Obsession (41 page)

Although he earned straight A’s in junior high school, his behavior was increasingly disturbing. A loner even then, he began writing letters to a teacher—at times more than one a day. Indicating he was already becoming more rooted in the world of fantasy than reality, he signed his letters in character as James Bond, Dirty Harry Callahan, and the like. He wrote of death—his own by suicide and the murder of his teacher and others. According to at least one published report, teachers tried to convince his parents he was in need of psychiatric intervention. But aside from one week of counseling at Palo Verde Hospital, the teachers’ recommendations went unheeded.

Both Park Dietz and another psychiatrist, Dr. John Stalberg, indicated after studying Bardo’s case that his family background was likely a contributing factor to his erratic, unsocial behavior. Although I wouldn’t make the leap of logic to say that having a reportedly alcoholic father and/or paranoid mother leads to a child’s becoming a stalker and a murderer, Bardo’s disturbing background is consistent with those of so many criminals I’ve studied. According to one report, Bardo filled out a form sent by school officials to his parents and took the opportunity to ask for help: “This house is hell…. I can’t handle it anymore. Please help. Fast.” Bardo indicated to psychiatrists who interviewed him after the crime that an older
brother abused him physically, allegedly forcing him to drink urine and shoplift. Whatever the source of Bardo’s troubles, at the very least his parents seem to have been in denial about the extent of their son’s problems.

By high school, his behavior was so disturbing that one former teacher characterized him as “a time bomb waiting to explode.” Although still making A’s, he wrote one teacher a tenpage letter in which he threatened to kill himself. After temporary placement in a foster home, he was returned to his parents. In 1985, he was hospitalized during the summer and was evaluated as “severely emotionally handicapped,” and his family described as “pathological and dysfunctional.” In general, though, he was regarded as a good patient, enthusiastic about treatment and therapy and in some ways a role model for other young patients, whom he discouraged from using illegal drugs. Although it seemed he was making progress, his parents took him home after a month. Just weeks later, he left high school for good.

At this point, his fantasy life grew increasingly important, and his career as a stalker (and ultimately a murderer) began to take form. He was a social outcast at school, but at least there he had his grades to help shore up his ego. Without that, all the insecurities and inadequacies overwhelmed him. This young man who was smart enough to get straight A’s became a janitor at Jack in the Box, leaving his parents’ house before five in the morning to start the two-mile walk to work. When he wasn’t cleaning the fastfood restaurant, he was sleeping, playing guitar, or immersing himself in the alternative reality of TV and radio.

His introduction to Rebecca Schaeffer occurred in 1986. At this point, the asocial sixteen-year-old had never had a date, let alone a girlfriend, and never had sex. To someone like Bardo, Schaeffer represented an
ideal: pretty, young, and innocent-looking, she was completely nonthreatening. Bardo watched her on
My Sister Sam
and would later say, “She just came into my life at the right time.” He started writing letters to her. She answered one, in which he’d written his thoughts on friendship and spirituality, with a compliment on how nice and “real” his letter was and signed it “Love, Rebecca.” This was for Bardo what lunch with Laura Black and another coworker was to Richard Farley. In Bardo’s mind, the connection he’d felt watching her on TV had been solidified by this contact, the first time he’d had this with a woman.

Bardo remained obsessed with Schaeffer, but for a time in 1988 diverted some of his attention to other famous young celebrities, including the singers Tiffany and Debbie Gibson—both of whom offered the same blend of youthful innocence and budding femininity Schaeffer embodied. In 1989, though, he saw Schaeffer in a bedroom love scene in the film
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills
. Although he’d let his obsession wane, his attention—and fury—now turned back to Schaeffer. What had been for her just another role in her expanding career signified to Bardo that she was becoming, as he put it, “just another Hollywood whore.”

Like Theresa Saldana and Laura Black, Rebecca Schaeffer was a lowrisk victim. Although she was becoming famous, she lived a lowkey lifestyle in an average, relatively safe neighborhood. According to her friends and coworkers, she was well liked, and her talent was greatly respected. Her
Sam
costar Pam Dawber adored her and was devastated by her death. She had no enemies. Or at least, no enemies that she knew of before Bardo killed her. Schaeffer had only seen early fan mail from Bardo. Her agent and people at the studio where she worked screened the mail and threw away frightening letters so as not to worry the
young actress, who remained unaware of Bardo’s growing obsession. Before he shot Schaeffer at her home, Bardo had tried to reach her at the Warner Brothers lot where they taped her show. The first time, he carried a large stuffed teddy bear and a letter for the actress, but was turned away by security guards. The second time, angry at what he perceived as Schaeffer’s increasing arrogance, he carried a knife. This time, according to one account, the director of security drove Bardo back to his hotel and told him it was time to return to Arizona.

With his history of letters and visits, Bardo was sending a clear message to Schaeffer’s people that he was desperate for contact with her. I’d like to believe that if the same thing happened today, someone with a solid background in threat assessment would be analyzing the situation. I know that Gavin de Becker, for one, would be, were she his client. Perhaps such an expert would have been able to predict that Schaeffer’s name appeared frequently in Bardo’s diary, where he wrote, “I feel that I want to become famous and impress her.” I believe an expert would have known of Bardo’s extensive collection of Schaeffer memorabilia, including videotapes and still more letters to the actress. And, perhaps, that expert would have read Bardo’s letters and warned that the fan, although inadequate and unable to function well in society, was intelligent and resourceful enough to prove himself dangerous.

In fact, some of the same skills that served him well in school helped Bardo finally get to Schaeffer. He studied how Arthur Jackson gained access to his victim and hired his own private detective a month before the murder. It cost the PI just $4 to get Schaeffer’s address at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, but the information was worth a lot more to Bardo, who
paid $250. That, ultimately, was what Rebecca Schaeffer’s precious life cost.

Like Jackson, Bardo was more resourceful and focused on the mission to kill Schaeffer than he had been with anything else in his life. In Arizona, you had to be twenty-one to purchase a firearm, so Bardo got an older brother to buy one for him. He wanted to make sure his attempt wasn’t a failure, so he got hollow-point cartridges, designed to expand as they penetrate.

In 1991, Marcia Clark, now known for her role as chief prosecutor of the O. J. Simpson case, was the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who handled the case against Bardo. Defense attorney Stephen Galindo was able to remove the possibility of a death sentence by waiving a jury trial. While not disputing the prosecution’s assertion that Bardo pulled the trigger, the defense argued that Bardo was insane. To my knowledge, it was the only time Park Dietz testified for an insanity ruling in a murder case, and Park, whom I respect immensely, knew I disagreed with him on this one. Gavin de Becker worked with the prosecution, elucidating the planning, organization, and thought that went into the obsession and the crime.

As he pointed out in his fine book,
The Gift of Fear
, Gavin made clear that what might at first seem like insane, irrational, “sick” behavior is actually quite rational within the context of the personality of the stalker. “Assassins,” he writes, “do not fear they are going to jail—
they fear they are going to fail
, and Bardo was no different. He had gotten all the components together: He had studied other assassins, he had researched his target, made his plan, gotten the gun, written the letters to be found after the attack. But like the daredevil, he was just a guy who worked at Jack in the Box until he made that jump, until the wheels left the ground, until he killed someone famous.
Everything that goes with fame was waiting for him on the other side of the canyon, where, in his words, he’d finally be ‘a peer’ with celebrities.”

Judge Dino Fulgoni found Robert John Bardo guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. I hope that means what it says since he had, with great deliberation, sentenced Rebecca Shaeffer to death. His sentence is being served in California State Prison in Vacaville, which has also been home to Edmund Kemper.

Was Robert John Bardo a confused, disturbed, depressive personality? Yes. Was he damaged by a difficult upbringing? Possibly. Do I believe that these factors forced him to viciously take Rebecca Schaeffer’s life, or in any way excuse his actions? Absolutely not. He chose to do this. He fantasized about it, he planned it, he premeditated it months ahead of time, and he carried it out. The day he killed her, he actually rang Schaeffer’s buzzer twice. The first time the young woman came to the door they had a quick conversation, during which he gave her a note. She told him, “Take care,” as she closed the door.

He had his audience with her then. He could have left, allowing that meeting to suffice. Instead, he went and got breakfast and then returned to kill her. Bardo himself later summed up his personality defects: “I’m not insane…. I’m just emotional.” According to one report, he was able to look back objectively at his life from his jail cell and admit that dropping out of school was a mistake, that at that point he was completely isolated from real life, at home only in the world of movies and television. Truly delusional individuals do not recognize their retreat into fantasy as such. Marcia Clark thinks he’s more a con man than someone who deserves sympathy. I have to agree with her, and with Gavin’s assessment that he was primarily motivated
by a need for fame, to draw attention to himself. In that way, he fits the assassin mold.

In the mid-1980s, Park Dietz researched and compiled a list of indicative behaviors commonly displayed by assassins. These include some sort of mental disorder, researching the target, keeping a diary, securing a weapon, communicating inappropriately with a public figure, narcissism and grandiosity, random travel, identifying with a previous assassin, getting around security and making repeated approaches to one or more public figures. As we see, this assassin behavior Park outlined applies equally to stalkers.

Gavin de Becker’s research tells him that the most important single indicator of danger to the life of a celebrity or public figure from a stalker/assassin is what he calls “ability belief”—that is, the individual’s belief that he can accomplish his mission. This seems to be the reason Bremer shifted his attentions from Richard Nixon to George Wallace. He didn’t believe he could kill Nixon, but he did believe he could kill Wallace.

Before killing Schaeffer, Robert Bardo wrote to his sister, “I have an obsession with the unattainable … I have to eliminate what I cannot attain.” As with Mark David Chapman’s obsession with John Lennon, these statements, I believe, apply as much to the unattainability of the success and importance Ms. Schaeffer achieved in her life as they did to the unattainability of the actress as a girlfriend figure to Bardo. Again, we’re dealing with an insignificant nobody—in this case, someone clearly living below his intellectual potential and frustrated by that—who can only achieve recognition by taking the life of someone famous.

Rebecca Schaeffer’s murder had far-reaching effects for the Hollywood community and, on a larger scale, the criminal justice system in the United States. In this case, the senseless killing of one good person with a promising
future before her caused outrage and concern that fueled positive changes. In 1990, California became the first state to pass specific antistalking legislation, which was a model for similar legislation throughout the country. Just months after Schaeffer’s murder, the Conference of Personal Managers, a group composed of agents representing celebrities, met with experts in the security field and with officials from the Los Angeles Police Department. The goal was to highlight the concerns the agents had for their clients’ safety and to discuss options open to them. It was the first step in the police department’s development of a special unit to handle such cases of harassment. The LAPD’s Threat Management Unit went into operation in July of 1990, the first unit of its kind in the United States.

There have been other consequences of Schaeffer’s murder as well. The idea that Robert Bardo was able to “buy” Schaeffer’s address (through a middleman) from the California DMV led that agency to increase restrictions on public access to its records. And the industry in general became even more sensitive to the advice of experts like Park Dietz and Gavin de Becker.

Even with antistalking legislation and a greater focus on the dangers, we still have a long way to go. De Becker estimates that internationally prominent stars such as Madonna may be recognized by more than a billion people, and with every detail of the star’s personal life so well publicized, even those of us who are not obsessed can easily come to feel that we “know” her and others of her stature.

And the publicity machine surrounding the famous negotiates a delicate line between protecting the celebrity and keeping his or her image accessible to fans. Today, even after Saldana’s attack, Schaeffer’s death, and a great number of threats and deflected attempts,
many in the entertainment industry seem unwilling to err on the side of caution.

With so large a group of celebrities in the New York area, Linda Fairstein naturally sees love-obsession stalking cases. “Part of the problem with a lot of the public figures,” she says, “is they are discouraged from having the person arrested. It’s going to be bad for their image. It’s going to be in the tabloids. They’re going to look like they’re mean to someone who has a psych problem.” But the laws won’t protect anyone unless they’re utilized.