Ex-Fbi Agent Guilty Of Attempted Murder

A jury on Tuesday convicted a former FBI agent of trying to kill his wife, rejecting his claim that her lesbian affair broke up his marriage and drove him temporarily insane.

Eugene Bennett, who pleaded innocent by reason of insanity, was found guilty of attempted murder, abduction and seven other charges. The jury recommended a 61-year sentence. His lawyer said an appeal was likely.

“I can’t say I’m completely surprised,” said attorney Reid Weingarten. “There was a lot of evidence and most of it was bizarre.”

Prosecutors said Bennett, 42, wove a complex plan last June to kill his wife, Marguerite, collect nearly $1 million in insurance money and get custody of the couple’s two young daughters.

They said Bennett took his wife’s minister hostage and used the clergyman to lure his wife to a church where he threatened to blow her and the clergyman up.

Marguerite Bennett, also a former FBI agent, foiled the plan when she squirted her husband with pepper spray and fired a gun at him. The “bombs” he wrapped on the minister’s body turned out to be Play-Doh, prosecutors said.

Marguerite Bennett testified that she and crime novelist Patricia Cornwell had “two intimate contacts” but said the relationship had nothing to do with her divorce. They met in 1992 while Cornwell was going through FBI training to research her best-selling series about a sleuthing coroner.

His lawyers argued that Bennett had been losing his grasp on sanity for years - and was being tormented by a malevolent alter ego named Ed - when his wife’s affair pushed him over the edge.

Marguerite Bennett said she was relieved by the verdict. “I’ve got to move on with my life. I do feel there is a future now,” she said.

Bennett’s other convictions include possession of explosives with the intent to make a bomb, threatening to damage a church by bombing and possession of explosives.