Jean Ritchie - Stalkers

‘When he told me he had a very good part for my daughter I got excited and gave him Theresa’s address,’ Mrs Saldana later told a journalist.

By the time of the attack, Theresa knew she was being stalked. Her New York agent told her of a conversation with a man who claimed to be from the famous William Morris talent agency; a few simple questions had betrayed his lack of knowledge of film industry procedure, and the agent went on the alert, reporting the call to the police. Her mother, too, had called her to tell her Scorsese had another part for her: when no offer came, it was clear her mother had been hoaxed. Not only that, but the hoaxer now had Theresa’s address.

‘My mom has never, never given out information before,’ said Theresa a few days after the attack. ‘It’s not her fault. She just didn’t want me to miss the opportunity. She was excited that Scorsese would be calling me.’

After the warnings from her agent and her mother, she was scared and stayed with a neighbour until her husband came home. After that she took more precautions than usual, making sure that she was rarely alone in her apartment and never alone outside at night. But she did not anticipate an attack in broad daylight on a sunny morning, when she had only a few yards to go from her front door to her car.

‘I’ve always been a trusting person. When John Lennon was killed all I can remember is terrible, terrible sadness, as though a piece of my life had been taken away,’ Theresa said seven months after the attack. ‘But it didn’t really make me afraid for me. Now I do not give my phone number to anyone. I do not let anyone know where I live. If someone wants to reach me for a job, it’s strictly through my agent.

‘I now do things with other people and I always have someone with me. I’m not paranoid, but I am very, very careful.’

She re-started work as soon as she could, taking parts in three television series in the months between the attack and Jackson’s court case. She needed to work: her bills of more than $50,000 for the two and a half months she spent in hospital exceeded the limits of her health insurance. During that time she left hospital in a wheelchair and on an intravenous drip to identify Jackson as her attacker before a court.

She believed that work was therapeutic. ‘Some people can’t believe I want to go on acting after being stabbed by a nut who saw me in a film,’ she said in a newspaper interview. ‘But I feel that, though you never forget, you’ve got to carry on and be active.’

Any spare time she had went to founding an organization to help other victims of violence; she found the support system inadequate because none of the counsellors she met had themselves been through an experience similar to hers. She teamed up with a Los Angeles teacher who had been shot in her classroom, and with the backing of the police and psychiatrists they organized support counselling for other victims.

The only emotion Arthur Jackson expressed while he was held on remand was one of regret – not for stabbing Theresa, but for failing to kill her. Another prisoner told the prosecution that he was distraught when he discovered that she had lived, because that meant he had failed to fulfil his mission. He was tried for attempted murder at Santa Monica Supreme Court seven months after the attack, and found guilty. The maximum sentence, twelve years, was passed on him the following month. Theresa testified against him, saying in court: ‘I have had to endure a tremendous amount of physical pain and there will be still more pain in the coming weeks, months and possibly years.’

Because Jackson refused to accept that he was insane – he could have pleaded guilty but insane and been sentenced to a secure psychiatric institution – under the American system he went to prison (in Britain, regardless of his own opinion about his mental state, he would have been assessed and, with his history, almost certainly been sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, such as Broadmoor). The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Michael Knight, expressed disquiet after the trial about Jackson being treated as a ‘normal’ prisoner. He pointed out that, with good behaviour, Jackson would be released in eight years, and although he would be instantly deported back to Scotland ‘the son of a gun could be back in this country within a week. He’s already been deported twice, if that tells you something.’

Investigations into how Jackson managed to get a tourist visa to return to the States revealed that he had legally changed his middle name from John to Richard two years earlier. He had first been deported in 1961, after entering the States in 1955, for failing to declare that he had a history of mental illness. He arrived as a permanent immigrant, and served fourteen months in the US army, but was then discharged as unfit. He served ninety days in jail for possessing a knife, which was discovered after the secret service detained him for making threats against President Kennedy, and after he came out of jail he was taken straight to the airport and flown back to Scotland. In 1966 he returned as a tourist, and was deported for overstaying his visa, after serving another prison sentence for carrying a knife. At that stage he was treated in a Californian psychiatric hospital.

Jackson’s own lawyer had the trial delayed for a month while they collected evidence of his long-term illness from psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and the States. He said he could not think of a stronger insanity defence than Jackson’s, and described it as ‘a classic example’.

But Jackson, who listed his occupation on his British passport as ‘technician in scenario and music’, refused to allow him to run it and pleaded not guilty. He rejected diagnoses of his condition, described by a psychiatrist in court as ‘chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, and maintained that he was ‘allergic to the world’. It seems that the only time he recognized the degree of his own problems was when he was seventeen and was voluntarily admitted to a hospital in Scotland, where he asked the psychiatrist in charge of his case to ‘go into my brain and scrape the dirt off’. With an insanity defence, his lawyer hoped he could prove that he did not act with premeditated malice – that he was too ill to be responsible for his actions. The prosecutor in the case argued that Jackson’s preparations – the journey from Scotland, the purchase of the knife, the research into where Theresa lived – proved that he was capable of what is known in legal jargon as ‘malice aforethought’.

The jury took nine hours to decide that Jackson was guilty of attempted first-degree murder, not a lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon, which would have carried a maximum sentence of seven years.

Theresa Saldana wept tears of joy when Jackson got the maximum sentence. But her relief was tempered with the knowledge that Jackson would one day be released. Three years after the Saldana case, a new law was introduced to allow for the indefinite detention on a year-by-year renewable basis of deranged prisoners in California, although Jackson’s sentence pre-dated the legislation and it was therefore arguable that he was not covered by it. But before those arguments could even be aired, the law was repealed as ‘unconstitutional’, to the great dismay of Theresa Saldana and many other victims.

Jackson’s behaviour record in prison was deemed to be good, despite him sending letters and making phone calls to journalists and others, stating that his one aim in life was to fulfil the same mission: to kill Theresa. He was still referring to himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, and in one letter to a television producer he wrote: ‘I am capable of alternating between sentiment and savagery, romance and reality … Also police or FBI protection for TS won’t stop the hit squad, murder contract men, nor will bullet-proof vests.’ He was being held in the medical wing of Vacaville prison in California, where the chief psychiatrist considered him ‘extremely dangerous. He is still psychotic, still delusional, still elaborately involved with Theresa Saldana, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston and Charles Bronson.’