Jean Ritchie - Stalkers

‘If the love is unrequited, the love turns to hate. Two sides of the same coin. Love letters turn into hate mail, often accompanied by horrendous threats, although these are usually only an attempt to gain attention. To many sufferers from obsessional love, the love is the peak experience of their lives. It is the only time they have fallen in love, it comes like a bolt from the blue. Often the sufferer believes obsessive behaviour is simply a way of getting through to someone, with the rationale that anyone can have anything if they try hard enough.

‘Harmless fantasy can easily turn into dangerous obsession, especially if the sufferer is a lonely person with a vivid imagination. If a man is strongly attracted to a woman he can become wildly jealous. To him she is coming and going as she pleases and yet he thinks she is his. But she doesn’t even know he exists. He feels constantly rejected and you get dysfunctional attempts at taking control of her life.’

Dr Nias confirms that there is no single effective cure. Some sufferers from obsessional love do recover spontaneously, but for many it takes twenty or more years to loosen the grip of an obsession.

‘For many it is merely a part of another disorder. The textbooks say there is no known cause and no known cure. There has been little research into this specific area, but there is also no real cure for a lot of mental disorders. Doctors may try a form of therapy which attempts to change the way in which the sufferer thinks, but many sufferers do not accept or admit that there is a problem. To them, it is obvious that the victim loves them. They are confident that in time the object of their desire will come around and accept them.

‘The law, police, court, prison have no effect. Love will conquer all. A prison sentence is useless, and a stay in a secure hospital is no better, apart from the fact that we can make the victim feel safer when the persecutor is locked up. Tragically, some victims will know no respite, because the stalker’s obsession will be lifelong and unshakeable. Unless he switches his allegiance to a new target, they will remain in the frame. Sometimes a doctor takes the place of the original victim, and they may be able to cope better, but they face the same problems. It is more than an occupational hazard, it is something a doctor dreads. A second obsession is no less binding than a first.’

The life sentence for the victim is a prognosis also given by Professor David Allen, a clinical psychologist based in Paris: ‘Being a stalking victim can be a death sentence – it is certainly a life sentence, spent looking over the shoulders. There is no cure. In extreme cases it can lead to murder, although that is very rare. For the sufferer, there is an absolute conviction that they are loved: every word, every gesture, every facial tic is interpreted as evidence of that. A simple “See you tomorrow” takes on huge significance in their minds.’

Professor Allen’s wife Michelle is a leading French psychoanalyst who has dealt professionally with stalkers and obsessives: ‘I can listen to women and men who are in the grip of an obsession with another person and I can offer them analysis and they can go into therapy, which may contain and control them, but it will not cure them. They may drop their object of desire but latch on to someone else, another victim. Nothing will shake their self-belief. There is no division between fantasy and reality. In extreme cases, life and death become blurred, too, and they become a danger, a walking time bomb.’

More studies of stalking and stalkers have been done in America than anywhere else because stalking has been accepted as a crime in the States since 1990, when California pioneered the first anti-stalking laws through its state legislature (fuelled by the enormous problems the Hollywood stars were experiencing). Since then every other state has followed suit, which makes it possible to determine and examine a specific group of people who have been found guilty of stalking offences. In Britain, some stalkers are pursued under civil law, some under criminal law, and many not at all (see ‘A Paper Shield’, pp. 319—37).

‘Most stalkers are men, and they come in all ages and from all ethnic backgrounds, and from varied social and family backgrounds,’ says Houston forensic psychologist Jerome Brown. ‘Many are relatively intelligent men with a history of inept inadequate heterosexual relationships. They are motivated by fantasies of romantic involvement with their victims, but they have no idea what ‘love’ really means. To many of them, love equals possession. At first, they usually don’t want to hurt their victims, just possess them. The thrill of the chase increases the satisfaction they feel upon “obtaining” them. They’re not able to see the person of their obsession as a real person. When the “thing” does not respond to them properly, they’re likely to get angry at it.’

Stanton Samenow, an American psychologist and author of a book called Inside the Criminal Mind says stalkers vacillate between considering themselves ‘No. 1’ and ‘nothing’.

‘The stalking is the tip of the iceberg. The stalking props up their self-esteem,’ he says. When the stalker is rejected he suffers a huge blow to his feeling of self-worth, and this, coupled with the realization that he is not going to be able to have what he wants, leads to violence.

The predominance of men among stalkers is borne out by British Telecom statistics, which show that twice as many malicious calls are made by men than by women. The only other measure of the gender profile of the British stalker is anecdotal: four out of every five cases that are reported in a newspaper involve a man stalking a woman. It could be that these receive more publicity – women are more likely to look to the police and the courts for help, and the presence of a physically powerful male stalker may actually be more threatening than the continued attentions of a female one. But, even allowing for this distortion, it is likely that we follow the American pattern and have a much higher number of males stalking females than the other way round.

‘Women who are rejected may act destructively towards themselves, or turn to others for nurturing to get over the rejection. Men use aggression to restore the equilibrium of their self-esteem,’ says New York forensic psychologist Dr James Wulach.

Almost all stalking has an underlying sexual motive, although there are cases where the stalker is simply trying to get into the victim’s life for other reasons, usually associated with feelings of prestige and identity: they want the same role as their victim, they want to belong to the same social group/family/work organization (see the cases of Bob and Kathleen Krueger and Janey Buchan).

Analysis of the backgrounds of stalkers has shown that although they come from across all levels of society (with a slight predominance of better-educated individuals) one common factor appears to be an absence of a father figure in their childhood, plus a hot-and-cold relationship with their mothers, sometimes adored and sometimes ignored. With women stalkers (who generally latch on to celebrities or strangers) there is a general absence of any loving relationship in adult life. Women stalkers are usually more clearly recognizable as social inadequates; men may be holding down good jobs and have an outwardly successful life.

This book looks at every type of stalking, from the sort of harassment that is more of a nuisance than anything else, to the most sinister and dangerous stalking of all – that which ends in death.

PART ONE

THE PRICE OF FAME

‘YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE’

A COYOTE’S HEAD, some dog’s teeth, a bed pan, a syringe of blood, a toy submarine, a half-eaten chocolate bar, eight tubes of red lipstick, a shampoo coupon, a disposable razor, a photograph of the victim’s home, a map of the victim’s home town and a set of medical photographs of corpses with the victim’s face pasted over the head – this is just a small sample of the items sent to Hollywood celebrities in their mail.