Obsession (35 page)

By its very nature, the unit is most often dealing with the effects of violent crime. But there is one area in which they have taken large strides to prevent it from happening in the first place, and that is in the area of domestic violence.

As Carroll says, “Fortunately for us here in Fairfax County, we have an aggressive policy that our police officers will go out and arrest the guy doing the abusing and cart him off to jail—not that they may arrest, but that they
shall
arrest the primary aggressor in a domestic violence incident and also accompany a woman to get an emergency protective order, where indicated.”

The centerpiece of the program, funded by a grant won by the unit, is Someplace Safe, a physical safe haven for domestic violence victims that is available on an emergency basis, twenty-four hours a day. Says Carroll, “If we have a tragic situation where a woman has nowhere to go, we’re taking her to Someplace Safe.”

And the service reaches out to those not in immediate need of alternate housing. Members of the unit are available by page around the clock. Certain high-risk victims are given pendants with electronic transmitters to contact police instantly. Virginia “Genny”
Struyk, one of the original members of the unit, coordinates the program.

Stalking is another area in which the unit hopes to prevent crime, rather than having to deal solely with its effects. “In the past it was one of those gray areas where you’re not sure how to proceed,” Carroll comments. “But from this office, we have encouraged victims to report every single instance where they have been aware that somebody is stalking them. We’ve been very supportive in working out safe plans and how to avoid threatening situations. We have aggressively sought help through our various local police stations. Basically, a victim can call us or come to our office and say, ‘I need help,’ and we will help them.”

For Carroll and Sandy and the rest of the staff, this kind of proactive work helps balance out the emotional toll of the type of horror they are unable to prevent.

“There’s so much you can’t do,” says Sandy. “The can’ts are easier to list than the cans. You can’t bring back the dead. You can’t give rape victims their previous happiness and security back. You can’t heal the limbs that have been broken or severed. You can’t give a molested child back his innocence. If you’re a little old widow and you’ve been the victim of a burglary, we can’t restore this little bit of a sense of security you had left in the world that now is just completely gone. There’s so much of that. For me, I have to go back to that idea of being in the moment. What can I provide? I can provide whatever limited understanding I have of what their experience is. You know, there aren’t a lot of people who will come to you and say, ‘I am yours anytime you need me. You can call me day or night,’ and mean it.”

The program is so highly regarded that Carroll and others are continually being called on to speak to other groups, such as police academies and state crime
commissions, and to help other victim-witness pro grams throughout the country get established and set up good working relationships with their respective police departments.

Much of what the unit does may seem routine and obvious, but we have only to look to jurisdictions where nothing like this is available to see how vital and unroutine it really is. I recently read a newspaper interview with the mother of a homicide victim who, many months after the murder, had heard nothing from the investigating detective and had not even been able to get her son’s watch back. All of her calls went unanswered. This woman felt completely cut off and removed from the investigative and judicial processes, and her grief and anxiety were only being compounded. She could not possibly begin her journey toward closure and some semblance of livable life.

Now I happen to have worked with the police department in question on several occasions throughout my career at Quantico. It’s a good and conscientious department in a city with a number of high concentrations of violence, which means they’re overworked and underfunded, and I know from my contacts that morale is not what it should be or once was. Can I countenance or condone the way this mother has been treated? Of course not. But I can understand that an investigator with the kind of unsolved caseload this detective is working under is going to have to put public outreach low on his list of priorities. If this woman had a victim’s advocate working with her, to meet with people and run interference when necessary, she could get the information and simple human kindness she so desperately needs, and the entire system would be better off, particularly when this case is ready to go to trial.

Ultimately, as Sandy says, the job is to “empower victims to become survivors.”

And one of the ways you empower is by remembering, as Carroll always stresses, by keeping the victims alive through honoring their memory. That is why, during National Crime Victims’ Rights Week each April, the unit holds a “Candlelight Vigil of Courage, Hope and Remembrance” in which victims’ names are read off one by one. There are speakers and the entire community is invited to participate.

At the ceremony held on April 13, 1997, Jack Collins spoke about what it meant to be a survivor and how you go on living your life. Two gifted young women, Christy Brzonkala and Aisha Barber, read a powerful poem they had written entitled “Silent No More.” And Martha Bazan, the mother of a homicide victim, spoke for mothers and fathers throughout the world who have suffered terrible losses when she read the English version of a poem she had originally written in Spanish. She called it “Remembering Tony.”

As Carroll says, “Real healing comes when you can take those memories and transport them to another place, removed from the sordid and horrible and painful way that the loved ones left, and deal with the legacy. And then that person lives on forever.”

W
hen I joined the Bureau in 1970, you wouldn’t have seen stalking listed as a category, even in a criminology textbook. In those days, there was no single, encompassing term for the set of behaviors we now recognize as menacing rather than annoying, and more dangerous than what was then generally lumped under the heading of simple harassment. The first U.S. anti-stalking law wasn’t enacted until twenty years later, in 1990, when California passed landmark legislation. And it is only in the last few years that other states have adopted their own laws to address the crime.

Legal definitions vary from state to state, but, to borrow language from a model statute developed by the National Criminal Justice Association, working with the National Institute of Justice and the National Victim Center, among other groups, the basic message is this: a stalker is someone who engages “in a course of conduct that would place a reasonable person in fear for (his or her) safety, and that the stalker intended and did, in fact, place the victim in such fear.”

Depending on the stalker, this conduct can range from overtly aggressive behavior, such as the abduction and murder of the victim’s pet or threats in letters,
to repeatedly calling someone, say, every hour on the hour all day long, asking for a date. The key is that the behavior is repeated over time, establishing the type of pattern Stanton Samenow has defined so well, and creates fear in the victim.

These days, we hear of so many frightening examples: A woman claims to be comedian and
Late Show
host David Letterman’s wife and has been arrested living with her son in Letterman’s home while he was away, driving his Porsche. A man is shot and wounded by pop star and actress Madonna’s bodyguards as he breaks onto the grounds of her home, screaming his intention to “marry the bitch or slit her throat.” Even the word
stalking
itself has become such a natural part of our lexicon that it was used to describe the paparazzi’s treatment of the late Princess Diana, likening the way they followed her everywhere, clearly causing her emotional distress, to a hunter stalking his prey.

The National Institute of Justice reported that in the twenty years preceding 1989, we’d seen as many public figures assaulted by people with mental disorders as there had been in the 175 years before that. Is it because today’s media makes celebrities seem more accessible? Or could it be that a generally more mobile society and cheaper, faster transportation have made it easier for obsessive fans to get to their targets? Or is it as simple as the possibility that there are just more mentally ill people out there, as funding for state hospitals and deinstitutionalization policies have put more potential stalkers out on the streets? While I don’t disagree with any of these suppositions, I believe stalking behavior has probably existed in one form or another for as long as there have been humans on the planet. I don’t think it’s that we’ve only recently seen this phenomenon so much as that it wasn’t organized under an umbrella heading in the past. The same laws that will make it easier for a
victim to prosecute a stalking offender will also allow law enforcement to track the incidence of the crime more effectively.

The National Victim Center, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, a nonprofit organization founded over a decade ago to advance the rights and interests of victims of all types of crime, is one group that has focused on advancing the cause of stalking victims, from providing counseling to legislative advocacy in support of antistalking laws, even assisting with prosecution and litigation. The Center estimates that up to two hundred thousand people are being stalked in this country at any moment, and that one out of every twenty women will be the target of a stalker at some point in her life. They are not alone in their frightening assessment. Dr. Park Dietz, probably the preeminent forensic psychiatrist practicing today, who consulted with my unit at Quantico and worked on the case of obsessed fan/would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr., has also stated his finding that about 5 percent of all women in the United States will likely be victimized by the unwanted and persistent attention of a man at some point in their life. Linda Fairstem—for whom stalking is not a specialty per se—still sees around ten cases each year and suspects that that number is artificially low, as many victims are either too scared to report the crime or unsure there are laws to help them.

When most of us hear the term
stalking
, we think of the well-publicized cases involving celebrities. And it seems there are new examples of that every day. But the statistics indicate it’s a far larger problem than that. Plenty of cases involve ordinary citizens, most of which are actually part of a larger pattern of domestic violence. In many cases, the victim already had a restraining order filed against her stalker, ostensibly to
protect her from the man who ultimately hunted her down.

There are also instances where a victim is stalked by someone with whom she never had a relationship—maybe someone she never previously met. Indeed, even as this book is being written, such a case is hi the news near where I live.

It started innocently enough. A twenty-one-year-old college social-work major was courteous to a fellow employee at the large department store where she had a part-time job. The coworker, described by the victim as a loner who was shunned by and alienated from others on the job, read quite a bit more into her simple kindness than she ever intended. He began sending her E-mail messages and giving her gifts, behaviors that she did not reciprocate. She began noticing him in places she didn’t expect, such as outside her home, where he left a note and a cookie for her on her car. This note was neither romantic nor threatening, but it was entirely inappropriate. It thanked her “for being supportive” of him at work, which seemed to imply she’d done more for him—or at least said more to him—than she had. She’d shown him the same degree of friendliness and courtesy she did every other acquaintance and stranger she met.

When she left her job in July 1997, he showed up at her college. At that point, she contacted the police and filed a harassment complaint. Just about two weeks later, he appeared at her house one morning and abducted her at gunpoint, according to numerous neighbors who witnessed the woman being handcuffed and forced into a car by a man holding a gun. The neighbors flooded 911 operators with desperate calls, shocked that something like that could happen in such a quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood.

In another neighborhood, folks were equally shocked that the hometown boy who shoveled snow for them in
the winter and apparently never gave them cause to worry would do such a thing. One was quoted in disbelief, “I saw him just the other day and he looked happy and said hello to me.” Of course, he may have been happy because he was planning the abduction that would finally unite him with his true love. It was later learned that he had purchased the handcuffs and gun in the month before the harassment report was filed.

As required by law, police had warned the suspect after that report was filed that he could be facing charges. At that time, the suspect said he would leave the woman alone, a response that at least some members of the police department must have recalled as they issued a description of the man and his vehicle after the apparent kidnapping. Local FBI agents also began search efforts. Tracing a phone call from the victim to her family made about eight hours after she disappeared, and using information on ATM card activity, law enforcement agencies tracked the pair to a nearby state, where they issued an alert for all officers to be on the lookout for the vehicle. Police spotted it early the next morning in a parking lot, where the suspect had apparently pulled over to catch some rest. They saw him taking a nap in the backseat as the woman sat in the front passenger seat, handcuffed to the seat-belt strap. The doors were unlocked and police were able to break in, free the woman, and arrest the suspect without a struggle. Almost nineteen hours after the ordeal began, it came to a much more positive end than many had predicted. In addition to a 9 mm Glock handgun, police found a knife in the suspect’s possession.

Although the woman was physically unharmed and reported that her captor tried to comfort and reassure her that he was not going to hurt her as he drove seemingly without a plan, I believe her to be a lucky
young woman, under the circumstances. At some point, it would have become clear to this guy that his fantasy of life with her—whatever details he’d imagined—would not come true. Instead of “coming around,” growing to love him back, she would remain a frightened captive. And as we’ve seen over and over again, when reality doesn’t live up to the fantasy, that can be when a victim faces the greatest danger.