Keep Him in Prison

by Kathryn Casey

I don't go to my P.O. Box as often as I should. I finally made it over there this past weekend, and to my dismay I discovered a letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice dated March 9. The subject: James Edward Bergstrom, the rapist in my book Evil Beside Her. The bad news: Bergstrom is up for parole.

Although the jury handed down four 99-year sentences, it shouldn't have been a shocker. Bergstrom was eligible a couple of years ago. At that time, I went on Montel and did a bunch of radio interviews, asking people to write letters protesting his release. I don't usually do this with the folks I write about. Once they've served their time, if the parole board decides to let them out, I don't try to keep them in. Bergstrom is an exception.

Why? Well, let me tell you something about him. He started out as a teenager, molesting a little girl. As an adult, he was a peeping Tom, skulking around windows, looking in on women, hoping to see them undress. From there, Bergstrom began breaking and entering, figuring out how to get into the houses. When he attacked his first intended victim and she fought back, he ran away.

Still, Bergstrom was determined. Stung by his failure, he began planning, thinking, watching, deciding the best way to subdue a victim, how to keep from getting caught. When he couldn't accomplish his goal by sheer physical force and intimidation, James Bergstrom began carrying a knife, and then a gun.

Once he had a weapon, he was in control. He tied his victims up, sometimes for hours, while he stayed in their homes, raping them. He psychologically tormented them, talking like they were friends, like they were willingly with him. It was demented, and he was obsessed.

Day and night, all waking hours, James Bergstrom fantasized about stalking and raping women. Over a period of two years in Houston, he has admitted attacking 35 women and raping five. He told me that they wanted him as much as he wanted them, insisting some of them enjoyed it. He threatened them with guns and knives, and told his last victim he'd kill her if she fought back.

The bottom line is that James Bergstrom is a very, very sick man, and he belongs in prison, forever. I have no doubt that he will attack more women, claim more victims, if he's ever released.

So I'm asking all of you, no matter where you live, to help me keep James Bergstrom in prison, where he belongs. It's easy. It doesn't matter where in the world you live. It's as easy as sending an e-mail.

Include this information:

His name: James Edward Bergstrom

His state ID: 04408281

TDCJ ID: 00659297

E-mail, fax or mail your protest letters to:

TDCJ – Victim Services Division

8712 Shoal Creek Blvd, Ste 265

Austin, Texas 78757

Email: victim.svc@tdcj.state.tx.us

FAX: 512-452-0825

You don't need to list your address, only your name. TDCJ assures me that the inmates don't see the protest letters and all names are kept confidential. Simply detail in the e-mail why you want James Bergstrom kept behind bars: because he's a psychopath obsessed with victimizing women. Spell it out: If he's released, more women will suffer. He threatened to kill his final victim, a 16-year-old high school student. There's absolutely no reason to believe he won't carry out his threats if he's ever allowed out on parole.

Take a few minutes, send TDCJ an e-mail. You may be saving another woman's life.

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Why I Write True Crime

by Kathryn Casey

Over the past couple of decades, the prestige of true crime writing has taken a hit. When In Cold Blood was first published in 1966, Truman Capote was lauded as a visionary who'd pioneered a new type of book, one that told a true story by exploring the human condition through the events surrounding one tragic murder case. Of course, Capote's book is still considered a classic, but something has happened. The prevailing sentiment has shifted. There are those who now look askance at true crime and at those who write it.

Especially since I've started writing fiction, I've had people question why I continue to write true crime. Some charge that I'm making money off the misery of others, even insinuating that I somehow bear a portion of the blame for the tragedies I write about. Yes, I make money, that's true. I sincerely wouldn't be able to afford to write true crime books if I didn't. I work hard and like most folks, I have bills to pay and a family to help support. As for true crime writers being somehow responsible for the crimes, I'm sure you understand that's flat out ridiculous.

When I hear those criticisms, I admit that I sometimes get a bit tongue-tied trying to explain why I write true crime. So I was particularly pleased when a reader sent me a recent e-mail. Her name is Meredith Appel, and she contacted me about my first book, The Rapist's Wife, now published under the title: Evil Beside Her. The book explores the case of Linda Bergstrom, a Houston woman who married a shy factory worker with a terrible secret. That's Linda's photo on the right. Lower left is her now ex-husband, James, holding their daughter, Ashley. What you'll note is what a great guy James appears to be in the photo. He's not. James Bergstrom is a very dangerous man.

The reason I'm sharing Meredith's e-mail is that she explains better than I can why I continue to write true crime. On one level, I hope the books are interesting to read, full of personalities and drama, true stories that take readers inside sensational crimes. But on another level, I know they can do so much good.

With Meredith's permission, here are a few paragraphs from her e-mail:

Ms. Casey,

...I'd written to you once before... when I was reading Evil Beside Her in college. I wanted to let you know more about that... I majored in criminal justice at a small private college, Saint Martin's University, in Washington State. The criminal justice department is expanding to include new types of courses that explore different angles on criminology, and every other semester a course in victimology is offered. The class turned out to be more of a psychology class than anything and even more than that the class was centered on victim impact. More than learning victim statistics, we listened to speakers who had personally survived a crime or were family members of someone who had been victimized.

What we learned is that it is important to take measures to protect ourselves, but at the same time we can't be expected to be responsible for identifying who is capable of committing crimes. In other words, although there are warning signs that are worth paying attention to, the only thing that ultimately determines who is murdered or raped is which person gets in the car with the murderer or rapist, which is something that no person can exactly predict beforehand, since it all depends on the psychology of the perpetrator. I say all that to say this... our teacher used Evil Beside Her as required reading for our class as an example of the impact that a perpetrator's choices have on those around him/her.

Domestic violence was a big section of our studies, and the main reason we read your book was to attempt to gain an understanding of the complexity behind the answer to "Why doesn't she just leave?" The James Bergstrom case and the way you portrayed it was a wonderful example for our class to learn what it feels like for a person to be right in the middle of a situation and to learn that things just aren't as simple as they may look to the objective person on the outside.


As Meredith so eloquently explains, we can learn a lot from an in-depth look behind the headlines, one that answers all the questions, including the all-important "why?" Not all true crime books are good true crime books, but the quality ones dissect the facts from all sides, explaining not only what happened, but what that particular set of personalities and circumstances says about all of us, who we are, where our society is going, what we believe.

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Where it all began . . .

by Kathryn Casey

Have you ever noticed how chance encounters can change your life? You walk down one street instead of another, happen upon an old friend, and rekindle a precious relationship, or you drive down the highway and miss your exit, take the next instead, and get hit by a car driving 60 miles-an-hour on the feeder road. Obviously, the first is a good thing. The second? Wouldn't we all prefer to know so we can make sure we get off at the right exit?

Sometimes the encounters are not completely by chance. That happened to me back in 1992. I was working as a contributing editor for Ladies' Home Journal magazine. I loved my job. I spent eighteen years with the Journal, and had incredible experiences, from interviewing presidents and first ladies to meeting the McCaughey septuplets, when there were just three-month-old little pink bundles. I enjoyed a day on a ranch with Patrick Swayze and his Arabian horses (all of them gorgeous), and I once took Marina Oswald, the widow of presidential assassin Lee Harvey, into the Dallas book depository, where decades earlier her dead husband stood aiming out a window at Kennedy's motorcade. It was her first time inside the old building, and I watched, overcome by the painful reality of what had happened in that place, as she gazed sadly out the window at the site where a president was mortally wounded.

Those experiences aside, what I wrote about the most for the Journal was crime. You might not think that a women's magazine would cover crime, but we did. Over the years, I wrote articles on murderers, serial killers and pedophiles. One article took me to Utah for a report on juvenile sex offenders and their young victims. The research absolutely broke my heart. I will always remember a five-year-old girl who'd been raped by a fourteen-year-old cousin participating in an exercise designed to give her a sense of control over her life. The youngster resolutely held up her hand and shouted, "Stop!"

I left hoping that little girl and the other children in the program would never need to defend themselves from another attacker, and I wondered if anything they learned would truly help if they did.

The article that changed my life, however, was on a Houston woman who'd married a shy young factory worker, so outwardly timid his coworkers at the paint factory showed him Playboy magazines to watch him blush. The young man, James Bergstrom, is pictured to the left, holding their daughter, Ashley. The woman in the photograph above is his ex-wife, Linda. For more than two years, Linda knew she was married to a dangerous psychopath. She called police and tried repeatedly to stop him. Her warnings went unheeded and James continued to add to his toll of victims.

Amazed at the courage of this woman, who suffered through terrifying abuse yet remained intent to save her daughter and other women, I wrote my first book, The Rapist's Wife. It came out in 1995, sold well, but due to a publishing glitch, went out of print a year later. It's the book that began my career as a true-crime author, and it's always been very special to me. I was disappointed when it was taken out of print. I can't tell you how pleased I am that HarperCollins is reissuing the book this coming week, with a new title, cover, photos and author's note, updating the case.

Evil Beside Her is available on Amazon for preorder now and in bookstores on October 28th. It's an amazing story of one woman's bravery in the face of utter depravity. Linda Bergstrom slept with the devil and lived to not only tell about it, but to stop him.

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