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‘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.

The kind of letters they get are just as bizarre:

I am afraid I made a mistake when I told you I was your father. Some guy showed me a picture of you and your father standing together when you got your award. I was so proud when I thought I was your pop. I guess that means that my daughter ain’t your sister either … I asked your manager to borrow ten thousand dollars, I hope she lets me have it. Before I go I just want to say that the only reason I thought I was your pop was because I used to go with a person that looked like you

wrote a middle-aged man to a young pop singer.

Another man wrote to a female celebrity:

Hello darling this is youre New friend … we will soon be together for our love honey. I will write and mail some lovely photo of myself okay. I will write to you Soon, have lovely Easter time hoping to correspond … here is a postcard for you … honey how are you doing … wishing to correspond with you Soon … hoping we do some camping and Barbecueing Soon okay.

Yet another fan wrote to a television personality:

I would like to Have lots of pictures of you sex symBol woman like you are all the times if you don’t mine at all if you take off your clotHes for me and I can see wHat you Got to the world then ever that love any How I would like to know How LonG is your breast anyHow I would like to know How mucH milk Do your carry in your Breast anyHow I would like to know How far does your Breast stick out on you anyHow I by playBoy Books all the times … I would like you to put up your legs and take pictures of you in the nude … I would like Have larGe pictures of you in tHe nude lots of them then ever were so I will take with me and have lots of women in tHe nude I like sex symBols womens to look at all the times.

One habitual letter-writer to a Hollywood female celebrity was a mental patient who had been found guilty of committing a murder, and who had also been involved in a gunfight with police after escaping from hospital, stealing a gun and ammunition and attacking the police who he believed were starving the star. He wrote afterwards:

Please disregard the other letter I sent to you. Disregard this letter if your are married or have a boyfriend as I don’t want to break up an existing relationship. I would like to be one of the following to me a) a lover, b) a girlfriend or c) a wife. I want it to be a forever thing, if we have faith in each other and don’t cheat. You must fulfil the following: 1) you must be vegetarian 2) you must not have another boyfriend 3) you must not hold hands or do anything beyond that point with another unless I give you permission 4) I believe in birth control devices and (foetus removal) abortion, to take the fear away form women so they can have a complete orgasm. Men never have to worry because they don’t have the baby. 5) You must not wear pants unless the temperature drops below 50 degrees F or you engage in hazardous work (like coal mining) 6) you can view pornographic movies.

… I was in a gunfight with the police because I thought you didn’t have to eat food. I was real sick at the time. I was arrested but should be getting out soon. I’m in a hospital for observation. I was wounded as was one policeman. We are both okay now. A bystander was wounded by another policeman … Let’s sit in a little room together. Let’s drive to the end of the world. Let’s look in each others eyes. Let’s magnetically attract each other from close up. Let’s talk till we want each other more than anyone else … Please call or write or come here by February 6th or else I’ll have to look for someone else …

One famous actor’s wife received the following letter from a woman who claimed the actor was father of her child:

I know that Jason is my beautiful baby and that [the star] is the daddy. I never been in love and I always been a queen … I don’t know much of anything other than the fact I love my son and [the star] very much. I don’t know very much about life I was never told about life or how to love or be loved … I know that I don’t deserve a man like [the star]. I know that I hurt him so much by writing to people all over the world about his son … Tell him to come get Jason and take him Home with you and the boys.

These samples of the sort of letters that pour constantly into the homes and offices of major stars are taken from the archives of Gavin de Becker Inc., a Los Angeles-based security consultation agency – the security consultation agency for California’s hundreds of celebrities, where the problem of stalking has been known about for over thirty years. It was in the 1980s that the threats to stars – and attacks on some – escalated, and de Becker’s business boomed. Unlike so many security firms, de Becker offers far more than just muscle: he collects, files and classifies all the suspicious mail his clients receive; he analyses the content of it through a computer program; he sorts out the really dangerous ‘fans’ and he goes into reverse-stalking mode – his staff track down and watch the movements of any stalker they regard as likely to carry out threats to attack celebrities. His experience coupled with the help he has had from the leading medical expert in the world on the subject of stalkers, Dr Park Dietz, means that he can frequently anticipate the actions of a deranged fan. He worked hard to get the law changed for the protection of his clients, but even before stalking was criminalized in California, de Becker was able to advise police forces just how they could nail stalkers under obscure and forgotten laws.

When Dr Dietz, who is clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences at the School of Medicine at the University of California, was called in to prepare a 600-page report for the US government on ‘Mentally Disordered Offenders in Pursuit of Celebrities and Politicians’, it was to de Becker’s files that he turned for the raw material he needed for his five years of research. De Becker has more than 200,000 items of correspondence on file, all indexed and cross-indexed to show up which stalkers were pursuing more than one celebrity.

Some of the really big Hollywood names have as many as five hundred individuals writing to them what de Becker classifies as ‘inappropriate’ letters (a top star will regularly receive as many as 4,000 genuine fan letters per month). All the staff in his clients’ offices are primed to send on to him any mail that is sinister, disjointed, bizarre, unreasonable or threatening, and to help them decide what falls into these categories they are specifically asked to be on the lookout for letters containing references to death, suicide, weapons, assassins, obsessive love or special destiny.

Dietz and colleagues analysed a scientifically chosen sample of mail from persistent letter writers in a bid to see if they could draw up a profile of the kind of writer who actually shows up at the celebrity’s home or workplace, and the conclusions are fascinating.

Obviously, those who make a direct attempt to speak or make physical contact with the celebrity are potentially far more dangerous than those who merely write letters, however incoherent, threatening and frightening the letters may be.

Letter writers who send mail from different addresses are more likely to be dangerous than those who consistently post their letters in the same place – the ones who are moving around may already be trying to track down the celebrity or, as the survey conclusion puts it, ‘travelling in a random pattern as they become increasingly frantic to find the celebrity, to escape their persecutors or for other unexplained reasons’. (Both Mark Chapman and John Hinckley travelled frantically in the days leading up to the assassination of John Lennon and the attempt on President Reagan’s life.)

Those who are likely to try to make contact with the star write significantly more letters to their idols, in fact they will usually send twice as many letters as other ‘inappropriate’ letter writers, although their attempts to get physically close to their victim may start after only one or two letters. Anyone who writes more than ten letters and keeps on writing for more than a year is potentially dangerous. They don’t write significantly longer letters though; most of these ‘inappropriate’ letters are long by normal standards, with six and a half pages a typical length (and one, in de Becker’s files, running to over two thousand pages).

The writers who want to marry, have sex with or have children with the celebrity turn out to be less potentially dangerous than those who simply expressed a strong desire to meet the star face-to-face, with no sexual propositions. And while almost a quarter of all writers made threats in their letters, this was found not to influence whether they actually turned up outside the celebrity’s home or office – perhaps the most important finding of the research.

There were some other interesting conclusions: anyone who writes on regular tablet-sized note paper is less dangerous, anyone who attempts to instil shame into the celebrity is less dangerous and anybody who repeatedly mentions other public figures is not a high level threat.

The research bore out one of Dietz’s earlier theories: that stalkers who write hate mail are less dangerous than those who write to stars romantically. ‘The person who sends hate mail is achieving their catharsis from putting the note in the mail,’ he said. The fan who believes he is destined to have a romance with the celebrity, on the other hand, will experience nothing but disappointment and rejection, and is more liable to have aggression born of frustration. Male stalkers are more likely to ‘act it out in a violent way’ says Dietz, but adds that this does not mean that women letter writers should be ignored. The same criteria for deciding which ones are likely to attack a celebrity apply to women as well as to men, it is simply that more men match the criteria.

Dr Dietz is accepted as the top world authority on stalking, and works as a consultant to a number of big American companies, helping them identify potentially dangerous employees. He has appeared as an expert witness at numerous trials, including those of John Hinckley and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and is known to some sections of the American press as ‘the FBI’s premier shrink’. Legend has it that he was the inspiration behind Thomas Harris’s book The Silence of the Lambs. He became fascinated by the criminal mind as a student after reading a book by Britain’s famous forensic pathologist Professor Keith Simpson.

He sees the rise of celebrity stalking as moving in parallel with the growth of television and video, bringing ever more intimate images of stars into the homes of potentially obsessed fans. It is now possible to replay on video, in the privacy of a bedroom, the exact moment in a film or TV programme when the stalker imagines the star is talking directly to him. It is not hard, for the determined stalker, to track down a star. ‘There’s an entire industry devoted to selling proximity to celebrities. There are books published on how to call and write famous people. In Hollywood there are tours to stars’ homes, and magazines often give overly personal information about stars. And stars themselves often reveal overly personal information in publicity interviews such as talk shows,’ he says.

In Britain and the rest of Europe, as well as America, a whole new ‘profession’ has been born from the public’s obsession with the famous, and we even have a new word for it: paparazzi. These are photographers who earn their living hanging around stars, always hopeful of a compromising or in some way interesting picture to sell to the ever-hungry newspapers and magazines. Some of them have grown rich from their dedication to hanging around outside nightclubs until the early hours of the morning. While the celebrities claim, perhaps genuinely, to be distressed by this level of media intrusion, there is a peculiarly symbiotic relationship between the two camps. The line between stardom and obscurity is a thin one, easily crossed; celebrities have been known to go back inside a club or hotel when there were no photographers waiting for them, and emerge again at the pop of a flashbulb.

Professor Dietz says that there has been more celebrity stalking in the last ten years than in the whole of previous show business history: ‘We have more celebrities at risk than ever before. The reason is … because of how visible and personal they become. We have close-ups of every glamorous performance, or even a personal interview about someone’s favourite restaurant or artistic likes. And the more personal and intimate the media portrayal, the more that mentally disordered people will misinterpret this as something personal for them.’

He has known instances where the mentally ill stalker has proved more adept at locating a celebrity than the police or mental health professionals who were trying to warn the star. The stalker, he explained, may have nothing else to do but pursue the career of the star, filing away every kernel of information they can glean. As Gavin de Becker once ruefully observed, the people he monitors may be unbalanced but they are not idiots: at least they CAN write letters.

Dr Dietz understands but does not approve of the feelings of reciprocation celebrities have towards their fans. Just as they court the attentions of the media, many stars accept the ‘where would you be without us’ attitude of a large number of fans. They may, as the actor Tom Conti puts it, regard obsessional fans as ‘a complete pain in the butt’, but on another level they feel grateful to their public who have, as they are constantly being reminded, given them the wealth, security and self-esteem that go with fame. What they fail to do, until they have the help of an expert like de Becker, is differentiate between the ‘normal’ fan and the potential stalker.

Dr Dietz believes the first and foremost rule for any star is not to respond to the stalker, and if he had his way famous people would never send out photographs of themselves, would certainly never sign them ‘with love from’ and would reduce the frequency with which they answer their fan mail.

‘The best thing a celebrity can do is to vanish as far as their private lives are concerned,’ he says. He believes court action against a stalker is a last resort, to be taken only when life is in danger.

‘The one thing that is certain to guarantee persistence is to respond on the level he seeks.

‘I want people to understand that nut mail is not harmless and that waiting for threats is not appropriate. Customarily, people who do not know anything about this will say “Well, we don’t have to worry about this person. He’s mentally ill, and he hasn’t made a direct threat.” The truth is that direct threats are not associated with whether or not people make attacks. On the other hand, several kinds of nonthreatening but inappropriate communications have a definite relationship to attacks.’

Dr Dietz does not give advice directly to Hollywood stars about how to avoid or deal with stalkers, but to their security consultants, like Gavin de Becker. The stars themselves, he believes, are difficult to advise because they refuse to accept that they cannot act like normal people and stay safe. It is left to de Becker to put Dietz’s theories – and his own, because he has been in the business long enough to have drawn some firm conclusions about celebrity stalkers – into a cogent code of practice for stars.

De Becker (who has not co-operated with the writing of this book) has a staff of over thirty people constantly monitoring the letters, phone calls, domestic security arrangements and public appearance plans of more than a hundred of the most famous people in the world. He does not name names, but his clientele – some of whom pay him half a million dollars a year – is believed to include Robert Redford, Michael J. Fox, John Travolta, Elizabeth Taylor, Tina Turner, Jane Fonda, Joan Rivers, Cher, Warren Beatty, Sheena Easton, Dolly Parton, Madonna, Olivia Newton John, Jessica Lange, Shaun Cassidy and Victoria Principal. It is almost easier to name the Hollywood stars who are not clients; Frank Sinatra and Sylvester Stallone head that, much shorter, list.

He came into the business after high school, when he got a job helping out with protection for Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. He was young and inexperienced but he learned fast, and he soon learned that what stars need is something much more sophisticated than being ringed by a posse of muscle-bound bodyguards. The enemy was cleverer than that; stalkers have proved they can get over barbed wire or past trained guard dogs, and they have even been prepared to take jobs with telephone companies to get access to unlisted phone numbers. Others have been taken on as security guards for their stars’ concerts; when de Becker discovers this he makes sure they are moved to low security areas. At least one stalker has applied for a job directly to the celebrity, using an assumed name.

De Becker sorts the threats delivered to his clients into three categories: harmless ones, serious ones which need to be monitored and urgent ones. About twenty-five per cent of this last group actually show up outside the celebrity’s home or office, although very few are able to commit any act that gets them arrested or their names into the newspapers – de Becker’s men are there to thwart them. There have been occasions when a stalker has turned up at Los Angeles airport and found himself being driven to his hotel, unknowingly, by one of de Becker’s staff. Others have attended concerts without realizing that the ‘fans’ sitting on either side of them work for de Becker.

Gavin de Becker agrees with Dietz that the rise in the stalking phenomenon is associated with the familiarity that television breeds. ‘If you are in the public eye – whether it’s the local newscaster or Jackie Onassis, whether your audience is 10,000 or one billion – someone will react in an unpredictable and inappropriate way,’ he said. ‘Today you have an entire sub-population who relate more to television characters – soap opera stars and such – than they do to real people.’

He works hard at understanding his adversaries, the stalkers. After the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer (not one of his clients) he said: ‘This killing … like the attack on Theresa Saldana, involved somewhat obscure and unusual target selection. This was not Victoria Principal or Madonna. This was somebody with a far smaller audience. There is a dynamic which says “Whitney Houston is for everyone, but you’re for me.”’

He also sees celebrity stalking as a particularly American phenomenon, born not just out of the many stars who are centred on Hollywood but also out of the American ethic. ‘We are a nation that gives rise to and authenticates virtually unlimited expectations … We are taught to feel that if we work hard we can do anything and be anything. And very few people want to be ordinary … Some people will do anything to be recognized. It’s part of the American myth that anybody can be unique and remarkable and important.’

His own observations lead him to assert that stalkers are at their most dangerous between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. As Dietz’s research into the de Becker archives shows, only five per cent of all persistent letter writers do so anonymously, so de Becker’s staff have few problems tracing the potentially dangerous ones. If they track them down to a psychiatric institution or a prison, the authorities are notified and attempts are made to ensure they are not released.

The most dangerous threats, Dietz found, were the specific ones; those which gave a time and a place for the attack on the celebrity. De Becker always takes those very seriously.

He accepts that the stars he looks after do not want to cut themselves off entirely from their public, and will probably never agree to retiring away from the spotlight as much as, perhaps, Dr Dietz would suggest they do. One part of de Becker’s job he sees as counselling them to live with the ever-present stalking threat. He calls it his ‘you don’t have to change your life when you get a dead chicken in the mail’ message.

There are things that should be done, though, and de Becker is not the only security man dispensing advice. Homes and cars should never be bought in the celebrity’s own name (stars should set up trust funds to handle impersonally those sort of purchases), phone numbers should never be listed in their names, even as ex-directory numbers, because the leaks from telephone companies are unstoppable. All bills and paperwork should be handled through an agent’s office.

The police in Los Angeles are probably better equipped to deal with stalkers than any other force in the world, simply because they have had so much more experience of celebrity stalking than any other city. Since 1991 the Los Angeles Police Department has had a Threat Management Unit which deals exclusively with stalkers, although not all of them are pursuing stars. In the first three years of its operation the unit dealt with 200 cases.

The FBI, too, has had to wake up to the threat caused by stalkers, and has become involved in some investigations which mirror the kind of work de Becker is doing privately. When Stephanie Zimbalist, a Hollywood actress who starred in the TV series Remington Steele, received 212 intimidating letters from a stalker, it was FBI agent Karen Gardner who was assigned to the case. FBI interest in stalking dates from 1989 and the death of Rebecca Schaeffer; before that local police departments had handled it. But by the late 1980s the number of stalking cases had escalated so greatly that the national agency realized it would have to get involved, and the Stephanie Zimbalist case was one of their first triumphs. The fact that the letter writer, who always signed himself ‘Your Secret Admirer’, mentioned the FBI in several of the letters was a spur to them to take on the investigation.

The stalker gave great detail in his letters about Stephanie’s movements. He not only knew the dates and times of her visits to other cities, but he could even specify which floor of the hotel she stayed on. His information was so compellingly accurate that Stephanie stopped making any public appearances; her stalker simply sent her more chilling letters: ‘… following you around different cities, waiting for you at the hotel, seeing you at the theatre, looking for you late at night; these have become the most important things in my life … My continued patience depends on at least being able to see you on the road.’ In another letter he wrote, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’

In Ronald Kessler’s book The FBI, Karen Gardner reveals how she painstakingly assembled any clues the stalker had given about his whereabouts in any of his letters. She matched flight passenger lists and hotel guest lists until she was able to identify the stalker: a lonely 42-year-old bachelor who lived with his elderly mother. He appeared to be a harmless if disturbed fan, but when his room was searched, amongst the videos of Stephanie and a large collection of magazine articles about her, there was a gun. He pleaded guilty to mailing threatening communications, and was given a two-year sentence and ordered to have psychiatric counselling, as well as being ordered to keep away from Stephanie and her family.

At present in Britain there is no equivalent of a Gavin de Becker, and there has been no funding for research into stalking as there has for Dr Dietz and his colleagues in the States. Show business stars here can get straightforward security advice about their homes and their business premises, and a lot of the ‘rules’ for dealing with fans come down to common sense. The major television companies, approached for this book, deny that they have encountered the problem on behalf of their stars, and have not issued any guidelines about coping with unwanted attentions, but this defence is probably in itself part of a deliberate strategy. There is no doubt that a television company like Granada, which fields the long-running and phenomenally popular soap Coronation Street, has been aware of the danger of stalkers for years now. There may well not have been a policy document enshrining their tactics for dealing with the danger, but there will have been discussion of it. Talking publicly about the problem is seen as counterproductive, both here and in America; publicity about stalking can have a copycat effect.

If the problem continues to grow at its present rate (it’s increasing in America, and most British crime patterns follow America with a lag of about ten years), then it would be sensible for the big show business agents and television stations to start thinking about it more constructively. Out there, at any moment, someone, somewhere, is picking up a pen to write what Dr Park Dietz calls, with academic restraint, ‘an inappropriate communication’. And if they are writing it on a page of paper torn from an exercise book, and they have been writing to ‘their’ star for more than a year, and they are posting the letters from different areas of the country, then their ‘victim’ could be in for a very bumpy time.

‘It will only be a matter of time before we have a stalker here in Britain who tips over into extreme violence,’ predicts Dr David Nias.