If you think stalking only happens on movies-of-the-week, think again. Here is how two women dealt with it:
Christie: “My boyfriend, Tom, was an executive in a large company and 10 years older (than me). After I found out he was sleeping with several other women, I ended the relationship. I trusted him to stay away and return the keys to my apartment. Instead, he went into my apartment while I was at work and put my entire wardrobe in his car. He drove to my office and screamed for me from the lobby, threatening to throw my clothes in the river if I didn’t come back to him. He took the spare set of keys to my car and parked it across town.
“I went to court for a restraining order. The judge issued the order of protection and threatened to notify his employer if he did not leave me alone. Still, he violated the order several times. One night, a male colleague took me to dinner. When we returned, Tom threatened to kill my friend, made obscene remarks about me and tried to get his hands on my throat. My friend, who had been a football player, pulled him off me and told him to pick on somebody his own size. Tom came out of the confrontation bruised, bleeding and with a broken rib.
“He called me one last time to accuse me of destroying his life and to manipulate me into feeling sorry for him. I laughed and hung up on him. I really believe that he stopped stalking me because he was made to physically suffer. I heard he stalked several other women and was finally fired from his job. For embezzlement, not stalking.”
Marci: “When I was a freshman in college, I would come home on weekends and work the late shift at the local grocery store. That September, Greg, a guy that I knew only by name, starting coming in whenever I was working. He was four years older than me, and I remembered him from high school as rather odd, overweight, pimply and generally dorky. He hadn’t changed much.
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“At first, he would come in during regular hours and purposely go through my line. When he finally asked me out for coffee, I promptly and politely turned him down. My fiance was in the Army in South Korea. After I turned Greg down, he started lurking in the store late at night. My shift would end at 11 p.m. and he would appear at 10:55 and hang around. He also started hanging around my car. It was so bad that the store manager would escort me to my car or would hide me in the front office until Greg left. I didn’t think of contacting the police because he hadn’t actually done anything and I was too young to think that I could really be a stalking victim.
“When my fiance called me, I told him about Greg. He told me to be careful. After two more weeks of Greg trolling around the store, staring at me and continually going through my line, buying one item at a time, he suddenly disappeared and I never saw him again.
“Three years later, on the night before our wedding, my soon-to-be-husband told me that after he hung up with me that night, he called home and had his mom look up Greg’s address in the phone book. He wrote a letter threatening that if Greg didn’t leave me alone pronto, he would have his six large brothers make sure that he didn’t come near me again. It worked, and I never knew a thing about it.”
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Have you ever stalked anyone? Send your tale, along with your relationship questions to Cheryl Lavin, Tales from the Front, baiduhai, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL. 60611 or e-mail [email protected]. Please include day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be used in whole or in part for any purpose and become the property of the column.