Stalkers

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’

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.