Love gone wrong is more than pathetic-it`s illegal. At least, that`s what a federal jury found Friday in the case of an infatuated defendant who couldn`t forget his high school girlfriend.
At the end of an unusual two-day trial, David Taylor was found guilty of sending threatening letters to the woman he pursued obsessively for more than two decades.
The one-sided love story that started in a Chicago suburb back when Richard Nixon was president may now end in federal prison.
Taylor faces a maximum sentence of 30 years if U.S. District Judge Norman Roettger upholds the verdict when he considers it Tuesday.
Taylor, a stocky 39-year-old dressed in jail-house gray, stood impassively with his hands in his pockets as the jury announced its verdict after nearly five hours of deliberation.
”Most of us felt very sorry for him,” said jury foreman Todd Nerenhausen, a 33-year-old sailboat rigger. ”It was a very difficult decision.”
Taylor`s response to the public condemnation of his fantasy life? ”He didn`t have a reaction,” said Assistant Public Defender Victor Martinez, who plans to ask Roettger to overturn the verdict.
Starting in 1970, Taylor wrote more than 1,000 love letters to Kathleen McHugh Goldstein, now a school principal in Fort Lauderdale.
The letters are full of the stuff of romance-schmaltzy poetry, memories of good times, allusions to tragic fictional lovers.
But the last ones also contain what the jury decided were threats against Goldstein`s husband, David.
”Your husband will have his health take a turn for the worse this Christmas,” wrote Taylor, the divorced father of a daughter he named Kathleen.
The Goldsteins tried for years to shake off Taylor, with everything from a home security system to court orders.
Kathleen Goldstein testified this week that she believed her husband`s life and her own were in danger.
She would not talk about the verdict Friday.
Nerenhausen said jurors felt sympathy for Goldstein and took a while to agree that Taylor`s letters violated the law.
”The biggest issue was if the actual wording of the letters was an actual threat,” he said. ”Several people were not sure if it was a threat or not . . . . We determined that it was a threat, and that`s why he was guilty. ”We felt he might need a different type of help than he was able to get.”
Defense attorney Martinez said he is hopeful Roettger will overturn the verdict because the judge Thursday postponed until next week his ruling on the defense`s request for an acquittal.
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”He would be on firm ground legally if he threw it out,” Martinez said.