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Stalking victim details her life on the run

From the News and Observer

Published: August 4, 2008

CHICAGO - The woman in the blue suit striding briskly into the Sofitel Hotel near O'Hare International Airport looked like any other businesswoman in her 50s heading for a meeting. And in a way she was, a marketing consultant and freelance writer visiting from her hometown several hundred miles away.

But the woman had flown to Chicago on a strangely secret errand: a newspaper interview that she gave under an assumed name. Afterward, she checked into a hotel downtown under a different fake identity.

Then she returned to her home in the woods along the Mississippi River, where she has tried, with only partial success, to carve out a peaceful existence after more than a decade of being stalked by a former boyfriend.

The woman, writing under the name Kate Brennan, is about to publish a book, "In His Sights" (HarperCollins), one of the first full-length memoirs of a stalking victim.

She describes a campaign of surveillance, break-ins, severed phone lines and creepy confrontations after her decision to leave "Paul," a charming but distant adventurer with serious relationship issues.

The stalking, which continues sporadically, is at once bizarre, terrifying and, because of Paul's deep pockets, unrelenting and difficult to trace, according to the book. The author has had to move 16 times in 16 months, she writes.

"It got to the point with Paul," Brennan recalled while seated in the hotel lobby, "where if my car and my house hadn't been tampered with and I hadn't gotten a threatening phone call and I'd been able to do my work, that was a good day."

Brennan, 58, a blunt, chipper woman who comes across as nobody's idea of a victim, said she hopes her memoir will help give voice to the million women and several hundred thousand men who, according to government statistics, are stalked each year in this country, usually by former lovers.

She decided to risk provoking her stalker by writing the book, but to preserve some privacy by giving herself and her stalker pseudonyms. Those decisions, she acknowledges, are hard to explain. They certainly complicate how the book will be received in a publishing environment where the hoax memoir has become its own subgenre.

Brennan said that once she had determined to tell her story, adopting a pseudonym "felt like the one thing I could do that had any possibility of minimizing the danger." Her true identity and that of Paul were revealed to The New York Times so that the newspaper could confirm the outlines of her case.

The Times reviewed police reports, confirmed biographical information about Brennan and Paul on the Internet and spoke by telephone to the former detective who handled Brennan's case.

On meeting, Brennan showed the reporter a current passport issued under her real name. The photo matched, and stamps in the passport matched trips described in her book.

Brennan's stalker was never violent to her; he never even directly threatened to harm her.

But one of the more disturbing truths in the book is that if you are determined to turn someone's world upside-down and destroy any semblance of order in her life, and if you have the means to hire people to do it, not even the police can do much to stop you.

It's all about control

Perhaps only a crazy person would do such a thing, but there are a lot of crazy people. And though stalkers have many different motivations, psychologists and criminologists have found that most are driven by a need to control others, to prove that they cannot be gotten rid of with a simple Dear John.

Brennan, then a 41-year-old college writing teacher and Bronte scholar in a biggish city in the Midwest (its real name is not hard to guess from the book), met Paul, a freelance photographer, in 1991 at a party and was impressed by his worldliness.

A few weeks after they started dating, Paul's father, a wealthy businessman, was brutally murdered. (In the interview, Brennan said she fictionalized some details of the murder to disguise the identity of Paul's family and altered the physical descriptions of Paul and others, but not the events in the book.)

When Brennan's new boyfriend grew more erratic after the murder, Brennan chalked it up to the recent trauma. She had grown up in an alcoholic family and was drawn, she writes, to unbalanced yet controlling men.

"I kind of gave him a pass," she said. "I gave him a lot of passes."

After a year, she moved in with him. Paul's protestations of love grew louder even as his interest in Brennan waned. Former girlfriends floated in and out of his life, as did ex-con friends, some of whom he introduced as computer hackers.

After Paul started asking Brennan repeatedly if it scared her that he kept a gun in the house, she moved out. It was June 1994.

Harassment begins

Paul called her again and again, begging her to return. He drove past her house. He canceled her mail forwarding order.

Then, Brennan said, Paul stopped contacting her directly, and the more creative harassment began.

His friends called her to tell her where Paul had seen her the day before and that he was angry she had left. Her phone started going dead. Her 20-year account history with the phone company was deleted.

Just before Brennan arrived to visit a brother at a summer house in Maine, Paul called the brother's unlisted number. A few days later, she was out hiking when a stranger approached and said: "I've been watching you. You're alone now, aren't you?"

No matter how many times Brennan changed the locks, she writes, her apartment was entered and subtly rearranged.

"I find a bar of soap from the second-floor bathroom on the third-floor kitchen counter," she writes. "A teaspoon from a kitchen drawer lies on the middle of my bed."

Mark Wynn, a retired police lieutenant and a consultant on stalking who advises the U.S. Justice Department, said that micro-tampering in a victim's life is not unusual.

"I've actually worked cases as a police investigator where the offender would do similarly bizarre things," he said. "It's the constant behavior that the offender wants the victim to know, 'I'm here, and I can get to you.' "

A vain plea for help

After Paul bought a house within sight of Brennan's apartment, she finally went to the police.

"They checked into things," she said, "but what they came up with was what I thought they would -- which was what could be proven, which was, really, that he moved in across the street from me."

A detective advised her to seek a restraining order, but she decided not to, wary of confronting Paul in court.

When the police brought Paul in for questioning, he denied harassing Brennan. He had married, and he said it was his wife's decision to buy the house, according to the police report.

"He had every 'tell' of a guilty man," the detective who took Brennan's first complaints and interviewed Paul said. He spoke anonymously because it is against the policy of the detective's current agency to speak on the record. The detective said Paul was informed that if anything happened to Brennan, he would be a suspect. It was all the police could do.

To get away, Brennan moved out. But no matter where she went, she says, the harassment continued for years -- at her home and at her jobs.

After she moved two years ago to a small town where her family has deep roots, the harassment tapered off. She decided to write her book.

"There was a point at which I thought, 'This is the biggest story in my life right now, and if it were anything else, I would be writing a book about it. And am I going to give that to him, too?' And I decided no."

She chose to write anonymously, she said, because "I don't want to heighten the risk to me and/or people close to me by forcing his hand."

The Times did not attempt to contact Paul, which was a condition under which Brennan volunteered his name; she hopes that he will not learn of her book.

'Prove your story'

Brennan's editor at HarperCollins, Jennifer Barth, said that when she told the author her story would have to be vetted, Brennan readily offered police and psychotherapist reports.

"She had the sense that the onus is on you to prove your story," Barth said. In an age of James Frey and JT LeRoy and, most recently, Margaret Seltzer, whose memoir of growing up in Los Angeles gangs proved fictional (and was withdrawn by its publisher), Brennan satisfied HarperCollins lawyers, Barth said.

For this article, The New York Times also spoke to Brennan's psychotherapist, who saw Brennan on and off for 15 years, mostly for relationship problems, she said. The therapist, whose name was provided on the condition that it not be used, said there was "no chance" that Brennan was inventing her story.

"She's a pretty normal person, about as normal as we can be," the therapist said. "I've never seen any psychopathology in her."

'It's a game for him'

Last September, as Brennan was finishing her manuscript, her phone went dead again. The service technician, she said, told her the line had been cut and reattached to another line. He could offer no explanation. Brennan was angry but not surprised: She assumed it was Paul or one of his agents.

"I don't have any expectation that I would ever, in a legal way, that I would have any justice," she said. "That's not even in the realm of what I think will happen in my life."

She said she does not expect the harassment to get much worse, nor does she expect it to get better.

"I think it's a game for him," she said. "Much more fun to just mess with me and spoil my life in this way and constantly remind me I can't get rid of him, that he's got control over me."

Her hope, she said, is to outlive her stalker.

"The only way that I'll know the stalking will stop," she said, "is if he's dead."