Obsession (40 page)

As though to explain why he shot her, he again spoke in terms of the effect Black had on him, not the other way around. Her smile at that moment, Farley testified, “stuns me, basically, and the gun goes off.” As in his letters to her, he was consciously missing the point again: the gun went off not because of her smile, but because he—who’d spent hundreds of dollars on ammunition and a new gun, rented a vehicle, dressed the part, and drove to her workplace, all in preparation for that very moment—consciously and willfully pulled the trigger.

Prosecutors wanted a verdict of guilt and a sentence of death. Police negotiator Lt. Ruben Grijalva was called to testify and recalled for the jury how Farley said he’d stopped shooting people because he didn’t find it “fun anymore.” The lieutenant reported that even when he was done firing at his former coworkers, Farley said he wasn’t ready to surrender too quickly because he’d like to “gloat for a while.” Between what they heard from Grijalva and from Farley’s own testimony, the jurors got a good look at the chilling personality of the man. At one point Farley spelled out the terms of his near four-year reign of terror: “I win if I get to have Laura as a girlfriend, possibly a wife…. If she gets rid of me permanently, she’s won.”

The jury reached its verdict on October 21, 1991. Richard Farley was convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder. And although Farley had previously promised in a letter, “I’ll smile for the cameras on the way to the gas chamber,” he was not smiling on November 1, when the jury recommended he be sentenced to die in said gas chamber. California’s laws
call for an automatic appeal in such cases, though, and as of now, Laura Black and all the survivors of Farley’s rampage still await final justice.

I know there will be people who will say, “This poor man! Obviously he was terribly mentally disturbed. We should help him, not punish him.” To them I say that this poor deranged mental case was somehow nonetheless able to hold down a full-time job at ESL and, after being fired, was able to get another job in his field. Then, while stalking Laura Black and working in the programming department of his new company, this poor man who so desperately needed help and compassion was also somehow able to take classes at San Jose State. He also met another woman—from whom he was able to keep his stalking of Black a secret—and got engaged. As he wrote in one of his letters to Black, “I’m really not insane, but I’m calculating. I just might scare us both with what I might do if I’m pushed into it.” Some stalkers—many erotomaniacs among them—are mentally ill, and that’s another story. But more, like Richard Farley, are master manipulators. They can use our compassion against us as we first fail to recognize dangerous behavior as more than simple pathetic, unrequited love, and then later as they try to evade punishment for their calculated and well-planned crimes.

The cases of Richard Wade Farley and Arthur Jackson offer prime examples of the importance of assessing dangerousness
before
a violent crime occurs. Clearly, Jackson suffered more severe personality defects (and possibly mental illness) than Farley. Farley was able to maintain (on the surface, at least) the image of a man who was self-sufficient and professionally successful, if not a social success, whereas Jackson was so dysfunctional and unstable that the only thing he ever succeeded in was the stalking of Theresa Saldana (and thankfully, he failed at his ultimate mission
of killing her). But they were similar in terms of their single-minded obsessions with their chosen targets, and in the way they both gave off warning signals long before they committed their criminal acts.

Behavior reflects personality
, and the two men revealed their potential for violence in different ways, consistent with their different personalities. Jackson’s signs were more general, more related to his instability. I believe, though, that when you’re looking at someone whose identity is totally wrapped up in the lives of others (remember that Jackson had been obsessive over hopeless relationships from his early days as a schoolchild up to the day he tried to kill Theresa Saldana) and has nothing to lose, there’s the potential for unpredictable behavior. Jackson had, after all, suffered several nervous breakdowns, tried committing suicide, and threatened the president of the United States. I think getting him out of the country was a good idea. It’s just unfortunate that there was no system in place for the Secret Service to turn him over to authorities overseas in his own country who could appropriately monitor his behavior.

Although Richard Farley did not have a history as troubled as Jackson’s, the signs were there in his letters and actions, as well as in the way he allowed his previously functional life to slip away. He was warned before he lost his job, but he persisted in his stalking behavior even as he knew his position, home, financial situation, and reputation all hung in the balance. If you start with a man whose behavior is already erratic and strip away all the remaining elements of normalcy in his life—giving him more anger to motivate him, and more time to fantasize—you’re creating a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, you don’t need to have a rap sheet of previous violent crimes a mile long to be in a position to commit murder. Everyone who kills
begins with a fantasy and a motivation, and if you read the signs, you can often see both.

California’s antistalking legislation wasn’t on the books when Farley was after Laura Black, but the case is a good example of why David Beatty says stalking-related behaviors need to be felony crimes. As he puts it, and as is so painfully evident from the Black case, stalking “is one of the rare opportunities where a potential murderer raises his hand and says, ‘I’m gonna be killing somebody. Just wait. I’m on the path.’”

Beatty asks, “How difficult is it to prevent every other kind of murder? It’s almost impossible.” But stalking, he asserts, “leaves an opportunity to intervene in what seems to be in many cases an inevitable escalation towards violence and murder.”

Laws weren’t in place that were strong enough and specific enough to so identify Farley and stop him. We couldn’t have predicted which seven individuals he would kill any more than we could have known that James Brady would pay for John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession with Jodie Foster for the rest of his life but we had indicators that
someone
was likely to pay dearly if no one intervened in either case. We can only hope now that enough people have died that we’re ready to start picking these guys up and bringing them in when, as Beatty says, they first raise their hands.

Farley and Jackson can also give us some insight into how individual each stalking case is, depending on the offender. Jackson was so inadequate that he could not accomplish any intermediate stages in his stalking of Theresa Saldana: as soon as he found out where she was, he went for the kill. In some ways he was like David Carpenter, the socially inept, stuttering Trailside Killer, whom I profiled and pursued, and who murdered at least eight people in parks north of San Francisco before being apprehended. Carpenter
betrayed his tremendously inadequate personality in his blitz style of attack, which gave his victims no time to react once the assault began, similar to Jackson’s sudden, concentrated stabbing of Saldana.

Farley was in some ways more like Ronnie Shelton, with a similar combination of insecurity and arrogance. One former classmate described him as “one of those faceless people,” and a “wimp,” an image that would have been frustrating for a man who was also described by a former roommate as egotistical, “obsessed with always being right, with being macho.” Where Shelton compensated for his insecurities by obsessively hitting on women, taking great pains with his appearance, and pursuing macho interests, getting into fights and collecting police paraphernalia, Farley joined the Navy. There, he was recognized for his marksmanship and good conduct and obviously got a lot out of the experience, since years later he alluded to how his training made him part of an “elite society,” intimating that he’d been involved in secret surveillance operations that honed the skills he’d later use to keep track of and gather intelligence on Laura Black. Farley felt membership in this society made him special, allowing him to do things forbidden to others. Many of the serial offenders I’ve interviewed expressed a similar mix of feelings of invincibility and insecurity.

In the past (and to some extent even today) we have made it easy for stalkers to have those occasional feelings of invincibility. Unless they did something obviously dangerous to the victim, in many states no law had been broken for which they could be prosecuted. There were statutes against misdemeanors such as harassment, but even if someone was writing letters vowing to kill you, nothing could get the guy off the streets and remove the threat. It took one more tragic case for things to start to change.
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As is often the case, when something happens to a famous person, the attendant publicity leads to heightened public awareness. The 1989 murder of Rebecca Schaeffer forced us all to look at stalking in a way we hadn’t before. It forced the entertainment industry to recognize that anyone can be a victim, and it showed law enforcement just how dangerous these offenders can be.

Rebecca Schaeffer grew up in Portland, Oregon, the only child of a writer and a psychologist. A good student at Lincoln High School, she was also beautiful, with big brown eyes, a warm, friendly smile, dimples, and a ton of innocent charm. Schaeffer first tried her hand at modeling when she was in her early teens and landed roles in commercials as well as a part as an extra on a made-for-TV movie. She moved to New York City, where people in the modeling industry remember her as a “good kid” who, despite her youth, had a professional, serious approach to her work and was as clean-cut in her life as her image that appeared on the cover of
Seventeen
magazine.

Schaeffer’s real career goal, though, was acting. She committed herself to acting lessons and the life of a struggling artist—even doing without phone service at one point because she couldn’t afford it. With a regular part on a popular soap opera, she was soon offered a screen test for a role in the TV sitcom
My Sister Sam
. She landed the part and costarred with Pam Dawber, playing Dawber’s younger sister on the show from 1986 to 1988. By the summer of 1989, she had also appeared in a feature film comedy,
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills
, and had just finished another film, directed by Dyan Cannon. That July she had a meeting scheduled with Francis Ford Coppola about a possible role in
The Godfather, Part III
. She was just twenty-one years old, with a life of unlimited potential ahead of her.

On the morning of July 18,1989, the day after she’d thrown a party for her grandfather’s seventy-first birthday, Schaeffer had reason to be in a good mood. In just under an hour she’d be meeting with the famous director about her possible next role. At about 10:15, someone rang the buzzer to her apartment. The intercom didn’t work, so Schaeffer went to see who it was—still wearing her bathrobe. A young, white man with dark, bushy hair stood there waiting for her, a .357 magnum hidden in a bag. Probably before she had a chance to register what he was doing, the man drew his gun and shot her once in the chest at point-blank range. As she fell, screaming, he jogged down the block and disappeared. One of her neighbors ran to help her but could not find a pulse. She was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—the same hospital that had ministered to Theresa Saldana’s wounds after her assault seven years earlier—where Schaeffer was pronounced dead just a half hour later. Her killer was still at large and her community—of neighbors, family, friends, fellow actors, and fans—was in shock.

Neighbors reported seeing a stranger hanging around in the hours before the murder, carrying a package. Some who’d walked by were approached by the young man in a yellow shirt, who showed them a publicity photo of Schaeffer and asked if they knew the actress and where she lived. At least one woman noticed him because she ran into him twice that morning and wondered what he was doing there. Another overheard him asking a cabdriver stopped in front of where Schaeffer lived if the structure was a house or apartment building. From all the descriptions of the UNSUB and his behavior—and from investigators’ assessment that Schaeffer was not likely to have been killed by anyone she knew—the initial theory was that her killer was a disturbed fan.

These suspicions were confirmed the next day, when
police in several jurisdictions worked together to identify and arrest a suspect: nineteen-year-old Robert John Bardo, an unemployed former fastfood-restaurant janitor from Tucson, Arizona. A friend of Bardo’s who lived in Tennessee reported to police in L.A. that Bardo had talked about Schaeffer. The friend said Bardo had written a love letter to the young actress but that he’d also threatened her. The morning after the shooting, police in Tucson responded to reports of a man acting strangely in the middle of a major intersection. When they got there, they took Bardo into custody and faxed his picture to the LAPD, where several neighbors of Schaeffer’s positively identified him as the young man they saw walking around outside her apartment. Bardo was charged with Schaeffer’s murder.

Although police seemed to have the answer to the question of who killed Rebecca Schaeffer, the why was still a mystery. Bardo had a troubled history but no criminal, violent past, certainly nothing to indicate he would one day murder someone. Unless, that is, you knew what to look for. In retrospect, we can say that there were warning signs. But just as stalking was a little-reported and less understood crime than it is today, the telltale predictors that Robert John Bardo was potentially dangerous went unrecognized by those who might have helped protect Rebecca Schaeffer, both those who would have seen a disturbed pattern of behavior as Bardo grew up and those who would have shielded Schaeffer from any frightening contact with fans.

Robert John Bardo was the youngest child of seven in his family. His father, a noncommissioned Air Force officer, married a Korean woman living in Japan while at Yokota Air Force Base. As many military families do, the Bardos moved frequently before finally settling in Tucson when Robert was thirteen. Within months,
Bardo started getting in trouble. That year, after stealing $140 from his mother, he hopped a bus to Maine in search of Samantha Smith, the young girl who had gained international attention with her letter to Mikhail Gorbachev. Bardo had written to Smith and she’d written back, which was apparently enough to send him on the journey across the country. Juvenile authorities found him before he was able to find Smith, however. Before he was returned home, he stabbed himself with a pen.