Stalkers. Jean Ritchie

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

‘BANG, BANG, YOU’RE DEAD’

      THE EIGHTH OF DECEMBER 1980 was the day that stalking was blasted into public awareness by a snub-nosed five-shot revolver. As John Lennon followed his wife back into the Dakota Building, the famous New York apartment block where they lived, a fat bespectacled youth called Mark Chapman approached him. Chapman had for a few days been one of the regular fans who hung around hoping to glimpse the ex-Beatle, but by 8.30 p.m. on a cold dark night the others had all drifted away. The doorman of the exclusive apartment block had been chatting normally to the young man only minutes before, and said afterwards that Chapman was calm and rational.

      As Yoko Ono swept passed him Chapman said ‘Hello’. Lennon, who was behind her, stared for a few seconds at his nemesis. Earlier that day he had signed his autograph on an album sleeve for Chapman, but he showed no sign of recognition. As Lennon started to enter the building Chapman stepped sideways, pulled the pistol from his pocket, held it straight in front of him with both arms outstretched, and fired all five bullets at his hero. The two bullets that hit Lennon in the back caused him to spin round, and two more ripped into his chest. One went wide of the target.

      The most famous pop star in the world staggered up five steps to the Dakota office, where he collapsed in front of the night-duty man. The man who was about to become one of the most famous assassins in the world dropped his gun and stepped back into the shadows. He did not try to run away, but calmly pulled out his well-thumbed copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and started to read it while he waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.

      The news of John Lennon’s death flew electronically around the world, and everywhere there was a reaction of shock. The Dakota was besieged by fans and inundated with flowers, radio stations played Lennon music for twenty-four hours a day and a worldwide ten-minute silent vigil was held six days later.

      But while Lennon fans were stupefied by the death of the man they regarded as the next thing to God, others around the world were shocked by something else: the man who had murdered Lennon was one of his fans. The killer was a devotee of his, one of those who claimed to worship him. To those outside the closed world of megastardom, it seemed preposterous. Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been assassinated, but there was some perverted political sense to their killings. It would have been easier to comprehend if Lennon’s killer had been bent on attracting international attention to some cause or other, if the murder had been a kamikaze publicity stunt. But the only thing that Chapman wanted to draw attention to was himself.

      The risk from deranged fans had been known for years to those in the public eye. They received nutty mail in with the thousands of genuine, innocent adoring fan letters; they received death threats, they felt uneasy about certain persistent hangers-on at their gates. But it was Lennon’s death that publicly marked the extent of the risk, and brought celebrity stalking into the open. It was Lennon’s death that floodlit the dark, strange, obsessional world of the fanatical fan.

      Mark Chapman’s decision to kill his hero John Lennon may have been triggered by a perceptive article in Esquire magazine, published in October 1980. The piece examined Lennon’s life, which was that of an eccentric semi-recluse, dominated by his Japanese wife Yoko. Their married life was bizarre, their relationship with their son Sean (born by Caesarean operation so that his birth date was the same as his father’s) was unconventional. The magazine article examined how Lennon’s life measured up to the peace and love philosophy that he had expounded for so long, and found it wanting. He did not emerge as an idealist who put his money where his mouth was, but as an extremely rich 40-year-old who watched daytime television and amused himself speculating in property.

      Many devoted fans must have read the article and rejected it, others will have felt betrayed by Lennon. Critics of John and Yoko will have felt vindicated. But Chapman went further. He felt so deeply upset by his icon that he decided to kill him. It took a few weeks, but he managed it – one of the few times that Mark Chapman lived up to his own expectations.

      Chapman was twenty-five at the time he killed Lennon. He was an unremarkable-looking young man who had managed to conceal the full extent of his mental disturbance from a lot of people for a long time. The son of a nurse and an ex-army sergeant, who divorced when he was still a child, he was born in Texas and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, alienating his family in his early teens when he adopted a hippie lifestyle and experimented with marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and barbiturates. He acquired a criminal record for minor offences, most of them connected with drugs. During these years he idolized Lennon. At seventeen he cleaned up his act after he claimed to have met Jesus Christ, who came into his room and stood by his left knee, starting a tingling which spread ‘from the tip of my toe to the top of my head’. Chapman became a smartly dressed, clean-shaven, short-haired Bible freak, conventionally dressed apart from the large cross he always hung around his neck. He dropped out of school – where his record had not been good – to follow Christ. He joined a Pentecostal church, and walked the streets accosting passers-by and trying to convert them. His Christianity was fundamental: God represented the forces of good and the devil represented the forces of evil, and the world was a battleground in which the two sides fought each other. His feelings about Lennon became ambivalent; СКАЧАТЬ