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

by Robert I. Simon

  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.

  Chapman told King that before he stalked and killed Lennon he had gone to art galleries and had his picture taken with other celebrities: “I felt important while I was with them. And then,
after, you disintegrate again.”

  The love and hate that seem to have alternated in Chapman toward Lennon were similar to what Robert John Bardo apparently felt toward the actress Rebecca Schaeffer. At Bardo’s trial, forensic psychiatrist Park Elliot Dietz explained on the witness stand the mechanism of good-bad splitting that is so often seen in borderline individuals. Dr. Dietz said that Bardo’s love and hate existed simultaneously in his mind and that he could switch between love and hate “in an instant.” That was why, Dr. Dietz testified, Bardo could love and adore Schaeffer at the same time that he was plotting to kill her. In his opinion, it was a sudden switch that occurred in Bardo’s brain during his second visit to Schaeffer’s doorstep that led to the fatal shooting.

  The Erotomanic Stalker

  A person who suffers from erotomania has the entrenched delusion that he or she is ardently loved by some other person. This delusion usually involves idealized romantic love and spiritual union, rather than simple sexual attraction. The one loved is usually of higher status than the adorer, a famous personage or a superior at work, although it can also be a complete stranger. Approximately 25% of delusional stalkers have stalked others before switching (often after a job reassignment) to the current victim. Margaret Ray, arrested repeatedly for stalking David Letterman, previously had stalked Yul Brynner. The erotomanic individual makes persistent efforts to contact the one about whom he or she has delusions through the telephone, by letter, by e-mails, through visits, through the sending of gifts. Whatever obstacles are put in the erotomanic individual’s path are viewed as tests of the ardor of their love.

  Studies show that people who write love letters to a delusionally loved person, even if the letters make no threats, are nonetheless prone to violence because of their abnormal craving for contact with the loved person. Research reveals that threatening letters sent to Hollywood celebrities were not associated with approaching them. Nor were the threatening letters sent to members of the U.S. Congress. Disorganized letters (that is, those showing evidence of psychotic thinking) also were less often associated with approaches to famous persons. People who wrote 10 to 14 letters had a 66% likelihood of approaching the celebrity. Those who wrote fewer or more letters were less likely to approach.

  Interestingly, there is a dichotomy between the gender groups of erotomanic stalkers. In clinical practice, psychiatrists see mostly female erotomanics, whereas in forensic practice, they tend to encounter more males. Males more than females tend to run afoul of the law in their pursuit of delusionally loved persons or in some misguided effort to rescue them from an imagined danger.

  Under current standards of diagnosis, those suffering from erotomania are classified as having a delusional disorder that is distinct from schizophrenia or mood disorders. Erotomania can exist across a whole spectrum of psychiatric disorders. Only 25% of stalkers are pure erotomanics; the other 75% have a second psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, or a mood disorder. The symptoms persist, studies show, for an average of 10 to 12 years and are not as uncommon as once thought. Apart from the delusion and its consequences, erotomanic individuals do not display odd or bizarre behavior and may not intend any harm to their victims. In fact, they generally do not understand that their victims are being harmed by their stalking; on the contrary, they believe the victims are enjoying the attention.

  During a preshow warm-up of the game show Wheel of Fortune, a man in battle fatigues and dog tags jumped out of the audience and screamed to letter-turner Vanna White that her boyfriend was dangerous and associated with the Mafia, but that he was there to protect her. Security guards escorted him from the studio, but he returned again and again. Court papers later revealed that he had been calling the show’s production office and stating that he wanted to marry Ms. White.

  Margaret Ray insisted that she was already David Letterman’s wife. She broke into his home for the seventh time 3 days after being released from serving a 9-month sentence for trespassing on his property. For her, as for the battle-dressed admirer of Vanna White, arrests and imprisonments were merely obstacles to be overcome, opportunities to demonstrate the strength of their love.

  John Thomas Smetek, later described as a 39-year-old drifter from Texas, walked up to a repertory theater where actress Justine Bateman was appearing in a play. Business card in hand, he pushed past patrons waiting in line and presented the card to a ticket taker. A love note to Bateman was written on its back, and with it Smetek delivered a verbal ultimatum: he was going to kill himself with a .22-caliber pistol. Eventually, Smetek was talked into surrendering. He was charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor, but he explained to the authorities that he had done all of this so that Justine Bateman would know how much he still cared about her. He claimed to have had an affair with her 7 years earlier. Authorities determined that he had been stalking her since March. At that time, he had bluffed his way onto the set of her television series, Fam ily Ties, and twice managed to come face to face with her before disappearing. At the theater the night before the suicide threat, he had also come near her, shouting “I love you” to her as she left a rehearsal.

  “I love you 6 trillion times,” John Hinckley, Jr., wrote to the object of his unrequited ardor, actress Jodie Foster, just a few days before he set out to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. “Goodbye,” he wrote to her. “Don’t you maybe like me just a little bit?” He was trying to impress her with what he was about to do, although he did not spell it out. “You know a few things about me, dear sweetheart, like my obsession with fantasy; but what the rabble don’t yet understand is that fantasies can become reality in my world.”

  The Schizophrenic Stalker

  Schizophrenic individuals experience illogical, bizarre, and delusional disturbances in their thinking. They also exhibit many other disturbances in their perceptions, emotions, sense of self, volition, and relationship to the outside world. Schizophrenic individuals often have hallucinations, mainly auditory and visual. Their emotions are flat; their sense of self is fragmented. Withdrawn and self-absorbed, they often exhibit unusual or bizarre mannerisms but are usually loners who try to avoid all contact with other people.

  Most schizophrenic stalkers do not wish to make contact with their victims. But some are driven to make contact because their own bizarre delusions convince them that they are tormented by their victims or that they have been somehow ordained, fated, or commanded to contact their victims. It is such schizophrenic individuals who are compelled to pursue their victims, driven, as it were, to seek relief by contact with them. When stalking is a symptom of chronic schizophrenia, this behavior may become intractable. Some schizophrenic individuals are psychologically fused with their victims, hopelessly unable to discern where they stop and the other person begins. Thus, killing the victim is tantamount to committing suicide.

  Michael Perry, who had escaped from a mental institution, stalked singer-actress Olivia Newton-John. He wrote her two letters saying that he wanted to get in touch with her to prove to himself that she was real and not just a “Disneyland mirror image.” Reportedly, he believed that Olivia Newton-John was responsible for dead bodies that were rising through the floor of his house and that her eyes changed colors as signals to him. He compiled a death-list of 10 names that included Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He killed five persons, including his father and mother, whose eyes he shot out. Two weeks after those murders, he was in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., near the Supreme Court building. There were seven television sets in the room, all of them tuned to static and with eyes drawn on the screens with a marker. Fortunately, he was arrested before killing any more people on his death list.

  Individuals like Perry can be extremely dangerous because of their persecutory or messianic delusions about specific individuals. But the majority of schizophrenic individuals who have delusional beliefs are too disorganized and self-absorbed to be capable of planning and carrying out a reasonably competent, sustained stalking.r />
  As an aside, let me point out that some serial murderers, particularly serial sexual murderers, are stalkers, in that they often track their victims. Richard Ramirez, a California serial killer, was dubbed by the media as the “Night Stalker,” but there was no discernible pattern in his killings and so could not be said to have stalked anyone. Most serial killers who stalk are not interested in the socioeconomic status of their victims or in their specific personalities, and so do not really fit into this chapter about stalkers. Serial murderers who stalked, such as Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper, are discussed in Chapter 11.

  The Cyberstalker

  The Internet provides the stalker with another avenue by which to arrive at a person’s doorstep. The stalker can obtain private information to facilitate pursuit of the victim as well as to communicate with the victim for the purposes of harassment and threats. Cyberstalking statistics show that between January 1, 2000, and December 2001, 83% of cyberstalking victims were women and 64% of the harassers were men. When the victims were asked where they first encountered the abuser or stalker, the top three locations were e-mail (39%), chat room (15%), and message board/forum (11%).

  Most cases were resolved after reports were made to the stalker’s Internet service provider. Prosecutors are increasingly prosecuting cyberstalking crimes. Cyberstalking is just another example of how far stalkers will go to harass and frighten their victims.

  Prevention and Protection Preventive Measures

  Stalking is psychological terrorism. Inflicting terror on the victim often is intended, but it is also sometimes an unintended consequence of the stalker’s obsession. No matter where the victim goes, he or she is at risk. It is difficult to appreciate the intensity of fear felt by victims for their lives. The horror is so intense and constant that it often defies our understanding and taxes our ability to empathize with the victim. The stalking victim gradually becomes a captive of the stalker. As the terrorism escalates, the victim’s life becomes a prison. Friends may fall away for fear of becoming entangled and stalked themselves. The victim scurries from the protective cover of home to work and back, much as a prisoner is shuttled from cell to cell. Frequently, the workplace is no refuge from the stalker. Some victims are too terrified to leave home. They live in solitary confinement, peering out at the world from behind blinds. Sometimes, if help cannot be obtained, the only release is death—at the hands of the stalker. Such was the fate of Kristin Lardner, who was gunned down in broad daylight by Michael Cartier.