Stalkers. Jean Ritchie
and Victoria Principal. It is almost easier to name the Hollywood stars who are not clients; Frank Sinatra and Sylvester Stallone head that, much shorter, list.
He came into the business after high school, when he got a job helping out with protection for Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. He was young and inexperienced but he learned fast, and he soon learned that what stars need is something much more sophisticated than being ringed by a posse of muscle-bound bodyguards. The enemy was cleverer than that; stalkers have proved they can get over barbed wire or past trained guard dogs, and they have even been prepared to take jobs with telephone companies to get access to unlisted phone numbers. Others have been taken on as security guards for their stars’ concerts; when de Becker discovers this he makes sure they are moved to low security areas. At least one stalker has applied for a job directly to the celebrity, using an assumed name.
De Becker sorts the threats delivered to his clients into three categories: harmless ones, serious ones which need to be monitored and urgent ones. About twenty-five per cent of this last group actually show up outside the celebrity’s home or office, although very few are able to commit any act that gets them arrested or their names into the newspapers – de Becker’s men are there to thwart them. There have been occasions when a stalker has turned up at Los Angeles airport and found himself being driven to his hotel, unknowingly, by one of de Becker’s staff. Others have attended concerts without realizing that the ‘fans’ sitting on either side of them work for de Becker.
Gavin de Becker agrees with Dietz that the rise in the stalking phenomenon is associated with the familiarity that television breeds. ‘If you are in the public eye – whether it’s the local newscaster or Jackie Onassis, whether your audience is 10,000 or one billion – someone will react in an unpredictable and inappropriate way,’ he said. ‘Today you have an entire sub-population who relate more to television characters – soap opera stars and such – than they do to real people.’
He works hard at understanding his adversaries, the stalkers. After the murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer (not one of his clients) he said: ‘This killing … like the attack on Theresa Saldana, involved somewhat obscure and unusual target selection. This was not Victoria Principal or Madonna. This was somebody with a far smaller audience. There is a dynamic which says “Whitney Houston is for everyone, but you’re for me.”’
He also sees celebrity stalking as a particularly American phenomenon, born not just out of the many stars who are centred on Hollywood but also out of the American ethic. ‘We are a nation that gives rise to and authenticates virtually unlimited expectations … We are taught to feel that if we work hard we can do anything and be anything. And very few people want to be ordinary … Some people will do anything to be recognized. It’s part of the American myth that anybody can be unique and remarkable and important.’
His own observations lead him to assert that stalkers are at their most dangerous between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. As Dietz’s research into the de Becker archives shows, only five per cent of all persistent letter writers do so anonymously, so de Becker’s staff have few problems tracing the potentially dangerous ones. If they track them down to a psychiatric institution or a prison, the authorities are notified and attempts are made to ensure they are not released.
The most dangerous threats, Dietz found, were the specific ones; those which gave a time and a place for the attack on the celebrity. De Becker always takes those very seriously.
He accepts that the stars he looks after do not want to cut themselves off entirely from their public, and will probably never agree to retiring away from the spotlight as much as, perhaps, Dr Dietz would suggest they do. One part of de Becker’s job he sees as counselling them to live with the ever-present stalking threat. He calls it his ‘you don’t have to change your life when you get a dead chicken in the mail’ message.
There are things that should be done, though, and de Becker is not the only security man dispensing advice. Homes and cars should never be bought in the celebrity’s own name (stars should set up trust funds to handle impersonally those sort of purchases), phone numbers should never be listed in their names, even as ex-directory numbers, because the leaks from telephone companies are unstoppable. All bills and paperwork should be handled through an agent’s office.
The police in Los Angeles are probably better equipped to deal with stalkers than any other force in the world, simply because they have had so much more experience of celebrity stalking than any other city. Since 1991 the Los Angeles Police Department has had a Threat Management Unit which deals exclusively with stalkers, although not all of them are pursuing stars. In the first three years of its operation the unit dealt with 200 cases.
The FBI, too, has had to wake up to the threat caused by stalkers, and has become involved in some investigations which mirror the kind of work de Becker is doing privately. When Stephanie Zimbalist, a Hollywood actress who starred in the TV series Remington Steele, received 212 intimidating letters from a stalker, it was FBI agent Karen Gardner who was assigned to the case. FBI interest in stalking dates from 1989 and the death of Rebecca Schaeffer; before that local police departments had handled it. But by the late 1980s the number of stalking cases had escalated so greatly that the national agency realized it would have to get involved, and the Stephanie Zimbalist case was one of their first triumphs. The fact that the letter writer, who always signed himself ‘Your Secret Admirer’, mentioned the FBI in several of the letters was a spur to them to take on the investigation.
The stalker gave great detail in his letters about Stephanie’s movements. He not only knew the dates and times of her visits to other cities, but he could even specify which floor of the hotel she stayed on. His information was so compellingly accurate that Stephanie stopped making any public appearances; her stalker simply sent her more chilling letters: ‘… following you around different 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