Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (16 page)

Chapman told King that before he stalked and killed Lennon he had gone to art galleries and had his picture taken with other celebrities: “I felt important while I was with them. And then, after, you disintegrate again.”

The love and hate that seem to have alternated in Chapman toward Lennon were similar to what Robert John Bardo apparently felt toward the actress Rebecca Schaeffer. At Bardo’s trial, forensic psychiatrist Park Elliot Dietz explained on the witness stand the mechanism of good-bad splitting that is so often seen in borderline individuals. Dr. Dietz said that Bardo’s love and hate existed simultaneously in his mind and that he could switch between love and hate “in an instant.” That was why, Dr. Dietz testified, Bardo could love and adore Schaeffer at the same time that he was plotting to kill her. In his opinion, it was a sudden switch that occurred in Bardo’s brain during his second visit to Schaeffer’s doorstep that led to the fatal shooting.

The Erotomanic Stalker

A person who suffers from erotomania has the entrenched delusion that he or she is ardently loved by some other person. This delusion usually involves idealized romantic love and spiritual union, rather than simple sexual attraction. The one loved is usually of higher status than the adorer, a famous personage or a superior at work, although it can also be a complete stranger. Approximately 25% of delusional stalkers have stalked others before switching (often after a job reassignment) to the current victim. Margaret Ray, arrested repeatedly for stalking David Letterman, previously had stalked Yul Brynner. The erotomanic individual makes persistent efforts to contact the one about whom he or she has delusions through the telephone, by letter, by e-mails, through visits, through the sending of gifts. Whatever obstacles are put in the erotomanic individual’s path are viewed as tests of the ardor of their love.

Studies show that people who write love letters to a delusionally loved person, even if the letters make no threats, are nonetheless prone to violence because of their abnormal craving for contact with the loved person. Research reveals that threatening letters sent to Hollywood celebrities were not associated with approaching them. Nor were the threatening letters sent to members of the U.S. Congress. Disorganized letters (that is, those showing evidence of psychotic thinking) also were less often associated with approaches to famous persons. People who wrote 10 to 14 letters had a 66% likelihood of approaching the celebrity. Those who wrote fewer or more letters were less likely to approach.

Interestingly, there is a dichotomy between the gender groups of erotomanic stalkers. In clinical practice, psychiatrists see mostly female erotomanics, whereas in forensic practice, they tend to encounter more males. Males more than females tend to run afoul of the law in their pursuit of delusionally loved persons or in some misguided effort to rescue them from an imagined danger.

Under current standards of diagnosis, those suffering from erotomania are classified as having a delusional disorder that is distinct from schizophrenia or mood disorders. Erotomania can exist across a whole spectrum of psychiatric disorders. Only 25% of stalkers are pure erotomanics; the other 75% have a second psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, or a mood disorder. The symptoms persist, studies show, for an average of 10 to 12 years and are not as uncommon as once thought. Apart from the delusion and its consequences, erotomanic individuals do not display odd or bizarre behavior and may not intend any harm to their victims. In fact, they generally do not understand that their victims are being harmed by their stalking; on the contrary, they believe the victims are enjoying the attention.

During a preshow warm-up of the game show
Wheel of Fortune
, a man in battle fatigues and dog tags jumped out of the audience and screamed to letter-turner Vanna White that her boyfriend was dangerous and associated with the Mafia, but that he was there to protect her. Security guards escorted him from the studio, but he returned again and again. Court papers later revealed that he had been calling the show’s production office and stating that he wanted to marry Ms. White.

Margaret Ray insisted that she was already David Letterman’s wife. She broke into his home for the seventh time 3 days after being released from serving a 9-month sentence for trespassing on his property. For her, as for the battle-dressed admirer of Vanna White, arrests and imprisonments were merely obstacles to be overcome, opportunities to demonstrate the strength of their love.

John Thomas Smetek, later described as a 39-year-old drifter from Texas, walked up to a repertory theater where actress Justine Bateman was appearing in a play. Business card in hand, he pushed past patrons waiting in line and presented the card to a ticket taker. A love note to Bateman was written on its back, and with it Smetek delivered a verbal ultimatum: he was going to kill himself with a .22-caliber pistol. Eventually, Smetek was talked into surrendering. He was charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor, but he explained to the authorities that he had done all of this so that Justine Bateman would know how much he still cared about her. He claimed to have had an affair with her 7 years earlier. Authorities determined that he had been stalking her since March. At that time, he had bluffed his way onto the set of her television series,
Fam ily Ties
, and twice managed to come face to face with her before disappearing. At the theater the night before the suicide threat, he had also come near her, shouting “I love you” to her as she left a rehearsal.

“I love you 6 trillion times,” John Hinckley, Jr., wrote to the object of his unrequited ardor, actress Jodie Foster, just a few days before he set out to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. “Goodbye,” he wrote to her. “Don’t you maybe like me just a little bit?” He was trying to impress her with what he was about to do, although he did not spell it out. “You know a few things about me, dear sweetheart, like my obsession with fantasy; but what the rabble don’t yet understand is that fantasies can become reality in my world.”

The Schizophrenic Stalker

Schizophrenic individuals experience illogical, bizarre, and delusional disturbances in their thinking. They also exhibit many other disturbances in their perceptions, emotions, sense of self, volition, and relationship to the outside world. Schizophrenic individuals often have hallucinations, mainly auditory and visual. Their emotions are flat; their sense of self is fragmented. Withdrawn and self-absorbed, they often exhibit unusual or bizarre mannerisms but are usually loners who try to avoid all contact with other people.

Most schizophrenic stalkers do not wish to make contact with their victims. But some are driven to make contact because their own bizarre delusions convince them that they are tormented by their victims or that they have been somehow ordained, fated, or commanded to contact their victims. It is such schizophrenic individuals who are compelled to pursue their victims, driven, as it were, to seek relief by contact with them. When stalking is a symptom of chronic schizophrenia, this behavior may become intractable. Some schizophrenic individuals are psychologically fused with their victims, hopelessly unable to discern where they stop and the other person begins. Thus, killing the victim is tantamount to committing suicide.

Michael Perry, who had escaped from a mental institution, stalked singer-actress Olivia Newton-John. He wrote her two letters saying that he wanted to get in touch with her to prove to himself that she was real and not just a “Disneyland mirror image.” Reportedly, he believed that Olivia Newton-John was responsible for dead bodies that were rising through the floor of his house and that her eyes changed colors as signals to him. He compiled a death-list of 10 names that included Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He killed five persons, including his father and mother, whose eyes he shot out. Two weeks after those murders, he was in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., near the Supreme Court building. There were seven television sets in the room, all of them tuned to static and with eyes drawn on the screens with a marker. Fortunately, he was arrested before killing any more people on his death list.

Individuals like Perry can be extremely dangerous because of their persecutory or messianic delusions about specific individuals. But the majority of schizophrenic individuals who have delusional beliefs are too disorganized and self-absorbed to be capable of planning and carrying out a reasonably competent, sustained stalking.

As an aside, let me point out that some serial murderers, particularly serial sexual murderers, are stalkers, in that they often track their victims. Richard Ramirez, a California serial killer, was dubbed by the media as the “Night Stalker,” but there was no discernible pattern in his killings and so could not be said to have stalked anyone. Most serial killers who stalk are not interested in the socioeconomic status of their victims or in their specific personalities, and so do not really fit into this chapter about stalkers. Serial murderers who stalked, such as Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper, are discussed in Chapter 11.

The Cyberstalker

The Internet provides the stalker with another avenue by which to arrive at a person’s doorstep. The stalker can obtain private information to facilitate pursuit of the victim as well as to communicate with the victim for the purposes of harassment and threats. Cyberstalking statistics show that between January 1, 2000, and December 2001, 83% of cyberstalking victims were women and 64% of the harassers were men. When the victims were asked where they first encountered the abuser or stalker, the top three locations were e-mail (39%), chat room (15%), and message board/forum (11%).

Most cases were resolved after reports were made to the stalker’s Internet service provider. Prosecutors are increasingly prosecuting cyberstalking crimes. Cyberstalking is just another example of how far stalkers will go to harass and frighten their victims.

Prevention and Protection
Preventive Measures

Stalking is psychological terrorism. Inflicting terror on the victim often is intended, but it is also sometimes an unintended consequence of the stalker’s obsession. No matter where the victim goes, he or she is at risk. It is difficult to appreciate the intensity of fear felt by victims for their lives. The horror is so intense and constant that it often defies our understanding and taxes our ability to empathize with the victim. The stalking victim gradually becomes a captive of the stalker. As the terrorism escalates, the victim’s life becomes a prison. Friends may fall away for fear of becoming entangled and stalked themselves. The victim scurries from the protective cover of home to work and back, much as a prisoner is shuttled from cell to cell. Frequently, the workplace is no refuge from the stalker. Some victims are too terrified to leave home. They live in solitary confinement, peering out at the world from behind blinds. Sometimes, if help cannot be obtained, the only release is death—at the hands of the stalker. Such was the fate of Kristin Lardner, who was gunned down in broad daylight by Michael Cartier.

If the stalker shows up repeatedly at the victim’s place of work, the victim may lose his or her job. Friends may have to do the victim’s shopping. E-mail contacts can be endless and visually threatening. The telephone may ring incessantly. One victim’s home was buzzed by a stalker in a small plane. Other victims have lost pets, cars, homes, and have had defamatory material spread about them (e.g., the victim has AIDS) at work, school, or on the Internet. Some victims of stalkers have had to move away from their homes, their towns, even out of the country. As an extreme measure, a few stalking victims change their identities. Andrea Evans, who had a starring role on ABC’s
One Life to Live
, a series taped in New York City, felt forced by a Russian immigrant stalker to give up her job and her city. He sent her letters with threats written in blood, and despite his frequent hospitalizations, he continued to disrupt her life for some time. Eventually, her career in shambles, Ms. Evans left New York for an undisclosed location.

Actress Theresa Saldana’s stalker, Arthur Jackson, came all the way from Scotland to see her, then stabbed her 10 times and left her for dead. Imprisoned in California, he frequently indicated in letters that he intended to finish the job of killing her when he was released. For the new threats, he received additional jail time. Jackson has been described by psychiatrists as a very dangerous, paranoid psychotic. He said that he wanted to kill Saldana so they could be united after death. Upon his release in the U.S., he was returned to Great Britain to stand trial for another violent offense, and in 2004 was reported to be in a mental institution there. Arthur Jackson is a classic example of a stalker who is “forever yours.”

All states and the District of Columbia, recognizing the magnitude of the stalking problem, have passed anti-stalking laws. Victims can also obtain restraining orders to try to stay out of the clutches of stalkers, but these orders have had inconsistent success. Restraining orders are not effective against desperate people who have nothing to lose. To obtain such an order, the victim must go to court, itself a difficult process. Then, once the protective or restraining order is in hand, the victim must deal with the possibility that it may further inflame a determined stalker, perhaps pushing him or her over the edge into violence. Experts now suggest that the victim who obtains a protective order should also attempt to have criminal charges pressed. The combination may get the stalker off the streets and into jail, preventing immediate physical harm to the victim.

A federal task force has recommended that stalking be considered a felony offense. A number of states have already taken this step, codifying stalking as an offense punishable by up to 5 years in prison. The most effective laws concerning stalking are those that define the offense broadly, stating, for instance, that it means willful, malicious conduct that involves repeated harassment. Under such a definition, any word, gesture, or action that is intended to diminish a person’s safety, security, or privacy will meet the definition of stalking and give the authorities reason to charge the stalker. In some states, however, the anti-stalking law is hampered by stipulations that an arrest warrant can be obtained only if the stalker has also made a “credible” threat against the victim, such as causing the victim to fear death or bodily harm. Unfortunately, this makes it necessary for the victim to prove violence directed against him or her even before that violence takes place. Moreover, threats are not highly correlated with actual violence.