The following is respectfully quoted from “To Have or To Harm” by Linden Gross:
Chicago, Illinois, August 5, 1989
After violating a protective order three times, Sheila Gallo’s former husband kills her. Their divorce had been final for just two days.
Richmond, Virginia, February 9, 1989
Deborah Frost’s old high-school boyfriend kills her while out on bond. The young man, who came from a “nice family” according to the victim’s mother, had never gotten over her. Eleven encounters with the law over a ten-month period did nothing to change his intentions or the outcome.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 9, 1992
Shirley Lowery waits in the hall outside a courtroom where she’s applied for a restraining order against the man with whom she’d once lived. Before she makes it inside, Benjamin Franklin stabs her nineteen times, fulfilling his promise to make Shirley pay for leaving him.
Boston, Massachusetts, May 30, 1992
Eleven days after Kristin Lardner gets a permanent injunction to keep Michael Cartier away from her, the twenty-two-year-old bouncer walks up to her in the middle of a busy street during daylight hours and shoots her repeatedly in the head. He was on probation at the time, for the beating of a previous girlfriend. “If the courts had checked his record or spoken to police when she sought help, he would have been locked up rather than set loose to kill her,” Kristin’s sister Helen Lardner, a Washington lawyer, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
Statistics on stalking are limited, principally because the cases wind up being classified as the crimes into which they usually escalate, such as assault or homicide. But most authorities agree that the overwhelming number of stalking victims are women. In fact, 90 percent of the fifteen hundred women killed by their current or former mates each year in this country were stalked before being murdered. However, that doesn’t mean that most stalking victims are killed. But “there’s a far greater chance that an ordinary -citizen case is going to result in a tragic conclusion than the celebrity,” says Lieutenant John Lane, who heads the Los Angeles Police Department’s Threat Management Unit, created especially to deal with stalking cases.
Stalkers don’t prey just on their individual targets. In cases involving family units, children frequently wind up as the victims. In October 1992, for example, Andrew Taylor made good on a prior threat. After his attempts at reconciliation — and his intimidation campaign — failed, he kidnapped his one-month-old daughter from her mother, a respiratory therapist. Authorities found the bodies of the unemployed actor and baby, whom he’d strangled, on a nearby bench. Eight months later, a South Dakota man shot his estranged wife and their two children just before their divorce was to become final.
Obsessed pursuers will frequently harass a third party to whom the actual target is attached in order to gain the intense impact and reaction they seek. “The easiest way to get me is to get to the people I love,” says Sarah Jane Williams, whose grandmother wound up in a nursing home after being knocked over by a prowler — presumably Sarah Jane’s stalker — when he broke into her home.
How did he know where to find the ninety-eight-year-old woman? or for that matter Sarah Jane, whom he continues to harass by phone even though she changes her number so often it takes her a few seconds to remember her current one?
Today’s easy access to informaiton has made us all potential victims. In his book Privacy for Sale, Jeffery Rothfeder explains how the proliferation of computerized records containing information about personal, private lives (5 billion records to date in the United States alone) means that a person with the right skills or contacts can find out virtually everything about us, from our whereabouts to our finances to our purchasing habits and family ties.
Why would one person obsess about another to the point of craving this sort of intimate information?
Anyone who has ever fallen in love or been infatuated knows how close the experience can be to a spiritual or drug induced high. Suddenly, our thoughts are consumed with one single being. Everything we see or do seems to bring him or her to mind. We find ourselves doing things we wouldn’t under any other circumstances. Like calling and then hanging up or using a fake voice just to see if anyone is home. Or driving by the house or apartment again and again for a glimpse.
The truth is that, for most of us, we’re in love not just with the person but with our projection of what kind of couple we’ll make, the needs that he or she will fulfill, and the idealized notion of love in general. Before we’ve even gotten to know what we’re really dealing with, we’ve fallen in love with what this person could represent to our future.
The individual whose life is a void waiting to be filled, however, takes those feelings and amplifies them. The person with whom he’s infatuated becomes his reason to exist. Any contact is better than no contact, any information a way to feel more intimately involved even if no relationship exists. That emptiness also helps explain the explosions that take place during the separations or divorces of many couples, when those who have used their relationships to define their identities simply can’t afford to let go.
In a culture where male violence is highlighted daily in the press and glorified nightly on television, the inability to accept rejection can easily mutate into dominance — particularly if it’s the man who’s been cast aside. “It has been sanctioned in society for a thousand years that a man has control over his woman,” says Michael Faymar, training coordinator for the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota.
The social conditioning that most American men receive feeds this distorted view of relationships as ownership and love as a predestined occurrence. Even when they have targeted women who don’t return their affections, the socially accepted notion that men choose women, rather than the other way around, feeds their sense of righteousness. “She’s the only one for me,” says the ardent suitor, as if that should be the determining factor in her decisions.
