Jean Ritchie - Stalkers

The security that surrounded Hinckley as he waited for his trial was greater than any that Jodie Foster had. The security services recognized that, as with Mark Chapman, Hinckley was a natural target for plenty of glory-seekers. It caused a sensation when Hinckley was found not guilty of attempting to murder Reagan, because of his insanity. But the net result for the American people was the same: he went behind bars, with very little prospect of ever being released.

It was surprising, therefore, to find him being considered for unsupervised release to spend a weekend with his parents only six years after the shooting. His application to be allowed home – he had already been back to Colorado in the company of a nurse – was supported by staff who had been involved in his care and treatment.

At a court hearing to consider his application it was revealed that he had written a sympathetic letter to Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers who is on Death Row in Florida. Hinckley ‘expressed sorrow’ at the ‘awkward position you [Bundy] find yourself in’. He had also written to a college student, asking her to kill Jodie Foster for him and to send a pistol by post to him so that he could escape from jail. He then told the girl to hijack a jet and demand that Hinckley and Jodie Foster both be taken aboard it. Hinckley had also received a letter from a woman in jail for trying to kill President Ford; she suggested Hinckley write to Charles Manson. To hear about the networking that was going on between long-term prisoners was almost as shocking to the law-abiding public as the whole idea of stalking.

Hinckley’s application to go home alone was turned down, and has been turned down ever since. When Hinckley’s application came up again in 1988, the court heard that staff had intercepted a letter from him to a mail order company that was selling pictures of Jodie Foster; his obsession was undiminished. In 1993, twelve years after committing the crime, he applied for parole. The answer was no.

‘THE BENEVOLENT ANGEL OF DEATH’

SHE RUSHED OUT of her apartment block in Los Angeles on a fine sunny morning in March 1982, a slim, pretty girl with long dark hair, wearing a sailor-style top and trousers. It wasn’t far from the block doorway to her car, which was parked by the kerb. She was on her way to a music class, in a hurry because she was late.

‘Are you Theresa Saldana?’ a male voice with a pronounced Scottish accent asked, as she was slipping the key into the car door. She knew, as soon as she heard the question, that the man who had been stalking her for the past few weeks had caught up with her. She instinctively turned to face him, and then tried to run. He was very close, and when he grabbed her she knew he was far too strong for her to be able to escape. She spontaneously raised her hands, to protect her face, and as she did so she felt the first searing hot thrust of pain in her chest.

Arthur Jackson, a 47-year-old Scottish drifter with a long history of psychiatric illness, stabbed 27-year-old actress Theresa Saldana ten times with the five-inch blade of a kitchen knife as she struggled with him, screaming ‘He’s trying to kill me.’ Fortunately for her, among the people who witnessed the attack was a 26-year-old bottled water delivery man, Jeff Fenn, who had the courage to tackle Jackson. He launched himself on to the demented Scotsman, not realizing that he was armed. When he saw the knife he was able to get it off Jackson and then hold him on the ground until the police arrived.

‘I heard a lady screaming, I ran up the street and tried to break it up,’ said Fenn. ‘The man appeared to be beating her with a fist, but when I grabbed the guy to get him into a headlock I saw he had a knife. Then I pulled him to the ground while she ran into the apartment. I got the knife out of his hands and threw it into the street. He asked me how long it had been since he stabbed her, but I didn’t want to talk to him so I told him to just lie down and be still while I held his arms behind him on the ground.’

While he was being held by Fenn, Jackson told the crowd that gathered that they would find the reasons for his attack in a bag he was carrying.

Released from Jackson’s grip, Theresa ran back to the apartment block, screaming that she was dying and needed help. Her husband Fred Feliciano had been called, and he stayed by her side as paramedics gave her blood transfusions and then rushed her to the Cedars-Sinai hospital. She was operated on immediately. Four of the stab wounds had punctured one of her lungs, and there were three other stab wounds in her chest, narrowly missing her heart. The left hand which she had raised to protect her face had been slashed so badly that it required extensive surgery over the next few months. The doctors lost count of how many stitches they had to put in on that first day, but she needed twenty-six pints of blood. Before she was wheeled into the operating theatre for her first four hours of surgery Theresa told them she was an actress and begged them to do their job well and not leave her with too many scars. For four weeks she was on two drips, one in each arm, and she was in hospital for a total of ten weeks.

The delivery man who saved her life visited her in hospital a few days later. Although he had seen her most celebrated film, Raging Bull, in which she played Jake La Motta’s sister-in-law, only the day before, he did not recognize her at the time of the attack. Theresa had a large trophy inscribed for him with the words: ‘To my hero, Jeffrey Fenn. Thank you, thank you, thank you. With much love and gratitude for ever.’

There was no doubt that Jeffrey’s actions saved Theresa from death. When police examined Arthur Jackson’s belongings, they found in the battered shoulder bag he was carrying a document he had written, describing Theresa as his ‘divine angel’ and his ‘countess angel’. He had seen her in a film called Defiance, in which she played the girlfriend of a young seaman caught up in a fight with a street gang. Jackson, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, was deluded enough to believe that the film was the story of his life, and that Theresa was therefore his girlfriend. He claimed she was too good for the world, and he was on a ‘divine mission’ as a ‘benevolent angel of death’. His mission was to kill her, and he wrote that he was acting under the orders of the ‘Knights of St Michael in the kingdom of heaven’. Theresa, he believed, would be better off dead than with the ‘scum’ she mixed with on earth, which was probably a reference to her husband.

In the document, which was entitled ‘Petition to the United States Government for a State-Imposed Execution’, he pleaded for his own life to be ended in the electric chair, so that he could join her. He said he wanted to die at Alcatraz, the famous federal prison which had been closed for some years. He stipulated the execution should take place in Cell Block D, because that was where a convicted armed robber named Joseph Cretzer had died in 1946 while leading an insurrection, and Jackson believed that by dying there he could free Cretzer’s soul from purgatory, while rejoining his own ‘divine angel’ in heaven. He also asked for piped music to be played and light refreshments served while he was in the electric chair. He mentioned Theresa Saldana’s name fifty times in the whole document.

He also weighed up the pros and cons of where he should kill her – she had an apartment in New York as well as her home in Los, Angeles – but opted for California because it had recently reintroduced the death penalty. He wanted to die, but could not bring himself to commit suicide.

Jackson was first diagnosed as mentally ill when he was seventeen, and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and America ever since. He had been deported from America twice, but had still managed to get a visa to return. Two days after seeing Defiance during the Christmas holiday in his home town of Aberdeen, he travelled 8,000 miles on ‘an odyssey to find her and complete my mission’. He funded his travel from his British state benefits; he was classified as long-term disabled. He tried to get hold of a gun, which he described in his writings as ‘more humane’ but could not get one, despite travelling to several states. About a week before he stabbed Theresa, he had turned up in New York, phoning both her New York and Hollywood agents, and then tracking down and contacting her parents. He told her mother that he was speaking on behalf of Martin Scorsese, who directed Raging Bull, and that he wanted to offer her another part. Well-spoken, with a distinctive accent, and perfectly lucid, he convinced her mother into giving him Theresa’s address in Los Angeles.