Stalkers. Jean Ritchie
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Stalkers - Jean Ritchie страница 15
Название: Stalkers
Автор: Jean Ritchie
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Социология
isbn: 9780008226930
isbn:
Almost immediately, police and friends reached the conclusion that the murderer was a deranged fan. There could be no other motive.
‘I can only assume it was somebody who didn’t know her but was obsessed with her. I can’t imagine that anybody who really knew her would do this. She was so mature and intuitive that she would have made sure this couldn’t happen,’ said the director of her TV series.
By the following day, Bardo was back in his home town of Tucson, where police picked up reports of a man behaving bizarrely and disrupting traffic at a major road junction. They arrested Bardo. In the meantime LA police had a tip-off from a friend of Bardo’s in Tennessee, who knew that the youth had harboured a long-term obsession with the actress, had written to her, phoned her agent several times and had talked about hurting her. A photo of Bardo was faxed from Arizona to California, and the neighbours who had seen Bardo on the day of the murder identified him immediately.
At Bardo’s home the police found a collection of videos. He had everything Rebecca Schaeffer had ever appeared in. He had apparently visited her at Warner Brothers studios the year before, to deliver a five-foot high teddy bear to her. He’d confessed his love for her to a security guard, but his desire for her had tipped into hatred when he saw the character she was playing in Scenes From the Class Struggle lose her virginity on screen.
At his trial the judge refused to accept that Bardo was mentally unstable, although he had a history of mental illness. The judge, sentencing him to life without parole, said, ‘He had different motives from most people, but again most people aren’t murderers.’
Before he was given a life sentence, to be served at the notorious San Quentin prison, Bardo made a long, rambling speech to the court. ‘I do realize what I’ve done and the pain I caused and it was irreversibly wrong,’ he said. He admitted stalking his ‘goddess’ for days, ‘hoping to get the chance to say hello to her’. When he finally rang her doorbell and she appeared, he was too tongue-tied to speak – so he pulled out a gun and shot her, laughing as he did it.
‘WHEN I STARTED out, I didn’t have any desire to be a great actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.’
It was Katharine Hepburn who said those words, and she was being characteristically honest. There are many celebrities who talk about their vocation, their art, the importance of their work. They are not (necessarily) phoneys: as a breed actors and actresses have a high work ethic. Theirs is a craft that can be worked on and developed and improved, and the good ones are constantly honing their natural skills and talents for the camera or the stage. But few are as ruthlessly truthful as Hepburn; they did not lie in their childhood beds and dream of attending drama classes, voice training, stage technique; they did not fantasize about early morning calls to make-up, about finding their best scenes on the cutting-room floor, about difficult and demanding directors. What they dreamed about was fame. Names in lights, top billing, adulation. Some coveted the financial rewards of stardom, others would (in the secrecy of their adolescent yearnings) have even sacrificed that for the heady taste of public adulation.
Even had they been presented with a true picture of the downside of stardom, it is unlikely that any of them would have abandoned their dreams. Years later, having fulfilled their ambitions, and well-aware of the bitter realities that come with the other trappings of celebrity, a few genuinely wonder whether the chase was worth the quarry; most would still not exchange Hollywood mansions, hot and cold running servants and an eager public dancing attendance on them for obscurity, a nine-to-five job in an office or on a factory production line, and a modest home. They may feel afraid, angry, intruded upon and at risk at different times, but the balance still weighs, they reckon, in their favour.
And then along comes a monster …
It’s true that all Hollywood stalkers are deranged, but the degree of derangement varies enormously. Some will be content to write long, rambling, nonthreatening letters; others will turn up on the doorstep with a knife or a gun. Some celebrities attract more obsessive fans than others, partly because of the nature of the parts they play and their public profile. It’s fair to say, although no research has been done into it, that every above-the-title star will have at least one stalker, and some will have many. But there seems to be no way of predicting which star will attract the very dangerous life-threatening stalker – even though there may be ways of assessing which stalker may turn nasty, which star they will be fixated on is in the lap of the gods.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.