ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 11, 1996 TAG: 9607110074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MANASSAS
SOURCE: Associated Press
A former FBI agent accused of taking a minister hostage and planting bombs carried a specially equipped ``death kit'' to the scene of a confrontation with his estranged wife, court documents show.
Eugene Bennett packed a gym bag with hypodermic needles, gloves, razor blades, ammunition, a bulletproof vest and other supplies, according to police affidavits.
Bennett and his wife, Marguerite, also a former FBI agent, are embroiled in a four-year divorce and custody battle. In divorce petitions, Bennett, 41, accuses his wife of having a lesbian affair with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. Neither woman has commented on the allegation.
Police are investigating whether Bennett planned to kill his wife June 23, the night he allegedly abducted her minister and forced him to lure Marguerite into an ambush at her church. Bennett was armed with at least one gun and carried with him tools that law enforcement officials said can be used to commit a killing or cover one up.
A police affidavit for a search warrant refers to the supplies as a ``death kit'' or ``crime kit.''
``This gym bag contained various apparatus consistent with violent crime enterprise,'' Prince William County Detective Ronald McClelland wrote in the affidavit. The June 27 document and others in the bizarre Bennett case were unsealed by a county Circuit Court judge this week.
``A death kit is a term for something used in the underground world,'' Washington-area FBI spokeswoman Susan Lloyd said. ``It's sort of like a [burglar's] little black case. It's an updated and more violent version of that for killing someone.''
Bennett, 41, specialized in undercover work as an FBI special agent before he was forced to resign in 1993. But Lloyd said Bennett more likely got the idea for his crime kit from spy novels than from his 12 years with the agency.
``They're not standard issue here,'' she joked.
Bennett carried the kit to the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church on June 23, police contend. Bennett lured the Rev. Edwin Clever to the church on the pretext of making a donation, but instead put a bag over Clever's head and shackled him to a chair, police said.
Bennett then strapped what he said were plastic explosives around Clever's waist and forced Clever to call Marguerite Bennett, a parishioner at the Manassas church, police said.
At Bennett's direction, Clever called Marguerite Bennett and summoned her to the church, police said.
She suspected foul play and arrived armed, police said. Inside the church, she and Bennett argued about their children, and she fired one shot at him, police said. The shot missed and Bennett fled.
Clever was unharmed. The packets around his waist contained Play-Doh, not explosives.
Live bomb components were discovered outside the church, in one of Bennett's cars and inside a storage locker at the community college where Marguerite Bennett works, police and prosecutors said.
Inside the church, Bennett had planted homosexual pornography in a church safe, McClelland's affidavit said.
Bennett was arrested in the early hours of June 24 at his house, after he held off police for several hours. He told officers he could not surrender before conquering his evil alter ego, Ed. He finally told police he had locked Ed in the garage, and then surrendered peacefully.
He is charged with five felonies, including abduction, and could face 50 years in prison if convicted.
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