up. Two deputies who worked the area called and asked to see it. Tonry sent copies, but neither was able to tie the man in the drawing to any of their cases. The charcoal sketch then joined others that papered the walls of the offices Tonry shared with his fellow detectives. Another face with an unknown name.

On a Sunday night two weeks after Jesse Neal was raped, James Bergstrom circulated through the streets of Clear Lake, a Houston suburb south of where he’d committed three rapes in eighteen months. He drove up and down Clear Lake Boulevard and Bay Area Boulevard, scouting the myriad
apartment complexes surrounding the Johnson Space Center. In the Grand Prix, Bergstrom was nearly invisible behind tinted windows. Inside the car, rap music thundered. When he hunted, Bergstrom liked the beat. It helped his concentration, built up his machismo. Other kinds of music distracted him. “The rap music made my blood rush,” he’d say later. “It enhanced my wanting to do stuff.”

At just before ten, Bergstrom maneuvered through the traffic on Bay Area Boulevard when he saw a dark blue 1985 Mustang. He was frustrated. He’d been driving for hours. If something didn’t happen soon, he’d have to go home, his urges unspent. Bergstrom turned off the car radio. He wanted to be totally committed, thinking about what he was doing. No distractions. No mistakes. He pulled into the parking lot of the University Green Apartments right behind the Mustang and then drove a short distance and parked just in time to see a beautiful young woman with soft, dark brown hair and a Christie Brinkley figure get out of her car.

Andrea Hoggen usually hated walking the short distance from the parking lot to her first-floor apartment. The shadows from the high patio fences and hedges spooked her. But this Sunday night she hadn’t considered the possibility of evil lurking in the bushes. It was a week before her twenty-first birthday and she’d just come from watching football with friends. The green-eyed computer programmer wanted to call her boyfriend and then take a long bath and sleep. Tomorrow was a workday. She would never remember hearing footsteps behind her as she walked briskly toward her front door.

As he trailed her, Bergstrom became flustered. He’d arrived too late and was cutting it too close. He would have preferred to be in position, ready to pounce. When the woman thrust her key into the lock, he awkwardly rushed toward her. As the door opened, James Bergstrom pushed Hoggen into her apartment and shadowed her inside.

At first, Andrea thought it was a friend playing a joke on her. The only light in the room was the reflection off a
lighted clock and the few beams from an outside lamp that streamed in through her patio door, but as her eyes adjusted, she distinctly saw a man pointing a gun at her. He was wearing a maroon ski-type mask, but there was something wrong with it. It looked odd. Andrea’s terrier, Sylvia, charged at the stranger, growling and nipping at the man’s ankles, until the stranger kicked her away.

Bergstrom was nervous. He was usually so careful. In his rush to get inside the apartment, he’d yanked the mask over his head and it was askew, the back hanging over his eyes. But he wanted her and he moved up behind her, putting the gun to her head.

“Be quiet,” he ordered as he slipped his free hand over her mouth. “I have a gun.”

Then he pushed her to the floor, and Andrea Hoggen crumpled on the floor. Not wanting to see him, as if it would make him disappear, she covered her face with a comforter her grandmother had made that she kept folded next to the couch.

“Is anyone else coming?” Bergstrom asked, trying to secure the chain lock Andrea’s father had just installed a few weeks earlier. The lock had never lined up quite right, and Andrea had developed a trick to lock it. Bergstrom, all nervous thumbs, fumbled.

“Yeah, my brother was following me in his car,” Andrea lied, Sylvia snarling and barking. “He stopped for gas. He ought to be here any minute.”

James Bergstrom sized up the apartment. One bedroom, he figured. Feminine. The girl was lying. He kept fumbling with the lock.

“If your brother is coming, what’s taking so long?”

“He’s coming. You’ll see. You better just take my purse and go,” Andrea pleaded. Inside she was praying,
Please, God, don’t let it be messy. If he’s going to kill me, don’t let my mother find my body.

Andrea peeked up from under the quilt and saw the man standing above her had taken off his ski mask. For the briefest
second, she saw his face, long, thin, dark eyes, angular, before he readjusted the mask to cover his face.

James Bergstrom sensed something was wrong. He looked down at Andrea and thought,
She saw me.
The door still wasn’t locking and the little dog yapped louder than ever. He turned and left. Andrea jumped up, shaking. She’d been preparing herself to die. Now she locked the door, flipped on the lights, and called her mother. Police were called. A report was filed. But this time the jurisdiction was HPD’s, and no one knew about Tonry’s sketch on the wall at the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.

James Bergstrom went directly home that Sunday night. He was frightened. It was a close call. He waited for the doorbell to ring. For someone to shout, “Police. Open up.” He promised himself that this time he’d come too close, he was taking too many chances. He had to stop. “But when nothing happened, I figured nobody even cared,” James said later. “I guess it was a week or so, and I was out stalking again.”

In the fall of 1991, doctors scheduled Gino’s wife, Benita Martinez, for a battery of medical tests. In preparation, she was instructed not to sleep during the twenty-four hours before the tests began. So the night before her appointment, Linda brought Ashley and stayed overnight to help her stay awake. Benita, a wide woman with short, dark hair who worked as a department store clerk, had known Linda since 1986, when she first dated Gino. Early on, Benita had written her sister-in-law off as unfriendly. In the past two years since she and James had returned from Washington State, Gino had often invited them to their small condo. The Bergstroms rarely showed up. Usually Linda would call, urging her brother to not invite them again. “This isn’t a real marriage. We’re not a real family,” she explained. “Please don’t push this. I can’t stand to go anywhere with him.”

Over the years, Benita had heard stories about James Bergstrom through the Martinez family grapevine. Though Linda had sometimes used their condominium, cheerily decorated with everything from cat pillows to cat pictures, as a safe house, somewhere to run to hide from James, Benita tended to discount much of what her sister-in-law said. After all, Gino had known James for nearly a decade from work and liked him. He always described James as shy and timid, not the kind of man likely to terrorize his wife or anyone else.

Yet on the night they spent together, for the first time Linda opened up to Benita, confessing to her about Washington State and the telltale signs she’d discovered that convinced her that her husband continued to stalk women and rape them. Linda seemed sincere and desperately unhappy. Before long, Benita believed her.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, incredulously. “Can’t you turn him in?”

Linda then detailed the incident with the Pearland police and her calls to HPD, ending with what she’d learned about James and the little girl he’d molested and what the two attorneys had advised her about the impossibility of keeping Ashley from James if they divorced.

“I hate to just leave. I’d have to hide out forever,” Linda said. “James would kill both Ashley and me if he ever found us. I figure I’m safe enough till Ashley gets older. I don’t think he’ll abuse her when she’s still a baby. But if something doesn’t happen, it’ll get to the point where I’ll just have to leave. Then I’ll have to run and pray that he never finds me.”

The last day of November, James came home angry, swearing that the car had been broken into. The radio was stolen and the steering column gutted where would-be thieves had tried to hot-wire it.

“Good job, Linda,” he seethed. “Thanks for leaving it unlocked.”

Certain she had locked the car the night before, Linda went out to look, James glowering behind. On the driver’s side of the Grand Prix, Linda found the window scratched as if something metal had been inserted to pop the lock.

“I told you I locked it,” she insisted, pointing to the evidence.

To James, her proof didn’t appear to matter. He was angry. Linda wasn’t surprised. She had come to believe James used his anger as fuel. “I owe you one, bitch,” he seethed.

“Owe me what?” Linda asked, but in her heart she feared
she knew, and that some unsuspecting woman would suffer for his unjust accusations against her.

Wary that he’d be on the prowl, Linda wasn’t surprised when later that week, on Thursday, December 5, 1991, James announced he had plans to spend the evening with his high school buddy Sam. Months earlier, the arrangement Linda had made with James’s friend had deteriorated, when Sam accused her of lying about James. Convinced Linda was playing some sort of bizarre game, Sam no longer called when James arrived at or left his apartment. Linda knew James. She knew he’d take advantage of any opening. She’d sensed for months that James used the ruse of a night out with Sam as a way to escape her Argus-eyed scrutiny. The way James prepared to leave that night, brusque and nervous, Linda felt certain he planned a solitary pursuit.

“Why don’t you stay home,” she prodded as he slipped on a jacket and headed for the door.

“Sam’s expecting me,” he insisted on his way out the door. “Don’t wait up.”

All night long, Linda waited. She paced the living room, fidgeted endlessly in front of the television, tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. No matter how she attempted to distract herself, she couldn’t escape the premonition that haunted that night. It was like her nightmares; somewhere someone was screaming in fright, and she couldn’t stop it. She fell asleep praying,
Please let it be tonight that he gets caught. Please make this end.

At one
A.M.
the following morning the phone in the Bergstroms’ apartment rang. Linda, groggy from sleep, answered. It was James. He’d been arrested.

Convinced that authorities had finally caught up with him, Linda listened in disbelief as James told her he was in the county jail on a minor traffic violation, failure to signal a turn. They’d brought him in simply because he’d left his wallet, with his driver’s license, car title, and proof of insurance, at home. The cops had noticed the broken steering column and booked him, suspicious that the car may have been stolen.
Linda doubted James was telling the truth. When she continued to question him, he put an officer on the phone who assured her that her husband had, indeed, told her the truth.

Disappointed, Linda listened as James gave orders: “Call my mother and have her bring you. I need bail money. The car was towed to the county impound lot. But don’t go get it,” he ordered. “I’ll do that when you get me out of here.”

Irene Bergstrom had to work, but at six the following morning Maria picked Linda up at the apartment and drove to the bank, where she withdrew two hundred dollars for a deposit on James’s two-thousand-dollar bail. Then they drove into the acres of marbled and mirrored skyscrapers that comprise downtown Houston. At the Harris County Jail, Linda posted bond, and a clerk informed her James would be released later that day. Moody throughout the day, Maria, Linda sensed, was anxious to leave.

“Why don’t I just drop you off at your car?” she suggested.

In the web of red tape required to free James from jail, much of the day had passed. It was nearly four
P.M.
when Maria drove away, leaving Linda at the county impound lot, where a burly attendant wanted $75.73 to pay off towing charges.

“By the way,” Linda asked the man, “where was he picked up?”

“Checking up on your husband, huh?” said the attendant.

“Not really,” she answered. “Not for the reasons you think.”

The thick-necked man leafed through the Grand Prix’s papers with fat, oil-stained hands. “It looks like he was off Dixie Farm Road about 12:01 this morning,” he said. “They pulled him over at a gas station.”

Just after midnight, alone, a deserted road surrounded by subdivisions.
I knew it. He was out stalking again,
Linda thought.
Why else would he be out there?

The attendant pulled up the car and left it running. As Linda climbed inside, she glanced at the passenger seat. Her
eyes trailed downward to the floor and fixed on a pile of James’s belongings. For just the briefest second it didn’t click that what she saw were two ski masks, duct tape, a glove, and a rope. “Oh shit,” she muttered, stepping harder on the gas to get home as soon as possible. She ran red lights and stop signs all the way home. Ramirez’s words kept replaying in her mind: “Whatever you do, don’t touch anything.”

She pulled into the apartment parking lot and locked the car, then sprinted upstairs. Hands shaking and heart pounding, she dialed the by-now-familiar number for Houston Police Department’s dispatch. When a woman answered, she shouted, “I need an officer now. My husband is a rapist and there’s evidence in the car.”

“Is this that same woman who’s been calling?” the woman who answered asked, sounding a bit perturbed.

“Yes, it is. And I’m telling you there’s evidence in the car. You need to get someone out here now, before my husband gets home, or he’ll destroy it. I just bailed him out of the county jail. Can you stop his release?”

“Not if you paid the bail,” the woman said.

“Listen, you’ve got to help me,” Linda pleaded.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Half an hour passed with no sign of the police. Linda was frantic. She called dispatch again, yelling into the phone that she needed help. “Please, please, I’m begging,” she cried. “I need someone out here now.”

When she hung up, the phone rang. It was James calling from the county jail. “Why’d you get the car?” he demanded.

“Maria was tired. The police called,” she lied. “They’re on their way out to look at it.”

“Why?”

“Because of the stuff in the front seat. Someone filed a report.”

“Don’t let them.”

“Why? Did you do something?”

“No,” he shouted. “But I don’t want them in my stuff. Get in the car now and come pick me up. Now!”

“No. How am I supposed to stop them?” she said. “You know, James, I’m not Bonnie and you’re not Clyde.”

Linda slammed down the receiver, and almost instantly it rang again.

“Officer Dawson here, HPD,” a man’s voice said. “I’m at the apartment gate. I need to get in.”

Linda pressed the button to open the complex’s security gates, then ran outside, just in time to spot a white HPD van pulling into the parking lot. She flagged it down.

Officer L. L. “Lee” Dawson, a thirteen-year veteran of HPD, had worked CSU, the crime scene unit, for five years. In his van, he carried everything necessary to fingerprint, photograph, and document physical evidence. More often than not, Dawson, a husky man with graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses, worked murder cases, sometimes when the only link tying a suspect to the crime was minute traces of fabric, a hair, or a single fingerprint. Dawson saw the petite woman with the dark hair running toward him as he got out of the van.

“I want this stuff out of my car,” she was shouting. “My husband’s a rapist and this is his stuff.”

“How do you know?” Dawson said, looking inside at the pile of paraphernalia on the front-seat floor of the brown Grand Prix.

“I know,” Linda persisted. “I’ve tried to tell everyone. I tried to tell the cops in Pearland and I’ve been calling dispatch for almost two years. You’ve got to believe me.” Then she started talking about everything, from Washington State to the duct tape James had worn home on his shirt from a “church visit” to the handcuffs she’d given to his mother.

“Well, when the guys who pulled him over last night saw this stuff in the car, they thought he might be robbing convenience stores,” Dawson said skeptically. “That’s why they brought him down to the jail. But they did a search and it didn’t match anything.”

Dawson looked carefully at the woman. Her hands were shaking and she appeared on the verge of tears. “Is it possible he’s just hiring prostitutes?” he asked. “That he likes to tie them up?”

“No, he’s a rapist,” Linda shouted, the anger and fear welling up inside her. “He’s confessed to me and I just know he’s doing it again.”

Finally Dawson believed her. This woman was too frightened—terrified was a better description. She was pleading for help. Every time he mentioned the husband, she trembled. It didn’t feel like a wife just trying to get her husband in hot water. “All right,” he said. “I’ll bag this stuff and take it in.”

Linda signed a consent form, and Dawson carefully removed and bagged each item separately in clear plastic zip-top bags, labeling each and sealing it with HPD evidence tape. Both the masks appeared odd. When Dawson looked closer he realized they were homemade: The maroon one had eyes cut into a regular knit cap; the yellow one was a section cut from the sleeve of a medium-weight, yellow knit shirt, eyes cut and the top stapled shut.

“Have you got any photos?” he asked.

“Sure. I’ll be right back.”

Linda ran upstairs and retrieved two photographs, including one taken just that Halloween. James, the proud father, played it up for the camera, smiling broadly as he held Ashley in her cat costume. Outside she handed them to the officer.

“Look at this,” he said, holding up a long, black, military-style handgun. “I found it in the trunk.”

“Is that real?” Linda asked.

“No,” Dawson answered, inspecting the gun. “It’s a pellet gun. But it looks enough like a .45-caliber semiautomatic to scare the hell out of anyone. It’s as convincing as the real thing.” Dawson took his own weapon from his holster and held them side by side. “From a distance or in low light, they’d look identical. Even I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“What am I going to tell James when he gets home? He’ll kill me if he finds out I called,” she said as Dawson got ready to leave. “Maybe I can say this was all HPD’s idea? If James calls, will they tell him the guy from the impound lot told you about this stuff and you came out to get it on your own?”

“Okay,” Dawson assured her. “Don’t worry. We won’t tell him you called. If he asks, tell him we think he’s robbing convenience stores or something and that we took this stuff to investigate. Don’t mention rape.”

Dawson pulled a card out of his pocket and wrote something down. “Here’s my phone number and the number for the department’s sex crimes unit,” he said. “Call them on Monday morning. Tell them I suggested it.”

Linda took the numbers and Dawson left. When James arrived, he was distraught, asking question after question about why the officer had come and what the officer had said.

“He said they were curious about why you had the stuff in the car,” Linda said with what she hoped was a casual shrug. “They thought that you might be robbing Stop-n-Gos.”

“I’m not doing that,” James insisted.

“Yeah,” she answered. “That’s what I told them. Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

Throughout the weekend, James continued to badger Linda. Like a train circling on a track, he’d rush past her, shouting out questions. “What did they want? What did they say? What do they want the stuff for?” he asked over and over, incessantly through the day and into the night. Even in the bathroom he pursued her, shouting in to her as she sought a few minutes of solace in the shower. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell you why they needed the stuff. What did they say they were going to do with it?” he demanded. “You’re not telling me everything.”