Reply #32: The scariest thing the stalker did was... [View All]

[LiberalHeart]

...wrap a belt around the hanger bar in my closet. It was coiled around it in a way that caused it -- when I opened the closet door -- to spring out at me like an attacking snake. I nearly messed my panties that time.

Another time he unbuttoned all the blouses in my closet (I always button the top button when I hang up a blouse).

Oh, and by the way, there was never any sign of how he entered my home. No breaking and entering. And my doors were always locked. Windows likewise.

His three mistakes: he wrote me a letter and, though I didn't know what his handwriting looked like, others did. So once I picked up on mistake number two, I went to two people who knew him and asked if they recognized the writing. It was a unique and both recognized it immediately (one named the author before I had turned the paper writing-side up ... the sun was shining through the paper as I was unfolding it and he recognized the writing backwards, as it became visible through the back side of the paper). That second mistake he made was that he mentioned in a really sick, threatening letter he sent me that I hadn't returned his calls. I had my own business and had an answering service with real live people taking my calls. I had the service search back over the previous three or four months and photocopy all the messages they had taken for me. There was only one person whose calls I hadn't returned: his. The reason I hadn't returned the calls was because he was a builder and showed me plans for a house he was building. On the blueprints, one room was labeled as belonging to ME. Freaked me out.

His third mistake was putting something in my car (yeah, he'd get into my attached garage, too). I had no clue what it was but took it around to stores asking if clerks had ever sold anything like it. I finally got it identified as a sticky/putty type of material that builders use on the bottom of cheap stainless steel sinks to deaden the sound when water runs in the sink. He had put that stuff on the passenger seat in my car. I knew only one builder. I then used his handwritten letter as a comparison when examining the building permits he had taken out with the county. A very obvious match.

I took the evidence to the county prosecutor, told him I didn't want to prosecute (on advice of a shrink who looked over the letter and a log of the incidents, and told me the guy would get off on being involved with me in a legal case, it would feed his need to be connected to me even though it was in a negative way), but I told him I did want to do *something*. The prosecutor said he could send the county sheriff out to talk to him, letting him know he was dealing with them, not me, but when I ran that by the shrink, he said nope, it'd be better to get him steered toward some sort of intervention, medically. The guy came from some serious money and was living on a trust fund (he never sold the houses he built; he became too attached to them and couldn't bear to part with them). In the end, the prosecutor contacted the guy's lawyer -- who doled out his trust fund dollars -- and he, looking out for the best interests of the old-money family he represented, did intervene. He told me he would not release another dollar to the guy until he voluntarily sought in-patient treatment, which he did. I never had another problem with him after that.

I later learned that he'd had an illness not long before all this behavior started. It caused inflammation of the brain which was the likely cause of his going so nutty. I'd known him for years and always knew he was unusual, but never thought he'd go off the deep end like that.