An unemployed restaurant worker sent a stream of fan letters to actress Rebecca Schaeffer for two years. He paid a private detective $250 to find her and walked Los Angeles streets showing her photograph to passers-by.
When Robert Bardo finally found where the 21-year-old actress lived, police said, he went to her apartment building last month and rang her front door bell. When Schaeffer opened the door, they say, he killed her with a single shot to the chest."There was no talking. The man just turned around and left," a neighborhood restaurateur, who identified himself only as Francois, said after hearing the shot.
Schaeffer, a wide-eyed, curly haired actress who played the free-spirited younger sister in the television series "My Sister Sam" and was recently in the film "Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills," was apparently the latest victim of a Hollywood menace - the possessive fan.
"The evidence shows Bardo was an obsessive fan of Miss Schaeffer," Deputy District Attorney Robert Savitt said. Bardo is being held in lieu of $1 million bail in Tucson, Ariz., while Los Angeles police seek his return on a murder warrant.
A Scottish drifter, Arthur Jackson, said he had a divine mission to take actress Theresa Saldana, who starred in the film "Defiance," to heaven when he stabbed her 10 times outside her Hollywood home in 1982.
Jackson, who served seven years in prison for the attack, is now serving an additional 270 days for smashing prison property.
A shipping clerk, Tina Ledbetter, 26, is alleged to have sent nearly 6,000 letters to Michael J. Fox, star of "Back to the Future" and the television series "Family Ties." She is now awaiting trial on five counts of threatening the actor, apparently in an attempt to persuade him to leave his wife.
A former mental patient, Nathan Trupp, is alleged to have gone to Universal Studios last December and asked to see actor Michael Landon. Moments after two guards turned him away, he killed them with a burst of gunfire, police allege. Trupp has pleaded not guilty to shooting the guards.
Gavin de Becker, a security specialist who has been employed by stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Redford, Cher and John Travolta, believes the problem is becoming worse.
"So much emphasis is put on the personal lives of known figures, particularly on television," he said. "People come to feel they know these celebrities."
"Certain fans envy and want to identify themselves with a famous person," Dr. Martin Reiser, chief psychiatrist for the Los Angeles police, said.
"But there is resentment and love-hate feelings because they know this is not going to happen."
A Justice Department study on ways to protect stars from fans listed 500 people who had become obsessed with celebrities and, in some cases, came to believe a star was a lover or a friend.
In many cases, the study found, the obsessive fans were lonely and had a poor view of themselves.
Clint Eastwood has a license to have a gun for his protection, and Cybill Shepherd says she sleeps with a gun in a drawer next to her bed. Eddie Murphy seldom appears in public with fewer than three bodyguards.
Warren Beatty and Marlon Brando have closed circuit television systems watching over their Los Angeles homes and Victoria Principal, who played the long-suffering Pamela Ewing in "Dallas," has two Doberman guard dogs.
Kate Jackson, a star of the former "Charlie's Angels" television series, has a "panic button" system that can snap down iron shutters over her windows in an emergency.
Although stars can afford protection, many up and coming actors and actresses have to make do with having their names removed from telephone directories and asking friends and relatives not to reveal their addresses.
Extra police have been posted on the sets of some of the situation comedy series because fans tend to link themselves to people they see each week on television.
Margaret Ray, 36, who has claimed to be the wife of talk show host David Letterman, a bachelor, pleaded guilty last month to breaking into his home while he was away and driving his Porsche.
A Canadian farmer, Robert Kieling, has been convicted several times of harassing singer Anne Murray. He is alleged to have telephoned her 263 times in six months. Murray said she does not know him.
Ralph Nau, who was acquitted last month of murdering his 8-year-old stepbrother, was said by an Illinois prosecutor to have gone to Australia twice to track down singer Olivia Newton-John, who he believed was his lover.
John Hinckley was trying to impress actress Jodie Foster when he shot and wounded President Reagan in Washington in 1981. "You'll be proud of me, Jodie," he wrote to the actress.
In October 1980 Beatles fan Mark David Chapman signed off as "John Lennon" on his last day as a security guard in Honolulu. Two months later he shot and killed the former Beatle outside his New York apartment complex.