Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream: A Forensic Psychiatrist Illuminates the Darker Side of Human Behavior (15 page)

Soto may have had trouble distinguishing between the actress Christina Applegate and the Kelly Bundy character she played. Applegate has been emphatic in telling people that privately she is the antithesis of the Kelly Bundy character, who on television wears extremely tight skirts and tops that reveal cleavage. Soto is an example of how tenacious some people will be in their attempt to contact media stars about whom they have developed an obsession—or a delusion.

Only a small minority of stalkers are disgruntled fans. The vast majority of stalkers of public figures are mentally ill. They tend to be media addicts who are highly self-absorbed loners. Some of them delude themselves into thinking that they have a special relationship with a famous person. Others believe that they can become celebrities themselves by their association with a famous person—even if it means killing that person. Mark David Chapman, who stalked and killed John Lennon, was one of these. He described himself as a “nobody” who “didn’t know how to handle being a nobody.” Chapman said he struck out in anger “to become something he wasn’t, to become somebody.” Margaret Ray, a 41-year-old stalker, reportedly believed she was actually a specific somebody, the wife of David Letterman, and she repeatedly broke into the talk-show host’s home.

Forensic psychiatrist Park Elliot Dietz has researched the subject of celebrity stalkers and has found that celebrities who are perceived as “nice” attract more pursuers than do those celebrities with a less friendly image. The obsessed fan generally pursues the nonthreatening, “girl-next-door” types, not the actresses who project strong personalities, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Joan Collins. The friendly, outgoing image of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who starred in the television series
My Sister Sam
, attracted the attention of a man named Robert John Bardo. He sent her a fan letter. She did what most actors and actresses have been urged to do in such instances: she sent him in return a picture of herself with a brief thank-you note. In this case, it was a mistake because Bardo misread this as a real interest in him, and he stalked and killed Schaeffer. Almost always, a confrontation between the stalker and the person who is the object of his or her intense fantasy is ineffective in deterring the stalker, no matter what the celebrity’s intent. Such contact will likely reinforce the stalker’s unshakable belief that a love relationship exists between him or her and the celebrity. The only way for a person being stalked to help himself or herself is to enforce complete separation from the stalker.

People in love think constantly about their loved ones. What is she or he doing now? I wish I could see her this very moment, at work, at play. What is he thinking about? Is he thinking of me? Even reasonably healthy people “mind stalk” those to whom they are attracted. People harbor subconscious wishes to merge with others that derive from the earliest stages of human development. But aberration can occur. I once examined a short, skinny man with a hawklike appearance, who repeatedly stalked and injured his ex-wife. When I asked him why he did this, he chillingly said: “Before we married, I loved her. Once we married, she was mine. And since I’m no good, she became worthless. She is me. I can’t let her go.” So it is no wonder that stalkers reflect the entire spectrum of psychopathology, from the moonstruck adolescent to the delusional psychotic. The difference between the healthy and the nonhealthy is that the latter are driven by internal psychological needs to actually pursue their object of interest, whether or not that person wants to be pursued. Stalkers cannot confine their obsessions or delusions within their heads; they must act them out. Bad men do what good men dream.

Many stalkers are men who have been rejected by women. Most stalkers are mentally ill loners without meaningful lives of their own. But there is some psychological distance between a vengeful ex-spouse and an obsessed celebrity stalker. In the following pages, I look into some of the psychological profiles of stalkers, but I need to warn the reader in advance that the categories into which stalkers are placed are not as neat or as all-encompassing as those for rapists or for other criminals described in other chapters. The lines separating categories of stalkers must not be seen as hard and fast.

The Immature Romantic Stalker

Let us begin with that moonstruck adolescent. It is not unusual for an adolescent to become infatuated and romantically preoccupied with some person. Indeed, the relationship may be totally one-sided and exist only from afar because the idealized person of the adolescent’s ardor may be unaware of this interest. The young romantic sits outside the person’s house, hides in the bushes, follows his or her car to steal a glimpse, or telephones and hangs up just to hear the voice of the person. Boys are acculturated through television and movies to persistently pursue the woman of their desire. Unlike adult stalkers, adolescents usually do not make threats. In developmentally normal adolescents, these pursuit behaviors usually cease as the person matures. Most people have gone through this phase. In some adults, however, the behavior may continue and become fixed—and that, of course, can cause problems.

The Dependent, Rejection-Sensitive Stalker

Generally, the dependent, rejection-sensitive stalker is a person who is extremely sensitive to being rejected and at the same time is extremely dependent on the person with whom he or she has a “love” relationship. This jilted lover gathers intelligence on the person who has rejected him or her and attempts contact through incessant phone calls, e-mails, letters, gifts, and visits. Some rejected lovers badger the victim’s friends, coworkers, or relatives for information. Others go further, reading the victim’s personal mail, breaking into his or her house, checking the computer, listening to the answering machine, even watching the person sleep. The most vicious of this category of stalkers applies every means of harassment and of psychological terror he or she can dream up. Some of the more harsh tactics include pouring weed killer on a lawn, taping gun cartridges to a car window, leaving threatening notes scrawled in nail polish, destroying property, sabotaging cars, killing the victim’s pets, and threatening the victim’s children.

Many of the men in this category hide their dependency feelings behind a hypermasculine, macho image and are chronically abusive toward women. They attempt to cover their deepest fear—that the woman will leave them for another man—by saying, in effect, “If I can’t have her, nobody else will.” Michael Cartier, the Boston nightclub bouncer, had been overheard saying words to that effect, and in many ways Cartier fit the profile of a dependent, rejection-sensitive stalker.

Many such stalkers sustained significant losses in their childhoods, either through the death of a parent or through psychological and physical abuse or parental neglect. Stalkers usually have an impairment of attachment, reflecting childhood disturbances in their relationships. They are unable to grieve normally, let go, and find other relationships. Often, the abandonment rage is a defense against feeling intolerable hurt and humiliation from childhood rejections that get tacked onto the current loss.

Cartier was reported as having been abused as a child, although the abuse was denied by his mother, who insists that he was born troubled. As evidence, she cites early behavior in which he took bottles away from his baby stepsister and lit matches behind a gas stove. At age 5 or 6, the mother reported, Cartier ripped the legs of his pet rabbit right out of their sockets. By age 7, he was in a state-supported residential treatment center for troubled children. At 12, Cartier graduated to a treatment center for disturbed adolescents. He dropped out of high school because he was facing about 20 criminal charges that he had accumulated in various Massachusetts jurisdictions. He expressed his extreme bitterness toward his mother in his wish to get a tattoo depicting her hanging from a tree with animals ripping at her body. At age 18, Cartier asked his stepsister if she wanted him to kill their mother. He had beaten several women before Kristin Lardner, and, as he had with her, would then break into tears and ask for their help, citing his belief that his mother had never loved him.

The Borderline Personality Stalker

The label
borderline
is an attempt to convey the notion of the thin line walked by the individual between relative normality on the one side, and, on the other side, serious problems in being able to correctly differentiate reality from fantasy. It is from this group that most celebrity stalkers come.

Borderline individuals have unstable but intense personal relationships that alternate between extremes of overidealization and devaluation. They can change from adoration to hate in a heartbeat when the person being idealized does something—or is perceived to have done something—that pricks the balloon of perfection.

In psychiatry, the mechanism of imbuing a person with either all good or all bad characteristics is known as
splitting
: the good and the bad representations exist simultaneously but are kept apart from each other through a failure of cohesive integration; they are split. The borderline stalker does this to the idealized person, but he or she also splits his or her own self-image. Most normal people are able to integrate the good and bad perceptions and feelings they have about themselves and about others into a realistic whole. Borderline individuals cannot. They also tend to be impulsive, to be emotionally unstable, and to shift moods rapidly for periods that may last from a few hours to a few days. Depression is a common complication of borderline personality disorder. Such depression further influences the borderline individual’s behavior. For instance, it magnifies inappropriate, intense anger and an inability to control one’s temper. The utter hatred vented by individuals with borderline personality disorder can be withering. Their sense of self can be so fragile that the slightest insult or criticism can produce in them intense feelings of rejection, abandonment, and shame. And when rejected, the borderline individual may discharge his or her hatred in attempts to destroy the victim’s career, reputation, family, friends, and, in some instances, the victim’s life.

Rejected borderline individuals often threaten suicide. They exhibit marked disturbances in self-image, sexual orientation, career choice, types of friends, and value system. They experience chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom, and often make frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Borderline individuals tend to project their disavowed, unacceptable thoughts and feelings onto others, whom they then try to control. This is a common underlying psychological mechanism observed in borderline stalkers. Impairments in reality testing and the blurring of boundaries between themselves and others facilitate this process. Such was the situation in the movie
Fatal Attraction
, with its classic borderline female stalker.

Borderline patients are typically difficult to treat. One minute the therapist may be revered like a god. In the next moment, if the borderline patient feels provoked or rejected, the therapist can be attacked with a venomous, eviscerating hate that cuts to the soul. Recently, I was asked to evaluate a couple experiencing marital problems. The husband had borderline personality disorder. The wife experienced depression secondary to the marital discord. In a separate interview, the husband described his wife adoringly but, without blinking an eye, went on in the next breath to make astonishingly degrading, depreciating comments about her. He was totally oblivious to the utterly contradictory views he held of his wife. The simultaneously held split images that stood in such sharp contrast were mind-jolting to me. When I interviewed his wife, she told me that she could tolerate her husband’s irresponsible spending, even his affairs with other women, but she could no longer withstand his bouts of virulent hate directed at her.

As with the rejection-sensitive stalker, the borderline individual is often found to have experienced physical or sexual abuse as a child. In general, the categories of rejection-sensitive and borderline have many overlapping characteristics. Among celebrity stalkers, however, there appears to be a troubled combination of low self-esteem and an overidealized view of their victims. One wants to say to them—as some who wish to help them do—“get a life,” because they do not seem to have lives independent of the celebrity they are stalking. In fact, obtaining a life is exactly what they are doing by stalking a celebrity. In fastening their lives to a well-known figure, celebrity stalkers attempt to achieve meaning. Overidealization, however, is a fragile thing, and one that easily and quickly can turn to murderous anger and hate.

All of the characteristics that psychiatrically define a borderline personality disorder seemed to be on display in an interview that Larry King conducted with Mark David Chapman, the assassin of John Lennon. As a youngster, Chapman idolized John Lennon. When Chapman insisted that the man who shot Lennon was not the man he had become after some years in treatment and confinement, King asked him who he had been at the time of the murder:

C
HAPMAN
: On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman was a very confused person. He was literally living inside a paperback novel, J. D. Salinger’s book
The Catcher in the Rye
. He was vacillating between suicide, between catching the first taxi home back to Hawaii, between killing, as you said, an icon.

At the time, Chapman went on, Lennon was “an album cover to me. He didn’t exist, even when I met him earlier that day when he signed the album for me—which he did very graciously.” Chapman believed that he was unable to “register” that Lennon, or Lennon’s son, whom he also met that day, were human beings: “I just saw him as a two-dimensional celebrity with no real feelings.” King asked him why he had wanted to shoot the “album cover”:

C
HAPMAN
: Mark David Chapman at that point was a walking shell who didn’t ever learn how to let out his feelings of anger, of rage, of disappointment. Mark David Chapman was a failure in his own mind…. He tried to be a somebody through his years but as he progressively got worse—and I believe I was schizophrenic at the time, no one can tell me I wasn’t, although I was responsible—Mark David Chapman struck out at something he perceived to be phony, something he was angry at, to become something he wasn’t, to become somebody.