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Introduction

I always thought that getting stalked was the kind of thing that happened to other people – celebrities in the main, or someone who’d escaped a bad relationship with a revenge-filled ex or had somehow managed to antagonise a random nutcase. As I saw it, stalking was the kind of thing that only happened to a person who was perhaps slightly naive, had made bad choices in their love life or was maybe just too darn attractive for their own good. Given that I was a street smart, overweight, middle-aged mother, living a quiet life in the inner suburbs, the idea that I might attract the attentions of a stalker seemed ridiculous.

Until last year.

Charlie is a slightly older male – still handsome, but getting a bit grey around his chin if you look very closely. He’s carrying a few extra kilos, but is friendly, unvaryingly polite to nanas and toddlers alike, and often seen happily making new acquaintances in the park, on the street or at the local cafe. He has the kind of personality that makes him irresistible to everyone from hipsters with Ned Kelly beards to blokes in fluoro vests and workman’s boots. He retired young from the family property in the Gippsland countryside, and found a new life in the city when he was still young enough to enjoy its pleasures.

Thanks to Charlie’s early life on the farm, he’s brilliantly trained and I usually feel free to let him wander behind me and can trust absolutely that he won’t raise his nose from my left leg when he’s been given the command to ‘stay behind’. The joys of a well-trained kelpie.

Mind you, it’s a different matter at the shops, when I’ll often lift my head from the newspaper at the local cafe to find Charlie lying his head on a stranger’s lap – begging for his ears to be patted or a bite of someone’s breakfast. He’s just as bad at the park, running free, when he’ll approach total strangers in the full expectation that they’ll throw his ball or tickle his tummy or simply admire his profile.

In short, Charlie is the perfect doggy wingman for a socially isolated writer. Over the years, I’ve probably chatted to hundreds of complete strangers who’ve approached me about my dog, or who have been approached by the dog himself. More than a few of those strangers have since become friends. So it was nothing out of the ordinary when the elderly bloke with the walking stick at the neighbouring cafe table one day struck up a conversation about Charlie the dog. It was 28 August 2013.

***

Let’s call this man Dick* (mainly because that’s the shortened version of what my son and I ended up calling him). Dick was a farmer, down from the country for some medical treatment – a brain tumour, he told me. He was missing his dogs, and Charlie was just so darn handsome and clearly smart that he couldn’t resist giving him a pat. Dick and I struck up the kind of conversation common between dog owners. Then it turned out Dick wasn’t just any old farmer, but an internationally renowned livestock breeder, exporter of beef cattle to Russia, and an inventor to boot – specialising in a side-shoot of technology that, funnily enough, I knew quite a bit about. Dick needed a website written about his new product. I was a freelance writer who knew about the subject matter. What were the chances of that?

And before you think a cafe might be an odd place to source work, I take the clients where I find them – at various other times, I’ve been commissioned to write something after a chance encounter with someone at the school gate, on a ski lift and at the Comedy Festival.

Now, if there were such a thing as a standard stalking victim, I would never have classified myself as one. I’m not naive and I have a very well-developed sense of personal safety, honed over years of living overseas and interviewing people ranging from bikers to porn stars, rapists, murderers, common conmen and also corporate bosses with dodgy ethics. Not to mention world famous chefs, actors, marketing gurus, refugees and even, memorably, Stalin’s grandson. I used to pride myself on the fact that I could generally tell if someone was having me on.

To give Dick some credit, he had me well and truly fooled at first. And it was only when I called him out on his lies that the real nightmare began.

***

Dick was mad; I’ll give him that. Maybe not clinically mad, but he was mad to think that a journalist and writer would accept a brief without employing the journalist’s favourite tool, Google, to find out more about the topic under review. That one simple step told me pretty much all I needed to know. He hadn’t been president of a noted national institution. He wasn’t a famed livestock breeder. And his son certainly wasn’t married to the flautist Jane Rutter’s daughter. (For the record, Jane Rutter only has a son, currently well below the age of consent in most jurisdictions for anything interesting, let alone marriage.)

Also, Dick’s other son had not been murdered by drug dealers in the States and his body left undiscovered for six months – at least, not according to any news reports I could dig up under the name I had been given.

Curious about the technology Dick claimed to have invented, I did a quick patent search too. Nope, nothing under his name there. Then I remembered something: Dick had professed to have been interviewed on ABC TV’s Landline program about his invention. Unluckily for Dick, my ex-husband was a reporter on that very same program. Access to the archives was the matter of one quick phone call. Nope, nothing. A quick email from my ex to the presenter, Pip Courtney, confirmed this. She had never even heard of the man, although Landline had done a story on some similar technology in use in the agricultural sector. (I suspect Dick had watched the program obsessively until he had the details down pat, and could rattle it off to unsuspecting mugs like me.)

Indeed, the only digital traces I could find of Dick were a couple of newspaper articles about his claim to have been abused by priests at a Catholic boys school in Queensland – something he had also talked about in person with me at our chance cafe meeting. According to the news reports, the only problem was that the school had no record of him ever having attended – at least not under the name he was using today. The reporter quoted a representative of the victims of clergy abuse as saying that it was a despicable act to make fraudulent claims, and that it only made it even more difficult for real victims.

As far as I could ascertain, Dick was certainly not who he had claimed to be. None of the facts matched up. However, a search of various professional networking sites turned up a number of people Dick and I both knew. Starting to feel like a bit of a stalker myself, I made contact with these friends of friends, professional acquaintances. Turns out, he’d spun exactly the same story to them and, like me, they’d fallen for it at first then finally blanked him when they discovered the truth. I was merely the latest in a long line of people who’d been taken in by his lies.

I’m still not exactly sure what the point of Dick’s fabrications may have been – in other words, what he was hoping to gain from asking me to write a website. It certainly wasn’t about striking up a romantic relationship given that at least one of his other targets had been a bloke. Perhaps he was just lonely, frustrated with his lack of career success, or maybe he was simply mentally unwell.

We’d met twice and exchanged a couple of emails by the time I rumbled him, but the moment I knew he was a conman, I no longer responded to his text messages, his emails or the voicemail messages he left. His tone of voice became increasingly demanding. He wanted my bank account details, to arrange another meeting, to find out why I wasn’t responding to his requests. He also wanted to borrow money from me, claiming that he had been mugged and lost all his credit cards – possibly the first time I have ever been hit up by a supposedly well-heeled client for a loan! If I hadn’t already been suspicious, this request would have been enough to set the alarm bells ringing.

At first, it was simply annoying to see his name pop up on my phone so often, and to have to reject every call. Then one day, the phone buzzed and showed that the call was coming from an unknown contact – common enough when you are a freelance writer. I answered and sure enough, it was him again, obviously calling from a friend’s phone or another phone of his own.

‘Please don’t call me again,’ I said, before he had a chance to say anything much. ‘I know that you are not who you claim to be, so do not waste my time.’ Then I hung up. That would be that, or so I thought. He knew that I knew he was a fraud. Surely he’d just forget about me and move onto someone else?

The next morning I woke up to a voicemail full of obscene and somewhat threatening messages – definitely not worth repeating here.

I thought no more about it, but fired off a quick email to him, explicitly saying that I did not want any further contact with him, and that if he persisted in leaving obscene messages, I would report him to the police. Best to have something in writing, I thought, just in case. And I was right – this is a key step in getting an intervention order should you need one.

***

I’d read about the flight or fight response, but only twice have I ever experienced it at the most visceral level. The first time was in the 1990s when I was living in Russia and a soldier grabbed and attempted to rape me while I was gathering wood for a barbecue in the woods near our apartment. Usually quietly spoken and totally non-violent, I escaped by screaming my head off and repeatedly banging him over the head with a brick lying on the ground nearby. God knows where THAT voice or THAT willingness to brain another human being came from, but I survived the attack and will be forever grateful to an inbuilt survival mechanism that can overcome the best, most polite of upbringings.

The only other time I’ve experienced such sudden fear was in 2013 when I spotted Dick, the bloke who’d been pestering me by email, phone and text message, around the corner from my house. A matter of metres away from where I lived. It was one thing being cyberharassed – at the time, I didn’t quite consider it as stalking – but having him in my neighbourhood was something else entirely. Around the corner from my house, indeed!

I had never given him my address, had never given any indication of where I lived, yet there he was. Despite being middle aged, and not having run more than 100 metres at a slow trot since I was in high school, fear and adrenalin worked their magic. I was home in 20 seconds flat, moved the car (which Dick had seen before and would recognise) to a neighbouring street, and then hovered inside with the doors locked and the curtains drawn. Then when I could see no sign of him out the front of my house through the crack in the curtains, I went to the police.

***

When you’re a civilian, with a spotless criminal history (bar some petty milk bar pilfering as a kid), your taxes up to date and only a few parking fines to your name, there’s something quite exciting about visiting a police station. (I’m sure many of the people I’ve written about in previous books feel quite differently.)

From a professional point of view, I was also interested to find out how Australian police treat members of the public popping in for advice and/or help with a stalker, and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. I explained the circumstances, played a few of the voice messages I’d been left, and said that the reason I was there today was the fact that I’d seen him near my house (coincidence perhaps, but spooky nonetheless, given that I’d initially met the stalker out of my suburb, and also well away from his.)

Luckily, I hadn’t bothered deleting his voice messages, his texts or the numerous emails he’d sent. The police were quite interested in those, as it turned out. They were particularly keen on the emails sent by someone purporting to be Dick’s lawyer and threatening me with legal action. I might have been more concerned had the letters not contained a mishmash of spelling errors and dodgy legal terms, and been sent from a person not qualified as a lawyer in any state of Australia. (Yes, I had a friend check.)

I was able to give the stalker’s name to the police officer on the front desk – well, a name at least, given that there was every chance it could have been entirely false – and also the phone numbers and email addresses he’d used to contact me. I was immediately advised to keep logging all future interactions with him, and to think about taking out an intervention order – something that would mean that if he did contact me, then action could be taken against him.

Like me, many are sceptical about intervention orders, given the number of men who flout intervention orders and sometimes go on to commit homicide. As just one example, take the murder of 43-year-old Kelly Thompson in Melbourne in 2014, despite her having taken out an intervention order against her ex, 59-year-old Wayne Wood. Thompson had suffered through months of threats and violence against her, and Woods had openly discussed with people his intention of harming both Thompson and himself. The Coroners Court was told that Wood had breached the intervention order twice in the weeks leading up to the murder, and Thompson had made 34 worried phone calls to police over that same period. Neighbours called police after they noticed Wood hanging around Thompson’s Point Cook home, and were allegedly told to call back if they heard screaming or glass breaking. But it was already too late. After killing Thompson, Wood then killed himself.

I wasn’t yet at the point where I thought an intervention order might be necessary for me. But I was almost relieved to hear that when the desk sergeant had done a search on Dick’s full name, they’d discovered that he was already ‘well known to police’ as the saying goes. Call me suspicious, but my next question was whether any of this ‘history’ involved sexual crimes, or crimes of violence – I certainly wasn’t looking forward to being raped or murdered or even bashed as a result of having a friendly chat to an old bloke in a coffee shop. The officer could not say anything more than ‘Known to us for similar behaviour.’ I was again urged to take out an intervention order. ‘Oh, great,’ I thought, and went home.

***

At home, the one place on earth where I’d always felt exceptionally safe, every unexpected noise suddenly made me start and wonder – was he outside right now? Had he somehow managed to find his way inside? The roller door at the back of the garden was found open – was that him or the wind? The switch from the water tank that controlled the garden irrigation was turned to closed – was that him? But the tapping of a walking stick on the footpath outside my house was the one thing that really set my teeth on edge. Now you might think that Dick being elderly and in need of a walking stick might have been some consolation, but this just made things worse.

You see, I have one old people’s home just down the street from my house and another one on the corner. The constant tap of walking sticks past my study window haunted me for months – still does, if I am honest. I was even more unsettled when a friend joked that perhaps Dick wasn’t carrying an ordinary walking stick, but perhaps a James Bond-ish cane that actually concealed a sword or a rifle. I’ll never look at an old bloke with a walking stick in quite the same way again.

It’s the kind of crack I myself may have made before I made Dick’s acquaintance, but nowadays, I don’t quite see the humour. The thing is, even an elderly bloke with bad teeth and a walking stick is capable of scaring the hell out of someone – even someone much younger, much stronger and much fitter – given the right degree of malevolence. Stalkers come in all sizes and shapes and degrees of separation, as I was to discover in the course of researching this book.

How people respond varies almost as widely. I sought immediate police help when he turned up near my house, but others choose not to involve the law until it gets unbearable, particularly if they have been in a relationship with the stalker before.

I also chose not to take out an intervention order on the advice of a psychologist friend, who said that given that Dick was a random albeit resentful stranger, there was every chance that he would soon lose interest. If I’d taken out an order against him, then he would have had the opportunity to contest it in court – a process that would perhaps just feed into his sense of injustice and spur him on to further nasty acts.

Most of my friends were curious about the details of what was going on and very supportive, with some particularly keen characters even volunteering to dash to my rescue – any time of the day or night – should Dick turn up near my house again. One was a big, burly, ex-copper; the other was a young, six foot four, insanely fit Irishman who walks his dog at the same park as me. Others wanted to maintain their distance – like being stalked might be contagious. My sister, for one, said it was okay for me to send her copies of emails and voicemails for safekeeping, but she didn’t want to know the explicit details.

But there were plenty out there who were downright judgmental: ‘What did you do to him?’ was pretty much the gist of it. And also: ‘What would you change about your behaviour next time?’ from one particularly sanctimonious acquaintance. Like this was MY fault somehow – that my talking to a stranger in a coffee shop, or exchanging pleasantries about a dog meant I was asking for it? It was victim blaming at its most thoughtless, and I soon learned not to talk about the experience unless I knew my confidant could be trusted. How much more difficult must it be for those who know their stalkers intimately – where family and friends will have their relationships and opinions too?

My teenage son was kept informed of what was happening, mainly for his own safety, but I did not share too many of the details of the notes and messages. No kid needs to know that. But it was important that he knew who to look out for (old bloke, glasses, walking stick, bad teeth) and never to open the door or answer the phone without checking who it was first. For weeks, we lived with a big sign on the bench by the phone with emergency contact numbers, and a description of the stalker for houseguests too. There were entire areas of the town that I avoided – particularly the suburb where I knew he lived, and the suburb where I had first encountered him (not mine, thankfully, but home to my favourite cafe). I knew I had to stay away from there when the barista warned me that Dick had started haunting the place, asking about my whereabouts. A few times I’d even spotted him myself when driving through the shopping strip, either tapping along with his walking stick, or deep in conversation with someone at a cafe. I couldn’t help a mean flash of hope that he had found a new target.

Thankfully, the stalking was all over within six weeks. ‘I think it’s time we just went around to his house and nailed his head to the floor,’ the desk sergeant told me at what turned out to be my final visit to the station. While half of me hoped she was serious, in the event all it took to make him back off was one stern phone call from the police officer. ‘Any more contact with Victoria Heywood and you’ll be up on charges,’ was the message she gave. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to listen in, but this is what she told me when she reappeared at the front desk, looking rather shaken. ‘Well, he’s a belligerent one,’ was her summation of their exchange. Belligerent, perhaps, but also a bully and like most bullies, scared of authority. I have not heard from him again.

Who’s Stalking Now?

A stalker is a stalker is a stalker right? It seems not, according to international research and some of the brightest brains working with people who ‘exhibit stalking behaviours’ as the textbooks would have it. Indeed, there is almost as much variation between stalkers as there is between their victims.

The classic image is of a complete stranger watching an attractive young woman (probably blonde and American, if you happen to be watching a telemovie) from a distant vantage point, before swooping in for the kill. However, the reality is far more mundane, if no less terrifying. Most stalkers know their victims – and most of them know them intimately. They are husbands, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends or any other variation on the theme. Stalkers can be colleagues, patients, co-workers, acquaintances – and possibly also strangers. In most cases, the target knows exactly who is stalking them and has had an intimate relationship with him or her.

One American study in 2009 asked victims what they thought had motivated the stalking.1 Overwhelmingly, 36.6 per cent replied ‘retaliation, anger or spite’. A need for ‘control’ was cited by 32.9 per cent of participants, and ‘mental illness or emotional instability’ was alluded to by 23.4 per cent. Some thought a combination of factors had driven their stalker’s actions. Almost three and a half million victims stepped forward to give their views, which is a scary enough figure in itself.

Types of Stalkers

So what kinds of stalkers are out there? Categories – according to Mullen, Pathé and Purcell, the authors of Stalkers and Their Victims (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and used by the UK’s Fixated Threat Assessment Authority amongst others – include the following:

• rejected stalkers

• resentful and retaliatory stalkers

• intimacy seekers

• incompetent suitors

• predatory stalkers.

Of course, some stalkers may combine several of the above categories – the incompetent suitor who then becomes resentful, for example.

The Rejected Stalker

The rejected stalker is the man or woman who has experienced the unwanted end of a relationship. This is most likely to have been a romantic relationship, but the end of a friendship, or severing of ties with a family member or even a trusted therapist, could also spur someone on to stalk. As with the end of any relationship, the stalker is likely to feel an acute sense of loss and perhaps anger. But rather than retiring under the doona with a tub of ice cream and a bottle of whisky, like most people would, the rejected stalker instead plots an intricate campaign of harassment.

The stalker may justify their behaviour as an attempt to ‘win back’ the person who rejected them, although it seems highly unlikely in my opinion that constant threats and harassment would encourage any ex to think, ‘Wow – I really must get back with him/her!’

Jealousy, possessiveness and a history of domestic violence are all warning signs that an ex may turn into a rejected stalker.

And it seems that the rejected stalker can be one of the most persistent. Having had their relationship so cruelly terminated, stalking can be one way of maintaining a sense of closeness with their victim. In therapy, the focus is generally on helping the stalker ‘fall out of love’. They are encouraged to face up to reality, move on from their obsession with their ex, and accept the sadness of their loss.

The Resentful Stalker

Resentful stalkers hold a grudge against their victim for some slight or action (either real or imagined). Feeling humiliated or badly treated, resentful stalkers want to ‘get their own back’, and take delight in scaring and distressing their victim. Sometimes, they may remain anonymous – with the victim having no idea why they are being pursued or perhaps even who is after them.

Mark Chapman, who infamously stalked and murdered John Lennon, is a classic case of a resentful stalker. Chapman described himself as the world’s biggest rock fan and admired Lennon and all his work, until he read a biography of the musician. Angered that Lennon would ‘preach love and peace, but yet have millions [of dollars]’, Chapman shot and killed Lennon on 8 December 1980. (See page 155 for more information.)

Funnily enough, stalkers of this kind actually consider themselves the victim – of the system, the business, or the person involved – and resent the power they consider their victim to hold. The motive behind their actions may be spurious – they might just be expressing their rage at someone who, for them, symbolises all those who have hurt or humiliated or otherwise mistreated them in the past.

Retaliatory stalkers are considered a subset of this category. Rather than just swanning around in a dark cloud of resentment for months or even years, retaliatory stalkers will take swift, vindictive action against their victim – perhaps through poison pen letters or a short-lived spate of abusive phone calls. Their campaign of harassment may last only a few days, and once they have vented their spleen, they will stop.

The Intimacy Seeker/Incompetent Suitor

The intimacy seekers’ fancy alights upon a person, often a complete stranger, who they have decided is The One. Many delude themselves that they are actually in a relationship with their victim, as was the case with David Letterman’s stalker, who claimed to be married to him (see page 126). This apparently is the one category of stalkers where women far outnumber men.

Intimacy seekers can be downright persistent too. The satisfaction of being in love, even if this is not reciprocated or is actively rejected, keeps them going. Most are socially isolated – they are lonely people just looking for love, and in the absence of other close relationships, reach out to a fantasy figure. (Some, however, are not seeking a romantic relationship, but instead wish to become a close friend or mentor.)

Incompetent suitors, a bit like intimacy seekers, are hoping for a relationship that will satisfy their need for, well, intimacy. However, this type of person is held back not by their irrational belief that their victim loves them back, but by their poor social skills. Some are intellectually impaired; others just lack any social awareness, and are useless at the whole ‘courtship’ business. (I imagine that those ‘How to Pull Any Woman’ seminars are filled with blokes like this.)

Given their social awkwardness, it’s no surprise that the incompetent stalker’s idea of a courtship ritual can be bizarre and frightening. This was seen in 2004 when Britney Spears’ stalker jammed her letterbox and inbox with love letters, emails, and photos of himself with scary notes saying things such as ‘I’m chasing you’ (see page 141).

Perhaps less frightening was the method adopted by Richard Brittain, a stalker I interviewed for this book, who wrote an entire novel about the object of his obsession; see page 232. Richard himself openly admits to some of the delusions that characterise an incompetent suitor: an unwillingness to take ‘no’ for an answer, and a perverse tendency to take rejection as encouragement. One research study in 2001 suggested that such persistence is encouraged by cultural stereotypes – the pursued offers token resistance, which is finally overcome by the all-conquering lover.2

Incompetent suitors can also be led astray by the unwillingness of some victims to cause offence: any ambivalence, even just a polite response to an overture, is taken as a sign of interest and may prolong the pursuit. Both the incompetent suitor and the intimacy seeker have one thing in common: they feel entitled to a relationship with their victim, and are completely blind to the feelings or wishes of the person unlucky enough to have attracted their attentions.

The Predatory Stalker

Lastly, we come to the predatory stalker: the true stuff of nightmares, and the scenario that most often comes to mind when we think of stalking. Unlike an ex who can’t let go of a former partner and whose actions reflect extreme anger or personal distress over the dissolution of a close relationship, the predatory stalker does not target former lovers or intimates, but complete strangers or casual acquaintances. And unlike incompetent suitors and intimacy seekers, their goal is not to establish a relationship, but to exert power and control over their victim. This stalker is often a sexual predator: stalking is their twisted version of foreplay; the real goal is physical or sexual assault. Predatory stalkers gain pleasure from following and gathering information about their victim and from their violent and sexual fantasies, but what really gets them off is the assault itself.

Leaving aside the actual assault, the stalking itself may be sadistic too. Some predatory stalkers take delight in messing with their victim’s head by leaving sinister and subtle clues that they are being followed without revealing their identity. But even when the victim is unaware that she (and the overwhelming majority of victims are female) is being stalked, the perpetrator can still glory in the process – deciding how long to prolong the suspense, rehearsing the attack, and fantasising about how it is going to feel.

The surprising thing is how normal predatory stalkers can appear on the outside. They take great care to keep their secret desires separate from their normal lives, often leaving family, friends and colleagues stunned and incredulous when they are finally caught.

Take, for example, ‘the Night Stalker’ Delroy Grant (also known as ‘the Minstead Rapist’) who between October 1992 and May 2009, stalked, raped and terrorised elderly women living alone in south-east London, Kent and Surrey in England. Grant was suspected of over 100 offences. The father-of-eight was viewed as a friendly, self-sacrificing neighbour who provided meticulous care for his estranged wife, who was paralysed from the neck down from multiple sclerosis. Grant was found guilty, given four life sentences and ordered to serve a minimum of 27 years in prison.

And then there was American lawyer Danford Grant, a seemingly happily married father-of-three. Described as an ambitious and capable lawyer in an elite Seattle law firm, he was charged with four sexual attacks on three different female massage therapists. The attacks were not only violent and sexual in nature, but were also meticulously well-planned and researched. During one rape-at-knifepoint of a massage therapist in Bellevue, Washington, Grant told her that he had been researching her and to prove it accurately recited her home address, husband’s name and other details. In May 2014, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Even more horrifying was James Perry, ‘the Mall Rapist’. Over five years, Perry stalked and committed dozens of sexual attacks against children and young women. He specialised in petite young women working alone in strip malls and shopping centres around Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States, and would meticulously plan when and where to attack. After his capture, investigators looked at CCTV footage of him stalking his victims, with one officer describing his behaviour as ‘a shark tracking a fish in the ocean’. Perry was a popular member of his suburban community, where he lived with his wife and two young children.

American ABC News reported on 26 May 2006:

It can be argued that Perry’s wife, who we’ll identify as Joanne, was his first victim. For eight years, Perry completely fooled his family and community. The couple had two young daughters and lived in a family neighborhood near Madison.

‘I was living with pure evil, a manipulator, a liar, pure evil,’ Joanne said. ‘And I didn’t know.’

She said her husband was ‘loved by so many people…You just couldn’t help but like the guy…He was so smart. He really had so much to offer.’

She would not find out until much later that she was the perfect cover for a sexual predator. Her husband lived a double life – deceiving everyone he met. One life was that of the family man. The other was that of a sexual predator who terrorized four states – Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Texas – fondling, raping, then distributing video of his attacks in the dark world of Internet porn.

James Perry, then aged 36, was sentenced in November 2004 to 470 years in prison for creating child pornography, rape, child sexual assault and kidnapping. It was the longest sentence ever handed down for sex crimes in Wisconsin history.

Are They Nuts?

In real life, as opposed to the stuff you see on television, most stalkers don’t suffer from hallucinations or delusions, although many do suffer from other forms of mental illness including depression, substance abuse and personality disorders. Some are erotomaniacs, convinced that they are loved by their victims – even if they have never met. (Hello, the celebrity stalker.) Others are classified as love obsessionals, whose behaviour may be driven by a schizophrenic or bipolar disorder. Most of these stalkers are male. Unsurprisingly, most of their targets are young, female and possibly famous.

A US study back in 1997 looked at psychotic versus non-psychotic stalkers.3 The researchers found that psychotic stalkers were more likely to haunt the home of their victim, but less likely to send letters (or emails today, one assumes) or to keep their victim under surveillance. I found this surprising, thinking that someone who was ‘psycho’ was more likely to pop out of the wardrobe wielding an axe.

In fact, the same study found that those who weren’t psychotic were more likely to be armed with lethal weapons, willing to use violence, and cunning in the ways they were prepared to use this violence – for example, plotting over an extended period of time rather than exploding on the spur of the moment. This may have huge implications for law enforcement and mental health professionals – in terms of how they deal with such a diagnosis – but it has even wider meaning for victims: ‘Great! He’s psychotic so I don’t need to be worried?’

Predatory stalkers are a completely different kettle of fish to other stalkers. For one, they are far more likely to have a history of convictions for other sexual offences and to have a diagnosable paraphilia, ‘arousal in response to sexual objects and situations that are not part of normative arousal-activity patterns’ as the experts would put it.4 And unlike stalkers who develop delusions that their victim is really in love with them or has committed some imaginary offence, these stalkers rarely have psychotic disorders. They do, however, often have personality disorders.

Given their propensity for sexual violence, predatory stalkers are generally treated within a sex-offender program, with the main focus being on managing the paraphilia that is behind their stalking behaviour.