Obsession (39 page)

“What’s amazing.” Beatty says, “is what you hear as they’re being dragged off to jail, ‘I never did anything
to her. I only loved her.’” If an offender thinks he’s done nothing wrong, he perceives the involvement of the authorities as an injustice perpetrated against him, and just one more way the victim—and society, through the criminal justice system—is harassing him.

In Black’s case, seeking help from ESL management helped in that at least she’d finally gone on record with his harassment, but it did seem to escalate his behavior. It was shortly after Black reported him that Farley confronted her outside her apartment and first mentioned his gun collection. He told her how skillful he was at using his weapons. When she asked if he intended to kill her, he answered in person and in yet another letter that it wasn’t his intention, although he warned that by threatening his job she had raised the stakes: “Time to remove the kid gloves.”

He also wrote, “If I killed you, you won’t be able to regret what you did…. In between the two extremes of doing nothing and having the police or someone kill me, there’s a whole range of options, each getting worse and worse.”

It was obvious that his therapy wasn’t working. “Once I’m fired,” Farley wrote Black, “you won’t be able to control me ever again…. I’ll crack under the pressure and run amok and destroy everything in my path…. Even if you don’t crack up you will never again play with men with the same ease you do now, and I will win.”

Even as he claimed his actions were motivated by unrequited love, he couldn’t keep the all-important themes of domination and control from his manipulative letters to her. He was also unable to hide his obsession from ESL personnel, whom he advised that he owned guns that he could use to “take people with me.”

Two years after a coworker innocently introduced
them, the company fired Farley for harassment and poor job performance. At the same time, according to Black, she was told by the company she should get away for a while.

Loss of a job and loss of a wife or girlfriend are two of the precipitating Stressors we look for in the life of a violent offender. When we’re dealing with someone who already has personality problems, removal of the few anchors he has in his life can push him over the edge, as we’ve seen time and time again. Denied access to Black at work (even barred from the company parking lot), Farley’s behavior grew more menacing as he sensed the threat of losing control over her. Although he and Black had never had a real relationship, in his mind he was facing loss of his job and his girl at the same time. He continued to follow her and, before he got another job, devoted his days to his full-time position as a stalker, showing up at her house and spending hours trying to figure out (through painstaking trial and error) the code to open her garage. He tried to get the manager of her apartment complex to rent him the place next door. When Black learned this, she moved, as she had done earlier in her ordeal. But, as before, somehow Farley was able to track her down again.

He continued to use letters to communicate his moods, from loving to menacing, and to manipulate his way into her thoughts, if not her life. In one, he set up a date and used her lack of response as an excuse to show up at her house, dressed to go out. When she wouldn’t go, he took it as evidence of how she played games with him. She found herself in an impossible situation. If she called him to refuse the date, he’d found a way to get her to talk to him, which she knew he would interpret as encouraging. But if she didn’t contact him, he’d be on her doorstep, ready and waiting.

And he set up another impossible scenario. Out of work, he told her he was running out of money and outlined his plan: “I get a job or I live with you, there is no alternative.” Before that crisis arrived, however, he found another position in his field.

By the winter of 1987-88, three years after her ordeal began, Black was growing increasingly nervous and getting more signals from Farley. He’d lost a job, lost his home in foreclosure, and was being investigated by the IRS, to whom he owed some $40,000 in back taxes and penalties. “This is going to escalate and soon …,” Parley wrote to her. “The shit has hit the fan … all because you think I’m a joke and refuse to listen or understand that I’m gravely serious.” He continued to project the blame onto his victim: it was her fault they were estranged. She was forcing him to do these things.

Ironically, while he was blaming her for his behavior, she was spending considerable time trying to figure out how not to escalate things. She was warned that her situation with Farley could cost her her government security clearance. It wasn’t enough that she was living with the stress of Farley’s direct threats against her and the way he’d managed to insinuate himself into her life, causing her to move, affecting her personal relationships, altering every aspect of her personal life. Now he was indirectly jeopardizing her job. Black considered going for a restraining order, but as she put it, “I was afraid that a restraining order would not protect me and that it might set him off.” In early 1988, however, Farley left an envelope on her car windshield that contained a note and a copy he’d made of the key to her house.

Leaving her the key was just another way for him to assert his dominance, as if to say, “I didn’t use this, but I could have and I still could.” I’ve dealt with enough of these control types to know that he got off
on imagining the fear it created when she realized he had access to her house and she hadn’t even known it. He must have visualized the look on her face when she opened the envelope—if he wasn’t off watching from a distance. Just as the sexual assault part of a rape is much less gratifying to a rapist than the planning, fantasizing, and physical and emotional control over his victim, actually breaking into Laura Black’s home and killing her wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying to Farley as instilling the fear in her and fantasizing about it. Guys like this live for the hunt, for the power struggle.

But by playing that card, he moved Black to take legal action. On February 2, 1988, she sought help from the criminal justice system, asserting that she’d reached “the end of my rope” and pleading, “I need the court’s assistance and the assistance of the appropriate police agencies to keep this man out of my life.”

She was granted a temporary restraining order that prohibited Farley from threatening, following, surveilling, or calling her. He was also prohibited from getting closer than three hundred feet of her home, office, softball practices and games, and aerobics classes. A date of February 17 was set for the hearing on a permanent restraining order.

Laura Black had spent much of her adult life trying to rid herself of Richard Wade Farley, but this action was the last straw from his point of view. On February 9 he purchased a twelve-gauge semiautomatic shotgun for $600, along with plenty of ammunition for it and the other weapons he had at home. He had no trouble in the security check because he had FBI clearance from his former job and because the restraining order didn’t even show up—in California at that time there would have been no record of the order until it had been violated.

The next day Farley dropped off an envelope for
Black’s attorney. In it, he asserted that he had proof of his and Black’s relationship, including receipts from dinner dates, a garage door opener he said she gave him, and recordings of phone calls. As further proof, he claimed he knew where Black kept a secret stash of cocaine and described times they’d gone away together. None of it was convincing to Black’s lawyer.

Obviously, all of that was completely false. But there’s an important point here. Let’s assume Farley’s claims were only half BS and that at one time he and Black had dated. Let’s further assume that he had proof of this relationship. As a former special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I know of no laws, statutes, or articles in the Constitution that allow someone to stalk and systematically terrorize another human being just because at one point they did have a relationship. We’ll get into the dynamics of this type of stalking in the next chapter, but the reasoning behind Farley’s claims is the same faulty logic other offenders use to justify acquaintance rape. Breaking the law, demoralizing and/or physically harming another individual in the process, isn’t acceptable—ever. Although all rapes are not the same, and all stalkings are not the same, they are all criminal acts perpetrated against victims who in no way asked for or deserved the horrendous treatment they received.

As the day of the hearing approached, Farley got ready for a new mission: he either had to convince Laura Black to drop the court matter or he was going to commit suicide right in front of her. “I just felt she had to see the end result of what I felt she had done to me … not just read about it,” Farley later said. He rented a motor home, which he stocked full of his guns and ammunition, along with photographic equipment—presumably to record the proceedings in case he was able to lure her to go with him.

That morning he started out following his daily routine,
showering, shaving, and dressing, stopping at a local Jack in the Box for breakfast. After that, however, he prepared for combat. He returned home, where he left his last will and testament to be found if plans to talk Black out of the permanent restraining order were unsuccessful. That afternoon, suited up like a schleppy Rambo, he drove the motor home (now full of nearly one hundred pounds of weaponry and ammo) to ESL, where he planned to wait for Black to leave work. As 3:00
P.M.
approached, now wearing an ammunition vest to go with the headband and fatigues, Farley tired of waiting. He filled the vest with clips, slipped a knife in his belt, and revolvers in holsters he wore. When he was ready to leave the motor home a few minutes later, he was wearing or carrying seven weapons, including his shotgun, the revolvers, two semiautomatic pistols, and a rifle. In final preparation for the hunt, he grabbed a pair of earplugs and leather gloves.

As he made his way across the parking lot and into the building, the first person he met up with was forty-six-year-old Larry Kane, a data-processing specialist Parley knew. Farley fired at him with his shotgun and killed him. He also fired at another employee, Randell Hemingway, but missed him, before shooting into an office and killing twenty-three-year-old, recently married Wayne “Buddy” Williams. Farley kept shooting as he moved closer to Black’s office. He killed his third victim on the staircase to the second floor, where he shot five more people (three of whom died of their wounds) before he reached Black’s office. Although he claimed it was his intention to make her witness his suicide, once he saw her, he started firing. He missed her with the first shot, but the second hit her shoulder, knocking her out. When she came to seconds later, she saw she was bleeding heavily and managed to kick her office door closed as she screamed.
He didn’t force his way back in, so Black tried calling 911. But she got a busy signal. When she heard his trail of gunfire move away down the hall, she slipped out of her office to escape.

By now, the entire floor was in chaos, covered in blood and smoky from gunfire. Along with his former coworkers, Farley had been firing at computers as he passed through the building. Black found her co-worker and friend, twenty-seven-year-old Glenda Moritz, shot and dying on the floor. Software engineer Helen Lamparter, forty-nine, was also out there, lying facedown. As Black tried to stop her own bleeding from a wound the size of her fist, she hid with coworkers for the next half hour, in shock, blood making gurgling sounds in her lungs, as a police negotiator tried to talk Farley into giving himself up. He asked Farley to consider what his mother would be going through.

“It’s gonna be real bad for her,” Farley said of his mother, whom he claimed was the only person who ever loved him.

As Black fought for her life, hiding with colleagues who stuffed paper towels against her shoulder to slow the blood loss, Farley stressed to the police that he “never wanted to hurt her,” claiming, “All she had to do was go out with me.” He kept moving from one room to the next so the SWAT team couldn’t zero in on his location, until at one point, Black could hear him on the phone in the next room and decided to make her escape. She managed to get down the hall, down the stairs, and into the street. A waiting ambulance took her to the hospital, where she was treated for a collapsed lung and broken arm, in addition to the massive injury to her shoulder.

More than five hours after the shooting began, hours in which Farley threatened suicide and then ordered a sandwich and Pepsi for dinner, Black’s tormentor
surrendered. By that time, seven people lay dead, another four wounded. As he gave himself up, he announced, “I’m the guy who is shooting people.” But even then he tried to shift some of the responsibility for his actions, saying, “Tell Laura Black this is about her.” The next day—the day of the scheduled hearing—a San Jose court commissioner granted the permanent restraining order against Farley.

The nightmare still wasn’t over for Laura Black. After the assault, she was hospitalized for nineteen days, facing four operations to reconstruct and repair her shattered shoulder. Since then, she’s been through at least three more surgeries, yet will probably never regain total mobility or muscle control of the shoulder and arm. If she could forget the entire four-year ordeal, the constant pain and the scars on her body (including some on her leg, hip, and stomach from skin grafts) would surely remind her.

And Farley continued to write to her from prison. In one letter, he told Black she’d finally won, although I doubt she greeted that with much enthusiasm given that she never agreed to the terms of his war.

When the case went to trial, both Black and Farley spent time on the witness stand. While Black never looked at her tormentor, merely glancing in his direction when asked to identify him, Farley spoke of their “relationship” in the present tense. Those in attendance described him as transfixed by her presence, taking notes as she testified. His attorneys argued that since the killings were not premeditated, Farley should not be found guilty of first-degree murder. And in his testimony, Farley tried to remove himself from the killings, saying, “I remember the gun going off once or twice…. I had to be firing it. There was no one else holding the gun.” He also described the scene in Laura Black’s office—where he shot her instead of carrying out his supposed plan to shoot himself. According
to Farley, Black was smiling when she first looked to see who was entering her office, but “the smile is very fleeting … when she saw me, the smile disappeared.”