Obsession (37 page)

As modern serial murder usually begins with Jack the Ripper (although many of my colleagues and I feel it goes a lot further back than that), the case considered the first recorded celebrity-stalking shooting in history is that by Ruth Steinhagen, an obsessed fan of Chicago Cubs baseball player Eddie Waitkus, who shot Waitkus in his room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1949 (a scene on which parts of the movie
The Natural
were loosely based). As with other fans of celebrities, Steinhagen devoted tremendous energy to her obsession, collecting memorabilia, going to his games, studying Lithuanian out of respect for his heritage, even setting a place for him at her dinner table at times. Yet after she shot him (he survived and recovered), she was frustrated by the lack of attention she got. She waited for people to swarm her. Instead, as she woefully described, “Nobody seemed to want me much. I could’ve walked right out of that place and nobody would have come after me.” Rather than elevate her status and importance as she sought, after all the buildup and the excitement of finally seeing Waitkus face-to-face, shooting him simply highlighted her own insignificance.

In the years following the Waitkus murder attempt, political assassinations occurred with greater frequency than celebrity murder, though stalking was probably still common.

I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing and studying
assassins (and would-be assassins), including Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, and Arthur Bremer, who shot Alabama governor and then—presidential candidate George Wallace in a parking lot in Maryland during a political rally. At first, I made the mistake of likening assassins to serial killers. Even the assassins themselves denied that connection. But what I did find is that the assassin personality is similar to that of a celebrity stalker. Both tend to be paranoid, lacking trust in other individuals. Because of their highly suspicious nature, they can be difficult to interview. When I interviewed Bremer, I found myself trying not to make or hold eye contact because I could tell that it made him uncomfortable. Usually loners, they are not relaxed in the presence of others and not practiced or skilled in social interaction. Like many celebrity stalkers, though, in contrast to their inability or unwillingness to communicate through normal conversation, they keep a running dialogue with themselves, often painstakingly detailing their thoughts and fantasies in a diary. After the stalking and murder of a celebrity or politician, we tend to find that the offender has a thick diary (sometimes one he carries with him), with entry after entry about the attack—rationalizing it, planning it, fantasizing about it. It’s like they’re programming themselves to commit the crime, building courage to take action as they never have before.

Arthur Bremer kept such a diary, with entries that underscored his overwhelming feelings of insignificance and inadequacy, the primary motivators for most assassins and stalkers. In planning an assassination, the offender imagines that this one big event will prove once and for all that he has worth, that he can do and be something. It provides an identity and purpose as nothing in his life ever has. You can see this pathetic desperation in the fact that assassins are so focused on how people will receive them after they’ve
acted on their fantasy that they don’t always build in an escape plan. Many, like Ruth Steinhagen, want to be arrested and recognized at the scene of the crime. Bremer is another example of this. After spending time choosing a target and planning his attack, he never planned a way out. He simply needed to prove that this inadequate nobody was able to get in close enough range to get someone as important George Wallace. If he was unable to take that route to win himself significance in his life, in his diaries he wrote of another fantasy: after robbing a bank, police would catch up to him as he fled over a bridge. Before they could arrest him, he’d jump off the bridge and shoot himself in the head at the same time. It is key to his personality dysfunction that he couldn’t just overdose and wait for someone to find his body or shoot himself out in the woods somewhere. He needed a spectacular end to draw attention to himself, much as the assassination attempt on Wallace would. It wasn’t even a question of political ideology with Bremer. Before he stalked Wallace, he had stalked Richard Nixon and other national political figures, but concluded that getting close to them would be too formidable a challenge. It’s ironic that some of Bremer’s black fellow inmates held him in high regard for his assault on Wallace, who at the time was still espousing segregationist beliefs, when in fact he chose him as a target because he wasn’t accomplished enough as an assassin to reach anyone of higher political stature.

Another trait shared by celebrity stalkers and assassins is their odd lack of loyalty to their cause. I know this sounds like a contradiction, given the years some will spend collecting intelligence and memorabilia on their chosen target, but the obsessive behavior and the planned final event are often far more important than their affiliation with a given person or political ideology, as we’ve just seen with Bremer. David Letterman’s
stalker, Margaret Ray, has apparently recently switched her attentions over to former astronaut Story Musgrave. After her arrest outside Musgrave’s house, she reported that she was in love with Musgrave.

The issue of crazed fans stalking celebrities was brought back into public consciousness in 1980, when Mark David Chapman gunned down his idol, former Beatle John Lennon, on the street outside his apartment building in New York City. Like Steinhagen and Bremer, Chapman had no great ambition to escape after committing his crime because he, too, needed the identity he gained by murdering his victim. Unlike the other two, though, Chapman wasn’t looking for public recognition of his accomplishment as much as he was acting out a final step in his deluded worship of Lennon. In Chapman’s mind, the ultimate expression of his love for the man was to murder him, connecting his poor pathetic existence to the artist’s forever. Chapman collected all of John Lennon’s music and emulated him to the point that he reportedly formed relationships with women of Asian descent to mimic Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono. A second motive, one even easier to understand, was simply the inadequate Chapman’s profound jealousy of this man he admired so much. Basically, if he couldn’t enjoy this life of fame, fortune, talent, and adulation, he would see to it that Lennon couldn’t, either. Bringing about the superstar’s death was for him the final, best way to ensure that his life would always be linked with that of the man he idolized.

Just three months after Lennon’s murder, John Hinckley Jr. made his assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan as the president was leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., after a lunchtime speaking engagement. Hinckley’s case is interesting because it shows both the unpredictability of the erotomaniac, love-obsession stalker and at the same time illustrates
how nobody really knew how to deal with this type of criminal at the time.

Hinckley had been obsessed with movie star Jodie Foster. I met and got to know Foster while advising on the film of
The Silence of the Lambs
. She is a gifted, intelligent woman and I have extremely high regard for her both as an actress and a human being. I also have great compassion for her—that she became an innocent victim in one of the most appalling and potentially disastrous stalking incidents on record.

When Hinckley first began to contact her, she or her publicists responded simply by being nice to him as they would to anyone who wrote in, not realizing that the man who started out as just an enthusiastic fan was on a trajectory to violent behavior. When she became a college student at Yale, he obtained the telephone number of her dorm room. When he called her, she treated him cordially, as she would treat any fan who complimented her. Of course, she had no intention whatsoever of encouraging him into thinking that a relationship existed between them.

Unfortunately, things have reached such an alarming level today that many stalking and threat assessment experts, including Gavin de Becker, strongly discourage celebrities from contact with their fans, including sending out the signed photographs that are so popularly requested. This certainly penalizes the vast majority of genuine, respectful admirers because of the numerically small minority who might actually do the celebrity harm. But it’s just too risky to take the chance any longer. In some cases, public figures have had to title properly in other people’s names to make their home locations more difficult to trace.

John Hinckley Jr. wrote to Jodie Foster, “You’ll be proud of me, Jodie. Millions of Americans will love me—us.” To put it plainly, he was coldly and callously willing to take the life of the president of the United
States, as well anyone else who happened to be nearby, and conceivably alter history, to impress a girl who had no interest in him, in fact was only incidentally aware that he existed at all.

Although a failure as a political assassin, he achieved at least one part of his goal: his name is linked with Jodie Foster’s. If he couldn’t have her, this nobody could at least glory in the association.

Hinckley reportedly grew obsessed with Foster after seeing her performance in the movie
Taxi Driver
. Another actress had the misfortune to appear on-screen in a movie that would evoke similarly strong emotions in another disturbed individual. Although not yet a household name, twenty-seven-year-old Theresa Saldana had appeared in several films, including
Raging Bull
with Robert De Niro, by early 1982.

On the morning of March 15 of that year, a middle-aged man approached Saldana as she was unlocking her car outside her West Hollywood apartment. He said, “Excuse me,” to get her attention, then asked if she was Theresa Saldana. When she answered yes, he took out a hunting knife he’d brought and began slashing and stabbing her repeatedly, using enough force that he actually bent the knife. A deliveryman who happened to be nearby, Jeff Fenn, heard her screams and immediately ran to her assistance, managing to get the knife away from her attacker. Paramedics rushed the young actress to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she underwent heart-lung surgery and received twenty-six pints of blood. At one point, her heart stopped. Her assailant had almost accomplished what he would refer to as his “divine mission.”

Police arrested and questioned Arthur Jackson, a drifter from Scotland in his midforties. They learned more about him and his crime from a diary he kept in his traveling knapsack. Like Arthur Bremer’s, Jackson’s diary provided a good look into the mind of a
dedicated stalker whose obsession had become the be-all and end-all of his existence.

Investigation into his background—and from his own writings—revealed a history of disturbing behavior. The son of an alcoholic father and a reportedly schizophrenic mother, he was first hospitalized in his native Scotland with a nervous breakdown at age seventeen, which may have resulted when his romantic feelings went unreturned by the latest in a series of crushes he wrote about. After a year in the psychiatric hospital, he wandered through several countries and continents, holding down menial jobs in London, Toronto, and New York before joining the U.S. Army in the mid 1950s. There, he fell in love with another soldier and yet again the affection was one-sided. As he had back in his homeland, he suffered another nervous breakdown, and the Army sent him to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., for treatment. He was released on a weekend pass for his twenty-first birthday, went to New York, and tried to kill himself with sleeping pills.

By 1961, Jackson had been discharged from the military and was transitioning from unrequited crushes on people he knew to throwing all his emotions into a fantasy life with famous individuals he had never met. Arrested that year by the U.S. Secret Service for threatening Pres. John F. Kennedy, Jackson was deported to Scotland, where he alternately lived with his mother and wandered around on the dole, spending much of his time and money on the movies. It was at this time that Theresa Saldana appeared in the films
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
and
Defiance
, the latter of which apparently inspired Jackson to focus his obsessive thoughts on her. According to Jackson’s diaries, while watching a particularly violent part of the film, he had flashbacks to a similarly bloody real-life scene he saw while in the emergency room in 1956 following
his suicide attempt. He transferred the excitement he got from the violence on Saldana and wrote that by “sending her into eternity” he hoped to win her love. This new focus held more emotional satisfaction than any of his previous “relationships,” and it was here that he truly blossomed as a stalker.

For most stalkers, pursuing their prey becomes a full-time job, providing meaning in a life that previously had little or none. Arthur Jackson was no exception. The man who had been unable to keep menial jobs for long, who’d wandered around aimlessly through most of his life, suddenly had a mission and a goal for which he’d focus all his attention and travel thousands of miles—all in pursuit of a woman he’d never met. In 1982, he reentered the United States illegally and began trying to make contact with his target and potential victim. He started in New York. Posing as an agent with a great script—and as a producer, photographer, director’s assistant, and publicist—he tried to get to the actress through her relatives and people she worked with, traveling to Los Angeles when his early attempts in New York failed. He would not be discouraged. After returning to New York, he learned that Saldana lived in Hollywood, so he hopped a bus out West to cross the country again.

When he got to the point where he realized he couldn’t get any closer on his own, Jackson became more resourceful. In Hollywood, he hired a private investigator, who found Saldana’s address for him. Fortunately, he was not as successful in weapons acquisition. Jackson originally wanted to shoot Saldana, thinking that would be a “more humane” way to end her life than by stab wounds. In his journeys across the country he tried several times to buy a gun, but without proper ID, such as a U.S. driver’s license, he wasn’t able to do so. As horrible as Saldana’s injuries were, if Jackson had been able to fire a gun ten times
at point-blank range, there would have been a very different end to this story.