The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (37 page)

There followed a thirty-minute contest of fear and courage, with Ressler using his impressive behavioral insight to keep Kemper off balance. At one point in their high-stakes debate, Kemper acknowledged that if he killed Ressler, he would have to spend some time in “the hole,” but he added that it would be a small price to pay for the prestige of “offing an FBI agent.”

One of Ressler’s several gambits: “You don’t seriously think I’d come in here without some way to defend myself, do you?”

Kemper knew better: “They don’t let anybody bring guns in here.” That was true, but Ressler suggested that FBI agents had special privileges and that a gun might not be the only weapon available to him.

Kemper didn’t bite. “What have you got, a poison pen?” So it went until guards arrived, thankfully before Kemper put his ruminations into action. As Kemper was walked out, he put one of his enormous hands on Ressler’s shoulder. “You know I was just kidding, don’t you?” But Kemper wasn’t just kidding. He was feeding on a favorite delicacy of serial killers: human fear.

The murderer who soon joined me in the cell had been after different rewards: attention and fame. With a young man’s light stubble from a few days of not shaving and his prematurely receding hair a mess, Robert Bardo was not menacing like Kemper. In fact, he was the image of an awkward teenager. In another life (and in his previous life) he’d have been the guy dressed in a white apron sweeping the floor in the back of a drive-through restaurant. Robert Bardo was, as he put it, “a geek.”

Because I had studied him extensively when I consulted on his prosecution, meeting Bardo was like meeting a character from a book I’d read. I knew most of the lines he might speak, but the young man in front of me was a far more human incarnation than court transcripts or psychiatric reports could ever conjure, more human perhaps than I wanted him to be.

The power he’d discharged in one terrible second on the steps of Rebecca Schaeffer’s apartment wasn’t in that cell with us. He didn’t have the confidence to intimidate anyone, nor did he have those dead-cold murderer’s eyes that intimidate all on their own. In fact, he was reluctant to even look at me. We both knew what a murderous thing he’d done, and he knew very well from the trial exactly how I felt about it.

Bardo had been asked a great many questions since the killing and he was used to that, so I decided to let him speak first, to follow rather than lead him. As it turned out, that took a lot of patience. For about fifteen minutes, we just sat there, him with his head down, me counting on the idea that he wouldn’t be able to pass up the attention I was withholding.

The otherwise quiet cell was occasionally filled with the clang of some distant gate being slammed. (Noise is one of the few things that roams freely in a prison; the concrete walls that keep out so much carry it into every corner.)around the bed to cover her up, something small crushed under my feet. From that tiny signal (combined with all that preceded it), I knew a terrible thing had happened while I slept. It was a barbit"

Bardo finally looked up at me and studied my face intently. “Arthur Jackson asked me to give you a message.” (Jackson was the obsessed stalker who had brutally stabbed actress Theresa Saldana. After I testified against Jackson in court, he condemned me to “burn in hell.”)

“He wants you to meet with him too.”

“Not today,” I replied.

“Then why do you want to talk to me?”

“Because you have something to contribute,” I answered.

“I do want to help other people avoid what happened to Rebecca,” he said.

That choice of words implied some distance from his crime, which I didn’t want to grant him.

“Nothing just happened to Rebecca. You make it seem as if she had an accident.”

“No, no. I killed her. I shot her, and I want to help others not get killed by someone like me.”

“That sounds like you think there is someone else like you.”

He seemed surprised that it wasn’t obvious. “There is. I mean there are… many people like me.”

He was quiet for a long while before he continued: “I’m not a monster. On television they always want to portray me as someone frightening.”

I looked at him and nodded. We’d been together for nearly a half hour, and I had not asked him a single question.

“I was someone frightening, of course, but I’m not now. That video of me telling how I shot Rebecca makes me look like the worst assassin of all, and I’m not the worst.” He was concerned about his public image, about how he stacked up against his peers.

Like nearly all modern-day assassins, Bardo had studied those who came before him. After Mark Chapman went to prison for killing John Lennon, Bardo wrote to him and asked why he had done it. Chapman, the famous assassin, and Bardo, the apprentice, had a brief correspondence. “If he told me not to do my crime,” Bardo said, “that would not have overridden my emotions. Emotions are the key, out-of-balance emotions. Emotionally healthy people do not harm others.”

Bardo had also studied everything he could find on the Arthur Jackson case. Jackson had hired a private detective to locate his victim, so Bardo did too. Jackson used a knife, so on one of his earlier trips to kill Schaeffer, Bardo brought one along. Jackson traveled thousands of miles in pursuit of his target, sometimes in a crisscross fashion—as do nearly all assassins—and Bardo did too. They started off a continent apart but ended up living in the same building.

In a videotaped interview done by the defense months before Bardo knew I was working on the case, he revealed the extent of his research into public-figure attack. Describing the lack of security he had encountered around Rebecca Schaeffer, he said: “It’s not like she had Gavin de Becker or anything.”

Now, in offering me advice, Bardo hoped to distinguish himself from other assassins. He would become, he thought, the anti-assassin, helping famous people avoid danger. Of course, he was now famous himself, a fact that carried him to an almost too ironic comment on public life: “All the fame that I have achieved from this results in me getting death threats and harassment. The media says things about me that aren’t even true. I have no control over them invading my privacy, bringing up my case over and over again on TV so they can make money off it. They portray me in ways I never saw myself.”

He didn’t like reporters calling him a loner, but the description was accurate. Bardo had no friends, and had never even kissed a girl romantically. (Almost certainly, he never will.) A lack of healthy intimacy is a common feature of many assassins. John Hinckley didn’t ever attain a developed romantic relationship; nor did Arthur Jackson, nor did Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace.

Bremer was a virgin who sought to change that in the weeks before his crime. Knowing he would soon be dead or in prison for life, he hired a prostitute, but their sexual encounter ended awkwardly. In his diary he wrote, “Though I’m still a virgin, I’m thankful to Alga for giving me a peek at what it’s like.”

Bizarre though it may seem, the greatest intimacy most assassins attain is with those they attack. Through stalking, they come to know their victims more closely than they know others in their lives, and through shooting them, they become partners of sorts. Bremer’s diary shows increasing intimacy with his first victim of choice, President Richard Nixon. As he stalked the president from state to state, the diary references move from “the President” to “he” to “ Nixon” to “Nixy,” and ultimately to “Nixy-boy.”

Those who attack with knives have even more intimacy, as is disturbingly described in multiple-murderer Jack Henry Abbott’s book
In The Belly of the Beast
. Of one of his murder victims, he wrote: “You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder.”

Bardo’s coarse act of murder was, with the saddest irony, inflicted on the only girl who ever gave him any positive attention. Rebecca Schaeffer had sent a kind reply to one of his letters.

Bardo: It was a personal postcard where she wrote, “Robert, dash, your letter was the nicest, most real letter I ever received.” She underlined “real.” She wrote, “Please take care,” and drew a heart sign and then “Rebecca.” That’s what propelled me to want to get some more answers from her.

GdeB: So what advice would you offer other famous people?

Bardo: Be careful about what you write. If you do answer fan mail, don’t let it be so over-glowing. That’s not the way to be with a fan, because it makes it seem like they’re the only one, and that’s how I felt. I felt I was the only one.

Like other assassins, Bardo had stalked several famous people, including a client of mine whom he decided was too inaccessible. He gave up on her and switched his attention to Rebecca Schaeffer. For assassins, it is the act and not the target, the destination, not the journey that matters.

Because targets are interchangeable, I asked Bardo how the security precautions taken by some public figures affected his choice. He said, “If I read in an article that they have security and they have bodyguards, it makes you look at that celebrity different and makes a person like me stand back. It kind of stands against this hope of a romantic relationship.”

Though Bardo’s defense tried to sell the idea that he expected a romantic relationship with Rebecca Schaeffer, he never really did. Bardo expected exactly what he got, an unenthusiastic reception and ultimately a rejection. He used that rejection as an excuse to do what he had long wanted to do: release his terrible anger against women, against his family, and against the rest of us.

Of course, to care about being rejected by a total stranger, one must first come to care about that stranger. Bardo did this by obsessing on each of his various targets. Even today in prison, he is still doing it, focusing intently on two women. One is a singer, and the other is someone who was not famous when he first heard of her but is very famous now: Marcia Clark, the prosecutor who sent him to prison for life. In a letter Bardo wrote to me, he explained: “Twice, the
Daily Journal
has profiled Marcia Clark… I learned a lot. Turn to Page Two to give you an idea.” Page 2 was a lengthy list of personal facts about Marcia Clark and her family.

It is a convoluted irony of the media age that Marcia Clark prosecuted a regular citizen who stalked and killed a famous person, then prosecuted a famous person (O.J. Simpson) who stalked and killed a regular citizen, then became famous herself, and is now the focus of a stalker.

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Media-age assassins are not unlike another uniquely American icon: the daredevil. If you understand Evel Kneivel, you can understand Robert Bardo. Like those of a daredevil, all of an assassin’s worth and accomplishment derive from one act, one moment. This is also true for most heroes, but assassins and daredevils are not people who rise courageously to meet some emergency. The assassin and the daredevil create their own emergencies.

The daredevil fantasizes about the glory of accomplishing his stunt, the fame that waits for him on the other side of the canyon. The media has portrayed the daredevil as a courageous hero, but what if someone got the motorcycle, painted it special, got the colorful leather pants and jacket, got the ramps, notified the press, got all set up at the canyon… and then didn’t do it? Suddenly he’s not cool and special; he’s pathetic. Now he’s a guy whose silly name and goofy accessories add up to geek, not hero. The whole thing loses its luster if he doesn’t do it.

Arthur Bremer wrote, “I want a big shot and not a little fat noise. I am tired of writing about it, about what I was going to do, about what I failed to do, about what I failed to do again and again. It bothers me that there are about 30 guys in prison now who threatened the Pres and we never heard a thing about them.”

Assassins, you see, do not fear they are going to jail—
they fear they are going to fail
, and Bardo was no different. He had gotten all the components together: He had studied other assassins, he had researched his target, made his plan, gotten the gun, written the letters to be found after the attack. But like the daredevil, he was just a guy who worked at Jack in the Box until he made that jump, until the wheels left the ground, until he killed someone famous. Everything that goes with fame was waiting for him on the other side of the canyon, where, in his words, he’d finally be “a peer” with celebrities.

When he found Rebecca Schaeffer and was face-to-face with her, he had all the credentials of an assassin, but he couldn’t pick up his prize until he shot her. Since he was fourteen years old, he had known what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he got there on the steps of Rebecca Schaeffer’s apartment building. Robert Bardo was a career assassin, a killer for whom the victim was secondary to the act.

Some people put years into their heroic accomplishments; assassins do not. While stalking Richard Nixon, Bremer wrote, “I’m as important as the start of WWI. I just need the little opening, and a second of time.” Such narcissism is a central feature of every assassin, and like many of their characteristics, it is in us all to some degree. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book
Denial of Death
, Ernest Becker observes that narcissism is universal. Becker says every child’s “whole organism shouts the claim of his natural narcissism. It is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation.” Becker says we all look for heroics in our lives, adding that in some people “it is a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.”