Jean Ritchie - Stalkers

But despite all this, after seven years he came up for parole, and the psychiatrist’s opinion carried no weight; all that mattered was that he had behaved himself. He was not the first seriously disturbed patient to have slipped through the loophole: the parole division of the prison department estimated that about a hundred deranged prisoners had already been released.

‘The law ties our hands on this. Just because someone says they will do something, we cannot make the assumption that they will,’ said a department official.

Jackson’s psychiatrist believed it was the only assumption to make about him. He was, she said, a meticulous planner, used to waiting, and deeply regretted having botched his attempt on Theresa’s life. Shortly after his arrest he had started to write an eighty-nine page letter, in handwriting so tiny that it could hardly be read without a magnifying glass, in which he explained why he wanted to kill her.

It started with ‘Dear fondest Theresa’ and went on to explain that he was suffering from a ‘torturous love sickness in my soul for you combined with a desperate desire to escape into a beautiful world I have always dreamed of (the palaces of gardens of sweet paradise) whereby the plan was for you, Theresa, to go ahead first, then I would join you in a few months via the little green room at San Quentin.’

Another passage read, ‘I swear on the ashes of my dead mother and on the scars of Theresa Saldana that neither God nor I will rest in peace until this special request and my solemn petition has been granted.’

As the date for his potential release drew nearer Theresa Saldana reluctantly forced herself back into the limelight to fight it. By this time she had been married to her second husband, actor Phil Peters, for a few months and they were expecting their first child. Their address was a closely guarded secret, their telephone number was ex-directory and known to only a trusted handful of people. She had made a film about her own ordeal in 1984 and was still a little involved with the victim support group, but she was also intent on not letting her whole life be ruled by the horrific attack. ‘I got so over-identified with the issues and the cause,’ she said, ‘I became Theresa Saldana, The Girl Who Got Stabbed … the tragedy queen. It’s not really me to have all this depressing stuff circling round me. You know, ninety-nine per cent of my life is to smile and one per cent is this miserable situation. There is a part of me that feels really overjoyed to even be alive.’

Yet the prospect of Jackson’s imminent release was so terrifying that she made a public plea for ‘logic, decency and common sense’. ‘This is my life and I stand for other people as well … It’s so late and, you know, along the years I always believed that something would be passed. There seemed to be so many people working on so many different things. And I kept faith and believed that a law would be passed, and then a law was passed, and so recently repealed …’ she told the Los Angeles Times. ‘And then even when I got the letter about the repeal they said they weren’t going to take it as the final thing. But in the last couple of weeks all we got were very tacit and very, very specific and serious words to the effect of “Prepare yourself because he is coming out on the fifteenth of June. And there is nothing we can do.”

‘My life is in jeopardy. I’m not saying to kill this person … I’m’ not saying the reason for further detainment is punishment, not at all. I believe that we have an obligation to protect the public’s safety.’

Assurances that Jackson would again be deported to Britain were of little comfort to the actress, as she realized how easily he had been able to get back into America on previous occasions. Her pleas received wide publicity, and Jackson’s release was deferred when he was given an added 270-day sentence for damaging state property and resisting prison officers. The extra time gave the lawyers an opportunity to put together a new case against him for sending threatening letters to Theresa, and he was sentenced to another five years and eight months in prison.

It was before this second sentence began that Jackson’s story took a bizarre turn. From his prison cell he wrote to the People newspaper in London, to Scotland Yard and to the British consul in Los Angeles, claiming to have shot a man during a bank raid in London in 1967. Former Grenadier guardsman 33-year-old Anthony Fletcher was brutally gunned down by a single shot at point blank range, after courageously trapping in a cul-de-sac the robber, who had stolen £22 from a Chelsea branch of the National Westminster bank. His bravery led to him being dubbed a ‘have-a-go hero’ by the popular press, a sobriquet which has passed into common usage for any passer-by who tackles a criminal. Anthony Fletcher was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his bravery. Jackson also claimed to have taken part in another bank raid two years earlier, and said he had information on ‘a scheduled mass murderer’ in a British city.

This last claim, and his psychiatric history, led to a first reaction of disbelief, but Jackson was obviously in possession of detailed facts about the bank raids, and detectives from London flew out to interview him. They were satisfied that he knew enough to have been involved, and they reopened the case of Anthony Fletcher’s murder. After tracing thirty-five witnesses and re-examining the forensic evidence, they believed they had enough evidence to bring him to trial. If Jackson had been deported in 1990, he would have walked straight into the arms of the Metropolitan police.

But Theresa Saldana worried that he would not receive a long sentence in Britain and would soon be released to fly back to stalk her. Her campaign against him was rewarded with his second conviction, and her involvement will keep him in prison without parole until June 1996. Unless the Americans find some other way of detaining him – and Theresa would like him to stay permanently locked up in the States rather than see him handed over to Britain – he will eventually face trial here when he is released.

Friends of pretty 21-year-old American TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer were stunned by her death. Who could have gunned her down? Rebecca, they said, did not have an enemy in the world. When her murderer was arrested the following day it became clear that in his own eyes he was not her enemy but a devoted fan, bent on ‘saving’ her innocence from the wicked world.

Rebecca was an only child with parents who are a psychologist and a writer. She was doing well at school but was side-tracked into modelling by her own stunning looks. A model agency in her home town of Portland, Oregon, snapped her up at fifteen, and within a couple of years she headed for New York, where she was taken on to the books of one of the big, prestigious agencies. Her fresh-faced good looks made her a natural for teenage magazine covers. Friends from the time remember her as streetwise and confident, not tough but not frightened by the big city.

Not tall enough for fashion modelling and reluctant to limit herself to photographic modelling, she pursued her dream of becoming an actress, signing up for acting and dancing classes. She struggled, as all youngsters in the cut-throat business do; when her agent tried to let her know that she had been given a part in a CBS sitcom, My Sister Sam, her telephone was disconnected because the bill had not been paid, and the agent was forced to call at her home and tape a message to the door.

She moved to Los Angeles for the part, and found a quiet flat in a respectable, middle-class area of the city. After sharing with other models in New York she consciously chose to live on her own. But she was not lonely: she was popular on the set, she had girl friends and a few months before her death she was dating an actor who she knew from her home town.