Stalkers

By the beginning of March 1981 he was sticking more letters through Jodie Foster’s door at Yale, and by this time she was so concerned about them that they were handed to the college authorities. Hinckley then returned to Denver. He applied for jobs and pawned his possessions to pay for his motel room. His restless moving around the country continued: he went to Los Angeles via Salt Lake City by plane, only to board a bus back to Salt Lake City the next day. It was from there that he moved on to Washington, and his date with President Reagan.

It took him three days to get to Washington, travelling by Greyhound bus, arriving on Sunday 29 March. He ate a cheeseburger at the bus station, and walked about impatiently; other travellers thought he was waiting for someone to pick him up. Then he walked to a hotel two blocks west of the White House, where he checked into a $42-a-night room. He stayed in the room all day, making a couple of local phone calls. Next day he left early, and returned about noon, asking the receptionist if he had received any telephone messages while out. There was none for him. A chambermaid who tidied his room that morning noticed that among his possessions scattered around the room was a newspaper cutting about President Reagan’s timetable. It showed that Reagan would leave the White House at 1.45 p.m., after spending the morning with some prominent figures from the Hispanic community, and would then travel to the Washington Hilton to give a speech.

Hinckley wrote his letter to Jodie Foster and then walked to the Hilton, which was less than a mile from his hotel. He wore a raincoat, and he mingled with the photographers and reporters outside the hotel, giving at least one of them the impression that he was a secret service man. Inside, Reagan, the great communicator, was not on good form. His speech to 3,500 union delegates was not one of his best, but there was one line in it that the newspapers pounced on the following day: ‘Violent crime has surged by ten per cent, making neighbourhood streets unsafe and families fearful in their homes.’

As he stepped outside the hotel, violent crime surged again. Turning to wave at the crowd, Reagan smiled broadly. Hinckley pulled out his pistol, aimed, fired. Two bullets, then a pause, then four more. One of the secret service men pushed Reagan into the waiting limousine and dived on top of him, urging the driver to take off. Behind them, Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady slumped to the ground, blood pouring down his face. A bullet had gone into his head, an injury which would leave him permanently disabled. A Washington policeman was shot in the chest and a secret service agent also received a chest wound. It was a matter of minutes before Reagan and the agent with him in the back of the car realized that the President, too, had been shot in the chest.

Hinckley was pounced on and disarmed within seconds, handcuffed to an agent and thrown into the back of a police car. At Washington police headquarters he hardly spoke. ‘Does anybody know what that guy’s beef was?’ President Reagan asked, as he lay in his hospital bed.

Jodie Foster did not know the answer, although she knew she was in some macabre way the inspiration for Hinckley’s actions. Twenty-one months later she wrote a perceptive account of how Hinckley’s fixation with her, and his subsequent actions, affected her. She had overcome the initial reaction to her when she started at university, the curiosity about her because of her Hollywood background, the resentment of her. She had even, according to one journalist who interviewed her peers, changed her style of dress to blend inconspicuously in with the group. And then John Hinckley had come along and let her know that for her – and for other stars – there could be no normal, no blending in.

Why me? was the theme of the article she had published in Esquire magazine. It explored the terrifying events that followed Hinckley’s arrest. Jodie was appearing on stage in a college production, and she was determined to go ahead with it. She had been moved from her shared dormitory to a single room that could more easily be protected by security men, there were security men screening the audience for the play, and at Jodie’s request cameras were banned. A whole pack of photographers had descended on Yale as soon as the news of Hinckley’s obsession with her had broken, and she wasn’t prepared to face any more. But a camera did get in; she could hear the familiar rhythmic click of a motor drive in the darkened auditorium. She looked hard at the area of the audience the sound was coming from and locked eyes with a bearded man who was watching her unflinchingly. He was there again the next night, in a different seat. The following night a note was found on a bulletin board: ‘By the time the show is over, Jodie Foster will be dead.’ It turned out to be a hoax.

But a few days later a real death threat was pushed under Jodie’s door. This time the police swung into action and caught up with her second stalker, Edward Richardson, within hours. He was arrested in New York, with a loaded gun, and he told police that he decided not to kill Jodie because she was too pretty; he was going to kill the President instead. He had also telephoned a bomb threat, demanding the release of Hinckley and secret service agents had to search all the college rooms that Jodie used. Richardson had a beard, just like the man in the audience. A year later he was released, on parole.

After his arrest, Jodie says a great change came over her – or so she was told by those around her. ‘I started perceiving death in the most mundane but distressing events. Being photographed felt like being shot. I thought everyone was looking at me in crowds; perhaps they were. Every sick letter I received I made sure to read, to laugh at, to read again.’

She was not sleeping properly, her pride in her appearance went. She felt bitter about the way other students had, she felt, betrayed her by telling journalists all about her and, in one case, selling an article to a magazine about her. In her own intelligent well-written article she describes the pain and anger that she, at eighteen, suffered because of her two stalkers. Her anguish was heightened by the media pursuit of her, but the feelings of isolation, desperation and frustration she felt at being unable to control her own life are common to all victims.

The security that surrounded Hinckley as he waited for his trial was greater than any that Jodie Foster had. The security services recognized that, as with Mark Chapman, Hinckley was a natural target for plenty of glory-seekers. It caused a sensation when Hinckley was found not guilty of attempting to murder Reagan, because of his insanity. But the net result for the American people was the same: he went behind bars, with very little prospect of ever being released.

It was surprising, therefore, to find him being considered for unsupervised release to spend a weekend with his parents only six years after the shooting. His application to be allowed home – he had already been back to Colorado in the company of a nurse – was supported by staff who had been involved in his care and treatment.

At a court hearing to consider his application it was revealed that he had written a sympathetic letter to Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers who is on Death Row in Florida. Hinckley ‘expressed sorrow’ at the ‘awkward position you [Bundy] find yourself in’. He had also written to a college student, asking her to kill Jodie Foster for him and to send a pistol by post to him so that he could escape from jail. He then told the girl to hijack a jet and demand that Hinckley and Jodie Foster both be taken aboard it. Hinckley had also received a letter from a woman in jail for trying to kill President Ford; she suggested Hinckley write to Charles Manson. To hear about the networking that was going on between long-term prisoners was almost as shocking to the law-abiding public as the whole idea of stalking.

Hinckley’s application to go home alone was turned down, and has been turned down ever since. When Hinckley’s application came up again in 1988, the court heard that staff had intercepted a letter from him to a mail order company that was selling pictures of Jodie Foster; his obsession was undiminished. In 1993, twelve years after committing the crime, he applied for parole. The answer was no.

‘THE BENEVOLENT ANGEL OF DEATH’ (#ulink_1eb1f560-665d-5c82-b45e-9d09e5bd8528)

SHE RUSHED OUT of her apartment block in Los Angeles on a fine sunny morning in March 1982, a slim, pretty girl with long dark hair, wearing a sailor-style top and trousers. It wasn’t far from the block doorway to her car, which was parked by the kerb. She was on her way to a music class, in a hurry because she was late.

‘Are you Theresa Saldana?’ a male voice with a pronounced Scottish accent asked, as she was slipping the key into the car door. She knew, as soon as she heard the question, that the man who had been stalking her for the past few weeks had caught up with her. She instinctively turned to face him, and then tried to run. He was very close, and when he grabbed her she knew he was far too strong for her to be able to escape. She spontaneously raised her hands, to protect her face, and as she did so she felt the first searing hot thrust of pain in her chest.

Arthur Jackson, a 47-year-old Scottish drifter with a long history of psychiatric illness, stabbed 27-year-old actress Theresa Saldana ten times with the five-inch blade of a kitchen knife as she struggled with him, screaming ‘He’s trying to kill me.’ Fortunately for her, among the people who witnessed the attack was a 26-year-old bottled water delivery man, Jeff Fenn, who had the courage to tackle Jackson. He launched himself on to the demented Scotsman, not realizing that he was armed. When he saw the knife he was able to get it off Jackson and then hold him on the ground until the police arrived.

‘I heard a lady screaming, I ran up the street and tried to break it up,’ said Fenn. ‘The man appeared to be beating her with a fist, but when I grabbed the guy to get him into a headlock I saw he had a knife. Then I pulled him to the ground while she ran into the apartment. I got the knife out of his hands and threw it into the street. He asked me how long it had been since he stabbed her, but I didn’t want to talk to him so I told him to just lie down and be still while I held his arms behind him on the ground.’

While he was being held by Fenn, Jackson told the crowd that gathered that they would find the reasons for his attack in a bag he was carrying.

Released from Jackson’s grip, Theresa ran back to the apartment block, screaming that she was dying and needed help. Her husband Fred Feliciano had been called, and he stayed by her side as paramedics gave her blood transfusions and then rushed her to the Cedars-Sinai hospital. She was operated on immediately. Four of the stab wounds had punctured one of her lungs, and there were three other stab wounds in her chest, narrowly missing her heart. The left hand which she had raised to protect her face had been slashed so badly that it required extensive surgery over the next few months. The doctors lost count of how many stitches they had to put in on that first day, but she needed twenty-six pints of blood. Before she was wheeled into the operating theatre for her first four hours of surgery Theresa told them she was an actress and begged them to do their job well and not leave her with too many scars. For four weeks she was on two drips, one in each arm, and she was in hospital for a total of ten weeks.

The delivery man who saved her life visited her in hospital a few days later. Although he had seen her most celebrated film, Raging Bull, in which she played Jake La Motta’s sister-in-law, only the day before, he did not recognize her at the time of the attack. Theresa had a large trophy inscribed for him with the words: ‘To my hero, Jeffrey Fenn. Thank you, thank you, thank you. With much love and gratitude for ever.’

There was no doubt that Jeffrey’s actions saved Theresa from death. When police examined Arthur Jackson’s belongings, they found in the battered shoulder bag he was carrying a document he had written, describing Theresa as his ‘divine angel’ and his ‘countess angel’. He had seen her in a film called Defiance, in which she played the girlfriend of a young seaman caught up in a fight with a street gang. Jackson, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, was deluded enough to believe that the film was the story of his life, and that Theresa was therefore his girlfriend. He claimed she was too good for the world, and he was on a ‘divine mission’ as a ‘benevolent angel of death’. His mission was to kill her, and he wrote that he was acting under the orders of the ‘Knights of St Michael in the kingdom of heaven’. Theresa, he believed, would be better off dead than with the ‘scum’ she mixed with on earth, which was probably a reference to her husband.

In the document, which was entitled ‘Petition to the United States Government for a State-Imposed Execution’, he pleaded for his own life to be ended in the electric chair, so that he could join her. He said he wanted to die at Alcatraz, the famous federal prison which had been closed for some years. He stipulated the execution should take place in Cell Block D, because that was where a convicted armed robber named Joseph Cretzer had died in 1946 while leading an insurrection, and Jackson believed that by dying there he could free Cretzer’s soul from purgatory, while rejoining his own ‘divine angel’ in heaven. He also asked for piped music to be played and light refreshments served while he was in the electric chair. He mentioned Theresa Saldana’s name fifty times in the whole document.

He also weighed up the pros and cons of where he should kill her – she had an apartment in New York as well as her home in Los, Angeles – but opted for California because it had recently reintroduced the death penalty. He wanted to die, but could not bring himself to commit suicide.

Jackson was first diagnosed as mentally ill when he was seventeen, and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and America ever since. He had been deported from America twice, but had still managed to get a visa to return. Two days after seeing Defiance during the Christmas holiday in his home town of Aberdeen, he travelled 8,000 miles on ‘an odyssey to find her and complete my mission’. He funded his travel from his British state benefits; he was classified as long-term disabled. He tried to get hold of a gun, which he described in his writings as ‘more humane’ but could not get one, despite travelling to several states. About a week before he stabbed Theresa, he had turned up in New York, phoning both her New York and Hollywood agents, and then tracking down and contacting her parents. He told her mother that he was speaking on behalf of Martin Scorsese, who directed Raging Bull, and that he wanted to offer her another part. Well-spoken, with a distinctive accent, and perfectly lucid, he convinced her mother into giving him Theresa’s address in Los Angeles.

‘When he told me he had a very good part for my daughter I got excited and gave him Theresa’s address,’ Mrs Saldana later told a journalist.

By the time of the attack, Theresa knew she was being stalked. Her New York agent told her of a conversation with a man who claimed to be from the famous William Morris talent agency; a few simple questions had betrayed his lack of knowledge of film industry procedure, and the agent went on the alert, reporting the call to the police. Her mother, too, had called her to tell her Scorsese had another part for her: when no offer came, it was clear her mother had been hoaxed. Not only that, but the hoaxer now had Theresa’s address.

‘My mom has never, never given out information before,’ said Theresa a few days after the attack. ‘It’s not her fault. She just didn’t want me to miss the opportunity. She was excited that Scorsese would be calling me.’

After the warnings from her agent and her mother, she was scared and stayed with a neighbour until her husband came home. After that she took more precautions than usual, making sure that she was rarely alone in her apartment and never alone outside at night. But she did not anticipate an attack in broad daylight on a sunny morning, when she had only a few yards to go from her front door to her car.

‘I’ve always been a trusting person. When John Lennon was killed all I can remember is terrible, terrible sadness, as though a piece of my life had been taken away,’ Theresa said seven months after the attack. ‘But it didn’t really make me afraid for me. Now I do not give my phone number to anyone. I do not let anyone know where I live. If someone wants to reach me for a job, it’s strictly through my agent.

‘I now do things with other people and I always have someone with me. I’m not paranoid, but I am very, very careful.’

She re-started work as soon as she could, taking parts in three television series in the months between the attack and Jackson’s court case. She needed to work: her bills of more than $50,000 for the two and a half months she spent in hospital exceeded the limits of her health insurance. During that time she left hospital in a wheelchair and on an intravenous drip to identify Jackson as her attacker before a court.

She believed that work was therapeutic. ‘Some people can’t believe I want to go on acting after being stabbed by a nut who saw me in a film,’ she said in a newspaper interview. ‘But I feel that, though you never forget, you’ve got to carry on and be active.’

Any spare time she had went to founding an organization to help other victims of violence; she found the support system inadequate because none of the counsellors she met had themselves been through an experience similar to hers. She teamed up with a Los Angeles teacher who had been shot in her classroom, and with the backing of the police and psychiatrists they organized support counselling for other victims.

The only emotion Arthur Jackson expressed while he was held on remand was one of regret – not for stabbing Theresa, but for failing to kill her. Another prisoner told the prosecution that he was distraught when he discovered that she had lived, because that meant he had failed to fulfil his mission. He was tried for attempted murder at Santa Monica Supreme Court seven months after the attack, and found guilty. The maximum sentence, twelve years, was passed on him the following month. Theresa testified against him, saying in court: ‘I have had to endure a tremendous amount of physical pain and there will be still more pain in the coming weeks, months and possibly years.’

Because Jackson refused to accept that he was insane – he could have pleaded guilty but insane and been sentenced to a secure psychiatric institution – under the American system he went to prison (in Britain, regardless of his own opinion about his mental state, he would have been assessed and, with his history, almost certainly been sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, such as Broadmoor). The prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Michael Knight, expressed disquiet after the trial about Jackson being treated as a ‘normal’ prisoner. He pointed out that, with good behaviour, Jackson would be released in eight years, and although he would be instantly deported back to Scotland ‘the son of a gun could be back in this country within a week. He’s already been deported twice, if that tells you something.’

Investigations into how Jackson managed to get a tourist visa to return to the States revealed that he had legally changed his middle name from John to Richard two years earlier. He had first been deported in 1961, after entering the States in 1955, for failing to declare that he had a history of mental illness. He arrived as a permanent immigrant, and served fourteen months in the US army, but was then discharged as unfit. He served ninety days in jail for possessing a knife, which was discovered after the secret service detained him for making threats against President Kennedy, and after he came out of jail he was taken straight to the airport and flown back to Scotland. In 1966 he returned as a tourist, and was deported for overstaying his visa, after serving another prison sentence for carrying a knife. At that stage he was treated in a Californian psychiatric hospital.

Jackson’s own lawyer had the trial delayed for a month while they collected evidence of his long-term illness from psychiatric hospitals in Scotland and the States. He said he could not think of a stronger insanity defence than Jackson’s, and described it as ‘a classic example’.

But Jackson, who listed his occupation on his British passport as ‘technician in scenario and music’, refused to allow him to run it and pleaded not guilty. He rejected diagnoses of his condition, described by a psychiatrist in court as ‘chronic paranoid schizophrenic’, and maintained that he was ‘allergic to the world’. It seems that the only time he recognized the degree of his own problems was when he was seventeen and was voluntarily admitted to a hospital in Scotland, where he asked the psychiatrist in charge of his case to ‘go into my brain and scrape the dirt off’. With an insanity defence, his lawyer hoped he could prove that he did not act with premeditated malice – that he was too ill to be responsible for his actions. The prosecutor in the case argued that Jackson’s preparations – the journey from Scotland, the purchase of the knife, the research into where Theresa lived – proved that he was capable of what is known in legal jargon as ‘malice aforethought’.

The jury took nine hours to decide that Jackson was guilty of attempted first-degree murder, not a lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon, which would have carried a maximum sentence of seven years.

Theresa Saldana wept tears of joy when Jackson got the maximum sentence. But her relief was tempered with the knowledge that Jackson would one day be released. Three years after the Saldana case, a new law was introduced to allow for the indefinite detention on a year-by-year renewable basis of deranged prisoners in California, although Jackson’s sentence pre-dated the legislation and it was therefore arguable that he was not covered by it. But before those arguments could even be aired, the law was repealed as ‘unconstitutional’, to the great dismay of Theresa Saldana and many other victims.

Jackson’s behaviour record in prison was deemed to be good, despite him sending letters and making phone calls to journalists and others, stating that his one aim in life was to fulfil the same mission: to kill Theresa. He was still referring to himself as ‘the benevolent angel of death’, and in one letter to a television producer he wrote: ‘I am capable of alternating between sentiment and savagery, romance and reality … Also police or FBI protection for TS won’t stop the hit squad, murder contract men, nor will bullet-proof vests.’ He was being held in the medical wing of Vacaville prison in California, where the chief psychiatrist considered him ‘extremely dangerous. He is still psychotic, still delusional, still elaborately involved with Theresa Saldana, Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston and Charles Bronson.’

But despite all this, after seven years he came up for parole, and the psychiatrist’s opinion carried no weight; all that mattered was that he had behaved himself. He was not the first seriously disturbed patient to have slipped through the loophole: the parole division of the prison department estimated that about a hundred deranged prisoners had already been released.

‘The law ties our hands on this. Just because someone says they will do something, we cannot make the assumption that they will,’ said a department official.

Jackson’s psychiatrist believed it was the only assumption to make about him. He was, she said, a meticulous planner, used to waiting, and deeply regretted having botched his attempt on Theresa’s life. Shortly after his arrest he had started to write an eighty-nine page letter, in handwriting so tiny that it could hardly be read without a magnifying glass, in which he explained why he wanted to kill her.

It started with ‘Dear fondest Theresa’ and went on to explain that he was suffering from a ‘torturous love sickness in my soul for you combined with a desperate desire to escape into a beautiful world I have always dreamed of (the palaces of gardens of sweet paradise) whereby the plan was for you, Theresa, to go ahead first, then I would join you in a few months via the little green room at San Quentin.’

Another passage read, ‘I swear on the ashes of my dead mother and on the scars of Theresa Saldana that neither God nor I will rest in peace until this special request and my solemn petition has been granted.’

As the date for his potential release drew nearer Theresa Saldana reluctantly forced herself back into the limelight to fight it. By this time she had been married to her second husband, actor Phil Peters, for a few months and they were expecting their first child. Their address was a closely guarded secret, their telephone number was ex-directory and known to only a trusted handful of people. She had made a film about her own ordeal in 1984 and was still a little involved with the victim support group, but she was also intent on not letting her whole life be ruled by the horrific attack. ‘I got so over-identified with the issues and the cause,’ she said, ‘I became Theresa Saldana, The Girl Who Got Stabbed … the tragedy queen. It’s not really me to have all this depressing stuff circling round me. You know, ninety-nine per cent of my life is to smile and one per cent is this miserable situation. There is a part of me that feels really overjoyed to even be alive.’

Yet the prospect of Jackson’s imminent release was so terrifying that she made a public plea for ‘logic, decency and common sense’. ‘This is my life and I stand for other people as well … It’s so late and, you know, along the years I always believed that something would be passed. There seemed to be so many people working on so many different things. And I kept faith and believed that a law would be passed, and then a law was passed, and so recently repealed …’ she told the Los Angeles Times. ‘And then even when I got the letter about the repeal they said they weren’t going to take it as the final thing. But in the last couple of weeks all we got were very tacit and very, very specific and serious words to the effect of “Prepare yourself because he is coming out on the fifteenth of June. And there is nothing we can do.”