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Okay, welcome back, bingers, to another episode about Hollywood tragedy in the 1980s.
Now, we live in a culture that's hungry for fame. Celebrity is everywhere, represents power, freedom, riches, love and admiration, a reputation that precedes you wherever you go. Celebrities are often our role models and their lives represent the most visible peaks of privilege. For the minority of us who attain the celebrity that so many dream of,
Those lucky individuals eventually learn that for as rare a privilege as it is to be a celebrity, it's also accompanied by some equally rare burdens, sacrifices, and risks. You don't quite realize what a gift anonymity is until you've lost it.
And one of the risks of being in the public eye is that, of the many millions of radar screens you suddenly find yourself on, somewhere out there, one of those radar screens might be cracked.
You may have people out there who want to do you harm. People whose existence you aren't even aware of. Thinking about you every waking hour, maybe losing sleep over you. Building a fantasy around you in which you're their co-star and the lines between fantasy and reality become blurred.
In the summer of 1989, an up-and-coming Hollywood actor named Rebecca Schaefer was blindsided by the worst-case scenario version of this reality. And that's the story I'll be telling you today.
From the outset of her life, Rebecca Schaefer seemed destined for success. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Rebecca was the only child of Dr. Benson Schaefer, a child psychologist, and Dana Schaefer, a writer and university instructor. She was the apple of her parents' eyes. They showered her with love and she continually made them proud. She was a quick learner, a good student, and popular among her peers.
Both her parents were practicing Jews and she initially wanted to become a rabbi. But in her junior year of high school, she began acting in school plays and modeling and discovered that performance came naturally to her and her magnetic presence drew people to her. Her very first talent agent in Portland remembered her as fresh-faced and charismatic with big brown eyes, dimples, and a beautiful smile.
As a teenager, Rebecca began earning money modeling for department store catalogs and appearing in local TV commercials. And after appearing as an extra in a made-for-TV movie when she was 16, she spent a summer in New York City working with elite model management. She was so successful that she called her parents and asked for their permission to just stay in New York.
They thought it over and because they trusted Rebecca, they knew she was intelligent and mature, and because she was having the time of her life in New York doing what she loved, they said okay. The modeling agents who worked with her saw her as different from many of their other clients.
She was serious about her work despite her young age. She was loyal to her friends, intelligent and grounded, and everyone who crossed paths with her knew she was headed toward bigger and better things. And they were all right. But Rebecca wanted to ascend to the heights of being a runway fashion model, and she found her model career plateauing, largely because she wasn't quite tall enough for couture modeling.
Even though she was 5'7", which is above average for women in America, it still wasn't quite tall enough. Rebecca began auditioning for roles on television, and before long, she got cast in a recurring role on the daytime soap opera, One Life to Live.
Two years later, in 1986, she moved to Japan for a while, and when she failed to book modeling gigs there, she returned to New York and landed a small role in a Woody Allen movie. She continued auditioning and putting her face out there while earning her keep by waiting tables as many young actors do.
And then she auditioned for a lead role in a sitcom. The name of the new show was Taking the Town. And after seeing her screen test and hearing her read for the role, the producers of the new show had little doubt. Schaefer was a perfect fit for the part of Patty Russell, a key role they had spent months trying to fill. But no one up until now was quite right for the role. So Rebecca moved out to Los Angeles and production for the show began.
It's no exaggeration to say this was Rebecca's big break, landing the lead role in a primetime sitcom for CBS, airing in a time slot that almost guaranteed the show high ratings. Before CBS began promoting it, the title of the show was changed from Taking the Town to My Sister Sam. And My Sister Sam premiered on October 6th, 1986, and it scored solid ratings right out of the gate.
By the end of the first season, My Sister Sam ranked a respectable number 21 on the ratings charts and was due to be renewed for a second season. And Rebecca Schaefer's life in Hollywood had gotten off to a grand start. Before long, she had a serious boyfriend, an ambitious young UCLA student and aspiring director named Brad Silberling,
She made the cover of TV Guide and in May, 1987, Rebecca appeared on the front cover of Seventeen Magazine, which really cemented for Rebecca that she had quote, "made it." One afternoon, a young man walked up to the Warner Brothers gate in Burbank, carrying a bouquet of flowers and a five foot teddy bear. The guard at the gate asked him what he wanted and the man told the guard he was there to see Rebecca Schaefer.
He had gifts for her, he said. He knew her and she was expecting him. The guard called Rebecca's trailer on set and her friend Sue Cameron picked up the phone. The guard explained there was a young man at the gate with flowers and he was there to see Rebecca who was expecting him.
Sue checked with Rebecca, who looked confused. She wasn't expecting any visitors, she told her friend. Sue relayed this information to the guard and asked him to send the man away. The guard hung up the phone and advised the man he was not expected and would not be allowed on the set. The guard knew that this was the same man who had called the set countless times wanting to speak to and meet Rebecca Schaefer.
The guard let the man know he would not be allowed to see Schaefer and it would be best if he went on his way and didn't return. The man was upset by this and insisted on leaving the teddy bear so they could deliver it to Rebecca Schaefer. The guard then called Jack Egger, the head of security, who asked him to bring the man to his office, teddy bear and all.
Once Jack had the man in his office, he told him it would be best if he forgot about Rebecca and made no further efforts to contact her and not to come back to the studio. He then asked him how he'd gotten there. The man told him he'd taken a bus from his hotel on Whitley Street in Hollywood. He asked the man where he was staying and then told him, quote, I don't think you should be boarding a city bus with that five foot teddy bear and all those flowers.
Let me give you a ride back to Hollywood. Jack then drove the young man back to his hotel and during the drive, he advised the guy that he should return home to where he's from. You're right, the man said, I'm gonna do that. But he wasn't about to give up and he wasn't done with Rebecca Schaefer. It's safe to say she had a stalker.
The young man's name was Robert John Bardo, and the opening act of his life had been the total inverse of Rebecca's. An 18-year-old high school dropout who worked menial jobs and whose life was going nowhere. Bardo had been beset by mental health issues for years. He was from a family with a history of mental health issues, and Bardo had what some described as a tortured childhood.
placed in foster care after being abused by one of his six siblings. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and institutionalized at age 15. One of his teachers would describe him as a ticking time bomb. He often threatened neighbors and classmates, and in his freshman year of high school, he dropped out and took a job as a janitor at a local Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant. He first became aware of Rebecca Schaefer in the summer of 1986.
when he saw a promo spot on TV for My Sister Sam.
His interest was piqued immediately by this young star who, for him, looked outgoing and bubbly, in a word, accessible. He began videotaping her TV appearances, and over the next year, he wrote Rebecca Schaefer several fan letters. Many celebrities in the industry, and this is mainly in the days before social media, would use fan services to respond to fan mail.
Number one, because there's such a high volume of fan mail and celebrities are often very busy people, but also because it's just safer that way.
But Rebecca was new to all of this, and she loved receiving and personally responding to her fan mail. And she had no idea what a mistake she may have been making by sending a personalized reply to Robert John Bardo. In it, she wrote, quote, Your letter was the nicest, most real letter I have ever received. Please take care. She then drew a heart and signed her name and included along with her response an autographed 8x10 headshot photo.
For the lonely young Bardo, this sent his fragile mind tailspinning into fantasies of a life with Rebecca. He knew he had to be with her. So in the summer of 1987, he boarded a plane and flew to LA. And from the Burbank airport, he took a cab to a hotel with weekly rates, checked into his room and took a bus to the studio where my sister Sam was shooting.
But when he was unceremoniously turned away at the Warner Brothers gate with Rebecca mere yards away, just beyond his grasp, he returned to Warner Brothers a month later, this time armed with a knife, just in case things went south. And once again, he was rebuffed by security and this enraged him. But he kept the knife pocketed, maybe because the security guards were armed.
Bardo left and returned home with his fantasies broken and frozen over by darkness. His life up to this point had been a big trash fire that was only growing in intensity. Over the next year, he would be arrested three times on charges ranging from domestic battery to disorderly conduct. Meanwhile, My Sister Sam began airing its second season.
But CBS pulled a surprise move. They changed My Sister Sam's time slot from its winning Monday night slot to Saturday nights. Nobody was pleased with this, and everyone involved with the production felt that it doomed My Sister Sam. And indeed, it did. The show's ratings took a sudden nosedive, and by the end of October 1987, it had fallen from its peak at 21 to number 71 on the ratings chart.
CBS weighed their options and put My Sister Sam on the chopping block. And while they decided whether to go ahead and cancel it or not, they put the show on hiatus. This resulted in an outcry from its fans. Letters of support began pouring in. And then the Writers Guild of America went on strike in March 1988. History does tend to rhyme, doesn't it?
And that lasted for four months. CBS knew this strike was brewing, so the network executives had cannily allowed My Sister Sam to continue production through the end of 1987, despite putting the broadcast on hold. So when the strike began, CBS had enough episodes in the can that they put the show back on the air in March of 1988.
And when I say in the can, I mean it literally in this case because My Sister Sam, like most sitcoms in the 80s, was shot on actual film stock. So CBS had enough unaired My Sister Sam in the can that they were able to return it to broadcast during the 1988 WGA strike.
and they moved it from its ill-fated Saturday night time slot to Tuesday nights, hoping that would give the show's ratings the boost it desperately needed. By the end of April, My Sister Sam was once again pulled from the CBS lineup, and this time, it wasn't coming back. The following month, the network announced that they had made the decision to just cancel the show, leaving 12 already finished episodes unaired.
This was disappointing news for Rebecca Schaefer, but she was resilient and knew her worth. She was still only starting out and she knew that bigger and brighter things lay ahead for her, onward and upwards. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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Let's get back into the episode. Meanwhile, one person who was not very resilient was Robert John Bardo. Back home, he was still reeling over what had happened in LA. He was thinking about Rebecca, a person he had never met, every minute of every hour of every day, seething with pain and anger over that which he could not have. And he couldn't let that go. He wouldn't let it go. He couldn't accept it.
He had to figure out a way back into her life so they could have the relationship he knew in his mind they were destined to have.
Rebecca Schaefer wasn't the first public figure Bardo had been obsessed with. When he was in his early teens, he had developed a fixation on Samantha Smith, a child actor who worked on the Disney Channel and became famous for her peace activism. Samantha wrote letters to Soviet leaders asking them about why relations between the Soviet Union and the United States remained so tense. She was like the Greta Thunberg of her day.
Bardo stalked Samantha Smith, traveling to Maine in an attempt to meet her, but he wasn't successful. And then in August 1985, Samantha was returning from a production shoot with her father when the small commuter plane carrying them slammed into some trees during landing, killing everyone on board.
Bardo grieved, and then he turned his attention to teen pop stars Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, traveling to New York in yet another unsuccessful attempt to meet a star he was fixated on. And then eventually he laid eyes on Rebecca Schaefer and wouldn't give up the way he had before.
In 1989, Rebecca landed a supporting role in an independent film called Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills. And on June 30th, the movie opened on one screen in Tucson, Arizona. And among the ticket buyers that weekend was Robert John Bardo. I must point out, this was 1989, pre-internet. Pre-internet.
pre-internet movie database and Wikipedia. So a guy like Bardo had to go out of his way to stay on top of what a performer like Rebecca Schaefer was up to. He had to have been reading a lot of entertainment publications for it to have entered his radar that Rebecca had a small supporting role in this little indie movie that was barely released. So the weekend it opened, he went down to the Cineplex Theater and bought a ticket to see scenes from The Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.
He sat and watched the film, disappointed by how few scenes Rebecca was appearing in. He was there to see Rebecca, not Ed Begley Jr. or Wallace Shawn. But then, midway into the film, Rebecca's character had some more screen time, and it was in a scene that would send Bardo over the edge, past the point of no return.
That fateful scene was a montage of various characters in bed together, and one of the shots shows Rebecca's character under the covers in bed, sleeping next to a male character, implying that they'd had sex. It wasn't a full-on sex scene, mind you. It was the mere implication that Rebecca's character had sex with this guy that sent Bardo spiraling.
Like he couldn't distinguish between her character and the actress playing her. Couldn't tell fiction from reality. Bardo left the theater blinded by rage and thinking pitch black thoughts. For him, Rebecca Schaefer was, in Bardo's own words, just another Hollywood whore. And for that, he was going to make her pay the ultimate price. Bardo then went to a gun shop in Tucson and tried to purchase a firearm.
But the gun shop owner's read on Bardo told him that this might not be someone who should have access to a gun. The owner asked him some questions and Bardo opened up about his mental health issues. That, as far as the law went, made Bardo ineligible to purchase a gun. So the owner refused to sell him one and he actually took a photo of Bardo and posted it on the wall behind the counter so other employees would be on alert.
That's like how disturbing a presence Bardo was. But Bardo was undeterred. He went home and approached his brother Edward and told him he wanted to buy a gun. Edward asked why he wanted a gun and Robert explained he just wanted it for target shooting.
Knowing the severity of Robert's mental health issues, Edward told him he'd agree to go into the gun shop and buy him a gun under the condition that he only use it for target shooting and only when they were together. Robert agreed, so Edward went to the gun shop and left with a Ruger GP-100, which they then kept stored in a bedroom closet. And while it was not legal for someone with Robert John Bardo's mental health history to purchase a firearm,
There was no law at the time preventing him from buying ammo. So Bardo went and bought hollow point bullets because Bardo had read that hollow point bullets were deadlier than ordinary bullets. Once fired, they expand inside the victim, causing a large, more potentially lethal wound. He wanted to shoot Rebecca Schaefer, a 21-year-old Hollywood actress he'd never met before, and kill her.
He had a relationship with her that was one-sided, entirely in his own mind. A relationship with Rebecca Schaefer that Rebecca Schaefer was entirely unaware of. Back in LA, in her ignorance of Robert John Bardo's existence and the danger that would be headed her way, Rebecca moved into a second-story apartment in West Hollywood, down from the mountain to city level in the thick of urban life.
Like most tenants in apartment buildings, Rebecca's last name was on her outside mailbox, which is something her more seasoned friends in the industry advised her against. But Rebecca saw any potential risk associated with this to be a long shot. She had bigger things to concern herself with, like her career. And
And when she got word from her agent that Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather movies, wanted to audition her for a part in the Godfather Part 3, this represented the single most exciting thing that had come her way to date.
More exciting than that cover of Seventeen magazine, than My Sister Sam. And though she would be competing against other bigger celebrities like Winona Ryder and Madonna, Rebecca was confident in her charm and in her abilities. Rebecca projected innocence, vulnerability, and accessibility, exactly the qualities of the role they were calling for.
and exactly the qualities that drew deranged stalker Robert John Bardo into the sticky, inescapable web of fixation on the fresh-faced young actress.
At this point, nothing would stop Bardo. Bardo had remembered reading about an incident that had taken place in 1982 with another Hollywood actress named Teresa Saldana, who one of her biggest fans was an unstable 46-year-old man from Scotland named Arthur Richard Jackson, who became obsessed with her and decided he had to meet her. He hired a private investigator to track her down, but the best the PI could deliver was an unlisted number of Teresa Saldana's mother,
Jackson then called Teresa's mother and posed as a director's assistant and said he wanted to hire Teresa as a last minute replacement. Jackson said he needed Teresa's residential address so he could send her documents and materials and her mother gave it to him. And with that information, Jackson arrived in Los Angeles, traveled to Teresa's West Hollywood home and in the middle of the day, waited for her to appear before lunging at her with a six inch hunting knife, slamming the knife into Teresa repeatedly.
People stood by watching and doing absolutely nothing until a delivery man named Jeff Fenn heard Teresa's screams and rushed from the second story of a nearby apartment building, subduing Jackson long enough for the police to arrive and place him under arrest. Teresa was taken to the hospital with 10 stab wounds and a punctured lung. Luckily though, she survived this attack, which took her four months to recover from.
So Robert Bardo read about this and found it inspiring. A light bulb was lit above his head and he picked up the phone and hired a private investigator of his own. A private investigator named Anthony Zinkis to find Rebecca Schaefer's home address.
Zinkis went to the DMV in Los Angeles where, at the time, you could pay a small fee, like $5, and get anyone's home address. Zinkis then got back to Bardo and gave him Rebecca Schaefer's home address of 120 North Sweetser Avenue, West Hollywood, California. Within days, Bardo was on a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles.
His family thought this was crazy, of course, but they didn't intervene because it didn't seem likely he'd get to a Hollywood star or that he would actually harm her. On the night of July 17th, Rebecca and her boyfriend Brad returned to her apartment after seeing a movie. They talked for a while. She was excited to meet with the director of the Godfather movies, and she was expecting delivery of her sides by the next morning. Sides, by the way, are the parts of a script an actor receives to prepare for an audition.
The script for Godfather Part 3, like any major Hollywood movie in pre-production, was heavily guarded under lock and key, so actors auditioning would receive only the parts of the scripts that are relevant to their characters. Someone was expected to show up the following morning with those sides. So Rebecca wanted to get some sleep for her big day. She also had plans to attend a concert that night with her friend Barbara, and
And so Brad left to go back to his apartment instead of staying over with Rebecca. The next morning, Robert Bardo got off his Greyhound bus and made his way to the area of Sweetser Avenue in West Hollywood. In his hands, he was carrying the autographed picture Rebecca had personally sent him inside a bulky manila envelope. He went around her neighborhood and began showing people the photo, asking them if they knew the woman in the photo and if they knew where she lived.
The people he approached instantly recognized that he seemed odd and out of place, but this was also LA, which is no stranger to drifters and a little bit of weirdos. Bardo walked in the neighborhood looking at the addresses and finally found 120 North Sweetser. He walked up to the front door and he looked on the mailboxes, saw Rebecca's name, and rang her buzzer.
Now, normally each apartment in this building had an intercom system where the resident could communicate with whoever was ringing their bell. But unfortunately, Rebecca's was broken. And since she was expecting that delivery of her Godfather Part 3 sides, she went down to the front door and opened it, thinking it may be those. But it wasn't. There stood a strange-looking stranger, a man that she'd never seen before.
Bardo in that moment was shocked that Rebecca Schaefer had actually come to the front door and was standing before him. Even though it had always been his objective to meet her, he couldn't have imagined it would ever be this easy. Since up to this point, it had kind of been difficult.
But here she was. He was nervous. He began mumbling, tripping over his words as he told her he was her biggest fan, showed her the autographed photo. Trying to be nice, Rebecca shook his hand and told him it was nice to meet him, but she had to get ready for an interview and she didn't have time to talk.
She wished him well and asked him to please not come to her home again. She then closed the door and Bardo stalked away, furious that she had simply dismissed him. As Rebecca went back upstairs, Bardo made his way to a nearby diner and ordered breakfast. He sat and ruminated, thinking about what he was going to do next. And then, after he finished his meal, he went to a payphone and called his sister. "'You're going to hear something about me pretty soon,' he said ominously."
After he hung up, he left the diner, walked back to Rebecca Schaefer's building, and rang the buzzer once again. Rebecca was actually in the middle of a shower when she heard the buzzer, and not wanting to miss the script, Rebecca threw on a bathrobe and ran back downstairs, not imagining that the man from earlier wouldn't have gotten the hint and would be back at her front door.
But she opened the door and there he was again. This time she was irritated and she hardened her tone. Look, she said, I'm really busy today and you're wasting my time. There's something I forgot to give you, he said. Reaching behind him, pulling the gun from his waistband, whipping it around in front of him and firing one shot at point blank range into Rebecca Schaefer's chest.
Rebecca cried out and asked why as she fell to the ground and Bardo walked away. Rebecca's neighbors, shaken by the deafening blast of the gun, followed by a sobbing, raced out to find Schaefer lying motionless on the ground, bleeding from a chest wound with her eyes open but empty. Police and medics were called. By the time they arrived, Rebecca Schaefer was rushed to the emergency room.
but it was too late to save her. At 30 minutes of intense medical attention, she was pronounced dead at 22 years old. By this point, Bardo was long gone and no one had any clue at this point who he was and who had shot and killed Rebecca Schaefer.
An intensive manhunt was launched with air and ground searches across West Hollywood as police canvassed the neighborhood and learned about the strange man who'd been seen with a photo of Rebecca asking if she really lived in the neighborhood. Rebecca's mother, Dana, first got the call. Hearing that her only child had been shot and killed was like a shot to her own heart.
Devastated, she called a friend who relayed the message to Benson, Rebecca's father, who was at a psychology workshop, which he then ran from, screaming. Benson and Dana Schaefer flew to LA and saw their daughter's lifeless body in the morgue, confirming that this wasn't an error. Rebecca was dead.
When reports of her murder hit the evening news, Bardo's family saw it on TV and immediately feared the worst. Edward Bardo ran to the closet to check if the gun he had bought his brother was still there. It wasn't. It was missing.
The following morning, Robert John Bardo boarded a Greyhound and returned home to Tucson. Hours later, a call came in to the Tucson police. The caller reported that there was a man standing in the middle of a busy roadway, running in and out of traffic, screaming that he had killed Rebecca Schaefer.
Police approached the man, who, of course, was Robert John Bardo. They noticed he looked dirty and disheveled, as if he hadn't slept in days. Officer John Norton frisked Bardo and didn't find a weapon, and then Bardo leaned against his car and began to cry. "'What's wrong?' the officer asked. "'You'd better arrest me now,' Bardo said. The officer asked him why. "'Because I shot somebody,' Bardo told him."
They immediately placed him under arrest and during that time they found the autographed picture of Rebecca Schaefer in his shirt pocket. In no time he openly admitted having killed her. He was charged with first-degree murder and extradited to LA. Rebecca's funeral took place in her hometown of Portland. It was standing room only at the synagogue. Rebecca's coffin was wheeled in and placed beside Dana, Rebecca's mother, who rested her hand on her daughter's casket and kept it there throughout the service.
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The woman assigned to prosecute Bardo was a young attorney named Marsha Clark, who you all know as the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial. But obviously that would be years later. Bardo was not denying that he killed Schaefer, but his attorneys mounted a defense that focused on Bardo's mental health.
trying to make the case that Bardo's mental illness impaired his capacity to carefully plan and premeditate and diminished his culpability. And among what they were presenting was that it was a U2 song called Exit off their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree, that had driven Bardo to kill.
Incidentally, that song is about a psychotic killer and it contains the line, "His hand in his pocket, his finger on the steel, the pistol weighed heavy, his heart he could feel was beating." Bardo stated that when he heard this song, it felt like he was hearing his destiny being delivered to him.
During the trial, they played the song in the courtroom, and Bardo, as he listened to the song, seemed to really come alive, as though he were possessed. He was rocking out in the defendant's chair, mouthing the words, singing along, bopping back and forth. It was quite a sight. Those testifying include the head of security from Warner Brothers, Robert Bardo's parents, Phillip and June, neighbors who heard the gunshots, and a forensic psychologist named Park Dietz.
Park Dietz had actually testified in the trial of John Hinckley Jr., the guy who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, you know, in order to impress actress Jodie Foster. And Dietz had later testified in the Unabomber and Jeffrey Dahmer trials. Dietz testified for the defense, telling the court that Bardo was schizophrenic and not fully accountable for what he had done. But Clark sought to prove this premeditation and special circumstances to ensure Bardo was locked up for good.
At the trial's conclusion in October of 1991, the judge, and this was a non-jury trial, the judge declared that Bardo was sane when he murdered Rebecca Schaefer and found him guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances. Bardo was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and he's currently serving out his sentence in California.
On the way out of the courtroom, Rebecca's boyfriend, Brad, addressed Bardo and told him, Brad went on to a successful career in Hollywood, directing such movies as Casper and City of Angels. In 2002, he wrote and directed a movie inspired by his dealing with the aftermath of Rebecca's murder and her family's grief.
That movie was Moonlight Mile with Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon as the parents of a murdered woman and their relationship with the dead woman's boyfriend. The cast of My Sister Sam did anti-gun PSA and Friends of Rebecca's have helped lobby for gun control and more stringent anti-stalking laws.
Rebecca's murder led to the criminalization of stalking in the state of California, making it illegal to, quote, follow, harass, and threaten another person. And in 1994, the Drivers Privacy Protection Act was signed into law, preventing the DMV from releasing people's residential addresses. Much like Patrick Sherrill became the poster man-child for Going Postal, Bardo was the textbook face of the Obsessed fan.
But stalking of public figures has only gotten worse in the years since. Rebecca Schaefer certainly wasn't the only celebrity killed by a deranged fan. In her murder, there were eerie echoes of not just John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate President Reagan, but also John Lennon's murder in 1980. And weirdly, the one tie that binds all three crimes is the book The Catcher in the Rye.
All three men were found to have this book in their possession after gunning down their targets, including Robert Bardo, who was carrying a copy of this book when he shot and killed Schaefer, flinging it onto the roof of a nearby apartment building as he fled the area.
But The Catcher in the Rye is blameless. If you love The Catcher in the Rye, it's okay to keep on loving it. Books don't drive people like Bardo to kill. Songs don't drive people like Bardo to kill. That drive is an inner drive from deep psychological damage and unchecked soul rot.
People like Rebecca Schaefer are a light in their darkness, and if they can't have total possession of those people, they snuff out their lights. That's the explosive cocktail of an impoverished existence and a warped mind. If you're a public figure, there's always a risk that some person out there, among the 8 billion of us on this planet, some person whose existence you're entirely unaware of is thinking about you just a little too much.
Thinking about you in ways that if you knew about, it would disturb you to your core. And sometimes those people reach out and don't go away. And sometimes those people kill.
Many other celebrities have had stalkers and the laws on the books are so loose about prosecuting stalkers and protecting victims that celebrities often have to hire private security consultants when they have stalkers who won't leave them alone and feel like they pose a danger. Next week, we'll take another look at a stalking case with a tragic outcome. Not in Hollywood, but in Houston, Texas. I'll see you then.