Stalkers

‘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’

‘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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