Scared for your life: What it’s really like to be stalked

“MY life revolves around it. If it’s really bad, I will be scared 24 hours a day,” says Helen as she details a persistent stalking campaign over three years that has changed her life forever. “It’s like this big sick game.”

WHEN you hear of someone being stalked it’s natural to think of a celebrity, but author Rachel Cassidy knows it can happen to anyone — because it happened to her.

Now she is fighting back to give the victims not only a voice, but the knowledge and support to reclaim their lives.

In Stalked: The Human Target, she talks to Australian victims, including Dancing with the Stars judge Mark Wilson, who was targeted by someone who twice burned his dance studio to the ground, about their experiences.

In this extract, victim Helen tells how her kindness to a new colleague was met with a stalking campaign that has forever changed her life.

DANGEROUSLY JEALOUS

‘When you have a stalker in your life, you’re never calm,’ Helen says. ‘You know that you’re suffering from anxiety, you feel so low, you’re depressed, you’re thinking the worst.’ Helen became friends with a man called Greg when he began working in the same company. A group of people from the office would go out socially. The first time Greg was included, he told Helen that he didn’t have a girlfriend. She offered to set him up with one of her friends. ‘From day one I had no interest in him and I made that clear. We were friends, we had a friendship for about three years.’ Helen liked to go for walks at lunchtimes and Greg would go with her. ‘Then when I started seeing someone in our group, I told him about it. He pulled me aside. “I would do anything for you,” he said.’ Helen’s mother interpreted that as a declaration of love. ‘But I didn’t think anything of it,’ Helen says.

From that point on, Greg pursued Helen. On one occasion he brought her 12 long-stemmed roses. When she asked him what they were for, he said, ‘It’s all in the card.’ The card said ‘I love you’. ‘That’s really sweet but we’re mates and that’s all we’re ever going to be,’ Helen said. ‘Normally, when I have come across men who liked me that way but who I wasn’t interested in,’ she says, ‘I’d just tell them and they’d either deal with it or the friendship would end. But this wasn’t like that.’

The rate of stalking can be difficult to determine for reasons including cases not being reported to police and inconsistent definitions, says Rachel Cassidy in her book. File picture

After about nine months, her relationship with her colleague broke up. A few weeks later she started to go out with someone else. When she told Greg, ‘he became very weird. I couldn’t deal with the way he was acting. He was angry with me and annoyed. He began picking on all my faults and telling me things he didn’t like about me — such as how I would make him late when we were going for a walk — something he had never done before. One time I did some singing at an open-mike night and Greg was making remarks about how bad my performance was, saying really nasty things about me. That night at the bar, he stood two metres away from me and the guy I was with and gave us really dirty looks.

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‘I spoke to him the next day and asked what was wrong. I spent about an hour trying to get to the bottom of it. But it gets to the point when you just get over it and you can’t deal with it any more. He just kept saying, “I want to speak to you. I want to meet up with you. Just let me buy you a coffee.” He sent one message that said something like, it’s been this number of weeks, this number of days and this number of minutes since we last spoke. Can I just buy you a cup of coffee or do you just not want to be friends any more? I’d never ever kissed this guy. I was so over the friendship and his weirdness. I replied that I didn’t want to be friends.’

Greg began inundating Helen with text messages, phone calls and voice messages. He made several websites about her. One of these was saying ‘sorry’ and included a letter that needed an email address to access, so he could monitor if Helen had opened and read it. She ignored it.

I was scared for my life. He had been creating more websites and wrote a daily blog about me.

He would intercept her on her way to work. Helen knew that this wasn’t his normal route to work and that he was going that way in order to see her. At one point he threw his arm out in front of her. ‘I remember coming in from a lunchbreak, shaking because I had seen him. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been like that, but the situation makes you feel so stressed, scared and alone and you make bad choices. I couldn’t deal with it, so my mother, who he knew, went to talk to him. She said, “My daughter is not interested in you. Just move on — don’t call her, don’t text her any more. She is just not interested in you.”

‘The calls and texts stopped for a while. But after a time, he resumed his stalking behaviour. Not every day, but he knew my routine, where I walked on my lunch breaks. He sent a letter to my office with the address typed so I wouldn’t know it was from him. I ripped open the envelope and inside I could see paper with cut-out letters. I was too frightened to even look at what it said. By this stage I was scared for my life. He had been creating more websites and wrote a daily blog about me, which went on for quite a long time. I was terrified. My brother-in-law called Greg and said, “Just take the websites down. You don’t want Helen to go to the police. One day you’ll find another girl”.’

Greg became very nasty.

Helen’s stalker has created websites to target her. File picture

About nine months later Helen finally reported him to the police. ‘I felt that I tried everything else I could and that he was trying to ruin my life. It had just kept escalating and was getting worse — everything he was doing was becoming worse. The police were really understanding. They couldn’t believe I had waited so long because I had so much evidence of his stalking. The police didn’t treat him badly and when they asked him, “Did you do this and do this?”, he said, “Yes, yes, yes”. They warned him that I could get a restraining order against him. So then he went off and did something even worse and got interviewed again. The police were astounded.’

At the time of writing, about three years after the stalking behaviour began, Helen was on her third restraining order. Without the order she would feel much less safe, she says, although Greg had told her that ‘the orders are as useless as tits on a bull’. Even with an order against him, he would still be waiting outside her office. ‘I will never feel 100 per cent safe. If he stops doing things for a period, I feel a little bit better, but I never feel totally safe. I got a prank call recently from a blocked number at 3 o’clock in the morning and so of course I thought it’s from him. It may have just been a random prank call but you become paranoid.’

At one point the police detained him because they feared for Helen’s safety. ‘This was the worst time. Over a two-week period he was contacting me every couple of minutes — I had to collect the evidence for the police and I have a book of screenshots that’s 5 centimetres thick. He was writing weird things on his blog and websites. By then he knew not to use my name but he was saying things like, “I see you coming down the windy steps. There is a light above your head”, which is a description of where I work. He was writing about killing me. And I was afraid he was going to kill himself because he was saying he was really depressed and that no one would help him. I was terrified he was going to kill himself, or kill me and then himself.’

One of the complications of being stalked is you don’t know how other people will react to it. At the beginning, Helen’s mother had difficulty believing Greg was stalking her daughter, but she understood after talking to him. ‘I didn’t tell anyone from work for the first nine months,’ Helen says. ‘No one had any idea what was happening. I felt very alone — I thought if I told anyone, the story would get around. I guess I felt ashamed. As well as my family, some of my close friends were aware of the stalking. But I didn’t tell my partner’s parents, who are not at all judgemental — it’s just that I didn’t want them to know I have to go to court, which is not a nice thing to have in your life. I know someone who’d had a similar problem with her ex-husband and people thought she must have contributed to his behaviour. Some people think, Why would someone normal have a stalker? There’s obviously got to be something wrong with her. I was terrified and I was embarrassed. I remember thinking no one can know. It wasn’t until the police came to my office to see me and I had to go to court that I told my employer.’

When Helen finally did tell her friends and colleagues, ‘Some people made jokes about it, which is not what you want to hear. It’s not a joke. Others would suggest getting someone to break his kneecaps — but I would never want to do that to anyone. My aunty said, “He is not going to kill you — he can’t live without you”. I couldn’t handle people giving me advice or hearing their opinions about his behaviour.’

I’m not friendly to people any more … I don’t feel I can smile at them because that’s letting them in.

Helen’s life has changed dramatically since the stalking began. ‘I don’t feel safe. I won’t go and hang out the washing after dark, for instance. I’m not friendly to people any more. I used to walk along the street and smile, but now I don’t acknowledge people I meet — even if they’re 80, I don’t feel I can smile at them because that’s letting them in. Sometimes I know I’m rude and quite evasive — I don’t like being like that but I feel I have to for my own safety.’

At the time of writing, the stalking was continuing. ‘I don’t expect this problem to go away any time soon,’ Helen says. ‘My life revolves around it. If it’s really bad, I will be scared 24 hours a day. I’m not able to sleep properly. It terrifies me that I might google my name and click on something that’s really horrible. I don’t know what’s out there but it has dramatically changed my life because I know he’s out to get me. Unfortunately, he is going to be around for a long time. As soon as one restraining order ends, he starts his websites up again.

‘Sometimes I have to go to get a court date organised four times in a month and that’s embarrassing because I need to take time off work. I don’t have a choice, I have to do it. The worst thing is not knowing what’s going to happen in court — whether he’s going to have a lawyer with him or go berserk. You feel so messed up, it’s scary. My partner has been really good but it stresses him out and he gets upset. We have been together over two-and-a-half years and lived this nightmare together — he has never known anything different.’

Stalked: The Human Target shares victims’ stories and also draws on the expertise of psychologists and lawyers.

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Helen says she saw no warning signs that this was going to happen. ‘Greg is very smartly dressed. Nothing about him would have made me think he would ever do anything like this. All I did was be polite and friendly to this man I met at work because he didn’t have many friends. Now he has changed my life forever. It’s really weird, with everything he has done to me — and he’s done horrible things to me — I still remember when I knew him before the stalking began and he seemed to be a person with a good heart.

‘It’s almost like he’s doing this so he can remain a part of my life — it’s like this big sick game in which he gets to see me in court and I have no choice but to be involved with him.’

• Names have been changed by the author to protect identities

• This is an edited extract from Stalked: The Human Target (Rockpool Publishing $29.99) by Rachel Cassidy, available 1 October at all good book stores and online at www.rockpoolpublishing.com.au

Originally published as Scared for your life: What it’s really like to be stalked