Stalkers
Stalkers
Jean Ritchie
SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE IS WATCHING, WAITING …What is it like to suffer the attentions of an obsessive fan, to be haunted by the menace of a stalker? What changes devotion into something far more sinister and how do the stars cope with the pressure?And what about the not-so-famous, the ordinary people who suddenly find themselves living in fear, stalked by a shadowy presence that is all too real?Ancell Marshall’s wife was killed by a stalker – a murder he stood trial for. Theresa Saldana will never escape the memory of the moment her stalker attacked her and nearly stabbed her to death. Vicky Caldwell had a nervous breakdown, while Lauren Barnes was eventually driven to retaliation. These and many other case histories are compelling reading.Jean Ritchie talks to the victims and their families, the counsellors, the therapists, the security experts – and the stalkers themselves – in this detailed, fascinating, sometimes chilling account of a growing and frightening phenomenon.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_974037a7-ec95-54db-aa36-3b5ffe305413)
Fourth Estate
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Copyright © Jean Ritchie 1994
Jean Ritchie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006383383
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226930
Version: 2016–11-08
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5a0866ec-721a-5c63-ac75-38f8e9a5db86)
Title Page (#uaf3a45eb-d2c8-5cbd-aea1-89aa801beb05)
Copyright (#ulink_3ec3d4d7-6615-51ff-8439-829c6d5d9717)
Introduction (#ulink_710befb8-d715-5dc2-9e93-d3aa37a282ed)
PART ONE – THE PRICE OF FAME (#ulink_17006759-5380-5479-a9aa-8b26cfbf7cda)
‘You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide’ (#ulink_4e4b5b1d-2bd1-5cc0-b4e7-9b998bc0b4b6)
‘Bang, Bang, You’re Dead’ (#ulink_b6530120-1a55-52d2-9119-3609a16cd873)
‘The Benevolent Angel of Death’ (#ulink_12f479d3-1731-52c9-a0ed-c58bac5cf20a)
‘Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You’ (#ulink_49461604-02bb-5e5a-9af8-167b26230f6b)
‘He’s Out There Somewhere’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Your Number One Fan’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO – YOU WILL SEE A STRANGER (#litres_trial_promo)
‘I’ve Had One of Those Calls’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘A Blight On Our Lives’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘The Nightmare was Real’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE – WHEN FRIENDSHIP TURNS TO FEAR (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Wherever I Went, He Followed’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘I Didn’t Want to Hurt His Feelings’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘He Has Invaded My Life’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘A Fatal Attraction’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR – IN THE NAME OF LOVE (#litres_trial_promo)
‘The Doors Are Locked, Aren’t They, Mummy?’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE – THE STALKERS’ PERSPECTIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
‘I Just Wanted to Take Care of Her’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX – REMEDIES, PRECAUTIONS AND THE LAW (#litres_trial_promo)
‘A Paper Shield’ (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_f5c342a6-ca0a-5b52-b071-605f864426a7)
‘IT’S THE NIGHTS that are the worst. I don’t know where he is, but my imagination tells me he is close at hand. In daylight I can keep the fears down; at night I am alone with the terror that he has created. If he rings me every ten minutes I think I will go mad with it; if he does not ring I worry that he is outside, watching me.’
The words of one stalking victim are echoed time and time again through the pages of this book. All stalking victims have different stories to tell, but all have one thing in common: fear. Stalking is a modern crime, a growing crime, a crime born out of loneliness and isolation. In America, where stalking has been studied and analysed far more than it has in Britain, there are an estimated 200,000 people who are being stalked, and the country’s greatest expert on the subject says that one in five women will at some time in their lives be the victim of unwanted pursuit.
In Hollywood, the most famous celebrities may have as many as five hundred people each writing ‘inappropriate’ letters to them, any one of whom may tip over the edge and become a dangerous stalker.
Pursuing celebrities is the type of stalking that makes the headlines, and for that reason it has defined the popular image of the problem. Nobody is surprised to find that a sexy young film starlet gets a barrage of kinky letters from lonely men. But stalking is not just about obsessional fans who turn up outside Hollywood mansions with knives or loaded guns in their pockets: stalking exists in all walks of life, it crosses all age and gender barriers, it knows no class distinctions. Even in California, the capital of the film industry, where the problems for celebrities are much greater than they are anywhere else in the world, celebrity stalking accounts for fewer than half of all cases. Elsewhere in America it is less than ten per cent, a figure that is probably consistent with British experience, although no comparable research has been carried out.
The dictionary definition of stalking is ‘to pursue prey stealthily’, and that is exactly what the human stalker does. His technique may be to make endless phone calls, or to send unwanted taxis and pizza deliveries, or to mail a stream of obscene letters. He may threaten violence, and he may even carry out his threats. Or he may simply, boringly, repetitively, to the point of persecution, try to insinuate himself in someone else’s life. However he does it, he is the hunter and his victim is the prey: he is a stalker.
Not all stalkers, of course, are male, there are some female stalkers about. More women become involved in celebrity stalking – pursuing an unattainable figure from a distance – than any other kind. But the majority of stalkers, more than eighty-five per cent, are men, according to American statistics. For them, stalking is connected with control; they want power over their victims and they can achieve this by frightening them, or – more simply – by knowing everything about their lives.
For the purposes of this book, stalking has been broken down into four broad categories: celebrity stalking, stalking by a complete stranger, stalking by an acquaintance and stalking by an ex-partner (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife). This last category is the largest but also the hardest to define: ex-partners often behave with irrational jealousy, and that behaviour alone does not make them into stalkers. They usually have genuine ties with their victims: there may be children in common, property in common, or at least a social life in common, and the break can be emotionally devastating, leading to a certain amount of clinging on, refusing to give up. But there comes a point when this is no longer the acceptable reaction of a grieving ex. Recognizing that point may be hard (it is hard for all stalking victims, whatever category they come into, but especially hard for this group). When there are phone calls coming at all hours day or night, when there is a car parked outside or a figure lurking in the shadows, that is stalking. Because of the severed emotional ties it is often more difficult for the victim to deal with it, and more difficult for the stalker to accept that his or her behaviour is objectionable.
Stalking by someone who is known to the victim is the second biggest category. A casual acquaintance suddenly starts to take an overwhelming interest in all the details of their victim’s life, they misinterpret small gestures of friendship into large expressions of love, they begin to write, phone, follow the person they are fixated on. As they get no encouragement they feel rejected, and that turns their love into hatred. Threats and obscenities usually follow.
This pattern is repeated by the stalkers who latch on to complete strangers, as well as by those who persecute celebrities. In both these groups, the pursuit is of an unrealistic ideal: the stranger or the celebrity is endowed with all the attributes the stalker is looking for in a partner. Their beliefs about their love-object may go off the sanity scale, but they are deeply held. Gay pop singer Boy George enjoyed the joke immensely when a woman claimed he was the father of her child. He delighted in telling the journalists outside the court in which she sued him for maintenance for the child that it would be a miracle if he was the father as ‘I have never penetrated a woman in my life.’ Yet there was a part of the woman that believed her own wild claims.
For many of these celebrity or stranger stalkers, with rejection comes anger and feelings of betrayal, which can lead to threats, obscene abuse and in some cases real violence.
Stalkers are all suffering from some degree of mental derangement, ranging from a severe psychotic illness like schizophrenia, in which the sufferer often believes he is responding to voices in his head which dictate his behaviour, to simple obsession, when behaviour can be quite normal in all other respects. This milder form is a version of more readily acceptable obsessions: there are football fanatics who plaster their bedroom walls with pictures of their favourite players and whose whole conversation and social life revolves around their team; there are railway enthusiasts who can crawl out of bed on cold wet mornings to collect train numbers at grimy stations; there are fitness freaks who suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they don’t get their daily workout. What starts as an interest and a hobby edges into a position of paramount importance; for the stalker it is the same slow build up. Many adolescents have crushes on music and film stars which are gradually superseded by real-life love affairs. Many people keep their youthful infatuations with them for life – plenty of happily married mothers and grandmothers turn up to have their heartstrings fluttered by Cliff Richard or Tom Jones in concert. But they have a sense of proportion: the rock star is a small and harmless helping of escapism. For a few, though, real life cannot or does not take the place of the fantasy, and the obsession with the star builds up until it dominates life enough to turn the fan into a fanatic, the fanatic into a stalker.
Similarly, a normal part of the business of growing up is to experience a painful love affair, to be rejected, to love unrequited from afar. Anyone who claims never to have been let down in love is probably lying or has a conveniently selective memory. Getting over it can be painful and protracted: adolescents, particularly, are inclined to feel that they will never love again. As Plato said, love is a serious mental condition: love casts out intelligence. The vast majority, of course, do get over it; for one or two, the experience assumes such epic dimensions that it dominates their lives, and the person they love becomes the focus of an obsession.
This is the more rational end of stalking, the tipping of the balance from the normal madness of love to unacceptable behaviour. Many a young person will have dialled the number of the person who is ignoring them, and then hung up. Many will have hung around the college corridors or the pubs and clubs their loved one frequents in the hope of catching a glimpse, even though they know that their affection is not returned. When the dialling of the phone number and the hanging around become a habit, then the delicate balance has shifted.
But there are much wilder shores of stalking, and these are the shores of clinical madness, where the stalker is psychotically ill. Because these stalkers dance to the tunes of their own fractured minds, they will not respond to normal reasoning or pleading, to the law, to physical threats, to anything. Imprisoning the mentally ill does not help, although holding them in secure mental hospitals is sometimes the only consolation that the victims can hope for because, as with so much psychotic illness, containment and not cure is all that can be provided.
David Nias is a clinical psychologist who lectures at London University, and who has worked at Broadmoor Hospital, a secure unit for the criminally insane, and has studied the varying degrees and effects of obsession. Many stalkers, he believes, are suffering from a condition known as De Clerembault’s Syndrome, named after the French doctor who discovered it. Sufferers put romantic constructions on to the most innocuous exchanges, eventually losing touch with reality and becoming obsessed with an unobtainable person, believing that this person reciprocates their feelings. They commonly believe that other people or things are thwarting the relationship. In this extreme form the condition is known as erotomania.
‘All the old clichés about love are true: life-long passion, madly in love, blinded by love, hopelessly in love. They are all, quite literally, true for some people. The classic symptoms are delusion,’ says Dr Nias. ‘The person who stalks a stranger, a celebrity or someone they only know slightly is usually a psychotic, carrying delusions about someone who is in a higher position socially and with whom they have very little in common. They become convinced this person is in love with them and plague their lives. They are irrational, and however hard you try to dissuade them they can come up with evidence of their own that their beliefs are true. They are, quite literally, madly in love.
‘Some doctors believe that erotomania, the delusion that one is loved by another, is a form of schizophrenia, and treat patients with major tranquillizers (anti-psychotic drugs: the name is misleading because they are not related to normal tranquillizers). If they have come to the attention of the medical profession because their behaviour has been inappropriate, they are often held in secure units until it is judged medically that they are safe to be released. But the trouble is that away from their obsession many of them seem perfectly normal, rational people.
‘They try to persuade doctors that they are over their obsession: then you visit their room and the wall is plastered with pictures or references to their victim. The most worrying aspect is that this sort of personality disorder can lead to suicide and the threat to take other lives, particularly that of their victim. Often the fantasies get sicker, more sordid and more frightening as the condition progresses.
‘The people who suffer from obsession are usually rather pathetic, unsuccessful at sexual relations. The obsession feeds their imagination. Anyone in the public eye can be selected as a target, but not only celebrities are at risk. Anyone thought of as a superior could be a victim: women could fall for their GP, priest or bank manager, men with a work colleague, a barmaid or the girl next door. There are quite a few cases in Broadmoor of patients who are dangerously in love with ordinary people.
‘Obsession and stalking can be separate, although they are close. Obsession is a very intense feeling of acute need. There is a childish level of demand for another person, a wave of inner desperation and desolation that makes the sufferer want to own the victim. Obsession affects more men than women. It can be biological, or the result of childhood traumas or problems. The difficulty with knowing whether obsessive love is dangerous is that a lot of people have suffered some form of it: the pangs of despised love, as Hamlet called it, are familiar enough. In some ways it is just an extreme of an emotion we all possess: arguably some of the greatest love affairs are obsessive, frantic and jealous. But the need to know everything about a new partner is not normal, not just an extension of passion: it is a mental disorder.
‘Stalking is often just seeing someone out of reach. Becoming fixated on a stranger is a useful way of avoiding reality – there is less chance of the fantasy being broken. It is a personality disorder, and you only really hear about it when it comes to court: at the lower levels the stalker is merely infatuated, and unless their behaviour presents a real threat to the person they love it does not come to public notice. Many do not even want to make direct contact with their love object, but some do. The sufferer will build up a fantasy world around the person and follow them to find out every detail of their lives. At first the stalker may send polite notes and flowers to try to attract their victim’s attention, but as these are ignored the stalker becomes gradually more angry. The tone of the notes becomes abusive, showing the signs of frustration that lead to aggression.
‘If the love is unrequited, the love turns to hate. Two sides of the same coin. Love letters turn into hate mail, often accompanied by horrendous threats, although these are usually only an attempt to gain attention. To many sufferers from obsessional love, the love is the peak experience of their lives. It is the only time they have fallen in love, it comes like a bolt from the blue. Often the sufferer believes obsessive behaviour is simply a way of getting through to someone, with the rationale that anyone can have anything if they try hard enough.
‘Harmless fantasy can easily turn into dangerous obsession, especially if the sufferer is a lonely person with a vivid imagination. If a man is strongly attracted to a woman he can become wildly jealous. To him she is coming and going as she pleases and yet he thinks she is his. But she doesn’t even know he exists. He feels constantly rejected and you get dysfunctional attempts at taking control of her life.’
Dr Nias confirms that there is no single effective cure. Some sufferers from obsessional love do recover spontaneously, but for many it takes twenty or more years to loosen the grip of an obsession.
‘For many it is merely a part of another disorder. The textbooks say there is no known cause and no known cure. There has been little research into this specific area, but there is also no real cure for a lot of mental disorders. Doctors may try a form of therapy which attempts to change the way in which the sufferer thinks, but many sufferers do not accept or admit that there is a problem. To them, it is obvious that the victim loves them. They are confident that in time the object of their desire will come around and accept them.
‘The law, police, court, prison have no effect. Love will conquer all. A prison sentence is useless, and a stay in a secure hospital is no better, apart from the fact that we can make the victim feel safer when the persecutor is locked up. Tragically, some victims will know no respite, because the stalker’s obsession will be lifelong and unshakeable. Unless he switches his allegiance to a new target, they will remain in the frame. Sometimes a doctor takes the place of the original victim, and they may be able to cope better, but they face the same problems. It is more than an occupational hazard, it is something a doctor dreads. A second obsession is no less binding than a first.’
The life sentence for the victim is a prognosis also given by Professor David Allen, a clinical psychologist based in Paris: ‘Being a stalking victim can be a death sentence – it is certainly a life sentence, spent looking over the shoulders. There is no cure. In extreme cases it can lead to murder, although that is very rare. For the sufferer, there is an absolute conviction that they are loved: every word, every gesture, every facial tic is interpreted as evidence of that. A simple “See you tomorrow” takes on huge significance in their minds.’
Professor Allen’s wife Michelle is a leading French psychoanalyst who has dealt professionally with stalkers and obsessives: ‘I can listen to women and men who are in the grip of an obsession with another person and I can offer them analysis and they can go into therapy, which may contain and control them, but it will not cure them. They may drop their object of desire but latch on to someone else, another victim. Nothing will shake their self-belief. There is no division between fantasy and reality. In extreme cases, life and death become blurred, too, and they become a danger, a walking time bomb.’
More studies of stalking and stalkers have been done in America than anywhere else because stalking has been accepted as a crime in the States since 1990, when California pioneered the first anti-stalking laws through its state legislature (fuelled by the enormous problems the Hollywood stars were experiencing). Since then every other state has followed suit, which makes it possible to determine and examine a specific group of people who have been found guilty of stalking offences. In Britain, some stalkers are pursued under civil law, some under criminal law, and many not at all (see ‘A Paper Shield’, pp. 319—37).
‘Most stalkers are men, and they come in all ages and from all ethnic backgrounds, and from varied social and family backgrounds,’ says Houston forensic psychologist Jerome Brown. ‘Many are relatively intelligent men with a history of inept inadequate heterosexual relationships. They are motivated by fantasies of romantic involvement with their victims, but they have no idea what ‘love’ really means. To many of them, love equals possession. At first, they usually don’t want to hurt their victims, just possess them. The thrill of the chase increases the satisfaction they feel upon “obtaining” them. They’re not able to see the person of their obsession as a real person. When the “thing” does not respond to them properly, they’re likely to get angry at it.’
Stanton Samenow, an American psychologist and author of a book called Inside the Criminal Mind says stalkers vacillate between considering themselves ‘No. 1’ and ‘nothing’.
‘The stalking is the tip of the iceberg. The stalking props up their self-esteem,’ he says. When the stalker is rejected he suffers a huge blow to his feeling of self-worth, and this, coupled with the realization that he is not going to be able to have what he wants, leads to violence.
The predominance of men among stalkers is borne out by British Telecom statistics, which show that twice as many malicious calls are made by men than by women. The only other measure of the gender profile of the British stalker is anecdotal: four out of every five cases that are reported in a newspaper involve a man stalking a woman. It could be that these receive more publicity – women are more likely to look to the police and the courts for help, and the presence of a physically powerful male stalker may actually be more threatening than the continued attentions of a female one. But, even allowing for this distortion, it is likely that we follow the American pattern and have a much higher number of males stalking females than the other way round.
‘Women who are rejected may act destructively towards themselves, or turn to others for nurturing to get over the rejection. Men use aggression to restore the equilibrium of their self-esteem,’ says New York forensic psychologist Dr James Wulach.
Almost all stalking has an underlying sexual motive, although there are cases where the stalker is simply trying to get into the victim’s life for other reasons, usually associated with feelings of prestige and identity: they want the same role as their victim, they want to belong to the same social group/family/work organization (see the cases of Bob and Kathleen Krueger and Janey Buchan).
Analysis of the backgrounds of stalkers has shown that although they come from across all levels of society (with a slight predominance of better-educated individuals) one common factor appears to be an absence of a father figure in their childhood, plus a hot-and-cold relationship with their mothers, sometimes adored and sometimes ignored. With women stalkers (who generally latch on to celebrities or strangers) there is a general absence of any loving relationship in adult life. Women stalkers are usually more clearly recognizable as social inadequates; men may be holding down good jobs and have an outwardly successful life.
This book looks at every type of stalking, from the sort of harassment that is more of a nuisance than anything else, to the most sinister and dangerous stalking of all – that which ends in death.
PART ONE (#ulink_acebc0b9-7b9e-5d88-a99c-097f10a1733f)
THE PRICE OF FAME (#ulink_acebc0b9-7b9e-5d88-a99c-097f10a1733f)
‘YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE’ (#ulink_d00525a5-98e2-513f-8297-fc2bc801a573)
A COYOTE’S HEAD, some dog’s teeth, a bed pan, a syringe of blood, a toy submarine, a half-eaten chocolate bar, eight tubes of red lipstick, a shampoo coupon, a disposable razor, a photograph of the victim’s home, a map of the victim’s home town and a set of medical photographs of corpses with the victim’s face pasted over the head – this is just a small sample of the items sent to Hollywood celebrities in their mail.
The kind of letters they get are just as bizarre:
I am afraid I made a mistake when I told you I was your father. Some guy showed me a picture of you and your father standing together when you got your award. I was so proud when I thought I was your pop. I guess that means that my daughter ain’t your sister either … I asked your manager to borrow ten thousand dollars, I hope she lets me have it. Before I go I just want to say that the only reason I thought I was your pop was because I used to go with a person that looked like you
wrote a middle-aged man to a young pop singer.
Another man wrote to a female celebrity:
Hello darling this is youre New friend … we will soon be together for our love honey. I will write and mail some lovely photo of myself okay. I will write to you Soon, have lovely Easter time hoping to correspond … here is a postcard for you … honey how are you doing … wishing to correspond with you Soon … hoping we do some camping and Barbecueing Soon okay.
Yet another fan wrote to a television personality:
I would like to Have lots of pictures of you sex symBol woman like you are all the times if you don’t mine at all if you take off your clotHes for me and I can see wHat you Got to the world then ever that love any How I would like to know How LonG is your breast anyHow I would like to know How mucH milk Do your carry in your Breast anyHow I would like to know How far does your Breast stick out on you anyHow I by playBoy Books all the times … I would like you to put up your legs and take pictures of you in the nude … I would like Have larGe pictures of you in tHe nude lots of them then ever were so I will take with me and have lots of women in tHe nude I like sex symBols womens to look at all the times.
One habitual letter-writer to a Hollywood female celebrity was a mental patient who had been found guilty of committing a murder, and who had also been involved in a gunfight with police after escaping from hospital, stealing a gun and ammunition and attacking the police who he believed were starving the star. He wrote afterwards:
Please disregard the other letter I sent to you. Disregard this letter if your are married or have a boyfriend as I don’t want to break up an existing relationship. I would like to be one of the following to me a) a lover, b) a girlfriend or c) a wife. I want it to be a forever thing, if we have faith in each other and don’t cheat. You must fulfil the following: 1) you must be vegetarian 2) you must not have another boyfriend 3) you must not hold hands or do anything beyond that point with another unless I give you permission 4) I believe in birth control devices and (foetus removal) abortion, to take the fear away form women so they can have a complete orgasm. Men never have to worry because they don’t have the baby. 5) You must not wear pants unless the temperature drops below 50 degrees F or you engage in hazardous work (like coal mining) 6) you can view pornographic movies.
… I was in a gunfight with the police because I thought you didn’t have to eat food. I was real sick at the time. I was arrested but should be getting out soon. I’m in a hospital for observation. I was wounded as was one policeman. We are both okay now. A bystander was wounded by another policeman … Let’s sit in a little room together. Let’s drive to the end of the world. Let’s look in each others eyes. Let’s magnetically attract each other from close up. Let’s talk till we want each other more than anyone else … Please call or write or come here by February 6th or else I’ll have to look for someone else …
One famous actor’s wife received the following letter from a woman who claimed the actor was father of her child:
I know that Jason is my beautiful baby and that [the star] is the daddy. I never been in love and I always been a queen … I don’t know much of anything other than the fact I love my son and [the star] very much. I don’t know very much about life I was never told about life or how to love or be loved … I know that I don’t deserve a man like [the star]. I know that I hurt him so much by writing to people all over the world about his son … Tell him to come get Jason and take him Home with you and the boys.
These samples of the sort of letters that pour constantly into the homes and offices of major stars are taken from the archives of Gavin de Becker Inc., a Los Angeles-based security consultation agency – the security consultation agency for California’s hundreds of celebrities, where the problem of stalking has been known about for over thirty years. It was in the 1980s that the threats to stars – and attacks on some – escalated, and de Becker’s business boomed. Unlike so many security firms, de Becker offers far more than just muscle: he collects, files and classifies all the suspicious mail his clients receive; he analyses the content of it through a computer program; he sorts out the really dangerous ‘fans’ and he goes into reverse-stalking mode – his staff track down and watch the movements of any stalker they regard as likely to carry out threats to attack celebrities. His experience coupled with the help he has had from the leading medical expert in the world on the subject of stalkers, Dr Park Dietz, means that he can frequently anticipate the actions of a deranged fan. He worked hard to get the law changed for the protection of his clients, but even before stalking was criminalized in California, de Becker was able to advise police forces just how they could nail stalkers under obscure and forgotten laws.
When Dr Dietz, who is clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences at the School of Medicine at the University of California, was called in to prepare a 600-page report for the US government on ‘Mentally Disordered Offenders in Pursuit of Celebrities and Politicians’, it was to de Becker’s files that he turned for the raw material he needed for his five years of research. De Becker has more than 200,000 items of correspondence on file, all indexed and cross-indexed to show up which stalkers were pursuing more than one celebrity.
Some of the really big Hollywood names have as many as five hundred individuals writing to them what de Becker classifies as ‘inappropriate’ letters (a top star will regularly receive as many as 4,000 genuine fan letters per month). All the staff in his clients’ offices are primed to send on to him any mail that is sinister, disjointed, bizarre, unreasonable or threatening, and to help them decide what falls into these categories they are specifically asked to be on the lookout for letters containing references to death, suicide, weapons, assassins, obsessive love or special destiny.
Dietz and colleagues analysed a scientifically chosen sample of mail from persistent letter writers in a bid to see if they could draw up a profile of the kind of writer who actually shows up at the celebrity’s home or workplace, and the conclusions are fascinating.
Obviously, those who make a direct attempt to speak or make physical contact with the celebrity are potentially far more dangerous than those who merely write letters, however incoherent, threatening and frightening the letters may be.
Letter writers who send mail from different addresses are more likely to be dangerous than those who consistently post their letters in the same place – the ones who are moving around may already be trying to track down the celebrity or, as the survey conclusion puts it, ‘travelling in a random pattern as they become increasingly frantic to find the celebrity, to escape their persecutors or for other unexplained reasons’. (Both Mark Chapman and John Hinckley travelled frantically in the days leading up to the assassination of John Lennon and the attempt on President Reagan’s life.)
Those who are likely to try to make contact with the star write significantly more letters to their idols, in fact they will usually send twice as many letters as other ‘inappropriate’ letter writers, although their attempts to get physically close to their victim may start after only one or two letters. Anyone who writes more than ten letters and keeps on writing for more than a year is potentially dangerous. They don’t write significantly longer letters though; most of these ‘inappropriate’ letters are long by normal standards, with six and a half pages a typical length (and one, in de Becker’s files, running to over two thousand pages).
The writers who want to marry, have sex with or have children with the celebrity turn out to be less potentially dangerous than those who simply expressed a strong desire to meet the star face-to-face, with no sexual propositions. And while almost a quarter of all writers made threats in their letters, this was found not to influence whether they actually turned up outside the celebrity’s home or office – perhaps the most important finding of the research.
There were some other interesting conclusions: anyone who writes on regular tablet-sized note paper is less dangerous, anyone who attempts to instil shame into the celebrity is less dangerous and anybody who repeatedly mentions other public figures is not a high level threat.
The research bore out one of Dietz’s earlier theories: that stalkers who write hate mail are less dangerous than those who write to stars romantically. ‘The person who sends hate mail is achieving their catharsis from putting the note in the mail,’ he said. The fan who believes he is destined to have a romance with the celebrity, on the other hand, will experience nothing but disappointment and rejection, and is more liable to have aggression born of frustration. Male stalkers are more likely to ‘act it out in a violent way’ says Dietz, but adds that this does not mean that women letter writers should be ignored. The same criteria for deciding which ones are likely to attack a celebrity apply to women as well as to men, it is simply that more men match the criteria.
Dr Dietz is accepted as the top world authority on stalking, and works as a consultant to a number of big American companies, helping them identify potentially dangerous employees. He has appeared as an expert witness at numerous trials, including those of John Hinckley and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and is known to some sections of the American press as ‘the FBI’s premier shrink’. Legend has it that he was the inspiration behind Thomas Harris’s book The Silence of the Lambs. He became fascinated by the criminal mind as a student after reading a book by Britain’s famous forensic pathologist Professor Keith Simpson.
He sees the rise of celebrity stalking as moving in parallel with the growth of television and video, bringing ever more intimate images of stars into the homes of potentially obsessed fans. It is now possible to replay on video, in the privacy of a bedroom, the exact moment in a film or TV programme when the stalker imagines the star is talking directly to him. It is not hard, for the determined stalker, to track down a star. ‘There’s an entire industry devoted to selling proximity to celebrities. There are books published on how to call and write famous people. In Hollywood there are tours to stars’ homes, and magazines often give overly personal information about stars. And stars themselves often reveal overly personal information in publicity interviews such as talk shows,’ he says.
In Britain and the rest of Europe, as well as America, a whole new ‘profession’ has been born from the public’s obsession with the famous, and we even have a new word for it: paparazzi. These are photographers who earn their living hanging around stars, always hopeful of a compromising or in some way interesting picture to sell to the ever-hungry newspapers and magazines. Some of them have grown rich from their dedication to hanging around outside nightclubs until the early hours of the morning. While the celebrities claim, perhaps genuinely, to be distressed by this level of media intrusion, there is a peculiarly symbiotic relationship between the two camps. The line between stardom and obscurity is a thin one, easily crossed; celebrities have been known to go back inside a club or hotel when there were no photographers waiting for them, and emerge again at the pop of a flashbulb.
Professor Dietz says that there has been more celebrity stalking in the last ten years than in the whole of previous show business history: ‘We have more celebrities at risk than ever before. The reason is … because of how visible and personal they become. We have close-ups of every glamorous performance, or even a personal interview about someone’s favourite restaurant or artistic likes. And the more personal and intimate the media portrayal, the more that mentally disordered people will misinterpret this as something personal for them.’
He has known instances where the mentally ill stalker has proved more adept at locating a celebrity than the police or mental health professionals who were trying to warn the star. The stalker, he explained, may have nothing else to do but pursue the career of the star, filing away every kernel of information they can glean. As Gavin de Becker once ruefully observed, the people he monitors may be unbalanced but they are not idiots: at least they CAN write letters.
Dr Dietz understands but does not approve of the feelings of reciprocation celebrities have towards their fans. Just as they court the attentions of the media, many stars accept the ‘where would you be without us’ attitude of a large number of fans. They may, as the actor Tom Conti puts it, regard obsessional fans as ‘a complete pain in the butt’, but on another level they feel grateful to their public who have, as they are constantly being reminded, given them the wealth, security and self-esteem that go with fame. What they fail to do, until they have the help of an expert like de Becker, is differentiate between the ‘normal’ fan and the potential stalker.
Dr Dietz believes the first and foremost rule for any star is not to respond to the stalker, and if he had his way famous people would never send out photographs of themselves, would certainly never sign them ‘with love from’ and would reduce the frequency with which they answer their fan mail.
‘The best thing a celebrity can do is to vanish as far as their private lives are concerned,’ he says. He believes court action against a stalker is a last resort, to be taken only when life is in danger.
‘The one thing that is certain to guarantee persistence is to respond on the level he seeks.
‘I want people to understand that nut mail is not harmless and that waiting for threats is not appropriate. Customarily, people who do not know anything about this will say “Well, we don’t have to worry about this person. He’s mentally ill, and he hasn’t made a direct threat.” The truth is that direct threats are not associated with whether or not people make attacks. On the other hand, several kinds of nonthreatening but inappropriate communications have a definite relationship to attacks.’
Dr Dietz does not give advice directly to Hollywood stars about how to avoid or deal with stalkers, but to their security consultants, like Gavin de Becker. The stars themselves, he believes, are difficult to advise because they refuse to accept that they cannot act like normal people and stay safe. It is left to de Becker to put Dietz’s theories – and his own, because he has been in the business long enough to have drawn some firm conclusions about celebrity stalkers – into a cogent code of practice for stars.
De Becker (who has not co-operated with the writing of this book) has a staff of over thirty people constantly monitoring the letters, phone calls, domestic security arrangements and public appearance plans of more than a hundred of the most famous people in the world. He does not name names, but his clientele – some of whom pay him half a million dollars a year – is believed to include Robert Redford, Michael J. Fox, John Travolta, Elizabeth Taylor, Tina Turner, Jane Fonda, Joan Rivers, Cher, Warren Beatty, Sheena Easton, Dolly Parton, Madonna, Olivia Newton John, Jessica Lange, Shaun Cassidy and Victoria Principal. It is almost easier to name the Hollywood stars who are not clients; Frank Sinatra and Sylvester Stallone head that, much shorter, list.
He came into the business after high school, when he got a job helping out with protection for Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. He was young and inexperienced but he learned fast, and he soon learned that what stars need is something much more sophisticated than being ringed by a posse of muscle-bound bodyguards. The enemy was cleverer than that; stalkers have proved they can get over barbed wire or past trained guard dogs, and they have even been prepared to take jobs with telephone companies to get access to unlisted phone numbers. Others have been taken on as security guards for their stars’ concerts; when de Becker discovers this he makes sure they are moved to low security areas. At least one stalker has applied for a job directly to the celebrity, using an assumed name.
De Becker sorts the threats delivered to his clients into three categories: harmless ones, serious ones which need to be monitored and urgent ones. About twenty-five per cent of this last group actually show up outside the celebrity’s home or office, although very few are able to commit any act that gets them arrested or their names into the newspapers – de Becker’s men are there to thwart them. There have been occasions when a stalker has turned up at Los Angeles airport and found himself being driven to his hotel, unknowingly, by one of de Becker’s staff. Others have attended concerts without realizing that the ‘fans’ sitting on either side of them work for de Becker.
Gavin de Becker agrees with Dietz that the rise in the stalking phenomenon is associated with the familiarity that television breeds. ‘If you are in the public eye – whether it’s the local newscaster or Jackie Onassis, whether your audience is 10,000 or one billion – someone will react in an unpredictable and inappropriate way,’ he said. ‘Today you have an entire sub-population who relate more to television characters – soap opera stars and such – than they do to real people.’
He works hard at understanding his adversaries, the stalkers. After the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer (not one of his clients) he said: ‘This killing … like the attack on Theresa Saldana, involved somewhat obscure and unusual target selection. This was not Victoria Principal or Madonna. This was somebody with a far smaller audience. There is a dynamic which says “Whitney Houston is for everyone, but you’re for me.”’
He also sees celebrity stalking as a particularly American phenomenon, born not just out of the many stars who are centred on Hollywood but also out of the American ethic. ‘We are a nation that gives rise to and authenticates virtually unlimited expectations … We are taught to feel that if we work hard we can do anything and be anything. And very few people want to be ordinary … Some people will do anything to be recognized. It’s part of the American myth that anybody can be unique and remarkable and important.’
His own observations lead him to assert that stalkers are at their most dangerous between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. As Dietz’s research into the de Becker archives shows, only five per cent of all persistent letter writers do so anonymously, so de Becker’s staff have few problems tracing the potentially dangerous ones. If they track them down to a psychiatric institution or a prison, the authorities are notified and attempts are made to ensure they are not released.
The most dangerous threats, Dietz found, were the specific ones; those which gave a time and a place for the attack on the celebrity. De Becker always takes those very seriously.
He accepts that the stars he looks after do not want to cut themselves off entirely from their public, and will probably never agree to retiring away from the spotlight as much as, perhaps, Dr Dietz would suggest they do. One part of de Becker’s job he sees as counselling them to live with the ever-present stalking threat. He calls it his ‘you don’t have to change your life when you get a dead chicken in the mail’ message.
There are things that should be done, though, and de Becker is not the only security man dispensing advice. Homes and cars should never be bought in the celebrity’s own name (stars should set up trust funds to handle impersonally those sort of purchases), phone numbers should never be listed in their names, even as ex-directory numbers, because the leaks from telephone companies are unstoppable. All bills and paperwork should be handled through an agent’s office.
The police in Los Angeles are probably better equipped to deal with stalkers than any other force in the world, simply because they have had so much more experience of celebrity stalking than any other city. Since 1991 the Los Angeles Police Department has had a Threat Management Unit which deals exclusively with stalkers, although not all of them are pursuing stars. In the first three years of its operation the unit dealt with 200 cases.
The FBI, too, has had to wake up to the threat caused by stalkers, and has become involved in some investigations which mirror the kind of work de Becker is doing privately. When Stephanie Zimbalist, a Hollywood actress who starred in the TV series Remington Steele, received 212 intimidating letters from a stalker, it was FBI agent Karen Gardner who was assigned to the case. FBI interest in stalking dates from 1989 and the death of Rebecca Schaeffer; before that local police departments had handled it. But by the late 1980s the number of stalking cases had escalated so greatly that the national agency realized it would have to get involved, and the Stephanie Zimbalist case was one of their first triumphs. The fact that the letter writer, who always signed himself ‘Your Secret Admirer’, mentioned the FBI in several of the letters was a spur to them to take on the investigation.
The stalker gave great detail in his letters about Stephanie’s movements. He not only knew the dates and times of her visits to other cities, but he could even specify which floor of the hotel she stayed on. His information was so compellingly accurate that Stephanie stopped making any public appearances; her stalker simply sent her more chilling letters: ‘… following you around different cities, waiting for you at the hotel, seeing you at the theatre, looking for you late at night; these have become the most important things in my life … My continued patience depends on at least being able to see you on the road.’ In another letter he wrote, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’
In Ronald Kessler’s book The FBI, Karen Gardner reveals how she painstakingly assembled any clues the stalker had given about his whereabouts in any of his letters. She matched flight passenger lists and hotel guest lists until she was able to identify the stalker: a lonely 42-year-old bachelor who lived with his elderly mother. He appeared to be a harmless if disturbed fan, but when his room was searched, amongst the videos of Stephanie and a large collection of magazine articles about her, there was a gun. He pleaded guilty to mailing threatening communications, and was given a two-year sentence and ordered to have psychiatric counselling, as well as being ordered to keep away from Stephanie and her family.
At present in Britain there is no equivalent of a Gavin de Becker, and there has been no funding for research into stalking as there has for Dr Dietz and his colleagues in the States. Show business stars here can get straightforward security advice about their homes and their business premises, and a lot of the ‘rules’ for dealing with fans come down to common sense. The major television companies, approached for this book, deny that they have encountered the problem on behalf of their stars, and have not issued any guidelines about coping with unwanted attentions, but this defence is probably in itself part of a deliberate strategy. There is no doubt that a television company like Granada, which fields the long-running and phenomenally popular soap Coronation Street, has been aware of the danger of stalkers for years now. There may well not have been a policy document enshrining their tactics for dealing with the danger, but there will have been discussion of it. Talking publicly about the problem is seen as counterproductive, both here and in America; publicity about stalking can have a copycat effect.
If the problem continues to grow at its present rate (it’s increasing in America, and most British crime patterns follow America with a lag of about ten years), then it would be sensible for the big show business agents and television stations to start thinking about it more constructively. Out there, at any moment, someone, somewhere, is picking up a pen to write what Dr Park Dietz calls, with academic restraint, ‘an inappropriate communication’. And if they are writing it on a page of paper torn from an exercise book, and they have been writing to ‘their’ star for more than a year, and they are posting the letters from different areas of the country, then their ‘victim’ could be in for a very bumpy time.
‘It will only be a matter of time before we have a stalker here in Britain who tips over into extreme violence,’ predicts Dr David Nias.
‘BANG, BANG, YOU’RE DEAD’ (#ulink_12e69cb8-e978-5331-9130-21f9cd0f5207)
THE EIGHTH OF DECEMBER 1980 was the day that stalking was blasted into public awareness by a snub-nosed five-shot revolver. As John Lennon followed his wife back into the Dakota Building, the famous New York apartment block where they lived, a fat bespectacled youth called Mark Chapman approached him. Chapman had for a few days been one of the regular fans who hung around hoping to glimpse the ex-Beatle, but by 8.30 p.m. on a cold dark night the others had all drifted away. The doorman of the exclusive apartment block had been chatting normally to the young man only minutes before, and said afterwards that Chapman was calm and rational.
As Yoko Ono swept passed him Chapman said ‘Hello’. Lennon, who was behind her, stared for a few seconds at his nemesis. Earlier that day he had signed his autograph on an album sleeve for Chapman, but he showed no sign of recognition. As Lennon started to enter the building Chapman stepped sideways, pulled the pistol from his pocket, held it straight in front of him with both arms outstretched, and fired all five bullets at his hero. The two bullets that hit Lennon in the back caused him to spin round, and two more ripped into his chest. One went wide of the target.
The most famous pop star in the world staggered up five steps to the Dakota office, where he collapsed in front of the night-duty man. The man who was about to become one of the most famous assassins in the world dropped his gun and stepped back into the shadows. He did not try to run away, but calmly pulled out his well-thumbed copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and started to read it while he waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.
The news of John Lennon’s death flew electronically around the world, and everywhere there was a reaction of shock. The Dakota was besieged by fans and inundated with flowers, radio stations played Lennon music for twenty-four hours a day and a worldwide ten-minute silent vigil was held six days later.
But while Lennon fans were stupefied by the death of the man they regarded as the next thing to God, others around the world were shocked by something else: the man who had murdered Lennon was one of his fans. The killer was a devotee of his, one of those who claimed to worship him. To those outside the closed world of megastardom, it seemed preposterous. Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated, but there was some perverted political sense to their killings. It would have been easier to comprehend if Lennon’s killer had been bent on attracting international attention to some cause or other, if the murder had been a kamikaze publicity stunt. But the only thing that Chapman wanted to draw attention to was himself.
The risk from deranged fans had been known for years to those in the public eye. They received nutty mail in with the thousands of genuine, innocent adoring fan letters; they received death threats, they felt uneasy about certain persistent hangers-on at their gates. But it was Lennon’s death that publicly marked the extent of the risk, and brought celebrity stalking into the open. It was Lennon’s death that floodlit the dark, strange, obsessional world of the fanatical fan.
Mark Chapman’s decision to kill his hero John Lennon may have been triggered by a perceptive article in Esquire magazine, published in October 1980. The piece examined Lennon’s life, which was that of an eccentric semi-recluse, dominated by his Japanese wife Yoko. Their married life was bizarre, their relationship with their son Sean (born by Caesarean operation so that his birth date was the same as his father’s) was unconventional. The magazine article examined how Lennon’s life measured up to the peace and love philosophy that he had expounded for so long, and found it wanting. He did not emerge as an idealist who put his money where his mouth was, but as an extremely rich 40-year-old who watched daytime television and amused himself speculating in property.
Many devoted fans must have read the article and rejected it, others will have felt betrayed by Lennon. Critics of John and Yoko will have felt vindicated. But Chapman went further. He felt so deeply upset by his icon that he decided to kill him. It took a few weeks, but he managed it – one of the few times that Mark Chapman lived up to his own expectations.
Chapman was twenty-five at the time he killed Lennon. He was an unremarkable-looking young man who had managed to conceal the full extent of his mental disturbance from a lot of people for a long time. The son of a nurse and an ex-army sergeant, who divorced when he was still a child, he was born in Texas and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, alienating his family in his early teens when he adopted a hippie lifestyle and experimented with marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and barbiturates. He acquired a criminal record for minor offences, most of them connected with drugs. During these years he idolized Lennon. At seventeen he cleaned up his act after he claimed to have met Jesus Christ, who came into his room and stood by his left knee, starting a tingling which spread ‘from the tip of my toe to the top of my head’. Chapman became a smartly dressed, clean-shaven, short-haired Bible freak, conventionally dressed apart from the large cross he always hung around his neck. He dropped out of school – where his record had not been good – to follow Christ. He joined a Pentecostal church, and walked the streets accosting passers-by and trying to convert them. His Christianity was fundamental: God represented the forces of good and the devil represented the forces of evil, and the world was a battleground in which the two sides fought each other. His feelings about Lennon became ambivalent; on one hand he still listened to and enjoyed the music, but on the other he suspected Lennon of being the anti-Christ because he had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
Chapman became involved with the YMCA, and attended their summer camps, acting as a counsellor to young children. He felt a great rapport with children, and was popular with them. When he felt his Christian calling was bigger and that he should be doing something more dramatic for his faith, in 1976 he went to Beirut with a group of other volunteers from the YMCA, but was rapidly recalled back to the States because of the war in the Lebanon.
At this stage Chapman was, by his own lights, doing well. He had an attractive, bright girlfriend who shared his evangelical Christianity. He was very well thought of by the YMCA bosses, and it was at their suggestion that he went, with his girlfriend, to college in Tennessee in the hope of getting some qualifications so that he could take up a full-time post with the organization. But he hated academic work, and before the first term was over he had had a breakdown, walking out on the course and his girlfriend. He blamed the staff and the other pupils, describing them as ‘phoneys’ – the favourite description used by Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye, for his enemies. The book, a seminal work about teenage alienation from the adult world, spoke to Chapman at a deep level, and he identified with the hero who believed that childish innocence was more precious than maturity.
His family were not sympathetic after he dropped out and Chapman, twenty-one years old at the time, found a job as a security guard to support himself. He was given some rudimentary training in the use of a pistol; Chapman proved to be a good marksman. But being a security guard was, he felt, only a stop gap, and in a desperate bid to get some better qualifications he enrolled once more in college. When he failed to keep up with the academic work once again he felt a complete failure, and decided that he would end his own life. But he wanted to do it in style and in his own time; he had read somewhere that the Hawaiian islands were as close to paradise as you can get on earth, so he decided to commit suicide only after he had visited them.
Six months later, having travelled all around the islands, he decided that the appointed time had come, and fixed a hosepipe from the exhaust of his car. But he was no more competent at suicide than he was at college work; he was found and taken to hospital. After his physical problems were sorted out he was transferred to a psychiatric ward where he was treated for severe neurotic depression, a diagnosis which shows how clever he was at masking the extent of his symptoms, because by this time Chapman was certainly psychotic. He was preoccupied by the fight between God and the devil, which he hallucinated about constantly. He believed his brain could pick up the commands of the opposing armies, so that he refused a confusion of signals urging him to do good and then to do evil.
Perhaps he recognized his own need for help and treatment: when he was discharged he took an undemanding clerical job in the hospital and worked as a volunteer in the psychiatric unit. He saved his earnings assiduously, and started to plan a six-week holiday, in which he intended to see as much as possible of the world. The travel agent who helped him plan his holiday, which started in Tokyo, was a Japanese girl working in a Honolulu agency. She was the daughter of a prosperous baker. While he was away Chapman sent her postcards, and when he returned they started going out together. Gloria was a Buddhist who believed in fortune-telling and astrology, a combination at odds with Chapman’s born-again evangelical Christian faith, but theirs was a genuine romance and in June 1979 they were married.
Gloria had a comfortable life; her father was wealthy and she had her own salary. Chapman, who was still working at the hospital, began to enjoy a lifestyle he had never previously aspired to. He harboured dreams of grandeur, seeing himself as an art connoisseur. But his taste in pictures was esoteric and no doubt governed by the religious battleground his brain had become; he coveted a Salvador Dali representation of the crucifixion of Christ overlaid with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Death was becoming a fixation of his.
By the time he had been married for six months, Chapman had walked out on his job at the hospital in a fit of pique because he did not get a promotion he wanted. He became a security guard again: it was a job which gave him less responsibility and paid him less money, and he recognized it as a downward step. Money was no problem, though, because he had access to a shared account with Gloria.
For the whole of 1980 Chapman’s behaviour was odd, although obviously not odd enough to alert anybody. He bullied Gloria, was inordinately possessive about her, and was extravagant with their money, spending far more than he contributed to the household. Opposite the apartment where he and Gloria lived was an office of the Church of Scientology, a cult which recruits with promises of self-improvement. Chapman disapproved of the organization, and could be seen marching up and down repeatedly outside their offices, muttering to himself. The office began to receive threatening phone calls, sometimes as many as forty in a day. The phone would ring, the receiver be picked up, and a male voice would whisper ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’ Chapman later admitted he was the caller.
At home Gloria was becoming increasingly worried about him. He had always played lots of Lennon music, but the signs were there that he was developing into more than a fan. In August he wrote to a friend, said he was going to New York on a mission, and gave his address as the Dakota. His beloved Bible had an addition that he had scrawled in himself: ‘The Gospel According to John’ became ‘The Gospel According to John Lennon’. He read everything he could get his hands on about the star. After reading the Esquire article in October, his attitudes to Lennon hardened. He would sit in a darkened room, naked, in the lotus position, listening to speeded-up Beatles and Lennon tapes, and chanting ‘John Lennon, I’m going to kill you.’
‘It was hideous,’ he said later from his prison cell at Attica, ‘I would strip naked, gritting my teeth and summoning the devil and wild things into my mind. I was sending out telegrams to Satan, “Give me the opportunity to kill John Lennon.”’
He had, he would reveal later in prison, already thought about and discounted killing Jackie Onassis, Ronald Reagan, David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. But once he hit on Lennon, everything he read and heard about the man whose music he revered confirmed that Lennon was ‘a phoney’. There was a time when Chapman’s delusions made him believe he was Lennon: when he gave up his job on 23 October he signed off as John Lennon, then scored the name out. But more telling, and more fundamental, was the belief that he was Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye.
Four days after finishing at work, Chapman bought a gun. It was not hard. He walked into a shop in Honolulu where the slogan above the door said ‘Buy a gun and get a bang out of life’ He paid $169.00 for .38 calibre pistol, which he chose because it was small enough to conceal in a pocket. He flew to New York on a one-way ticket, telling his wife Gloria that he was going ‘to make things different’. Arriving on 30 October, he became Holden Caulfield, retracing his fictional hero’s steps through the city with his well-thumbed copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his pocket. He went to the spots in Central Park that Salinger mentioned in the book and he went to the Museum of Natural History, another place Caulfield visited.
In between his pilgrimages, he joined the small knot of fans who hung around the Dakota building, hoping for a glimpse of their idol. He moved hotels, to be nearer to his stakeout, never giving any clue to the others that he was any different from them in his devotion to the star. He was even ‘normal’ enough to go out on a date with a girl he met in Central Park, where she worked in a café. The only clue she had about his state of mind came when he angrily lashed out at New York gun laws: he had discovered he could not buy bullets in the city. He contacted an old schoolfriend, a policeman back in his home state, Georgia, who agreed to supply him with ammunition. He flew to Atlanta to collect five hollow-nosed dumdum bullets.
Back in New York, Chapman was listening hard to the warring factions in his head. One side told him to kill Lennon, the other told him not to. The first victory went to the goodies: he phoned Gloria in Honolulu and told her that coming to New York had been a mistake. He revealed to her that he had been on a mission to kill Lennon – it was the first she had heard of his plans – but that he had won ‘a great victory’ and was on his way home. For three weeks he sat around the Honolulu apartment watching television. On the wall of the apartment was a plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and as he walked past it Chapman saw ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ leap out at him; a sign, he believed.
But the battle was still raging and he needed to get back to New York, to be near Lennon. He told Gloria that he had thrown the gun and the bullets into the sea, and that she was not to worry that he would do anything silly. He even made an appointment with a psychotherapist who had treated him before for depression, but he never turned up. When he should have been getting professional help coping with his delusions, he was on a plane to New York.
He stayed at the YMCA for the first night, staking out the Dakota during the days. His second day in New York was, probably more by coincidence than planning, Pearl Harbor day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on the American fleet which led to the US entering the Second World War. Both Lennon and Chapman had Japanese wives. That night, the eve of Lennon’s assassination, he went into his Holden Caulfield role-playing mode again. He moved from the YMCA to a hotel, booking a room for seven nights on his Visa card. On a table he laid out his must valued possessions: tapes by the Beatles and by guitarist Todd Rundgren, his New Testament in which he had written ‘Holden Caulfield’, a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and some photos of himself when he worked at YMCA summer camps with young children. Then, like Caulfield, he hired a prostitute and re-enacted a scene from the book: talking to the girl, massaging her and being given a massage, but not having sex.
The next day, on his way to the Dakota, he bought a new copy of the book. On the title page he wrote ‘This is my statement.’ He took a copy of Lennon’s new album, Double Fantasy, and was mingling with the other fans by lunchtime. He had dressed carefully for the cold New York winter, wearing long thermal underwear, a coat buttoned up to the neck and a Russian fur hat. With his chubby cheeks he looked as though he might be a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain. The first member of the Lennon clan who he saw was Sean, John’s 5-year-old son, who came out of the Dakota with his nanny. Holden Caulfield liked kids, so did Mark Chapman. It was another fan, one of the regulars, who introduced Sean to Chapman, who knelt on one knee before the little boy and put his hand in the child’s. He told Sean he had come all the way from Hawaii, and that he was honoured to meet him. Then he added that Sean should take care of his runny nose. ‘You wouldn’t want to get sick and miss Christmas,’ said the man who was planning to make sure there would be no happy family gathering in the Lennon apartment on Christmas Day that year. Afterwards Chapman described Sean as ‘the cutest little boy I have ever seen’. It was 5.00 in the afternoon when Lennon first appeared, and all Chapman did was thrust his copy of Double Fantasy in front of the star for an autograph. ‘John Lennon, December 1980’ was scrawled across the cover. An amateur photographer, Paul Goresh, who was hanging around hoping to get some good pictures, took one of Lennon with Chapman in the background; it would later appear all around the world.
The other fans got tired and drifted away. At 8.00 p.m. Goresh, who had been chatting with Chapman, said he was calling it a day. Chapman tried to persuade him to stay: ‘You never know, something might happen. He might go to Spain or something tonight – and you will never see him again.’
It was as near as he could get to inviting Goresh to record on film the murder of John Lennon. The photographer did not pick up on it, and missed the scoop of a lifetime. For a couple of hours Chapman chatted with the Cuban doorman at the building. He seemed, the doorman said later, sane and normal. It was ten minutes to eleven when the Lennons returned. A few seconds later mayhem broke loose. Lennon, blood pouring from his mouth and chest, staggered into the building. Yoko screamed and screamed. The night-duty man hit a panic button, and within minutes two police cars, sirens screeching, were at the scene. John was taken to hospital, barely alive. He died shortly after, despite the desperate efforts of a seven-strong medical team.
Chapman, while all this was going on, had taken off his coat and hat to show the police officers that he was no longer armed. He waited quietly for them to arrive, exchanging a few words with the devastated doorman, the Cuban to whom he had been talking earlier, who shook the gun from his hand and kicked it into the street. Chapman even apologized for what he had done, and when a woman who had heard the shots came running up, he told her to get out of there for her own sake. Then he took out his copy of Catcher and started to read. Not surprisingly, when the police arrived they went to arrest the wrong man, turning towards the young night-duty man, not fifteen-stone Chapman who was hanging back in the shadows.
Chapman’s original intention was to say nothing and hand over the book, with the inscription ‘This is my Statement’ to the police, but his resolution failed him when the police grabbed him.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ he pleaded, reassuring them that ‘I acted alone.’
In the police car being taken into custody one of the cops asked him if he knew what he had just done. He replied: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that he was a friend of yours.’ He was just as polite and restrained when he phoned his wife Gloria in Honolulu. He gave her concise and clear instructions about getting the police to protect her from the journalists who were already gathering outside the apartment. She said she loved him and he said he loved her.
He later explained the conflict that went on in his mind at the time of the killing, by seeing himself as two people, a child and an adult. He said the child and the adult went together to the Dakota that day, and the adult wanted to get in a cab and go home.
‘Then the child screams “No! No! No! Devil! Help me, Devil! Give me the power and strength to do this. I want this. I want to be somebody.”’
He placed great emphasis on the fact that neither Yoko nor John spoke to him, as if a smile and a ‘hello’ might have saved John’s life. In his disturbed state he did not see Lennon stagger into the building, and when he realized there was no body in front of him he was not sure that he had actually done it.
‘I was kind of glad that he wasn’t there because I thought I had missed him or didn’t kill him or something. I just wanted the police to hurry up and come.’
The death of the pop icon caused such an uproar that police insisted Chapman wore a bullet proof vest before his trial, and they painted the windows of his cell black so that he would not be shot by snipers. He refused to plead an insanity defence at the trial, instead admitting his guilt. The trial was therefore over quickly, with Chapman sentenced to between twenty years and life, with an order that he should receive psychiatric treatment. Because of the crime and the emotions it stirred up, it is likely that life will mean life. His own lawyer asked the judge not to impose a minimum sentence (after which Chapman could have been released) because, he said, ‘All reports come to the conclusion that he is not a sane man. It was not a sane crime. It was … a monstrously irrational killing.’ When Chapman was asked if he wished to say anything in his own defence he read out a passage from The Catcher in the Rye.
Chapman lives in Attica Prison, New York, segregated from the other inmates. Attica is notoriously violent, and amid its shifting population there are always some who would relish the fame of being the man who killed the man who killed John Lennon.
Gloria, Chapman’s wife, has not divorced him. For three years she lived near the prison, visiting him regularly. But she then moved back to their Honolulu home; he has said he no longer wants her to visit. She sends him money regularly.
In a television documentary, shown in Britain in 1988, Chapman showed no remorse for killing Lennon, only regret that the star did not die immediately and that Sean was left without a father. In a television interview in 1992 he said that when he shot Lennon he did not believe he was killing a real person, he was killing an image, a record cover. He said he had undergone an exorcism performed by a priest in his prison cell, and that his demons had left him. He said he did not expect to ever be forgiven for ‘taking away a genius’.
A psychiatrist involved in his care diagnosed Chapman as exhibiting ‘the symptoms of virtually every malady in psychiatric literature’.
Astonishingly, Mark Chapman, who stalked and murdered John Lennon, now has his own collection of would-be stalkers, weird letter writers who mail him their assorted fantasies. He gets plenty of straightforward hate mail from Lennon fans, but he also gets love letters from women he has never met, and letters applauding what he did.
He spends a lot of time answering them. He also spends a lot of time reading The Catcher in the Rye.
If the death of Lennon put stalking into the public eye for the first time, it was the shooting of President Reagan by a Jodie Foster fan four months later that proved to the world that Lennon’s murder was not an isolated tragedy. The cliché ‘the price of fame’ began to have real meaning to a public which had smiled cynically every time a celebrity complained about invasion of privacy or harassment by fans. To those on modest incomes who helped their idols amass million-dollar bank balances by buying their records, watching their films or getting hooked on their TV soap characters, the stars’ whinges had always been a bit hard to take. Now, within four months, the real fear that stalked the stars had been brought out into the open. When celebrities complained about fans it was not, as their public had imagined, out of frustration at autograph hunters disturbing them in the middle of restaurant meals, or because they were unable to walk down a shopping mall without being mobbed; it was an ever-present knowledge that somewhere out there was a mentally deranged fan who had them in their sights. All they could hope was that the sights were not attached to a rifle.
John Hinckley, who shot Reagan in the chest and seriously injured his press secretary James Brady, as well as wounding a policeman and a secret service agent, did it, he claimed, for Jodie. In his shabby motel room in Washington police found a letter to the star:
Dear Jodie
There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. This letter is being written an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel [where Reagan had been lunching]. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever,
John Hinckley
At the time Jodie Foster was eighteen, in her first year at Yale University. She was a well-established actress, having shot to fame as a child in films like Bugsy Malone. Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life largely mirrored the plot of one of her films, Taxi Driver, in which she played a teenage prostitute. The other star, Robert de Niro, played a character described in the publicity material for the film as ‘a loner incapable of communicating’ who spent ‘his off-duty hours eating junk food or sitting alone in a dingy room’. When the taxi driver is rejected by the prostitute, he sends her a letter before setting out to assassinate the President. There’s no doubt that Hinckley had seen – and been influenced by – the film, because about six months before he shot Reagan he wrote to the film’s scriptwriter, asking for an introduction to Jodie Foster. The actress also knew his name well before she heard it on the news bulletins about the shooting; he had been pushing letters under the door of her room at Yale.
Hinckley, who was twenty-five at the time of the shooting, was a desperate, deluded and dangerous misfit. Unlike Mark Chapman, he had never really established any long-lasting adult relationships; one of the most telling comments about him came from his landlord when he was in college, who commented that in all the time he had known Hinckley, he had only once seen him in the company of another human being. But there was nothing in his early life to suggest that the kid from the well-off Texan background would end up a notorious would-be assassin, no signs of deep emotional or mental disturbance in his childhood. He didn’t come from a broken home, he wasn’t brutalized by poverty. There were some traumas to cope with, like living in the shadow of a successful and popular sister in school, but the majority of youngsters cope with problems of that scale.
Hinckley even managed to conceal his solitariness throughout high school, although in retrospect no close friends stepped forward and claimed to have shared his confidences. But to the rest of his classmates he appeared normal: ‘So normal that he appeared to fade into the woodwork,’ said one girl who was in his year. After school, though, and after moving away from his parents’ home, his life began to gradually disintegrate.
John Hinckley was the third and last child of the family. His father was an oil engineer, who moved the family to the capital of America’s oil industry, Dallas, when his son John was two. They were an America adman’s dream of a family: good-looking, churchgoing, hardworking parents with three blonde, blue-eyed, attractive children. Even in the looks-conscious environment of middle-ranking Dallas society, the only girl, Diane, stood out for her prettiness. Scott, the oldest boy, seven years older than John, did well at school and at sports and eventually went into his father’s business. John, as a child, was very cute, average at his schoolwork, and very good at basketball – the best in his elementary school team.
When he was eleven his parents moved to the most swanky suburb of affluent Dallas, to a large house with a sweeping drive and a swimming pool. He seemed to fit in at high school, again becoming very involved in basketball, and a keen supporter of all the school’s other teams. He even joined in with school activities like the Rodeo Club, which organized barbecues, square dances and trips to rodeos. The only shadow over his school career – which was academically undistinguished but OK – was the popularity of his sister, who was three years older than him. She was good at everything: a star in class, head cheerleader, in the choir, in a school operetta production. She was also very attractive. But if John felt oppressed by her presence, his classmates saw no sign of it.
By the time he was fifteen his father had amassed enough capital to start his own business, Hinckley Oil. He was successful, and when his oldest son Scott finished his engineering degree he joined the company. Five years later the company – and the Hinckley family – moved to the town of Evergreen in Colorado, again to a quiet, well-to-do area. By this time John Hinckley was studying for a business degree at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas. He was registered at the Tech for the next seven years, changing from business to liberal arts, but never completed his degree and only attended classes sporadically.
It was at this stage that his life began to fall apart. He did not take part in any of the university social activities, and journalists who trawled through every aspect of his life after the assassination attempt failed to find any friends, close or casual, in Lubbock. Nobody really noticed him, and the only thing he did which in retrospect is revealing was to choose Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Auschwitz concentration camp as two of his study projects in his German history course. The room where he lived – where his landlord only once saw him with another person – was always full of burger boxes and ice-cream cartons.
‘He just sat there all the time, staring at the TV,’ said his landlord. The picture of the De Niro character from Taxi Driver was starting to emerge. He dropped out of college in 1976 and went to hang around Hollywood, staying in cheap rooms in the red-light district. He went back to college in 1977, but did not last the year. He became involved with the National Socialist Party of America, a neo-Nazi group, but in the end he was kicked out: he was too extreme even for these right-wing extremists, and when he started to advocate shooting people they decided he had to go. The president of the party later told a journalist that they decided that Hinckley was ‘either a nut or a federal agent’.
The American academic system means that students can drop a course and pick it up again whenever they like, without losing the credits they have already gained for previous work. Hinckley, having been away for more than a year, started back at Texas Tech in 1979. In the same year he started to buy firearms; in the small redneck town of Lubbock he was easily able to buy a .38 pistol and two .22 pistols. By this stage his parents must have been aware of the disintegration of his personality, because from time to time, back at the family home in Evergreen, Colorado, he visited a psychiatrist.
He finally left college in the summer of 1980, aged twenty-five, and started a strange chaotic ramble around America, as if he felt that by keeping moving, by never spending too long in one place, he could hold his fragmenting personality together. When he found himself in conversation with strangers he would boast of being a close friend of Jodie Foster’s, sometimes saying he was her lover. He turned up at Yale, where she was studying, and left several notes for her. He went to Nashville and was arrested as he tried to fly out to New York; his luggage contained three handguns and fifty rounds of ammunition. President Carter was due to fly into Nashville that day, but Hinckley’s name – which should have been passed on to the secret service – slipped through the net. Four days later he was in Dallas, buying two more pistols from a store with the slogan ‘Guns don’t cause crime any more than flies cause garbage’ in the window. He bought the bullets, appropriately named ‘devastator bullets’ from a store in Lubbock, the town where he had been in college. They cost ten times as much as ordinary bullets and exploded on contact, like dumdum bullets. Seven days after this shopping trip he was in Denver, applying for jobs. Then it was Washington, then Denver again, then back to New Haven (to be near Jodie at Yale), then Washington again.
By the beginning of March 1981 he was sticking more letters through Jodie Foster’s door at Yale, and by this time she was so concerned about them that they were handed to the college authorities. Hinckley then returned to Denver. He applied for jobs and pawned his possessions to pay for his motel room. His restless moving around the country continued: he went to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City by plane, only to board a bus back to Salt Lake City the next day. It was from there that he moved on to Washington, and his date with President Reagan.
It took him three days to get to Washington, travelling by Greyhound bus, arriving on Sunday 29 March. He ate a cheeseburger at the bus station, and walked about impatiently; other travellers thought he was waiting for someone to pick him up. Then he walked to a hotel two blocks west of the White House, where he checked into a $42-a-night room. He stayed in the room all day, making a couple of local phone calls. Next day he left early, and returned about noon, asking the receptionist if he had received any telephone messages while out. There was none for him. A chambermaid who tidied his room that morning noticed that among his possessions scattered around the room was a newspaper cutting about President Reagan’s timetable. It showed that Reagan would leave the White House at 1.45 p.m., after spending the morning with some prominent figures from the Hispanic community, and would then travel to the Washington Hilton to give a speech.
Hinckley wrote his letter to Jodie Foster and then walked to the Hilton, which was less than a mile from his hotel. He wore a raincoat, and he mingled with the photographers and reporters outside the hotel, giving at least one of them the impression that he was a secret service man. Inside, Reagan, the great communicator, was not on good form. His speech to 3,500 union delegates was not one of his best, but there was one line in it that the newspapers pounced on the following day: ‘Violent crime has surged by ten per cent, making neighbourhood streets unsafe and families fearful in their homes.’
As he stepped outside the hotel, violent crime surged again. Turning to wave at the crowd, Reagan smiled broadly. Hinckley pulled out his pistol, aimed, fired. Two bullets, then a pause, then four more. One of the secret service men pushed Reagan into the waiting limousine and dived on top of him, urging the driver to take off. Behind them, Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady slumped to the ground, blood pouring down his face. A bullet had gone into his head, an injury which would leave him permanently disabled. A Washington policeman was shot in the chest and a secret service agent also received a chest wound. It was a matter of minutes before Reagan and the agent with him in the back of the car realized that the President, too, had been shot in the chest.
Hinckley was pounced on and disarmed within seconds, handcuffed to an agent and thrown into the back of a police car. At Washington police headquarters he hardly spoke. ‘Does anybody know what that guy’s beef was?’ President Reagan asked, as he lay in his hospital bed.
Jodie Foster did not know the answer, although she knew she was in some macabre way the inspiration for Hinckley’s actions. Twenty-one months later she wrote a perceptive account of how Hinckley’s fixation with her, and his subsequent actions, affected her. She had overcome the initial reaction to her when she started at university, the curiosity about her because of her Hollywood background, the resentment of her. She had even, according to one journalist who interviewed her peers, changed her style of dress to blend inconspicuously in with the group. And then John Hinckley had come along and let her know that for her – and for other stars – there could be no normal, no blending in.
Why me? was the theme of the article she had published in Esquire magazine. It explored the terrifying events that followed Hinckley’s arrest. Jodie was appearing on stage in a college production, and she was determined to go ahead with it. She had been moved from her shared dormitory to a single room that could more easily be protected by security men, there were security men screening the audience for the play, and at Jodie’s request cameras were banned. A whole pack of photographers had descended on Yale as soon as the news of Hinckley’s obsession with her had broken, and she wasn’t prepared to face any more. But a camera did get in; she could hear the familiar rhythmic click of a motor drive in the darkened auditorium. She looked hard at the area of the audience the sound was coming from and locked eyes with a bearded man who was watching her unflinchingly. He was there again the next night, in a different seat. The following night a note was found on a bulletin board: ‘By the time the show is over, Jodie Foster will be dead.’ It turned out to be a hoax.
But a few days later a real death threat was pushed under Jodie’s door. This time the police swung into action and caught up with her second stalker, Edward Richardson, within hours. He was arrested in New York, with a loaded gun, and he told police that he decided not to kill Jodie because she was too pretty; he was going to kill the President instead. He had also telephoned a bomb threat, demanding the release of Hinckley and secret service agents had to search all the college rooms that Jodie used. Richardson had a beard, just like the man in the audience. A year later he was released, on parole.
After his arrest, Jodie says a great change came over her – or so she was told by those around her. ‘I started perceiving death in the most mundane but distressing events. Being photographed felt like being shot. I thought everyone was looking at me in crowds; perhaps they were. Every sick letter I received I made sure to read, to laugh at, to read again.’
She was not sleeping properly, her pride in her appearance went. She felt bitter about the way other students had, she felt, betrayed her by telling journalists all about her and, in one case, selling an article to a magazine about her. In her own intelligent well-written article she describes the pain and anger that she, at eighteen, suffered because of her two stalkers. Her anguish was heightened by the media pursuit of her, but the feelings of isolation, desperation and frustration she felt at being unable to control her own life are common to all victims.
The security that surrounded Hinckley as he waited for his trial was greater than any that Jodie Foster had. The security services recognized that, as with Mark Chapman, Hinckley was a natural target for plenty of glory-seekers. It caused a sensation when Hinckley was found not guilty of attempting to murder Reagan, because of his insanity. But the net result for the American people was the same: he went behind bars, with very little prospect of ever being released.
It was surprising, therefore, to find him being considered for unsupervised release to spend a weekend with his parents only six years after the shooting. His application to be allowed home – he had already been back to Colorado in the company of a nurse – was supported by staff who had been involved in his care and treatment.
At a court hearing to consider his application it was revealed that he had written a sympathetic letter to Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers who is on Death Row in Florida. Hinckley ‘expressed sorrow’ at the ‘awkward position you [Bundy] find yourself in’. He had also written to a college student, asking her to kill Jodie Foster for him and to send a pistol by post to him so that he could escape from jail. He then told the girl to hijack a jet and demand that Hinckley and Jodie Foster both be taken aboard it. Hinckley had also received a letter from a woman in jail for trying to kill President Ford; she suggested Hinckley write to Charles Manson. To hear about the networking that was going on between long-term prisoners was almost as shocking to the law-abiding public as the whole idea of stalking.
Hinckley’s application to go home alone was turned down, and has been turned down ever since. When Hinckley’s application came up again in 1988, the court heard that staff had intercepted a letter from him to a mail order company that was selling pictures of Jodie Foster; his obsession was undiminished. In 1993, twelve years after committing the crime, he applied for parole. The answer was no.
‘THE BENEVOLENT ANGEL OF DEATH’ (#ulink_1eb1f560-665d-5c82-b45e-9d09e5bd8528)
SHE RUSHED OUT of her apartment block in Los Angeles on a fine sunny morning in March 1982, a slim, pretty girl with long dark hair, wearing a sailor-style top and trousers. It wasn’t far from the block doorway to her car, which was parked by the kerb. She was on her way to a music class, in a hurry because she was late.
‘Are you Theresa Saldana?’ a male voice with a pronounced Scottish accent asked, as she was slipping the key into the car door. She knew, as soon as she heard the question, that the man who had been stalking her for the past few weeks had caught up with her. She instinctively turned to face him, and then tried to run. He was very close, and when he grabbed her she knew he was far too strong for her to be able to escape. She spontaneously raised her hands, to protect her face, and as she did so she felt the first searing hot thrust of pain in her chest.
Arthur Jackson, a 47-year-old Scottish drifter with a long history of psychiatric illness, stabbed 27-year-old actress Theresa Saldana ten times with the five-inch blade of a kitchen knife as she struggled with him, screaming ‘He’s trying to kill me.’ Fortunately for her, among the people who witnessed the attack was a 26-year-old bottled water delivery man, Jeff Fenn, who had the courage to tackle Jackson. He launched himself on to the demented Scotsman, not realizing that he was armed. When he saw the knife he was able to get it off Jackson and then hold him on the ground until the police arrived.
‘I heard a lady screaming, I ran up the street and tried to break it up,’ said Fenn. ‘The man appeared to be beating her with a fist, but when I grabbed the guy to get him into a headlock I saw he had a knife. Then I pulled him to the ground while she ran into the apartment. I got the knife out of his hands and threw it into the street. He asked me how long it had been since he stabbed her, but I didn’t want to talk to him so I told him to just lie down and be still while I held his arms behind him on the ground.’
While he was being held by Fenn, Jackson told the crowd that gathered that they would find the reasons for his attack in a bag he was carrying.
Released from Jackson’s grip, Theresa ran back to the apartment block, screaming that she was dying and needed help. Her husband Fred Feliciano had been called, and he stayed by her side as paramedics gave her blood transfusions and then rushed her to the Cedars-Sinai hospital. She was operated on immediately. Four of the stab wounds had punctured one of her lungs, and there were three other stab wounds in her chest, narrowly missing her heart. The left hand which she had raised to protect her face had been slashed so badly that it required extensive surgery over the next few months. The doctors lost count of how many stitches they had to put in on that first day, but she needed twenty-six pints of blood. Before she was wheeled into the operating theatre for her first four hours of surgery Theresa told them she was an actress and begged them to do their job well and not leave her with too many scars. For four weeks she was on two drips, one in each arm, and she was in hospital for a total of ten weeks.
The delivery man who saved her life visited her in hospital a few days later. Although he had seen her most celebrated film, Raging Bull, in which she played Jake La Motta’s sister-in-law, only the day before, he did not recognize her at the time of the attack. Theresa had a large trophy inscribed for him with the words: ‘To my hero, Jeffrey Fenn. Thank you, thank you, thank you. With much love and gratitude for ever.’
There was no doubt that Jeffrey’s actions saved Theresa from death. When police examined Arthur Jackson’s belongings, they found in the battered shoulder bag he was carrying a document he had written, describing Theresa as his ‘divine angel’ and his ‘countess angel’. He had seen her in a film called Defiance, in which she played the girlfriend of a young seaman caught up in a fight with a street gang. Jackson, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, was deluded enough to believe that the film was the story of his life, and that Theresa was therefore his girlfriend. He claimed she was too good for the world, and he was on a ‘divine mission’ as a ‘benevolent angel of death’. His mission was to kill her, and he wrote that he was acting under the orders of the ‘Knights of St Michael in the kingdom of heaven’. Theresa, he believed, would be better off dead than with the ‘scum’ she mixed with on earth, which was probably a reference to her husband.
In the document, which was entitled ‘Petition to the United States Government for a State-Imposed Execution’, he pleaded for his own life to be ended in the electric chair, so that he could join her. He said he wanted to die at Alcatraz, the famous federal prison which had been closed for some years. He stipulated the execution should take place in Cell Block D, because that was where a convicted armed robber named Joseph Cretzer had died in 1946 while leading an insurrection, and Jackson believed that by dying there he could free Cretzer’s soul from purgatory, while rejoining his own ‘divine angel’ in heaven. He also asked for piped music to be played and light refreshments served while he was in the electric chair. He mentioned Theresa Saldana’s name fifty times in the whole document.
He also weighed up the pros and cons of where he should kill her – she had an apartment in New York as well as her home in Los, Angeles – but opted for California because it had recently reintroduced the death penalty. He wanted to die, but could not bring himself to commit suicide.
Jackson was first diagnosed as mentally ill when he was seventeen, and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and America ever since. He had been deported from America twice, but had still managed to get a visa to return. Two days after seeing Defiance during the Christmas holiday in his home town of Aberdeen, he travelled 8,000 miles on ‘an odyssey to find her and complete my mission’. He funded his travel from his British state benefits; he was classified as long-term disabled. He tried to get hold of a gun, which he described in his writings as ‘more humane’ but could not get one, despite travelling to several states. About a week before he stabbed Theresa, he had turned up in New York, phoning both her New York and Hollywood agents, and then tracking down and contacting her parents. He told her mother that he was speaking on behalf of Martin Scorsese, who directed Raging Bull, and that he wanted to offer her another part. Well-spoken, with a distinctive accent, and perfectly lucid, he convinced her mother into giving him Theresa’s address in Los Angeles.
‘When he told me he had a very good part for my daughter I got excited and gave him Theresa’s address,’ Mrs Saldana later told a journalist.
By the time of the attack, Theresa knew she was being stalked. Her New York agent told her of a conversation with a man who claimed to be from the famous William Morris talent agency; a few simple questions had betrayed his lack of knowledge of film industry procedure, and the agent went on the alert, reporting the call to the police. Her mother, too, had called her to tell her Scorsese had another part for her: when no offer came, it was clear her mother had been hoaxed. Not only that, but the hoaxer now had Theresa’s address.
‘My mom has never, never given out information before,’ said Theresa a few days after the attack. ‘It’s not her fault. She just didn’t want me to miss the opportunity. She was excited that Scorsese would be calling me.’
After the warnings from her agent and her mother, she was scared and stayed with a neighbour until her husband came home. After that she took more precautions than usual, making sure that she was rarely alone in her apartment and never alone outside at night. But she did not anticipate an attack in broad daylight on a sunny morning, when she had only a few yards to go from her front door to her car.
‘I’ve always been a trusting person. When John Lennon was killed all I can remember is terrible, terrible sadness, as though a piece of my life had been taken away,’ Theresa said seven months after the attack. ‘But it didn’t really make me afraid for me. Now I do not give my phone number to anyone. I do not let anyone know where I live. If someone wants to reach me for a job, it’s strictly through my agent.
‘I now do things with other people and I always have someone with me. I’m not paranoid, but I am very, very careful.’
She re-started work as soon as she could, taking parts in three television series in the months between the attack and Jackson’s court case. She needed to work: her bills of more than $50,000 for the two and a half months she spent in hospital exceeded the limits of her health insurance. During that time she left hospital in a wheelchair and on an intravenous drip to identify Jackson as her attacker before a court.
She believed that work was therapeutic. ‘Some people can’t believe I want to go on acting after being stabbed by a nut who saw me in a film,’ she said in a newspaper interview. ‘But I feel that, though you never forget, you’ve got to carry on and be active.’
Any spare time she had went to founding an organization to help other victims of violence; she found the support system inadequate because none of the counsellors she met had themselves been through an experience similar to hers. She teamed up with a Los Angeles teacher who had been shot in her classroom, and with the backing of the police and psychiatrists they organized support counselling for other victims.
The only emotion Arthur Jackson expressed while he was held on remand was one of regret – not for stabbing Theresa, but for failing to kill her. Another prisoner told the prosecution that he was distraught when he discovered that she had lived, because that meant he had failed to fulfil his mission. He was tried for attempted murder at Santa Monica Supreme Court seven months after the attack, and found guilty. The maximum sentence, twelve years, was passed on him the following month. Theresa testified against him, saying in court: ‘I have had to endure a tremendous amount of physical pain and there will be still more pain in the coming weeks, months and possibly years.’
Because Jackson refused to accept that he was insane – he could have pleaded guilty but insane and been sentenced to a secure psychiatric institution – under the American system he went to prison (in Britain, regardless of his own opinion about his mental state, he would have been assessed and, with his history, almost certainly been sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, such as Broadmoor). The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Michael Knight, expressed disquiet after the trial about Jackson being treated as a ‘normal’ prisoner. He pointed out that, with good behaviour, Jackson would be released in eight years, and although he would be instantly deported back to Scotland ‘the son of a gun could be back in this country within a week. He’s already been deported twice, if that tells you something.’
Investigations into how Jackson managed to get a tourist visa to return to the States revealed that he had legally changed his middle name from John to Richard two years earlier. He had first been deported in 1961, after entering the States in 1955, for failing to declare that he had a history of mental illness. He arrived as a permanent immigrant, and served fourteen months in the US army, but was then discharged as unfit. He served ninety days in jail for possessing a knife, which was discovered after the secret service detained him for making threats against President Kennedy, and after he came out of jail he was taken straight to the airport and flown back to Scotland. In 1966 he returned as a tourist, and was deported for overstaying his visa, after serving another prison sentence for carrying a knife. At that stage he was treated in a Californian psychiatric hospital.
Jackson’s own lawyer had the trial delayed for a month while they collected evidence of his long-term illness from psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and the States. He said he could not think of a stronger insanity defence than Jackson’s, and described it as ‘a classic example’.
But Jackson, who listed his occupation on his British passport as ‘technician in scenario and music’, refused to allow him to run it and pleaded not guilty. He rejected diagnoses of his condition, described by a psychiatrist in court as ‘chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, and maintained that he was ‘allergic to the world’. It seems that the only time he recognized the degree of his own problems was when he was seventeen and was voluntarily admitted to a hospital in Scotland, where he asked the psychiatrist in charge of his case to ‘go into my brain and scrape the dirt off’. With an insanity defence, his lawyer hoped he could prove that he did not act with premeditated malice – that he was too ill to be responsible for his actions. The prosecutor in the case argued that Jackson’s preparations – the journey from Scotland, the purchase of the knife, the research into where Theresa lived – proved that he was capable of what is known in legal jargon as ‘malice aforethought’.
The jury took nine hours to decide that Jackson was guilty of attempted first-degree murder, not a lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon, which would have carried a maximum sentence of seven years.
Theresa Saldana wept tears of joy when Jackson got the maximum sentence. But her relief was tempered with the knowledge that Jackson would one day be released. Three years after the Saldana case, a new law was introduced to allow for the indefinite detention on a year-by-year renewable basis of deranged prisoners in California, although Jackson’s sentence pre-dated the legislation and it was therefore arguable that he was not covered by it. But before those arguments could even be aired, the law was repealed as ‘unconstitutional’, to the great dismay of Theresa Saldana and many other victims.
Jackson’s behaviour record in prison was deemed to be good, despite him sending letters and making phone calls to journalists and others, stating that his one aim in life was to fulfil the same mission: to kill Theresa. He was still referring to himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, and in one letter to a television producer he wrote: ‘I am capable of alternating between sentiment and savagery, romance and reality … Also police or FBI protection for TS won’t stop the hit squad, murder contract men, nor will bullet-proof vests.’ He was being held in the medical wing of Vacaville prison in California, where the chief psychiatrist considered him ‘extremely dangerous. He is still psychotic, still delusional, still elaborately involved with Theresa Saldana, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston and Charles Bronson.’
But despite all this, after seven years he came up for parole, and the psychiatrist’s opinion carried no weight; all that mattered was that he had behaved himself. He was not the first seriously disturbed patient to have slipped through the loophole: the parole division of the prison department estimated that about a hundred deranged prisoners had already been released.
‘The law ties our hands on this. Just because someone says they will do something, we cannot make the assumption that they will,’ said a department official.
Jackson’s psychiatrist believed it was the only assumption to make about him. He was, she said, a meticulous planner, used to waiting, and deeply regretted having botched his attempt on Theresa’s life. Shortly after his arrest he had started to write an eighty-nine page letter, in handwriting so tiny that it could hardly be read without a magnifying glass, in which he explained why he wanted to kill her.
It started with ‘Dear fondest Theresa’ and went on to explain that he was suffering from a ‘torturous love sickness in my soul for you combined with a desperate desire to escape into a beautiful world I have always dreamed of (the palaces of gardens of sweet paradise) whereby the plan was for you, Theresa, to go ahead first, then I would join you in a few months via the little green room at San Quentin.’
Another passage read, ‘I swear on the ashes of my dead mother and on the scars of Theresa Saldana that neither God nor I will rest in peace until this special request and my solemn petition has been granted.’
As the date for his potential release drew nearer Theresa Saldana reluctantly forced herself back into the limelight to fight it. By this time she had been married to her second husband, actor Phil Peters, for a few months and they were expecting their first child. Their address was a closely guarded secret, their telephone number was ex-directory and known to only a trusted handful of people. She had made a film about her own ordeal in 1984 and was still a little involved with the victim support group, but she was also intent on not letting her whole life be ruled by the horrific attack. ‘I got so over-identified with the issues and the cause,’ she said, ‘I became Theresa Saldana, The Girl Who Got Stabbed … the tragedy queen. It’s not really me to have all this depressing stuff circling round me. You know, ninety-nine per cent of my life is to smile and one per cent is this miserable situation. There is a part of me that feels really overjoyed to even be alive.’
Yet the prospect of Jackson’s imminent release was so terrifying that she made a public plea for ‘logic, decency and common sense’. ‘This is my life and I stand for other people as well … It’s so late and, you know, along the years I always believed that something would be passed. There seemed to be so many people working on so many different things. And I kept faith and believed that a law would be passed, and then a law was passed, and so recently repealed …’ she told the Los Angeles Times. ‘And then even when I got the letter about the repeal they said they weren’t going to take it as the final thing. But in the last couple of weeks all we got were very tacit and very, very specific and serious words to the effect of “Prepare yourself because he is coming out on the fifteenth of June. And there is nothing we can do.”
‘My life is in jeopardy. I’m not saying to kill this person … I’m’ not saying the reason for further detainment is punishment, not at all. I believe that we have an obligation to protect the public’s safety.’
Assurances that Jackson would again be deported to Britain were of little comfort to the actress, as she realized how easily he had been able to get back into America on previous occasions. Her pleas received wide publicity, and Jackson’s release was deferred when he was given an added 270-day sentence for damaging state property and resisting prison officers. The extra time gave the lawyers an opportunity to put together a new case against him for sending threatening letters to Theresa, and he was sentenced to another five years and eight months in prison.
It was before this second sentence began that Jackson’s story took a bizarre turn. From his prison cell he wrote to the People newspaper in London, to Scotland Yard and to the British consul in Los Angeles, claiming to have shot a man during a bank raid in London in 1967. Former Grenadier guardsman 33-year-old Anthony Fletcher was brutally gunned down by a single shot at point blank range, after courageously trapping in a cul-de-sac the robber, who had stolen £22 from a Chelsea branch of the National Westminster bank. His bravery led to him being dubbed a ‘have-a-go hero’ by the popular press, a sobriquet which has passed into common usage for any passer-by who tackles a criminal. Anthony Fletcher was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his bravery. Jackson also claimed to have taken part in another bank raid two years earlier, and said he had information on ‘a scheduled mass murderer’ in a British city.
This last claim, and his psychiatric history, led to a first reaction of disbelief, but Jackson was obviously in possession of detailed facts about the bank raids, and detectives from London flew out to interview him. They were satisfied that he knew enough to have been involved, and they reopened the case of Anthony Fletcher’s murder. After tracing thirty-five witnesses and re-examining the forensic evidence, they believed they had enough evidence to bring him to trial. If Jackson had been deported in 1990, he would have walked straight into the arms of the Metropolitan police.
But Theresa Saldana worried that he would not receive a long sentence in Britain and would soon be released to fly back to stalk her. Her campaign against him was rewarded with his second conviction, and her involvement will keep him in prison without parole until June 1996. Unless the Americans find some other way of detaining him – and Theresa would like him to stay permanently locked up in the States rather than see him handed over to Britain – he will eventually face trial here when he is released.
Friends of pretty 21-year-old American TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer were stunned by her death. Who could have gunned her down? Rebecca, they said, did not have an enemy in the world. When her murderer was arrested the following day it became clear that in his own eyes he was not her enemy but a devoted fan, bent on ‘saving’ her innocence from the wicked world.
Rebecca was an only child with parents who are a psychologist and a writer. She was doing well at school but was side-tracked into modelling by her own stunning looks. A model agency in her home town of Portland, Oregon, snapped her up at fifteen, and within a couple of years she headed for New York, where she was taken on to the books of one of the big, prestigious agencies. Her fresh-faced good looks made her a natural for teenage magazine covers. Friends from the time remember her as streetwise and confident, not tough but not frightened by the big city.
Not tall enough for fashion modelling and reluctant to limit herself to photographic modelling, she pursued her dream of becoming an actress, signing up for acting and dancing classes. She struggled, as all youngsters in the cut-throat business do; when her agent tried to let her know that she had been given a part in a CBS sitcom, My Sister Sam, her telephone was disconnected because the bill had not been paid, and the agent was forced to call at her home and tape a message to the door.
She moved to Los Angeles for the part, and found a quiet flat in a respectable, middle-class area of the city. After sharing with other models in New York she consciously chose to live on her own. But she was not lonely: she was popular on the set, she had girl friends and a few months before her death she was dating an actor who she knew from her home town.
‘We’d travel, go to parks, have picnics. She liked to horseback ride or just spend time on a mountain top. She was the only actor I’ve ever known who managed to become successful and remain unjaded,’ he said after her death. ‘She was extremely curious and spirited.’
After her exposure in the sitcom her future looked very bright. She landed a good role in a dark comedy, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, and signed to do another feature film, One Point of View. She loved the work and the laid-back Californian lifestyle.
Into this idyll stepped a 19-year-old stranger with a glossy publicity photograph of the actress he idolized. Robert Bardo, who came from Tucson, Arizona, traced his idol by hiring a private detective who checked address records at the California State Department of Motor Vehicles. (After Rebecca’s death, celebrities successfully petitioned for access to the records to be restricted.)
It was a warm Tuesday morning in July 1989 when Bardo turned up in the street outside Rebecca’s apartment block with a large manila folder under his arm, from which he pulled out her photograph from time to time. The curly-haired young man in a yellow polo shirt accosted a few passers-by, asking if they knew where she lived, and asking if the address he had for her was a house or an apartment block. Others who did not speak to him also remembered him – there was a strange and memorably disturbing quality about him.
‘He looked weird,’ said one neighbour who bumped into him twice. ‘It was strange seeing him twice. You think about it for a second, then you go your own way. That’s what you do in LA.’
Someone else described him as handling the folder containing the photograph gingerly, as though it were precious: ‘It was like it contained food and he didn’t want to turn it over.’
Shortly afterwards, another neighbour heard the sound of a shot and two screams, and then breaking glass. Rebecca Schaeffer’s body lay slumped on the doorstep of the block. Her intercom was broken, and she had come down in person to see who her caller was. A single bullet hit her in the chest and ripped through two panes of glass. By the time the neighbour reached her side there was no discernible pulse and she was pronounced dead on arrival when her body was taken to hospital. The youth in the yellow polo shirt had last been scene jogging calmly away from the scene of the crime. He disappeared down an alleyway.
Almost immediately, police and friends reached the conclusion that the murderer was a deranged fan. There could be no other motive.
‘I can only assume it was somebody who didn’t know her but was obsessed with her. I can’t imagine that anybody who really knew her would do this. She was so mature and intuitive that she would have made sure this couldn’t happen,’ said the director of her TV series.
By the following day, Bardo was back in his home town of Tucson, where police picked up reports of a man behaving bizarrely and disrupting traffic at a major road junction. They arrested Bardo. In the meantime LA police had a tip-off from a friend of Bardo’s in Tennessee, who knew that the youth had harboured a long-term obsession with the actress, had written to her, phoned her agent several times and had talked about hurting her. A photo of Bardo was faxed from Arizona to California, and the neighbours who had seen Bardo on the day of the murder identified him immediately.
At Bardo’s home the police found a collection of videos. He had everything Rebecca Schaeffer had ever appeared in. He had apparently visited her at Warner Brothers studios the year before, to deliver a five-foot high teddy bear to her. He’d confessed his love for her to a security guard, but his desire for her had tipped into hatred when he saw the character she was playing in Scenes From the Class Struggle lose her virginity on screen.
At his trial the judge refused to accept that Bardo was mentally unstable, although he had a history of mental illness. The judge, sentencing him to life without parole, said, ‘He had different motives from most people, but again most people aren’t murderers.’
Before he was given a life sentence, to be served at the notorious San Quentin prison, Bardo made a long, rambling speech to the court. ‘I do realize what I’ve done and the pain I caused and it was irreversibly wrong,’ he said. He admitted stalking his ‘goddess’ for days, ‘hoping to get the chance to say hello to her’. When he finally rang her doorbell and she appeared, he was too tongue-tied to speak – so he pulled out a gun and shot her, laughing as he did it.
‘DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU’ (#ulink_2618a8b9-0e38-5ce5-82e3-8e753d38e28e)
‘WHEN I STARTED out, I didn’t have any desire to be a great actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.’
It was Katharine Hepburn who said those words, and she was being characteristically honest. There are many celebrities who talk about their vocation, their art, the importance of their work. They are not (necessarily) phoneys: as a breed actors and actresses have a high work ethic. Theirs is a craft that can be worked on and developed and improved, and the good ones are constantly honing their natural skills and talents for the camera or the stage. But few are as ruthlessly truthful as Hepburn; they did not lie in their childhood beds and dream of attending drama classes, voice training, stage technique; they did not fantasize about early morning calls to make-up, about finding their best scenes on the cutting-room floor, about difficult and demanding directors. What they dreamed about was fame. Names in lights, top billing, adulation. Some coveted the financial rewards of stardom, others would (in the secrecy of their adolescent yearnings) have even sacrificed that for the heady taste of public adulation.
Even had they been presented with a true picture of the downside of stardom, it is unlikely that any of them would have abandoned their dreams. Years later, having fulfilled their ambitions, and well-aware of the bitter realities that come with the other trappings of celebrity, a few genuinely wonder whether the chase was worth the quarry; most would still not exchange Hollywood mansions, hot and cold running servants and an eager public dancing attendance on them for obscurity, a nine-to-five job in an office or on a factory production line, and a modest home. They may feel afraid, angry, intruded upon and at risk at different times, but the balance still weighs, they reckon, in their favour.
And then along comes a monster …
It’s true that all Hollywood stalkers are deranged, but the degree of derangement varies enormously. Some will be content to write long, rambling, nonthreatening letters; others will turn up on the doorstep with a knife or a gun. Some celebrities attract more obsessive fans than others, partly because of the nature of the parts they play and their public profile. It’s fair to say, although no research has been done into it, that every above-the-title star will have at least one stalker, and some will have many. But there seems to be no way of predicting which star will attract the very dangerous life-threatening stalker – even though there may be ways of assessing which stalker may turn nasty, which star they will be fixated on is in the lap of the gods.
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Jean Ritchie
SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE IS WATCHING, WAITING …What is it like to suffer the attentions of an obsessive fan, to be haunted by the menace of a stalker? What changes devotion into something far more sinister and how do the stars cope with the pressure?And what about the not-so-famous, the ordinary people who suddenly find themselves living in fear, stalked by a shadowy presence that is all too real?Ancell Marshall’s wife was killed by a stalker – a murder he stood trial for. Theresa Saldana will never escape the memory of the moment her stalker attacked her and nearly stabbed her to death. Vicky Caldwell had a nervous breakdown, while Lauren Barnes was eventually driven to retaliation. These and many other case histories are compelling reading.Jean Ritchie talks to the victims and their families, the counsellors, the therapists, the security experts – and the stalkers themselves – in this detailed, fascinating, sometimes chilling account of a growing and frightening phenomenon.
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_974037a7-ec95-54db-aa36-3b5ffe305413)
Fourth Estate
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Jean Ritchie 1994
Jean Ritchie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006383383
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226930
Version: 2016–11-08
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5a0866ec-721a-5c63-ac75-38f8e9a5db86)
Title Page (#uaf3a45eb-d2c8-5cbd-aea1-89aa801beb05)
Copyright (#ulink_3ec3d4d7-6615-51ff-8439-829c6d5d9717)
Introduction (#ulink_710befb8-d715-5dc2-9e93-d3aa37a282ed)
PART ONE – THE PRICE OF FAME (#ulink_17006759-5380-5479-a9aa-8b26cfbf7cda)
‘You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide’ (#ulink_4e4b5b1d-2bd1-5cc0-b4e7-9b998bc0b4b6)
‘Bang, Bang, You’re Dead’ (#ulink_b6530120-1a55-52d2-9119-3609a16cd873)
‘The Benevolent Angel of Death’ (#ulink_12f479d3-1731-52c9-a0ed-c58bac5cf20a)
‘Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You’ (#ulink_49461604-02bb-5e5a-9af8-167b26230f6b)
‘He’s Out There Somewhere’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Your Number One Fan’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO – YOU WILL SEE A STRANGER (#litres_trial_promo)
‘I’ve Had One of Those Calls’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘A Blight On Our Lives’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘The Nightmare was Real’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE – WHEN FRIENDSHIP TURNS TO FEAR (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Wherever I Went, He Followed’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘I Didn’t Want to Hurt His Feelings’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘He Has Invaded My Life’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ (#litres_trial_promo)
‘A Fatal Attraction’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FOUR – IN THE NAME OF LOVE (#litres_trial_promo)
‘The Doors Are Locked, Aren’t They, Mummy?’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART FIVE – THE STALKERS’ PERSPECTIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
‘I Just Wanted to Take Care of Her’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART SIX – REMEDIES, PRECAUTIONS AND THE LAW (#litres_trial_promo)
‘A Paper Shield’ (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_f5c342a6-ca0a-5b52-b071-605f864426a7)
‘IT’S THE NIGHTS that are the worst. I don’t know where he is, but my imagination tells me he is close at hand. In daylight I can keep the fears down; at night I am alone with the terror that he has created. If he rings me every ten minutes I think I will go mad with it; if he does not ring I worry that he is outside, watching me.’
The words of one stalking victim are echoed time and time again through the pages of this book. All stalking victims have different stories to tell, but all have one thing in common: fear. Stalking is a modern crime, a growing crime, a crime born out of loneliness and isolation. In America, where stalking has been studied and analysed far more than it has in Britain, there are an estimated 200,000 people who are being stalked, and the country’s greatest expert on the subject says that one in five women will at some time in their lives be the victim of unwanted pursuit.
In Hollywood, the most famous celebrities may have as many as five hundred people each writing ‘inappropriate’ letters to them, any one of whom may tip over the edge and become a dangerous stalker.
Pursuing celebrities is the type of stalking that makes the headlines, and for that reason it has defined the popular image of the problem. Nobody is surprised to find that a sexy young film starlet gets a barrage of kinky letters from lonely men. But stalking is not just about obsessional fans who turn up outside Hollywood mansions with knives or loaded guns in their pockets: stalking exists in all walks of life, it crosses all age and gender barriers, it knows no class distinctions. Even in California, the capital of the film industry, where the problems for celebrities are much greater than they are anywhere else in the world, celebrity stalking accounts for fewer than half of all cases. Elsewhere in America it is less than ten per cent, a figure that is probably consistent with British experience, although no comparable research has been carried out.
The dictionary definition of stalking is ‘to pursue prey stealthily’, and that is exactly what the human stalker does. His technique may be to make endless phone calls, or to send unwanted taxis and pizza deliveries, or to mail a stream of obscene letters. He may threaten violence, and he may even carry out his threats. Or he may simply, boringly, repetitively, to the point of persecution, try to insinuate himself in someone else’s life. However he does it, he is the hunter and his victim is the prey: he is a stalker.
Not all stalkers, of course, are male, there are some female stalkers about. More women become involved in celebrity stalking – pursuing an unattainable figure from a distance – than any other kind. But the majority of stalkers, more than eighty-five per cent, are men, according to American statistics. For them, stalking is connected with control; they want power over their victims and they can achieve this by frightening them, or – more simply – by knowing everything about their lives.
For the purposes of this book, stalking has been broken down into four broad categories: celebrity stalking, stalking by a complete stranger, stalking by an acquaintance and stalking by an ex-partner (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife). This last category is the largest but also the hardest to define: ex-partners often behave with irrational jealousy, and that behaviour alone does not make them into stalkers. They usually have genuine ties with their victims: there may be children in common, property in common, or at least a social life in common, and the break can be emotionally devastating, leading to a certain amount of clinging on, refusing to give up. But there comes a point when this is no longer the acceptable reaction of a grieving ex. Recognizing that point may be hard (it is hard for all stalking victims, whatever category they come into, but especially hard for this group). When there are phone calls coming at all hours day or night, when there is a car parked outside or a figure lurking in the shadows, that is stalking. Because of the severed emotional ties it is often more difficult for the victim to deal with it, and more difficult for the stalker to accept that his or her behaviour is objectionable.
Stalking by someone who is known to the victim is the second biggest category. A casual acquaintance suddenly starts to take an overwhelming interest in all the details of their victim’s life, they misinterpret small gestures of friendship into large expressions of love, they begin to write, phone, follow the person they are fixated on. As they get no encouragement they feel rejected, and that turns their love into hatred. Threats and obscenities usually follow.
This pattern is repeated by the stalkers who latch on to complete strangers, as well as by those who persecute celebrities. In both these groups, the pursuit is of an unrealistic ideal: the stranger or the celebrity is endowed with all the attributes the stalker is looking for in a partner. Their beliefs about their love-object may go off the sanity scale, but they are deeply held. Gay pop singer Boy George enjoyed the joke immensely when a woman claimed he was the father of her child. He delighted in telling the journalists outside the court in which she sued him for maintenance for the child that it would be a miracle if he was the father as ‘I have never penetrated a woman in my life.’ Yet there was a part of the woman that believed her own wild claims.
For many of these celebrity or stranger stalkers, with rejection comes anger and feelings of betrayal, which can lead to threats, obscene abuse and in some cases real violence.
Stalkers are all suffering from some degree of mental derangement, ranging from a severe psychotic illness like schizophrenia, in which the sufferer often believes he is responding to voices in his head which dictate his behaviour, to simple obsession, when behaviour can be quite normal in all other respects. This milder form is a version of more readily acceptable obsessions: there are football fanatics who plaster their bedroom walls with pictures of their favourite players and whose whole conversation and social life revolves around their team; there are railway enthusiasts who can crawl out of bed on cold wet mornings to collect train numbers at grimy stations; there are fitness freaks who suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they don’t get their daily workout. What starts as an interest and a hobby edges into a position of paramount importance; for the stalker it is the same slow build up. Many adolescents have crushes on music and film stars which are gradually superseded by real-life love affairs. Many people keep their youthful infatuations with them for life – plenty of happily married mothers and grandmothers turn up to have their heartstrings fluttered by Cliff Richard or Tom Jones in concert. But they have a sense of proportion: the rock star is a small and harmless helping of escapism. For a few, though, real life cannot or does not take the place of the fantasy, and the obsession with the star builds up until it dominates life enough to turn the fan into a fanatic, the fanatic into a stalker.
Similarly, a normal part of the business of growing up is to experience a painful love affair, to be rejected, to love unrequited from afar. Anyone who claims never to have been let down in love is probably lying or has a conveniently selective memory. Getting over it can be painful and protracted: adolescents, particularly, are inclined to feel that they will never love again. As Plato said, love is a serious mental condition: love casts out intelligence. The vast majority, of course, do get over it; for one or two, the experience assumes such epic dimensions that it dominates their lives, and the person they love becomes the focus of an obsession.
This is the more rational end of stalking, the tipping of the balance from the normal madness of love to unacceptable behaviour. Many a young person will have dialled the number of the person who is ignoring them, and then hung up. Many will have hung around the college corridors or the pubs and clubs their loved one frequents in the hope of catching a glimpse, even though they know that their affection is not returned. When the dialling of the phone number and the hanging around become a habit, then the delicate balance has shifted.
But there are much wilder shores of stalking, and these are the shores of clinical madness, where the stalker is psychotically ill. Because these stalkers dance to the tunes of their own fractured minds, they will not respond to normal reasoning or pleading, to the law, to physical threats, to anything. Imprisoning the mentally ill does not help, although holding them in secure mental hospitals is sometimes the only consolation that the victims can hope for because, as with so much psychotic illness, containment and not cure is all that can be provided.
David Nias is a clinical psychologist who lectures at London University, and who has worked at Broadmoor Hospital, a secure unit for the criminally insane, and has studied the varying degrees and effects of obsession. Many stalkers, he believes, are suffering from a condition known as De Clerembault’s Syndrome, named after the French doctor who discovered it. Sufferers put romantic constructions on to the most innocuous exchanges, eventually losing touch with reality and becoming obsessed with an unobtainable person, believing that this person reciprocates their feelings. They commonly believe that other people or things are thwarting the relationship. In this extreme form the condition is known as erotomania.
‘All the old clichés about love are true: life-long passion, madly in love, blinded by love, hopelessly in love. They are all, quite literally, true for some people. The classic symptoms are delusion,’ says Dr Nias. ‘The person who stalks a stranger, a celebrity or someone they only know slightly is usually a psychotic, carrying delusions about someone who is in a higher position socially and with whom they have very little in common. They become convinced this person is in love with them and plague their lives. They are irrational, and however hard you try to dissuade them they can come up with evidence of their own that their beliefs are true. They are, quite literally, madly in love.
‘Some doctors believe that erotomania, the delusion that one is loved by another, is a form of schizophrenia, and treat patients with major tranquillizers (anti-psychotic drugs: the name is misleading because they are not related to normal tranquillizers). If they have come to the attention of the medical profession because their behaviour has been inappropriate, they are often held in secure units until it is judged medically that they are safe to be released. But the trouble is that away from their obsession many of them seem perfectly normal, rational people.
‘They try to persuade doctors that they are over their obsession: then you visit their room and the wall is plastered with pictures or references to their victim. The most worrying aspect is that this sort of personality disorder can lead to suicide and the threat to take other lives, particularly that of their victim. Often the fantasies get sicker, more sordid and more frightening as the condition progresses.
‘The people who suffer from obsession are usually rather pathetic, unsuccessful at sexual relations. The obsession feeds their imagination. Anyone in the public eye can be selected as a target, but not only celebrities are at risk. Anyone thought of as a superior could be a victim: women could fall for their GP, priest or bank manager, men with a work colleague, a barmaid or the girl next door. There are quite a few cases in Broadmoor of patients who are dangerously in love with ordinary people.
‘Obsession and stalking can be separate, although they are close. Obsession is a very intense feeling of acute need. There is a childish level of demand for another person, a wave of inner desperation and desolation that makes the sufferer want to own the victim. Obsession affects more men than women. It can be biological, or the result of childhood traumas or problems. The difficulty with knowing whether obsessive love is dangerous is that a lot of people have suffered some form of it: the pangs of despised love, as Hamlet called it, are familiar enough. In some ways it is just an extreme of an emotion we all possess: arguably some of the greatest love affairs are obsessive, frantic and jealous. But the need to know everything about a new partner is not normal, not just an extension of passion: it is a mental disorder.
‘Stalking is often just seeing someone out of reach. Becoming fixated on a stranger is a useful way of avoiding reality – there is less chance of the fantasy being broken. It is a personality disorder, and you only really hear about it when it comes to court: at the lower levels the stalker is merely infatuated, and unless their behaviour presents a real threat to the person they love it does not come to public notice. Many do not even want to make direct contact with their love object, but some do. The sufferer will build up a fantasy world around the person and follow them to find out every detail of their lives. At first the stalker may send polite notes and flowers to try to attract their victim’s attention, but as these are ignored the stalker becomes gradually more angry. The tone of the notes becomes abusive, showing the signs of frustration that lead to aggression.
‘If the love is unrequited, the love turns to hate. Two sides of the same coin. Love letters turn into hate mail, often accompanied by horrendous threats, although these are usually only an attempt to gain attention. To many sufferers from obsessional love, the love is the peak experience of their lives. It is the only time they have fallen in love, it comes like a bolt from the blue. Often the sufferer believes obsessive behaviour is simply a way of getting through to someone, with the rationale that anyone can have anything if they try hard enough.
‘Harmless fantasy can easily turn into dangerous obsession, especially if the sufferer is a lonely person with a vivid imagination. If a man is strongly attracted to a woman he can become wildly jealous. To him she is coming and going as she pleases and yet he thinks she is his. But she doesn’t even know he exists. He feels constantly rejected and you get dysfunctional attempts at taking control of her life.’
Dr Nias confirms that there is no single effective cure. Some sufferers from obsessional love do recover spontaneously, but for many it takes twenty or more years to loosen the grip of an obsession.
‘For many it is merely a part of another disorder. The textbooks say there is no known cause and no known cure. There has been little research into this specific area, but there is also no real cure for a lot of mental disorders. Doctors may try a form of therapy which attempts to change the way in which the sufferer thinks, but many sufferers do not accept or admit that there is a problem. To them, it is obvious that the victim loves them. They are confident that in time the object of their desire will come around and accept them.
‘The law, police, court, prison have no effect. Love will conquer all. A prison sentence is useless, and a stay in a secure hospital is no better, apart from the fact that we can make the victim feel safer when the persecutor is locked up. Tragically, some victims will know no respite, because the stalker’s obsession will be lifelong and unshakeable. Unless he switches his allegiance to a new target, they will remain in the frame. Sometimes a doctor takes the place of the original victim, and they may be able to cope better, but they face the same problems. It is more than an occupational hazard, it is something a doctor dreads. A second obsession is no less binding than a first.’
The life sentence for the victim is a prognosis also given by Professor David Allen, a clinical psychologist based in Paris: ‘Being a stalking victim can be a death sentence – it is certainly a life sentence, spent looking over the shoulders. There is no cure. In extreme cases it can lead to murder, although that is very rare. For the sufferer, there is an absolute conviction that they are loved: every word, every gesture, every facial tic is interpreted as evidence of that. A simple “See you tomorrow” takes on huge significance in their minds.’
Professor Allen’s wife Michelle is a leading French psychoanalyst who has dealt professionally with stalkers and obsessives: ‘I can listen to women and men who are in the grip of an obsession with another person and I can offer them analysis and they can go into therapy, which may contain and control them, but it will not cure them. They may drop their object of desire but latch on to someone else, another victim. Nothing will shake their self-belief. There is no division between fantasy and reality. In extreme cases, life and death become blurred, too, and they become a danger, a walking time bomb.’
More studies of stalking and stalkers have been done in America than anywhere else because stalking has been accepted as a crime in the States since 1990, when California pioneered the first anti-stalking laws through its state legislature (fuelled by the enormous problems the Hollywood stars were experiencing). Since then every other state has followed suit, which makes it possible to determine and examine a specific group of people who have been found guilty of stalking offences. In Britain, some stalkers are pursued under civil law, some under criminal law, and many not at all (see ‘A Paper Shield’, pp. 319—37).
‘Most stalkers are men, and they come in all ages and from all ethnic backgrounds, and from varied social and family backgrounds,’ says Houston forensic psychologist Jerome Brown. ‘Many are relatively intelligent men with a history of inept inadequate heterosexual relationships. They are motivated by fantasies of romantic involvement with their victims, but they have no idea what ‘love’ really means. To many of them, love equals possession. At first, they usually don’t want to hurt their victims, just possess them. The thrill of the chase increases the satisfaction they feel upon “obtaining” them. They’re not able to see the person of their obsession as a real person. When the “thing” does not respond to them properly, they’re likely to get angry at it.’
Stanton Samenow, an American psychologist and author of a book called Inside the Criminal Mind says stalkers vacillate between considering themselves ‘No. 1’ and ‘nothing’.
‘The stalking is the tip of the iceberg. The stalking props up their self-esteem,’ he says. When the stalker is rejected he suffers a huge blow to his feeling of self-worth, and this, coupled with the realization that he is not going to be able to have what he wants, leads to violence.
The predominance of men among stalkers is borne out by British Telecom statistics, which show that twice as many malicious calls are made by men than by women. The only other measure of the gender profile of the British stalker is anecdotal: four out of every five cases that are reported in a newspaper involve a man stalking a woman. It could be that these receive more publicity – women are more likely to look to the police and the courts for help, and the presence of a physically powerful male stalker may actually be more threatening than the continued attentions of a female one. But, even allowing for this distortion, it is likely that we follow the American pattern and have a much higher number of males stalking females than the other way round.
‘Women who are rejected may act destructively towards themselves, or turn to others for nurturing to get over the rejection. Men use aggression to restore the equilibrium of their self-esteem,’ says New York forensic psychologist Dr James Wulach.
Almost all stalking has an underlying sexual motive, although there are cases where the stalker is simply trying to get into the victim’s life for other reasons, usually associated with feelings of prestige and identity: they want the same role as their victim, they want to belong to the same social group/family/work organization (see the cases of Bob and Kathleen Krueger and Janey Buchan).
Analysis of the backgrounds of stalkers has shown that although they come from across all levels of society (with a slight predominance of better-educated individuals) one common factor appears to be an absence of a father figure in their childhood, plus a hot-and-cold relationship with their mothers, sometimes adored and sometimes ignored. With women stalkers (who generally latch on to celebrities or strangers) there is a general absence of any loving relationship in adult life. Women stalkers are usually more clearly recognizable as social inadequates; men may be holding down good jobs and have an outwardly successful life.
This book looks at every type of stalking, from the sort of harassment that is more of a nuisance than anything else, to the most sinister and dangerous stalking of all – that which ends in death.
PART ONE (#ulink_acebc0b9-7b9e-5d88-a99c-097f10a1733f)
THE PRICE OF FAME (#ulink_acebc0b9-7b9e-5d88-a99c-097f10a1733f)
‘YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE’ (#ulink_d00525a5-98e2-513f-8297-fc2bc801a573)
A COYOTE’S HEAD, some dog’s teeth, a bed pan, a syringe of blood, a toy submarine, a half-eaten chocolate bar, eight tubes of red lipstick, a shampoo coupon, a disposable razor, a photograph of the victim’s home, a map of the victim’s home town and a set of medical photographs of corpses with the victim’s face pasted over the head – this is just a small sample of the items sent to Hollywood celebrities in their mail.
The kind of letters they get are just as bizarre:
I am afraid I made a mistake when I told you I was your father. Some guy showed me a picture of you and your father standing together when you got your award. I was so proud when I thought I was your pop. I guess that means that my daughter ain’t your sister either … I asked your manager to borrow ten thousand dollars, I hope she lets me have it. Before I go I just want to say that the only reason I thought I was your pop was because I used to go with a person that looked like you
wrote a middle-aged man to a young pop singer.
Another man wrote to a female celebrity:
Hello darling this is youre New friend … we will soon be together for our love honey. I will write and mail some lovely photo of myself okay. I will write to you Soon, have lovely Easter time hoping to correspond … here is a postcard for you … honey how are you doing … wishing to correspond with you Soon … hoping we do some camping and Barbecueing Soon okay.
Yet another fan wrote to a television personality:
I would like to Have lots of pictures of you sex symBol woman like you are all the times if you don’t mine at all if you take off your clotHes for me and I can see wHat you Got to the world then ever that love any How I would like to know How LonG is your breast anyHow I would like to know How mucH milk Do your carry in your Breast anyHow I would like to know How far does your Breast stick out on you anyHow I by playBoy Books all the times … I would like you to put up your legs and take pictures of you in the nude … I would like Have larGe pictures of you in tHe nude lots of them then ever were so I will take with me and have lots of women in tHe nude I like sex symBols womens to look at all the times.
One habitual letter-writer to a Hollywood female celebrity was a mental patient who had been found guilty of committing a murder, and who had also been involved in a gunfight with police after escaping from hospital, stealing a gun and ammunition and attacking the police who he believed were starving the star. He wrote afterwards:
Please disregard the other letter I sent to you. Disregard this letter if your are married or have a boyfriend as I don’t want to break up an existing relationship. I would like to be one of the following to me a) a lover, b) a girlfriend or c) a wife. I want it to be a forever thing, if we have faith in each other and don’t cheat. You must fulfil the following: 1) you must be vegetarian 2) you must not have another boyfriend 3) you must not hold hands or do anything beyond that point with another unless I give you permission 4) I believe in birth control devices and (foetus removal) abortion, to take the fear away form women so they can have a complete orgasm. Men never have to worry because they don’t have the baby. 5) You must not wear pants unless the temperature drops below 50 degrees F or you engage in hazardous work (like coal mining) 6) you can view pornographic movies.
… I was in a gunfight with the police because I thought you didn’t have to eat food. I was real sick at the time. I was arrested but should be getting out soon. I’m in a hospital for observation. I was wounded as was one policeman. We are both okay now. A bystander was wounded by another policeman … Let’s sit in a little room together. Let’s drive to the end of the world. Let’s look in each others eyes. Let’s magnetically attract each other from close up. Let’s talk till we want each other more than anyone else … Please call or write or come here by February 6th or else I’ll have to look for someone else …
One famous actor’s wife received the following letter from a woman who claimed the actor was father of her child:
I know that Jason is my beautiful baby and that [the star] is the daddy. I never been in love and I always been a queen … I don’t know much of anything other than the fact I love my son and [the star] very much. I don’t know very much about life I was never told about life or how to love or be loved … I know that I don’t deserve a man like [the star]. I know that I hurt him so much by writing to people all over the world about his son … Tell him to come get Jason and take him Home with you and the boys.
These samples of the sort of letters that pour constantly into the homes and offices of major stars are taken from the archives of Gavin de Becker Inc., a Los Angeles-based security consultation agency – the security consultation agency for California’s hundreds of celebrities, where the problem of stalking has been known about for over thirty years. It was in the 1980s that the threats to stars – and attacks on some – escalated, and de Becker’s business boomed. Unlike so many security firms, de Becker offers far more than just muscle: he collects, files and classifies all the suspicious mail his clients receive; he analyses the content of it through a computer program; he sorts out the really dangerous ‘fans’ and he goes into reverse-stalking mode – his staff track down and watch the movements of any stalker they regard as likely to carry out threats to attack celebrities. His experience coupled with the help he has had from the leading medical expert in the world on the subject of stalkers, Dr Park Dietz, means that he can frequently anticipate the actions of a deranged fan. He worked hard to get the law changed for the protection of his clients, but even before stalking was criminalized in California, de Becker was able to advise police forces just how they could nail stalkers under obscure and forgotten laws.
When Dr Dietz, who is clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences at the School of Medicine at the University of California, was called in to prepare a 600-page report for the US government on ‘Mentally Disordered Offenders in Pursuit of Celebrities and Politicians’, it was to de Becker’s files that he turned for the raw material he needed for his five years of research. De Becker has more than 200,000 items of correspondence on file, all indexed and cross-indexed to show up which stalkers were pursuing more than one celebrity.
Some of the really big Hollywood names have as many as five hundred individuals writing to them what de Becker classifies as ‘inappropriate’ letters (a top star will regularly receive as many as 4,000 genuine fan letters per month). All the staff in his clients’ offices are primed to send on to him any mail that is sinister, disjointed, bizarre, unreasonable or threatening, and to help them decide what falls into these categories they are specifically asked to be on the lookout for letters containing references to death, suicide, weapons, assassins, obsessive love or special destiny.
Dietz and colleagues analysed a scientifically chosen sample of mail from persistent letter writers in a bid to see if they could draw up a profile of the kind of writer who actually shows up at the celebrity’s home or workplace, and the conclusions are fascinating.
Obviously, those who make a direct attempt to speak or make physical contact with the celebrity are potentially far more dangerous than those who merely write letters, however incoherent, threatening and frightening the letters may be.
Letter writers who send mail from different addresses are more likely to be dangerous than those who consistently post their letters in the same place – the ones who are moving around may already be trying to track down the celebrity or, as the survey conclusion puts it, ‘travelling in a random pattern as they become increasingly frantic to find the celebrity, to escape their persecutors or for other unexplained reasons’. (Both Mark Chapman and John Hinckley travelled frantically in the days leading up to the assassination of John Lennon and the attempt on President Reagan’s life.)
Those who are likely to try to make contact with the star write significantly more letters to their idols, in fact they will usually send twice as many letters as other ‘inappropriate’ letter writers, although their attempts to get physically close to their victim may start after only one or two letters. Anyone who writes more than ten letters and keeps on writing for more than a year is potentially dangerous. They don’t write significantly longer letters though; most of these ‘inappropriate’ letters are long by normal standards, with six and a half pages a typical length (and one, in de Becker’s files, running to over two thousand pages).
The writers who want to marry, have sex with or have children with the celebrity turn out to be less potentially dangerous than those who simply expressed a strong desire to meet the star face-to-face, with no sexual propositions. And while almost a quarter of all writers made threats in their letters, this was found not to influence whether they actually turned up outside the celebrity’s home or office – perhaps the most important finding of the research.
There were some other interesting conclusions: anyone who writes on regular tablet-sized note paper is less dangerous, anyone who attempts to instil shame into the celebrity is less dangerous and anybody who repeatedly mentions other public figures is not a high level threat.
The research bore out one of Dietz’s earlier theories: that stalkers who write hate mail are less dangerous than those who write to stars romantically. ‘The person who sends hate mail is achieving their catharsis from putting the note in the mail,’ he said. The fan who believes he is destined to have a romance with the celebrity, on the other hand, will experience nothing but disappointment and rejection, and is more liable to have aggression born of frustration. Male stalkers are more likely to ‘act it out in a violent way’ says Dietz, but adds that this does not mean that women letter writers should be ignored. The same criteria for deciding which ones are likely to attack a celebrity apply to women as well as to men, it is simply that more men match the criteria.
Dr Dietz is accepted as the top world authority on stalking, and works as a consultant to a number of big American companies, helping them identify potentially dangerous employees. He has appeared as an expert witness at numerous trials, including those of John Hinckley and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and is known to some sections of the American press as ‘the FBI’s premier shrink’. Legend has it that he was the inspiration behind Thomas Harris’s book The Silence of the Lambs. He became fascinated by the criminal mind as a student after reading a book by Britain’s famous forensic pathologist Professor Keith Simpson.
He sees the rise of celebrity stalking as moving in parallel with the growth of television and video, bringing ever more intimate images of stars into the homes of potentially obsessed fans. It is now possible to replay on video, in the privacy of a bedroom, the exact moment in a film or TV programme when the stalker imagines the star is talking directly to him. It is not hard, for the determined stalker, to track down a star. ‘There’s an entire industry devoted to selling proximity to celebrities. There are books published on how to call and write famous people. In Hollywood there are tours to stars’ homes, and magazines often give overly personal information about stars. And stars themselves often reveal overly personal information in publicity interviews such as talk shows,’ he says.
In Britain and the rest of Europe, as well as America, a whole new ‘profession’ has been born from the public’s obsession with the famous, and we even have a new word for it: paparazzi. These are photographers who earn their living hanging around stars, always hopeful of a compromising or in some way interesting picture to sell to the ever-hungry newspapers and magazines. Some of them have grown rich from their dedication to hanging around outside nightclubs until the early hours of the morning. While the celebrities claim, perhaps genuinely, to be distressed by this level of media intrusion, there is a peculiarly symbiotic relationship between the two camps. The line between stardom and obscurity is a thin one, easily crossed; celebrities have been known to go back inside a club or hotel when there were no photographers waiting for them, and emerge again at the pop of a flashbulb.
Professor Dietz says that there has been more celebrity stalking in the last ten years than in the whole of previous show business history: ‘We have more celebrities at risk than ever before. The reason is … because of how visible and personal they become. We have close-ups of every glamorous performance, or even a personal interview about someone’s favourite restaurant or artistic likes. And the more personal and intimate the media portrayal, the more that mentally disordered people will misinterpret this as something personal for them.’
He has known instances where the mentally ill stalker has proved more adept at locating a celebrity than the police or mental health professionals who were trying to warn the star. The stalker, he explained, may have nothing else to do but pursue the career of the star, filing away every kernel of information they can glean. As Gavin de Becker once ruefully observed, the people he monitors may be unbalanced but they are not idiots: at least they CAN write letters.
Dr Dietz understands but does not approve of the feelings of reciprocation celebrities have towards their fans. Just as they court the attentions of the media, many stars accept the ‘where would you be without us’ attitude of a large number of fans. They may, as the actor Tom Conti puts it, regard obsessional fans as ‘a complete pain in the butt’, but on another level they feel grateful to their public who have, as they are constantly being reminded, given them the wealth, security and self-esteem that go with fame. What they fail to do, until they have the help of an expert like de Becker, is differentiate between the ‘normal’ fan and the potential stalker.
Dr Dietz believes the first and foremost rule for any star is not to respond to the stalker, and if he had his way famous people would never send out photographs of themselves, would certainly never sign them ‘with love from’ and would reduce the frequency with which they answer their fan mail.
‘The best thing a celebrity can do is to vanish as far as their private lives are concerned,’ he says. He believes court action against a stalker is a last resort, to be taken only when life is in danger.
‘The one thing that is certain to guarantee persistence is to respond on the level he seeks.
‘I want people to understand that nut mail is not harmless and that waiting for threats is not appropriate. Customarily, people who do not know anything about this will say “Well, we don’t have to worry about this person. He’s mentally ill, and he hasn’t made a direct threat.” The truth is that direct threats are not associated with whether or not people make attacks. On the other hand, several kinds of nonthreatening but inappropriate communications have a definite relationship to attacks.’
Dr Dietz does not give advice directly to Hollywood stars about how to avoid or deal with stalkers, but to their security consultants, like Gavin de Becker. The stars themselves, he believes, are difficult to advise because they refuse to accept that they cannot act like normal people and stay safe. It is left to de Becker to put Dietz’s theories – and his own, because he has been in the business long enough to have drawn some firm conclusions about celebrity stalkers – into a cogent code of practice for stars.
De Becker (who has not co-operated with the writing of this book) has a staff of over thirty people constantly monitoring the letters, phone calls, domestic security arrangements and public appearance plans of more than a hundred of the most famous people in the world. He does not name names, but his clientele – some of whom pay him half a million dollars a year – is believed to include Robert Redford, Michael J. Fox, John Travolta, Elizabeth Taylor, Tina Turner, Jane Fonda, Joan Rivers, Cher, Warren Beatty, Sheena Easton, Dolly Parton, Madonna, Olivia Newton John, Jessica Lange, Shaun Cassidy and Victoria Principal. It is almost easier to name the Hollywood stars who are not clients; Frank Sinatra and Sylvester Stallone head that, much shorter, list.
He came into the business after high school, when he got a job helping out with protection for Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. He was young and inexperienced but he learned fast, and he soon learned that what stars need is something much more sophisticated than being ringed by a posse of muscle-bound bodyguards. The enemy was cleverer than that; stalkers have proved they can get over barbed wire or past trained guard dogs, and they have even been prepared to take jobs with telephone companies to get access to unlisted phone numbers. Others have been taken on as security guards for their stars’ concerts; when de Becker discovers this he makes sure they are moved to low security areas. At least one stalker has applied for a job directly to the celebrity, using an assumed name.
De Becker sorts the threats delivered to his clients into three categories: harmless ones, serious ones which need to be monitored and urgent ones. About twenty-five per cent of this last group actually show up outside the celebrity’s home or office, although very few are able to commit any act that gets them arrested or their names into the newspapers – de Becker’s men are there to thwart them. There have been occasions when a stalker has turned up at Los Angeles airport and found himself being driven to his hotel, unknowingly, by one of de Becker’s staff. Others have attended concerts without realizing that the ‘fans’ sitting on either side of them work for de Becker.
Gavin de Becker agrees with Dietz that the rise in the stalking phenomenon is associated with the familiarity that television breeds. ‘If you are in the public eye – whether it’s the local newscaster or Jackie Onassis, whether your audience is 10,000 or one billion – someone will react in an unpredictable and inappropriate way,’ he said. ‘Today you have an entire sub-population who relate more to television characters – soap opera stars and such – than they do to real people.’
He works hard at understanding his adversaries, the stalkers. After the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer (not one of his clients) he said: ‘This killing … like the attack on Theresa Saldana, involved somewhat obscure and unusual target selection. This was not Victoria Principal or Madonna. This was somebody with a far smaller audience. There is a dynamic which says “Whitney Houston is for everyone, but you’re for me.”’
He also sees celebrity stalking as a particularly American phenomenon, born not just out of the many stars who are centred on Hollywood but also out of the American ethic. ‘We are a nation that gives rise to and authenticates virtually unlimited expectations … We are taught to feel that if we work hard we can do anything and be anything. And very few people want to be ordinary … Some people will do anything to be recognized. It’s part of the American myth that anybody can be unique and remarkable and important.’
His own observations lead him to assert that stalkers are at their most dangerous between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. As Dietz’s research into the de Becker archives shows, only five per cent of all persistent letter writers do so anonymously, so de Becker’s staff have few problems tracing the potentially dangerous ones. If they track them down to a psychiatric institution or a prison, the authorities are notified and attempts are made to ensure they are not released.
The most dangerous threats, Dietz found, were the specific ones; those which gave a time and a place for the attack on the celebrity. De Becker always takes those very seriously.
He accepts that the stars he looks after do not want to cut themselves off entirely from their public, and will probably never agree to retiring away from the spotlight as much as, perhaps, Dr Dietz would suggest they do. One part of de Becker’s job he sees as counselling them to live with the ever-present stalking threat. He calls it his ‘you don’t have to change your life when you get a dead chicken in the mail’ message.
There are things that should be done, though, and de Becker is not the only security man dispensing advice. Homes and cars should never be bought in the celebrity’s own name (stars should set up trust funds to handle impersonally those sort of purchases), phone numbers should never be listed in their names, even as ex-directory numbers, because the leaks from telephone companies are unstoppable. All bills and paperwork should be handled through an agent’s office.
The police in Los Angeles are probably better equipped to deal with stalkers than any other force in the world, simply because they have had so much more experience of celebrity stalking than any other city. Since 1991 the Los Angeles Police Department has had a Threat Management Unit which deals exclusively with stalkers, although not all of them are pursuing stars. In the first three years of its operation the unit dealt with 200 cases.
The FBI, too, has had to wake up to the threat caused by stalkers, and has become involved in some investigations which mirror the kind of work de Becker is doing privately. When Stephanie Zimbalist, a Hollywood actress who starred in the TV series Remington Steele, received 212 intimidating letters from a stalker, it was FBI agent Karen Gardner who was assigned to the case. FBI interest in stalking dates from 1989 and the death of Rebecca Schaeffer; before that local police departments had handled it. But by the late 1980s the number of stalking cases had escalated so greatly that the national agency realized it would have to get involved, and the Stephanie Zimbalist case was one of their first triumphs. The fact that the letter writer, who always signed himself ‘Your Secret Admirer’, mentioned the FBI in several of the letters was a spur to them to take on the investigation.
The stalker gave great detail in his letters about Stephanie’s movements. He not only knew the dates and times of her visits to other cities, but he could even specify which floor of the hotel she stayed on. His information was so compellingly accurate that Stephanie stopped making any public appearances; her stalker simply sent her more chilling letters: ‘… following you around different cities, waiting for you at the hotel, seeing you at the theatre, looking for you late at night; these have become the most important things in my life … My continued patience depends on at least being able to see you on the road.’ In another letter he wrote, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’
In Ronald Kessler’s book The FBI, Karen Gardner reveals how she painstakingly assembled any clues the stalker had given about his whereabouts in any of his letters. She matched flight passenger lists and hotel guest lists until she was able to identify the stalker: a lonely 42-year-old bachelor who lived with his elderly mother. He appeared to be a harmless if disturbed fan, but when his room was searched, amongst the videos of Stephanie and a large collection of magazine articles about her, there was a gun. He pleaded guilty to mailing threatening communications, and was given a two-year sentence and ordered to have psychiatric counselling, as well as being ordered to keep away from Stephanie and her family.
At present in Britain there is no equivalent of a Gavin de Becker, and there has been no funding for research into stalking as there has for Dr Dietz and his colleagues in the States. Show business stars here can get straightforward security advice about their homes and their business premises, and a lot of the ‘rules’ for dealing with fans come down to common sense. The major television companies, approached for this book, deny that they have encountered the problem on behalf of their stars, and have not issued any guidelines about coping with unwanted attentions, but this defence is probably in itself part of a deliberate strategy. There is no doubt that a television company like Granada, which fields the long-running and phenomenally popular soap Coronation Street, has been aware of the danger of stalkers for years now. There may well not have been a policy document enshrining their tactics for dealing with the danger, but there will have been discussion of it. Talking publicly about the problem is seen as counterproductive, both here and in America; publicity about stalking can have a copycat effect.
If the problem continues to grow at its present rate (it’s increasing in America, and most British crime patterns follow America with a lag of about ten years), then it would be sensible for the big show business agents and television stations to start thinking about it more constructively. Out there, at any moment, someone, somewhere, is picking up a pen to write what Dr Park Dietz calls, with academic restraint, ‘an inappropriate communication’. And if they are writing it on a page of paper torn from an exercise book, and they have been writing to ‘their’ star for more than a year, and they are posting the letters from different areas of the country, then their ‘victim’ could be in for a very bumpy time.
‘It will only be a matter of time before we have a stalker here in Britain who tips over into extreme violence,’ predicts Dr David Nias.
‘BANG, BANG, YOU’RE DEAD’ (#ulink_12e69cb8-e978-5331-9130-21f9cd0f5207)
THE EIGHTH OF DECEMBER 1980 was the day that stalking was blasted into public awareness by a snub-nosed five-shot revolver. As John Lennon followed his wife back into the Dakota Building, the famous New York apartment block where they lived, a fat bespectacled youth called Mark Chapman approached him. Chapman had for a few days been one of the regular fans who hung around hoping to glimpse the ex-Beatle, but by 8.30 p.m. on a cold dark night the others had all drifted away. The doorman of the exclusive apartment block had been chatting normally to the young man only minutes before, and said afterwards that Chapman was calm and rational.
As Yoko Ono swept passed him Chapman said ‘Hello’. Lennon, who was behind her, stared for a few seconds at his nemesis. Earlier that day he had signed his autograph on an album sleeve for Chapman, but he showed no sign of recognition. As Lennon started to enter the building Chapman stepped sideways, pulled the pistol from his pocket, held it straight in front of him with both arms outstretched, and fired all five bullets at his hero. The two bullets that hit Lennon in the back caused him to spin round, and two more ripped into his chest. One went wide of the target.
The most famous pop star in the world staggered up five steps to the Dakota office, where he collapsed in front of the night-duty man. The man who was about to become one of the most famous assassins in the world dropped his gun and stepped back into the shadows. He did not try to run away, but calmly pulled out his well-thumbed copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and started to read it while he waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.
The news of John Lennon’s death flew electronically around the world, and everywhere there was a reaction of shock. The Dakota was besieged by fans and inundated with flowers, radio stations played Lennon music for twenty-four hours a day and a worldwide ten-minute silent vigil was held six days later.
But while Lennon fans were stupefied by the death of the man they regarded as the next thing to God, others around the world were shocked by something else: the man who had murdered Lennon was one of his fans. The killer was a devotee of his, one of those who claimed to worship him. To those outside the closed world of megastardom, it seemed preposterous. Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated, but there was some perverted political sense to their killings. It would have been easier to comprehend if Lennon’s killer had been bent on attracting international attention to some cause or other, if the murder had been a kamikaze publicity stunt. But the only thing that Chapman wanted to draw attention to was himself.
The risk from deranged fans had been known for years to those in the public eye. They received nutty mail in with the thousands of genuine, innocent adoring fan letters; they received death threats, they felt uneasy about certain persistent hangers-on at their gates. But it was Lennon’s death that publicly marked the extent of the risk, and brought celebrity stalking into the open. It was Lennon’s death that floodlit the dark, strange, obsessional world of the fanatical fan.
Mark Chapman’s decision to kill his hero John Lennon may have been triggered by a perceptive article in Esquire magazine, published in October 1980. The piece examined Lennon’s life, which was that of an eccentric semi-recluse, dominated by his Japanese wife Yoko. Their married life was bizarre, their relationship with their son Sean (born by Caesarean operation so that his birth date was the same as his father’s) was unconventional. The magazine article examined how Lennon’s life measured up to the peace and love philosophy that he had expounded for so long, and found it wanting. He did not emerge as an idealist who put his money where his mouth was, but as an extremely rich 40-year-old who watched daytime television and amused himself speculating in property.
Many devoted fans must have read the article and rejected it, others will have felt betrayed by Lennon. Critics of John and Yoko will have felt vindicated. But Chapman went further. He felt so deeply upset by his icon that he decided to kill him. It took a few weeks, but he managed it – one of the few times that Mark Chapman lived up to his own expectations.
Chapman was twenty-five at the time he killed Lennon. He was an unremarkable-looking young man who had managed to conceal the full extent of his mental disturbance from a lot of people for a long time. The son of a nurse and an ex-army sergeant, who divorced when he was still a child, he was born in Texas and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, alienating his family in his early teens when he adopted a hippie lifestyle and experimented with marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and barbiturates. He acquired a criminal record for minor offences, most of them connected with drugs. During these years he idolized Lennon. At seventeen he cleaned up his act after he claimed to have met Jesus Christ, who came into his room and stood by his left knee, starting a tingling which spread ‘from the tip of my toe to the top of my head’. Chapman became a smartly dressed, clean-shaven, short-haired Bible freak, conventionally dressed apart from the large cross he always hung around his neck. He dropped out of school – where his record had not been good – to follow Christ. He joined a Pentecostal church, and walked the streets accosting passers-by and trying to convert them. His Christianity was fundamental: God represented the forces of good and the devil represented the forces of evil, and the world was a battleground in which the two sides fought each other. His feelings about Lennon became ambivalent; on one hand he still listened to and enjoyed the music, but on the other he suspected Lennon of being the anti-Christ because he had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
Chapman became involved with the YMCA, and attended their summer camps, acting as a counsellor to young children. He felt a great rapport with children, and was popular with them. When he felt his Christian calling was bigger and that he should be doing something more dramatic for his faith, in 1976 he went to Beirut with a group of other volunteers from the YMCA, but was rapidly recalled back to the States because of the war in the Lebanon.
At this stage Chapman was, by his own lights, doing well. He had an attractive, bright girlfriend who shared his evangelical Christianity. He was very well thought of by the YMCA bosses, and it was at their suggestion that he went, with his girlfriend, to college in Tennessee in the hope of getting some qualifications so that he could take up a full-time post with the organization. But he hated academic work, and before the first term was over he had had a breakdown, walking out on the course and his girlfriend. He blamed the staff and the other pupils, describing them as ‘phoneys’ – the favourite description used by Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye, for his enemies. The book, a seminal work about teenage alienation from the adult world, spoke to Chapman at a deep level, and he identified with the hero who believed that childish innocence was more precious than maturity.
His family were not sympathetic after he dropped out and Chapman, twenty-one years old at the time, found a job as a security guard to support himself. He was given some rudimentary training in the use of a pistol; Chapman proved to be a good marksman. But being a security guard was, he felt, only a stop gap, and in a desperate bid to get some better qualifications he enrolled once more in college. When he failed to keep up with the academic work once again he felt a complete failure, and decided that he would end his own life. But he wanted to do it in style and in his own time; he had read somewhere that the Hawaiian islands were as close to paradise as you can get on earth, so he decided to commit suicide only after he had visited them.
Six months later, having travelled all around the islands, he decided that the appointed time had come, and fixed a hosepipe from the exhaust of his car. But he was no more competent at suicide than he was at college work; he was found and taken to hospital. After his physical problems were sorted out he was transferred to a psychiatric ward where he was treated for severe neurotic depression, a diagnosis which shows how clever he was at masking the extent of his symptoms, because by this time Chapman was certainly psychotic. He was preoccupied by the fight between God and the devil, which he hallucinated about constantly. He believed his brain could pick up the commands of the opposing armies, so that he refused a confusion of signals urging him to do good and then to do evil.
Perhaps he recognized his own need for help and treatment: when he was discharged he took an undemanding clerical job in the hospital and worked as a volunteer in the psychiatric unit. He saved his earnings assiduously, and started to plan a six-week holiday, in which he intended to see as much as possible of the world. The travel agent who helped him plan his holiday, which started in Tokyo, was a Japanese girl working in a Honolulu agency. She was the daughter of a prosperous baker. While he was away Chapman sent her postcards, and when he returned they started going out together. Gloria was a Buddhist who believed in fortune-telling and astrology, a combination at odds with Chapman’s born-again evangelical Christian faith, but theirs was a genuine romance and in June 1979 they were married.
Gloria had a comfortable life; her father was wealthy and she had her own salary. Chapman, who was still working at the hospital, began to enjoy a lifestyle he had never previously aspired to. He harboured dreams of grandeur, seeing himself as an art connoisseur. But his taste in pictures was esoteric and no doubt governed by the religious battleground his brain had become; he coveted a Salvador Dali representation of the crucifixion of Christ overlaid with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Death was becoming a fixation of his.
By the time he had been married for six months, Chapman had walked out on his job at the hospital in a fit of pique because he did not get a promotion he wanted. He became a security guard again: it was a job which gave him less responsibility and paid him less money, and he recognized it as a downward step. Money was no problem, though, because he had access to a shared account with Gloria.
For the whole of 1980 Chapman’s behaviour was odd, although obviously not odd enough to alert anybody. He bullied Gloria, was inordinately possessive about her, and was extravagant with their money, spending far more than he contributed to the household. Opposite the apartment where he and Gloria lived was an office of the Church of Scientology, a cult which recruits with promises of self-improvement. Chapman disapproved of the organization, and could be seen marching up and down repeatedly outside their offices, muttering to himself. The office began to receive threatening phone calls, sometimes as many as forty in a day. The phone would ring, the receiver be picked up, and a male voice would whisper ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead.’ Chapman later admitted he was the caller.
At home Gloria was becoming increasingly worried about him. He had always played lots of Lennon music, but the signs were there that he was developing into more than a fan. In August he wrote to a friend, said he was going to New York on a mission, and gave his address as the Dakota. His beloved Bible had an addition that he had scrawled in himself: ‘The Gospel According to John’ became ‘The Gospel According to John Lennon’. He read everything he could get his hands on about the star. After reading the Esquire article in October, his attitudes to Lennon hardened. He would sit in a darkened room, naked, in the lotus position, listening to speeded-up Beatles and Lennon tapes, and chanting ‘John Lennon, I’m going to kill you.’
‘It was hideous,’ he said later from his prison cell at Attica, ‘I would strip naked, gritting my teeth and summoning the devil and wild things into my mind. I was sending out telegrams to Satan, “Give me the opportunity to kill John Lennon.”’
He had, he would reveal later in prison, already thought about and discounted killing Jackie Onassis, Ronald Reagan, David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. But once he hit on Lennon, everything he read and heard about the man whose music he revered confirmed that Lennon was ‘a phoney’. There was a time when Chapman’s delusions made him believe he was Lennon: when he gave up his job on 23 October he signed off as John Lennon, then scored the name out. But more telling, and more fundamental, was the belief that he was Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye.
Four days after finishing at work, Chapman bought a gun. It was not hard. He walked into a shop in Honolulu where the slogan above the door said ‘Buy a gun and get a bang out of life’ He paid $169.00 for .38 calibre pistol, which he chose because it was small enough to conceal in a pocket. He flew to New York on a one-way ticket, telling his wife Gloria that he was going ‘to make things different’. Arriving on 30 October, he became Holden Caulfield, retracing his fictional hero’s steps through the city with his well-thumbed copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his pocket. He went to the spots in Central Park that Salinger mentioned in the book and he went to the Museum of Natural History, another place Caulfield visited.
In between his pilgrimages, he joined the small knot of fans who hung around the Dakota building, hoping for a glimpse of their idol. He moved hotels, to be nearer to his stakeout, never giving any clue to the others that he was any different from them in his devotion to the star. He was even ‘normal’ enough to go out on a date with a girl he met in Central Park, where she worked in a café. The only clue she had about his state of mind came when he angrily lashed out at New York gun laws: he had discovered he could not buy bullets in the city. He contacted an old schoolfriend, a policeman back in his home state, Georgia, who agreed to supply him with ammunition. He flew to Atlanta to collect five hollow-nosed dumdum bullets.
Back in New York, Chapman was listening hard to the warring factions in his head. One side told him to kill Lennon, the other told him not to. The first victory went to the goodies: he phoned Gloria in Honolulu and told her that coming to New York had been a mistake. He revealed to her that he had been on a mission to kill Lennon – it was the first she had heard of his plans – but that he had won ‘a great victory’ and was on his way home. For three weeks he sat around the Honolulu apartment watching television. On the wall of the apartment was a plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments, and as he walked past it Chapman saw ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ leap out at him; a sign, he believed.
But the battle was still raging and he needed to get back to New York, to be near Lennon. He told Gloria that he had thrown the gun and the bullets into the sea, and that she was not to worry that he would do anything silly. He even made an appointment with a psychotherapist who had treated him before for depression, but he never turned up. When he should have been getting professional help coping with his delusions, he was on a plane to New York.
He stayed at the YMCA for the first night, staking out the Dakota during the days. His second day in New York was, probably more by coincidence than planning, Pearl Harbor day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on the American fleet which led to the US entering the Second World War. Both Lennon and Chapman had Japanese wives. That night, the eve of Lennon’s assassination, he went into his Holden Caulfield role-playing mode again. He moved from the YMCA to a hotel, booking a room for seven nights on his Visa card. On a table he laid out his must valued possessions: tapes by the Beatles and by guitarist Todd Rundgren, his New Testament in which he had written ‘Holden Caulfield’, a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and some photos of himself when he worked at YMCA summer camps with young children. Then, like Caulfield, he hired a prostitute and re-enacted a scene from the book: talking to the girl, massaging her and being given a massage, but not having sex.
The next day, on his way to the Dakota, he bought a new copy of the book. On the title page he wrote ‘This is my statement.’ He took a copy of Lennon’s new album, Double Fantasy, and was mingling with the other fans by lunchtime. He had dressed carefully for the cold New York winter, wearing long thermal underwear, a coat buttoned up to the neck and a Russian fur hat. With his chubby cheeks he looked as though he might be a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain. The first member of the Lennon clan who he saw was Sean, John’s 5-year-old son, who came out of the Dakota with his nanny. Holden Caulfield liked kids, so did Mark Chapman. It was another fan, one of the regulars, who introduced Sean to Chapman, who knelt on one knee before the little boy and put his hand in the child’s. He told Sean he had come all the way from Hawaii, and that he was honoured to meet him. Then he added that Sean should take care of his runny nose. ‘You wouldn’t want to get sick and miss Christmas,’ said the man who was planning to make sure there would be no happy family gathering in the Lennon apartment on Christmas Day that year. Afterwards Chapman described Sean as ‘the cutest little boy I have ever seen’. It was 5.00 in the afternoon when Lennon first appeared, and all Chapman did was thrust his copy of Double Fantasy in front of the star for an autograph. ‘John Lennon, December 1980’ was scrawled across the cover. An amateur photographer, Paul Goresh, who was hanging around hoping to get some good pictures, took one of Lennon with Chapman in the background; it would later appear all around the world.
The other fans got tired and drifted away. At 8.00 p.m. Goresh, who had been chatting with Chapman, said he was calling it a day. Chapman tried to persuade him to stay: ‘You never know, something might happen. He might go to Spain or something tonight – and you will never see him again.’
It was as near as he could get to inviting Goresh to record on film the murder of John Lennon. The photographer did not pick up on it, and missed the scoop of a lifetime. For a couple of hours Chapman chatted with the Cuban doorman at the building. He seemed, the doorman said later, sane and normal. It was ten minutes to eleven when the Lennons returned. A few seconds later mayhem broke loose. Lennon, blood pouring from his mouth and chest, staggered into the building. Yoko screamed and screamed. The night-duty man hit a panic button, and within minutes two police cars, sirens screeching, were at the scene. John was taken to hospital, barely alive. He died shortly after, despite the desperate efforts of a seven-strong medical team.
Chapman, while all this was going on, had taken off his coat and hat to show the police officers that he was no longer armed. He waited quietly for them to arrive, exchanging a few words with the devastated doorman, the Cuban to whom he had been talking earlier, who shook the gun from his hand and kicked it into the street. Chapman even apologized for what he had done, and when a woman who had heard the shots came running up, he told her to get out of there for her own sake. Then he took out his copy of Catcher and started to read. Not surprisingly, when the police arrived they went to arrest the wrong man, turning towards the young night-duty man, not fifteen-stone Chapman who was hanging back in the shadows.
Chapman’s original intention was to say nothing and hand over the book, with the inscription ‘This is my Statement’ to the police, but his resolution failed him when the police grabbed him.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ he pleaded, reassuring them that ‘I acted alone.’
In the police car being taken into custody one of the cops asked him if he knew what he had just done. He replied: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know that he was a friend of yours.’ He was just as polite and restrained when he phoned his wife Gloria in Honolulu. He gave her concise and clear instructions about getting the police to protect her from the journalists who were already gathering outside the apartment. She said she loved him and he said he loved her.
He later explained the conflict that went on in his mind at the time of the killing, by seeing himself as two people, a child and an adult. He said the child and the adult went together to the Dakota that day, and the adult wanted to get in a cab and go home.
‘Then the child screams “No! No! No! Devil! Help me, Devil! Give me the power and strength to do this. I want this. I want to be somebody.”’
He placed great emphasis on the fact that neither Yoko nor John spoke to him, as if a smile and a ‘hello’ might have saved John’s life. In his disturbed state he did not see Lennon stagger into the building, and when he realized there was no body in front of him he was not sure that he had actually done it.
‘I was kind of glad that he wasn’t there because I thought I had missed him or didn’t kill him or something. I just wanted the police to hurry up and come.’
The death of the pop icon caused such an uproar that police insisted Chapman wore a bullet proof vest before his trial, and they painted the windows of his cell black so that he would not be shot by snipers. He refused to plead an insanity defence at the trial, instead admitting his guilt. The trial was therefore over quickly, with Chapman sentenced to between twenty years and life, with an order that he should receive psychiatric treatment. Because of the crime and the emotions it stirred up, it is likely that life will mean life. His own lawyer asked the judge not to impose a minimum sentence (after which Chapman could have been released) because, he said, ‘All reports come to the conclusion that he is not a sane man. It was not a sane crime. It was … a monstrously irrational killing.’ When Chapman was asked if he wished to say anything in his own defence he read out a passage from The Catcher in the Rye.
Chapman lives in Attica Prison, New York, segregated from the other inmates. Attica is notoriously violent, and amid its shifting population there are always some who would relish the fame of being the man who killed the man who killed John Lennon.
Gloria, Chapman’s wife, has not divorced him. For three years she lived near the prison, visiting him regularly. But she then moved back to their Honolulu home; he has said he no longer wants her to visit. She sends him money regularly.
In a television documentary, shown in Britain in 1988, Chapman showed no remorse for killing Lennon, only regret that the star did not die immediately and that Sean was left without a father. In a television interview in 1992 he said that when he shot Lennon he did not believe he was killing a real person, he was killing an image, a record cover. He said he had undergone an exorcism performed by a priest in his prison cell, and that his demons had left him. He said he did not expect to ever be forgiven for ‘taking away a genius’.
A psychiatrist involved in his care diagnosed Chapman as exhibiting ‘the symptoms of virtually every malady in psychiatric literature’.
Astonishingly, Mark Chapman, who stalked and murdered John Lennon, now has his own collection of would-be stalkers, weird letter writers who mail him their assorted fantasies. He gets plenty of straightforward hate mail from Lennon fans, but he also gets love letters from women he has never met, and letters applauding what he did.
He spends a lot of time answering them. He also spends a lot of time reading The Catcher in the Rye.
If the death of Lennon put stalking into the public eye for the first time, it was the shooting of President Reagan by a Jodie Foster fan four months later that proved to the world that Lennon’s murder was not an isolated tragedy. The cliché ‘the price of fame’ began to have real meaning to a public which had smiled cynically every time a celebrity complained about invasion of privacy or harassment by fans. To those on modest incomes who helped their idols amass million-dollar bank balances by buying their records, watching their films or getting hooked on their TV soap characters, the stars’ whinges had always been a bit hard to take. Now, within four months, the real fear that stalked the stars had been brought out into the open. When celebrities complained about fans it was not, as their public had imagined, out of frustration at autograph hunters disturbing them in the middle of restaurant meals, or because they were unable to walk down a shopping mall without being mobbed; it was an ever-present knowledge that somewhere out there was a mentally deranged fan who had them in their sights. All they could hope was that the sights were not attached to a rifle.
John Hinckley, who shot Reagan in the chest and seriously injured his press secretary James Brady, as well as wounding a policeman and a secret service agent, did it, he claimed, for Jodie. In his shabby motel room in Washington police found a letter to the star:
Dear Jodie
There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. This letter is being written an hour before I leave for the Hilton Hotel [where Reagan had been lunching]. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love. I love you forever,
John Hinckley
At the time Jodie Foster was eighteen, in her first year at Yale University. She was a well-established actress, having shot to fame as a child in films like Bugsy Malone. Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life largely mirrored the plot of one of her films, Taxi Driver, in which she played a teenage prostitute. The other star, Robert de Niro, played a character described in the publicity material for the film as ‘a loner incapable of communicating’ who spent ‘his off-duty hours eating junk food or sitting alone in a dingy room’. When the taxi driver is rejected by the prostitute, he sends her a letter before setting out to assassinate the President. There’s no doubt that Hinckley had seen – and been influenced by – the film, because about six months before he shot Reagan he wrote to the film’s scriptwriter, asking for an introduction to Jodie Foster. The actress also knew his name well before she heard it on the news bulletins about the shooting; he had been pushing letters under the door of her room at Yale.
Hinckley, who was twenty-five at the time of the shooting, was a desperate, deluded and dangerous misfit. Unlike Mark Chapman, he had never really established any long-lasting adult relationships; one of the most telling comments about him came from his landlord when he was in college, who commented that in all the time he had known Hinckley, he had only once seen him in the company of another human being. But there was nothing in his early life to suggest that the kid from the well-off Texan background would end up a notorious would-be assassin, no signs of deep emotional or mental disturbance in his childhood. He didn’t come from a broken home, he wasn’t brutalized by poverty. There were some traumas to cope with, like living in the shadow of a successful and popular sister in school, but the majority of youngsters cope with problems of that scale.
Hinckley even managed to conceal his solitariness throughout high school, although in retrospect no close friends stepped forward and claimed to have shared his confidences. But to the rest of his classmates he appeared normal: ‘So normal that he appeared to fade into the woodwork,’ said one girl who was in his year. After school, though, and after moving away from his parents’ home, his life began to gradually disintegrate.
John Hinckley was the third and last child of the family. His father was an oil engineer, who moved the family to the capital of America’s oil industry, Dallas, when his son John was two. They were an America adman’s dream of a family: good-looking, churchgoing, hardworking parents with three blonde, blue-eyed, attractive children. Even in the looks-conscious environment of middle-ranking Dallas society, the only girl, Diane, stood out for her prettiness. Scott, the oldest boy, seven years older than John, did well at school and at sports and eventually went into his father’s business. John, as a child, was very cute, average at his schoolwork, and very good at basketball – the best in his elementary school team.
When he was eleven his parents moved to the most swanky suburb of affluent Dallas, to a large house with a sweeping drive and a swimming pool. He seemed to fit in at high school, again becoming very involved in basketball, and a keen supporter of all the school’s other teams. He even joined in with school activities like the Rodeo Club, which organized barbecues, square dances and trips to rodeos. The only shadow over his school career – which was academically undistinguished but OK – was the popularity of his sister, who was three years older than him. She was good at everything: a star in class, head cheerleader, in the choir, in a school operetta production. She was also very attractive. But if John felt oppressed by her presence, his classmates saw no sign of it.
By the time he was fifteen his father had amassed enough capital to start his own business, Hinckley Oil. He was successful, and when his oldest son Scott finished his engineering degree he joined the company. Five years later the company – and the Hinckley family – moved to the town of Evergreen in Colorado, again to a quiet, well-to-do area. By this time John Hinckley was studying for a business degree at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas. He was registered at the Tech for the next seven years, changing from business to liberal arts, but never completed his degree and only attended classes sporadically.
It was at this stage that his life began to fall apart. He did not take part in any of the university social activities, and journalists who trawled through every aspect of his life after the assassination attempt failed to find any friends, close or casual, in Lubbock. Nobody really noticed him, and the only thing he did which in retrospect is revealing was to choose Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Auschwitz concentration camp as two of his study projects in his German history course. The room where he lived – where his landlord only once saw him with another person – was always full of burger boxes and ice-cream cartons.
‘He just sat there all the time, staring at the TV,’ said his landlord. The picture of the De Niro character from Taxi Driver was starting to emerge. He dropped out of college in 1976 and went to hang around Hollywood, staying in cheap rooms in the red-light district. He went back to college in 1977, but did not last the year. He became involved with the National Socialist Party of America, a neo-Nazi group, but in the end he was kicked out: he was too extreme even for these right-wing extremists, and when he started to advocate shooting people they decided he had to go. The president of the party later told a journalist that they decided that Hinckley was ‘either a nut or a federal agent’.
The American academic system means that students can drop a course and pick it up again whenever they like, without losing the credits they have already gained for previous work. Hinckley, having been away for more than a year, started back at Texas Tech in 1979. In the same year he started to buy firearms; in the small redneck town of Lubbock he was easily able to buy a .38 pistol and two .22 pistols. By this stage his parents must have been aware of the disintegration of his personality, because from time to time, back at the family home in Evergreen, Colorado, he visited a psychiatrist.
He finally left college in the summer of 1980, aged twenty-five, and started a strange chaotic ramble around America, as if he felt that by keeping moving, by never spending too long in one place, he could hold his fragmenting personality together. When he found himself in conversation with strangers he would boast of being a close friend of Jodie Foster’s, sometimes saying he was her lover. He turned up at Yale, where she was studying, and left several notes for her. He went to Nashville and was arrested as he tried to fly out to New York; his luggage contained three handguns and fifty rounds of ammunition. President Carter was due to fly into Nashville that day, but Hinckley’s name – which should have been passed on to the secret service – slipped through the net. Four days later he was in Dallas, buying two more pistols from a store with the slogan ‘Guns don’t cause crime any more than flies cause garbage’ in the window. He bought the bullets, appropriately named ‘devastator bullets’ from a store in Lubbock, the town where he had been in college. They cost ten times as much as ordinary bullets and exploded on contact, like dumdum bullets. Seven days after this shopping trip he was in Denver, applying for jobs. Then it was Washington, then Denver again, then back to New Haven (to be near Jodie at Yale), then Washington again.
By the beginning of March 1981 he was sticking more letters through Jodie Foster’s door at Yale, and by this time she was so concerned about them that they were handed to the college authorities. Hinckley then returned to Denver. He applied for jobs and pawned his possessions to pay for his motel room. His restless moving around the country continued: he went to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City by plane, only to board a bus back to Salt Lake City the next day. It was from there that he moved on to Washington, and his date with President Reagan.
It took him three days to get to Washington, travelling by Greyhound bus, arriving on Sunday 29 March. He ate a cheeseburger at the bus station, and walked about impatiently; other travellers thought he was waiting for someone to pick him up. Then he walked to a hotel two blocks west of the White House, where he checked into a $42-a-night room. He stayed in the room all day, making a couple of local phone calls. Next day he left early, and returned about noon, asking the receptionist if he had received any telephone messages while out. There was none for him. A chambermaid who tidied his room that morning noticed that among his possessions scattered around the room was a newspaper cutting about President Reagan’s timetable. It showed that Reagan would leave the White House at 1.45 p.m., after spending the morning with some prominent figures from the Hispanic community, and would then travel to the Washington Hilton to give a speech.
Hinckley wrote his letter to Jodie Foster and then walked to the Hilton, which was less than a mile from his hotel. He wore a raincoat, and he mingled with the photographers and reporters outside the hotel, giving at least one of them the impression that he was a secret service man. Inside, Reagan, the great communicator, was not on good form. His speech to 3,500 union delegates was not one of his best, but there was one line in it that the newspapers pounced on the following day: ‘Violent crime has surged by ten per cent, making neighbourhood streets unsafe and families fearful in their homes.’
As he stepped outside the hotel, violent crime surged again. Turning to wave at the crowd, Reagan smiled broadly. Hinckley pulled out his pistol, aimed, fired. Two bullets, then a pause, then four more. One of the secret service men pushed Reagan into the waiting limousine and dived on top of him, urging the driver to take off. Behind them, Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady slumped to the ground, blood pouring down his face. A bullet had gone into his head, an injury which would leave him permanently disabled. A Washington policeman was shot in the chest and a secret service agent also received a chest wound. It was a matter of minutes before Reagan and the agent with him in the back of the car realized that the President, too, had been shot in the chest.
Hinckley was pounced on and disarmed within seconds, handcuffed to an agent and thrown into the back of a police car. At Washington police headquarters he hardly spoke. ‘Does anybody know what that guy’s beef was?’ President Reagan asked, as he lay in his hospital bed.
Jodie Foster did not know the answer, although she knew she was in some macabre way the inspiration for Hinckley’s actions. Twenty-one months later she wrote a perceptive account of how Hinckley’s fixation with her, and his subsequent actions, affected her. She had overcome the initial reaction to her when she started at university, the curiosity about her because of her Hollywood background, the resentment of her. She had even, according to one journalist who interviewed her peers, changed her style of dress to blend inconspicuously in with the group. And then John Hinckley had come along and let her know that for her – and for other stars – there could be no normal, no blending in.
Why me? was the theme of the article she had published in Esquire magazine. It explored the terrifying events that followed Hinckley’s arrest. Jodie was appearing on stage in a college production, and she was determined to go ahead with it. She had been moved from her shared dormitory to a single room that could more easily be protected by security men, there were security men screening the audience for the play, and at Jodie’s request cameras were banned. A whole pack of photographers had descended on Yale as soon as the news of Hinckley’s obsession with her had broken, and she wasn’t prepared to face any more. But a camera did get in; she could hear the familiar rhythmic click of a motor drive in the darkened auditorium. She looked hard at the area of the audience the sound was coming from and locked eyes with a bearded man who was watching her unflinchingly. He was there again the next night, in a different seat. The following night a note was found on a bulletin board: ‘By the time the show is over, Jodie Foster will be dead.’ It turned out to be a hoax.
But a few days later a real death threat was pushed under Jodie’s door. This time the police swung into action and caught up with her second stalker, Edward Richardson, within hours. He was arrested in New York, with a loaded gun, and he told police that he decided not to kill Jodie because she was too pretty; he was going to kill the President instead. He had also telephoned a bomb threat, demanding the release of Hinckley and secret service agents had to search all the college rooms that Jodie used. Richardson had a beard, just like the man in the audience. A year later he was released, on parole.
After his arrest, Jodie says a great change came over her – or so she was told by those around her. ‘I started perceiving death in the most mundane but distressing events. Being photographed felt like being shot. I thought everyone was looking at me in crowds; perhaps they were. Every sick letter I received I made sure to read, to laugh at, to read again.’
She was not sleeping properly, her pride in her appearance went. She felt bitter about the way other students had, she felt, betrayed her by telling journalists all about her and, in one case, selling an article to a magazine about her. In her own intelligent well-written article she describes the pain and anger that she, at eighteen, suffered because of her two stalkers. Her anguish was heightened by the media pursuit of her, but the feelings of isolation, desperation and frustration she felt at being unable to control her own life are common to all victims.
The security that surrounded Hinckley as he waited for his trial was greater than any that Jodie Foster had. The security services recognized that, as with Mark Chapman, Hinckley was a natural target for plenty of glory-seekers. It caused a sensation when Hinckley was found not guilty of attempting to murder Reagan, because of his insanity. But the net result for the American people was the same: he went behind bars, with very little prospect of ever being released.
It was surprising, therefore, to find him being considered for unsupervised release to spend a weekend with his parents only six years after the shooting. His application to be allowed home – he had already been back to Colorado in the company of a nurse – was supported by staff who had been involved in his care and treatment.
At a court hearing to consider his application it was revealed that he had written a sympathetic letter to Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers who is on Death Row in Florida. Hinckley ‘expressed sorrow’ at the ‘awkward position you [Bundy] find yourself in’. He had also written to a college student, asking her to kill Jodie Foster for him and to send a pistol by post to him so that he could escape from jail. He then told the girl to hijack a jet and demand that Hinckley and Jodie Foster both be taken aboard it. Hinckley had also received a letter from a woman in jail for trying to kill President Ford; she suggested Hinckley write to Charles Manson. To hear about the networking that was going on between long-term prisoners was almost as shocking to the law-abiding public as the whole idea of stalking.
Hinckley’s application to go home alone was turned down, and has been turned down ever since. When Hinckley’s application came up again in 1988, the court heard that staff had intercepted a letter from him to a mail order company that was selling pictures of Jodie Foster; his obsession was undiminished. In 1993, twelve years after committing the crime, he applied for parole. The answer was no.
‘THE BENEVOLENT ANGEL OF DEATH’ (#ulink_1eb1f560-665d-5c82-b45e-9d09e5bd8528)
SHE RUSHED OUT of her apartment block in Los Angeles on a fine sunny morning in March 1982, a slim, pretty girl with long dark hair, wearing a sailor-style top and trousers. It wasn’t far from the block doorway to her car, which was parked by the kerb. She was on her way to a music class, in a hurry because she was late.
‘Are you Theresa Saldana?’ a male voice with a pronounced Scottish accent asked, as she was slipping the key into the car door. She knew, as soon as she heard the question, that the man who had been stalking her for the past few weeks had caught up with her. She instinctively turned to face him, and then tried to run. He was very close, and when he grabbed her she knew he was far too strong for her to be able to escape. She spontaneously raised her hands, to protect her face, and as she did so she felt the first searing hot thrust of pain in her chest.
Arthur Jackson, a 47-year-old Scottish drifter with a long history of psychiatric illness, stabbed 27-year-old actress Theresa Saldana ten times with the five-inch blade of a kitchen knife as she struggled with him, screaming ‘He’s trying to kill me.’ Fortunately for her, among the people who witnessed the attack was a 26-year-old bottled water delivery man, Jeff Fenn, who had the courage to tackle Jackson. He launched himself on to the demented Scotsman, not realizing that he was armed. When he saw the knife he was able to get it off Jackson and then hold him on the ground until the police arrived.
‘I heard a lady screaming, I ran up the street and tried to break it up,’ said Fenn. ‘The man appeared to be beating her with a fist, but when I grabbed the guy to get him into a headlock I saw he had a knife. Then I pulled him to the ground while she ran into the apartment. I got the knife out of his hands and threw it into the street. He asked me how long it had been since he stabbed her, but I didn’t want to talk to him so I told him to just lie down and be still while I held his arms behind him on the ground.’
While he was being held by Fenn, Jackson told the crowd that gathered that they would find the reasons for his attack in a bag he was carrying.
Released from Jackson’s grip, Theresa ran back to the apartment block, screaming that she was dying and needed help. Her husband Fred Feliciano had been called, and he stayed by her side as paramedics gave her blood transfusions and then rushed her to the Cedars-Sinai hospital. She was operated on immediately. Four of the stab wounds had punctured one of her lungs, and there were three other stab wounds in her chest, narrowly missing her heart. The left hand which she had raised to protect her face had been slashed so badly that it required extensive surgery over the next few months. The doctors lost count of how many stitches they had to put in on that first day, but she needed twenty-six pints of blood. Before she was wheeled into the operating theatre for her first four hours of surgery Theresa told them she was an actress and begged them to do their job well and not leave her with too many scars. For four weeks she was on two drips, one in each arm, and she was in hospital for a total of ten weeks.
The delivery man who saved her life visited her in hospital a few days later. Although he had seen her most celebrated film, Raging Bull, in which she played Jake La Motta’s sister-in-law, only the day before, he did not recognize her at the time of the attack. Theresa had a large trophy inscribed for him with the words: ‘To my hero, Jeffrey Fenn. Thank you, thank you, thank you. With much love and gratitude for ever.’
There was no doubt that Jeffrey’s actions saved Theresa from death. When police examined Arthur Jackson’s belongings, they found in the battered shoulder bag he was carrying a document he had written, describing Theresa as his ‘divine angel’ and his ‘countess angel’. He had seen her in a film called Defiance, in which she played the girlfriend of a young seaman caught up in a fight with a street gang. Jackson, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, was deluded enough to believe that the film was the story of his life, and that Theresa was therefore his girlfriend. He claimed she was too good for the world, and he was on a ‘divine mission’ as a ‘benevolent angel of death’. His mission was to kill her, and he wrote that he was acting under the orders of the ‘Knights of St Michael in the kingdom of heaven’. Theresa, he believed, would be better off dead than with the ‘scum’ she mixed with on earth, which was probably a reference to her husband.
In the document, which was entitled ‘Petition to the United States Government for a State-Imposed Execution’, he pleaded for his own life to be ended in the electric chair, so that he could join her. He said he wanted to die at Alcatraz, the famous federal prison which had been closed for some years. He stipulated the execution should take place in Cell Block D, because that was where a convicted armed robber named Joseph Cretzer had died in 1946 while leading an insurrection, and Jackson believed that by dying there he could free Cretzer’s soul from purgatory, while rejoining his own ‘divine angel’ in heaven. He also asked for piped music to be played and light refreshments served while he was in the electric chair. He mentioned Theresa Saldana’s name fifty times in the whole document.
He also weighed up the pros and cons of where he should kill her – she had an apartment in New York as well as her home in Los, Angeles – but opted for California because it had recently reintroduced the death penalty. He wanted to die, but could not bring himself to commit suicide.
Jackson was first diagnosed as mentally ill when he was seventeen, and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and America ever since. He had been deported from America twice, but had still managed to get a visa to return. Two days after seeing Defiance during the Christmas holiday in his home town of Aberdeen, he travelled 8,000 miles on ‘an odyssey to find her and complete my mission’. He funded his travel from his British state benefits; he was classified as long-term disabled. He tried to get hold of a gun, which he described in his writings as ‘more humane’ but could not get one, despite travelling to several states. About a week before he stabbed Theresa, he had turned up in New York, phoning both her New York and Hollywood agents, and then tracking down and contacting her parents. He told her mother that he was speaking on behalf of Martin Scorsese, who directed Raging Bull, and that he wanted to offer her another part. Well-spoken, with a distinctive accent, and perfectly lucid, he convinced her mother into giving him Theresa’s address in Los Angeles.
‘When he told me he had a very good part for my daughter I got excited and gave him Theresa’s address,’ Mrs Saldana later told a journalist.
By the time of the attack, Theresa knew she was being stalked. Her New York agent told her of a conversation with a man who claimed to be from the famous William Morris talent agency; a few simple questions had betrayed his lack of knowledge of film industry procedure, and the agent went on the alert, reporting the call to the police. Her mother, too, had called her to tell her Scorsese had another part for her: when no offer came, it was clear her mother had been hoaxed. Not only that, but the hoaxer now had Theresa’s address.
‘My mom has never, never given out information before,’ said Theresa a few days after the attack. ‘It’s not her fault. She just didn’t want me to miss the opportunity. She was excited that Scorsese would be calling me.’
After the warnings from her agent and her mother, she was scared and stayed with a neighbour until her husband came home. After that she took more precautions than usual, making sure that she was rarely alone in her apartment and never alone outside at night. But she did not anticipate an attack in broad daylight on a sunny morning, when she had only a few yards to go from her front door to her car.
‘I’ve always been a trusting person. When John Lennon was killed all I can remember is terrible, terrible sadness, as though a piece of my life had been taken away,’ Theresa said seven months after the attack. ‘But it didn’t really make me afraid for me. Now I do not give my phone number to anyone. I do not let anyone know where I live. If someone wants to reach me for a job, it’s strictly through my agent.
‘I now do things with other people and I always have someone with me. I’m not paranoid, but I am very, very careful.’
She re-started work as soon as she could, taking parts in three television series in the months between the attack and Jackson’s court case. She needed to work: her bills of more than $50,000 for the two and a half months she spent in hospital exceeded the limits of her health insurance. During that time she left hospital in a wheelchair and on an intravenous drip to identify Jackson as her attacker before a court.
She believed that work was therapeutic. ‘Some people can’t believe I want to go on acting after being stabbed by a nut who saw me in a film,’ she said in a newspaper interview. ‘But I feel that, though you never forget, you’ve got to carry on and be active.’
Any spare time she had went to founding an organization to help other victims of violence; she found the support system inadequate because none of the counsellors she met had themselves been through an experience similar to hers. She teamed up with a Los Angeles teacher who had been shot in her classroom, and with the backing of the police and psychiatrists they organized support counselling for other victims.
The only emotion Arthur Jackson expressed while he was held on remand was one of regret – not for stabbing Theresa, but for failing to kill her. Another prisoner told the prosecution that he was distraught when he discovered that she had lived, because that meant he had failed to fulfil his mission. He was tried for attempted murder at Santa Monica Supreme Court seven months after the attack, and found guilty. The maximum sentence, twelve years, was passed on him the following month. Theresa testified against him, saying in court: ‘I have had to endure a tremendous amount of physical pain and there will be still more pain in the coming weeks, months and possibly years.’
Because Jackson refused to accept that he was insane – he could have pleaded guilty but insane and been sentenced to a secure psychiatric institution – under the American system he went to prison (in Britain, regardless of his own opinion about his mental state, he would have been assessed and, with his history, almost certainly been sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, such as Broadmoor). The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Michael Knight, expressed disquiet after the trial about Jackson being treated as a ‘normal’ prisoner. He pointed out that, with good behaviour, Jackson would be released in eight years, and although he would be instantly deported back to Scotland ‘the son of a gun could be back in this country within a week. He’s already been deported twice, if that tells you something.’
Investigations into how Jackson managed to get a tourist visa to return to the States revealed that he had legally changed his middle name from John to Richard two years earlier. He had first been deported in 1961, after entering the States in 1955, for failing to declare that he had a history of mental illness. He arrived as a permanent immigrant, and served fourteen months in the US army, but was then discharged as unfit. He served ninety days in jail for possessing a knife, which was discovered after the secret service detained him for making threats against President Kennedy, and after he came out of jail he was taken straight to the airport and flown back to Scotland. In 1966 he returned as a tourist, and was deported for overstaying his visa, after serving another prison sentence for carrying a knife. At that stage he was treated in a Californian psychiatric hospital.
Jackson’s own lawyer had the trial delayed for a month while they collected evidence of his long-term illness from psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and the States. He said he could not think of a stronger insanity defence than Jackson’s, and described it as ‘a classic example’.
But Jackson, who listed his occupation on his British passport as ‘technician in scenario and music’, refused to allow him to run it and pleaded not guilty. He rejected diagnoses of his condition, described by a psychiatrist in court as ‘chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, and maintained that he was ‘allergic to the world’. It seems that the only time he recognized the degree of his own problems was when he was seventeen and was voluntarily admitted to a hospital in Scotland, where he asked the psychiatrist in charge of his case to ‘go into my brain and scrape the dirt off’. With an insanity defence, his lawyer hoped he could prove that he did not act with premeditated malice – that he was too ill to be responsible for his actions. The prosecutor in the case argued that Jackson’s preparations – the journey from Scotland, the purchase of the knife, the research into where Theresa lived – proved that he was capable of what is known in legal jargon as ‘malice aforethought’.
The jury took nine hours to decide that Jackson was guilty of attempted first-degree murder, not a lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon, which would have carried a maximum sentence of seven years.
Theresa Saldana wept tears of joy when Jackson got the maximum sentence. But her relief was tempered with the knowledge that Jackson would one day be released. Three years after the Saldana case, a new law was introduced to allow for the indefinite detention on a year-by-year renewable basis of deranged prisoners in California, although Jackson’s sentence pre-dated the legislation and it was therefore arguable that he was not covered by it. But before those arguments could even be aired, the law was repealed as ‘unconstitutional’, to the great dismay of Theresa Saldana and many other victims.
Jackson’s behaviour record in prison was deemed to be good, despite him sending letters and making phone calls to journalists and others, stating that his one aim in life was to fulfil the same mission: to kill Theresa. He was still referring to himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, and in one letter to a television producer he wrote: ‘I am capable of alternating between sentiment and savagery, romance and reality … Also police or FBI protection for TS won’t stop the hit squad, murder contract men, nor will bullet-proof vests.’ He was being held in the medical wing of Vacaville prison in California, where the chief psychiatrist considered him ‘extremely dangerous. He is still psychotic, still delusional, still elaborately involved with Theresa Saldana, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston and Charles Bronson.’
But despite all this, after seven years he came up for parole, and the psychiatrist’s opinion carried no weight; all that mattered was that he had behaved himself. He was not the first seriously disturbed patient to have slipped through the loophole: the parole division of the prison department estimated that about a hundred deranged prisoners had already been released.
‘The law ties our hands on this. Just because someone says they will do something, we cannot make the assumption that they will,’ said a department official.
Jackson’s psychiatrist believed it was the only assumption to make about him. He was, she said, a meticulous planner, used to waiting, and deeply regretted having botched his attempt on Theresa’s life. Shortly after his arrest he had started to write an eighty-nine page letter, in handwriting so tiny that it could hardly be read without a magnifying glass, in which he explained why he wanted to kill her.
It started with ‘Dear fondest Theresa’ and went on to explain that he was suffering from a ‘torturous love sickness in my soul for you combined with a desperate desire to escape into a beautiful world I have always dreamed of (the palaces of gardens of sweet paradise) whereby the plan was for you, Theresa, to go ahead first, then I would join you in a few months via the little green room at San Quentin.’
Another passage read, ‘I swear on the ashes of my dead mother and on the scars of Theresa Saldana that neither God nor I will rest in peace until this special request and my solemn petition has been granted.’
As the date for his potential release drew nearer Theresa Saldana reluctantly forced herself back into the limelight to fight it. By this time she had been married to her second husband, actor Phil Peters, for a few months and they were expecting their first child. Their address was a closely guarded secret, their telephone number was ex-directory and known to only a trusted handful of people. She had made a film about her own ordeal in 1984 and was still a little involved with the victim support group, but she was also intent on not letting her whole life be ruled by the horrific attack. ‘I got so over-identified with the issues and the cause,’ she said, ‘I became Theresa Saldana, The Girl Who Got Stabbed … the tragedy queen. It’s not really me to have all this depressing stuff circling round me. You know, ninety-nine per cent of my life is to smile and one per cent is this miserable situation. There is a part of me that feels really overjoyed to even be alive.’
Yet the prospect of Jackson’s imminent release was so terrifying that she made a public plea for ‘logic, decency and common sense’. ‘This is my life and I stand for other people as well … It’s so late and, you know, along the years I always believed that something would be passed. There seemed to be so many people working on so many different things. And I kept faith and believed that a law would be passed, and then a law was passed, and so recently repealed …’ she told the Los Angeles Times. ‘And then even when I got the letter about the repeal they said they weren’t going to take it as the final thing. But in the last couple of weeks all we got were very tacit and very, very specific and serious words to the effect of “Prepare yourself because he is coming out on the fifteenth of June. And there is nothing we can do.”
‘My life is in jeopardy. I’m not saying to kill this person … I’m’ not saying the reason for further detainment is punishment, not at all. I believe that we have an obligation to protect the public’s safety.’
Assurances that Jackson would again be deported to Britain were of little comfort to the actress, as she realized how easily he had been able to get back into America on previous occasions. Her pleas received wide publicity, and Jackson’s release was deferred when he was given an added 270-day sentence for damaging state property and resisting prison officers. The extra time gave the lawyers an opportunity to put together a new case against him for sending threatening letters to Theresa, and he was sentenced to another five years and eight months in prison.
It was before this second sentence began that Jackson’s story took a bizarre turn. From his prison cell he wrote to the People newspaper in London, to Scotland Yard and to the British consul in Los Angeles, claiming to have shot a man during a bank raid in London in 1967. Former Grenadier guardsman 33-year-old Anthony Fletcher was brutally gunned down by a single shot at point blank range, after courageously trapping in a cul-de-sac the robber, who had stolen £22 from a Chelsea branch of the National Westminster bank. His bravery led to him being dubbed a ‘have-a-go hero’ by the popular press, a sobriquet which has passed into common usage for any passer-by who tackles a criminal. Anthony Fletcher was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his bravery. Jackson also claimed to have taken part in another bank raid two years earlier, and said he had information on ‘a scheduled mass murderer’ in a British city.
This last claim, and his psychiatric history, led to a first reaction of disbelief, but Jackson was obviously in possession of detailed facts about the bank raids, and detectives from London flew out to interview him. They were satisfied that he knew enough to have been involved, and they reopened the case of Anthony Fletcher’s murder. After tracing thirty-five witnesses and re-examining the forensic evidence, they believed they had enough evidence to bring him to trial. If Jackson had been deported in 1990, he would have walked straight into the arms of the Metropolitan police.
But Theresa Saldana worried that he would not receive a long sentence in Britain and would soon be released to fly back to stalk her. Her campaign against him was rewarded with his second conviction, and her involvement will keep him in prison without parole until June 1996. Unless the Americans find some other way of detaining him – and Theresa would like him to stay permanently locked up in the States rather than see him handed over to Britain – he will eventually face trial here when he is released.
Friends of pretty 21-year-old American TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer were stunned by her death. Who could have gunned her down? Rebecca, they said, did not have an enemy in the world. When her murderer was arrested the following day it became clear that in his own eyes he was not her enemy but a devoted fan, bent on ‘saving’ her innocence from the wicked world.
Rebecca was an only child with parents who are a psychologist and a writer. She was doing well at school but was side-tracked into modelling by her own stunning looks. A model agency in her home town of Portland, Oregon, snapped her up at fifteen, and within a couple of years she headed for New York, where she was taken on to the books of one of the big, prestigious agencies. Her fresh-faced good looks made her a natural for teenage magazine covers. Friends from the time remember her as streetwise and confident, not tough but not frightened by the big city.
Not tall enough for fashion modelling and reluctant to limit herself to photographic modelling, she pursued her dream of becoming an actress, signing up for acting and dancing classes. She struggled, as all youngsters in the cut-throat business do; when her agent tried to let her know that she had been given a part in a CBS sitcom, My Sister Sam, her telephone was disconnected because the bill had not been paid, and the agent was forced to call at her home and tape a message to the door.
She moved to Los Angeles for the part, and found a quiet flat in a respectable, middle-class area of the city. After sharing with other models in New York she consciously chose to live on her own. But she was not lonely: she was popular on the set, she had girl friends and a few months before her death she was dating an actor who she knew from her home town.
‘We’d travel, go to parks, have picnics. She liked to horseback ride or just spend time on a mountain top. She was the only actor I’ve ever known who managed to become successful and remain unjaded,’ he said after her death. ‘She was extremely curious and spirited.’
After her exposure in the sitcom her future looked very bright. She landed a good role in a dark comedy, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, and signed to do another feature film, One Point of View. She loved the work and the laid-back Californian lifestyle.
Into this idyll stepped a 19-year-old stranger with a glossy publicity photograph of the actress he idolized. Robert Bardo, who came from Tucson, Arizona, traced his idol by hiring a private detective who checked address records at the California State Department of Motor Vehicles. (After Rebecca’s death, celebrities successfully petitioned for access to the records to be restricted.)
It was a warm Tuesday morning in July 1989 when Bardo turned up in the street outside Rebecca’s apartment block with a large manila folder under his arm, from which he pulled out her photograph from time to time. The curly-haired young man in a yellow polo shirt accosted a few passers-by, asking if they knew where she lived, and asking if the address he had for her was a house or an apartment block. Others who did not speak to him also remembered him – there was a strange and memorably disturbing quality about him.
‘He looked weird,’ said one neighbour who bumped into him twice. ‘It was strange seeing him twice. You think about it for a second, then you go your own way. That’s what you do in LA.’
Someone else described him as handling the folder containing the photograph gingerly, as though it were precious: ‘It was like it contained food and he didn’t want to turn it over.’
Shortly afterwards, another neighbour heard the sound of a shot and two screams, and then breaking glass. Rebecca Schaeffer’s body lay slumped on the doorstep of the block. Her intercom was broken, and she had come down in person to see who her caller was. A single bullet hit her in the chest and ripped through two panes of glass. By the time the neighbour reached her side there was no discernible pulse and she was pronounced dead on arrival when her body was taken to hospital. The youth in the yellow polo shirt had last been scene jogging calmly away from the scene of the crime. He disappeared down an alleyway.
Almost immediately, police and friends reached the conclusion that the murderer was a deranged fan. There could be no other motive.
‘I can only assume it was somebody who didn’t know her but was obsessed with her. I can’t imagine that anybody who really knew her would do this. She was so mature and intuitive that she would have made sure this couldn’t happen,’ said the director of her TV series.
By the following day, Bardo was back in his home town of Tucson, where police picked up reports of a man behaving bizarrely and disrupting traffic at a major road junction. They arrested Bardo. In the meantime LA police had a tip-off from a friend of Bardo’s in Tennessee, who knew that the youth had harboured a long-term obsession with the actress, had written to her, phoned her agent several times and had talked about hurting her. A photo of Bardo was faxed from Arizona to California, and the neighbours who had seen Bardo on the day of the murder identified him immediately.
At Bardo’s home the police found a collection of videos. He had everything Rebecca Schaeffer had ever appeared in. He had apparently visited her at Warner Brothers studios the year before, to deliver a five-foot high teddy bear to her. He’d confessed his love for her to a security guard, but his desire for her had tipped into hatred when he saw the character she was playing in Scenes From the Class Struggle lose her virginity on screen.
At his trial the judge refused to accept that Bardo was mentally unstable, although he had a history of mental illness. The judge, sentencing him to life without parole, said, ‘He had different motives from most people, but again most people aren’t murderers.’
Before he was given a life sentence, to be served at the notorious San Quentin prison, Bardo made a long, rambling speech to the court. ‘I do realize what I’ve done and the pain I caused and it was irreversibly wrong,’ he said. He admitted stalking his ‘goddess’ for days, ‘hoping to get the chance to say hello to her’. When he finally rang her doorbell and she appeared, he was too tongue-tied to speak – so he pulled out a gun and shot her, laughing as he did it.
‘DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU’ (#ulink_2618a8b9-0e38-5ce5-82e3-8e753d38e28e)
‘WHEN I STARTED out, I didn’t have any desire to be a great actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.’
It was Katharine Hepburn who said those words, and she was being characteristically honest. There are many celebrities who talk about their vocation, their art, the importance of their work. They are not (necessarily) phoneys: as a breed actors and actresses have a high work ethic. Theirs is a craft that can be worked on and developed and improved, and the good ones are constantly honing their natural skills and talents for the camera or the stage. But few are as ruthlessly truthful as Hepburn; they did not lie in their childhood beds and dream of attending drama classes, voice training, stage technique; they did not fantasize about early morning calls to make-up, about finding their best scenes on the cutting-room floor, about difficult and demanding directors. What they dreamed about was fame. Names in lights, top billing, adulation. Some coveted the financial rewards of stardom, others would (in the secrecy of their adolescent yearnings) have even sacrificed that for the heady taste of public adulation.
Even had they been presented with a true picture of the downside of stardom, it is unlikely that any of them would have abandoned their dreams. Years later, having fulfilled their ambitions, and well-aware of the bitter realities that come with the other trappings of celebrity, a few genuinely wonder whether the chase was worth the quarry; most would still not exchange Hollywood mansions, hot and cold running servants and an eager public dancing attendance on them for obscurity, a nine-to-five job in an office or on a factory production line, and a modest home. They may feel afraid, angry, intruded upon and at risk at different times, but the balance still weighs, they reckon, in their favour.
And then along comes a monster …
It’s true that all Hollywood stalkers are deranged, but the degree of derangement varies enormously. Some will be content to write long, rambling, nonthreatening letters; others will turn up on the doorstep with a knife or a gun. Some celebrities attract more obsessive fans than others, partly because of the nature of the parts they play and their public profile. It’s fair to say, although no research has been done into it, that every above-the-title star will have at least one stalker, and some will have many. But there seems to be no way of predicting which star will attract the very dangerous life-threatening stalker – even though there may be ways of assessing which stalker may turn nasty, which star they will be fixated on is in the lap of the gods.
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Jean Ritchie
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Социология
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE IS WATCHING, WAITING …What is it like to suffer the attentions of an obsessive fan, to be haunted by the menace of a stalker? What changes devotion into something far more sinister and how do the stars cope with the pressure?And what about the not-so-famous, the ordinary people who suddenly find themselves living in fear, stalked by a shadowy presence that is all too real?Ancell Marshall’s wife was killed by a stalker – a murder he stood trial for. Theresa Saldana will never escape the memory of the moment her stalker attacked her and nearly stabbed her to death. Vicky Caldwell had a nervous breakdown, while Lauren Barnes was eventually driven to retaliation. These and many other case histories are compelling reading.Jean Ritchie talks to the victims and their families, the counsellors, the therapists, the security experts – and the stalkers themselves – in this detailed, fascinating, sometimes chilling account of a growing and frightening phenomenon.