Stalkers Come in Both Genders

Watching the popular TV mini-series “Dirty John” recently, I was struck by the similarities of stalker relationships regardless of gender—characteristics I shared in the 2009 memoir of my experiences dealing with a violent female stalker in 1980. So, I’m posting a pivotal chapter from that book, Luggage By Kroger:A True Crime Memoir as an excerpt for anyone else curious about these things. 

To set the stage, this chapter occurs after a volatile breakup destined to trigger violence as my former girlfriend visits my boss at The Houston Post in an attempt to have me fired from my job as the newspaper’s courthouse reporter. As I often write in a note when autographing my book, "Every Samson has his Delilah."

Chapter 49

January 14, 1980

            “Your psycho girlfriend is over here in the newsroom right now.”

            I couldn’t believe those words whispered over the phone by one of my friends on the city desk at The Houston Post. Ed had called me only a couple hours after deputies had evicted Catherine from the courthouse press room. She must have collected her thoughts and launched Plan B for this day in an attempt to get me fired.

            “What’s she doing?” I asked Ed, enlisting him to at least be my eyes at headquarters.

            “She’s in Logan’s office telling him all about something,” Ed said. “Oh, man, now she’s waving her arms around and pointing in his face.”

            Logan was our managing editor and he worked in one of those offices with glass walls that allowed him to monitor the staff at all times. Of course, on this occasion, they also allowed my scout, Ed Jahn, to provide a play-by-play of Catherine’s visit.

            “What’s he doing?” I asked.

            “He’s just sitting there watching her without much of an expression at all. He looks like a virgin who wandered into a porn movie and is seeing a real pussy for the first time in his life. He knows what they are supposed to look like but he wants to make sure this is it.”

            I was sure Logan had never experienced anything like Mehaffey, even in his long career with newspapers. I still had to laugh as I imagined him sitting there listening to a tirade similar to what had just occurred in the press room. I wondered if she had gotten to the part about the naked pictures of my wife. I realized she had just dismantled my effort to separate my private life with her from my professional life at the Post. And I had a good idea what might be coming next. Two of my three separate lives were about to merge.

            “It looks like she’s leaving now,” said Ed. “He’s still just watching her and it doesn’t seem like he said much. She’s going through the door. Now she’s stopped and answering a question. Now she’s turned and left and he looks pretty confused.”

            “Thanks for the warning, Ed. I owe you.”

            About 15 minutes later Logan called me at the courthouse and issued a succinct demand: “Gary, I need you to just stop whatever you might be doing and come into the office. I don’t want you to even take time to put anything away. Just get up, get in your car and come over here.”

            That was the only time Logan had ever called me on the job. I routinely worked under the direction of his city editor, Johnny B. It was highly unusual to receive a call directly from the managing editor but given my experiences of the past few weeks I was not surprised they had come down to this. I reached his office from downtown in about 20 minutes. Then it was my turn to sit there with everybody watching through the glass.

            “What’s up?” I asked politely, feigning ignorance as I took a seat in a chair across the desk from my boss.

            “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “I had an interesting visit at little while ago from a Ms Catherine Mehaffey and she had some disturbing things to say about you.”

            I just furrowed my brows in a way to encourage him onward.

            “She believes you are working secretly for the district attorney’s office as an investigator in a case against her.”

            “That’s not true,” I said, eager to make a definitive denial as quickly and forcefully as possible, without laughing. “She has some gripes with me of a personal nature. None of it involves my job here. You are the only one paying me a salary.”

            “She says you’ve made tape recordings of conversations with her and shared them with outsiders.”

            “I recorded her telephone conversations threatening me but I never played them for anyone else. A friend of mine did play part of a conversation he taped because he wanted the other reporters in the press room to let him lock the door.”

            Logan grunted and stroked his chin while locking eyes with me.

            “Okay,” he said, “Here’s what I have to do. Mary Flood is on her way over to the courthouse to relieve you there…..”

            “Aw, c’mon,” I raised my voice interrupting him. “Don’t let Mehaffey get away with this. Can anybody just come in here with any sort of story and ruin someone? I like that job.”

            Mary Flood was a younger reporter destined to attend law school and build a national reputation for legal reporting in the next 20 years, a period in which I often would boast that she owed her start on that career path to me and Catherine Mehaffey. While arguing my case to Logan, he just sat patiently and allowed me to vent. Then he laid down the law.

            “Nope, it is already done,” he said. “I talked to Johnny and he said you’ve been over there a couple of years anyway. It’s time to rotate on some of these beats. He has a desk ready for you back in the office. Now I don’t even want you going back there to get anything you might have left. Make a list of anything you need and Mary will bring it in.”

            “Don’t punish me for this,” I pleaded.

            He looked stunned and said, “Punish you? I’m not punishing you. I’m concerned for your safety. I just want to put as much distance as possible between you and that woman. It’s obvious she’s interfering with your work at that location and it’s my responsibility to make sure everyone at this paper has a chance to succeed in their assignments. You’ll have plenty of good stories to work on general assignment. Now go see Johnny and he’ll show you to your desk.”

            “Okay,” I sighed and got up to leave.

            “Gary,” he said, “I don’t meddle in reporters’ personal lives and you certainly don’t have to tell me this if you feel uncomfortable but after talking with her I’m really curious about something. What did you do to her?”

            There it was: The man’s fault. I, of course, had to be the one who did something to her. The question made me laugh as I imagined him sitting through her tirade wondering if aliens had invaded from Mars. Realizing any accurate explanation would be much too complicated, I searched my mind for a shorter version and finally just said, “Oh, I forgot to put her picture in my wallet.”

            Logan stared a moment trying to figure that out until he saw me grinning and then laughed himself.

            “Okay, okay, I think I understand,” he said. “But you should know something she told me right before she left. I asked her what she wanted me to do about any of this and she just got this strange, faraway look in her eyes and said, ‘I just want him to disappear’.”

            We stood there a moment considering that until I shrugged my shoulders and moved to the door.

            “So, go on, get your new desk and welcome back to the newsroom,” Logan said as I left. Then he added, “And, Gary, under no circumstance do I ever want you to initiate contact with that woman again.”

            So I walked out, went to my new desk, picked up the phone and immediately dialed Catherine at her office.

            “Hope you’re happy now,” I said when she answered.

            “You went to my bosses at Special Crimes so I thought I should go to your boss to teach you a lesson. Where are you now?”

            “I’m at my new desk in the newsroom. They took me off the courthouse beat.”

            “Wait a minute. You mean you haven’t been fired?”

            Instantly I realized I had an edge because she had failed in her primary mission to get me fired. As I thought about it, I realized Logan had been right in my reassignment. Digesting a universal truth about stalkers, I concluded I was lucky to still have a job. Wouldn’t it be easiest for any employer when facing a pest like Mehaffey to just eliminate the whole problem by cutting the worker? I thought. In this case, Logan and my paper had backed me. Suddenly, I felt grateful and decided to twist the knife with her.

            “Fired? No way. He said he wanted me in here for my safety. You know, we have a lot of important elections to cover this year and the Post will need its best people available on the desk for those stories. I’m really kind of excited about this promotion.”

            “Promotion?” I thought I heard her choke a bit as she repeated my mischaracterization of what essentially represented a lateral move for me.

            “And, I will have plenty of time for a little sideline project in this new job,” I said. “I want to do a little research on the lawyer ethics requirements of the State Bar of Texas and see if maybe you’ve slipped up on something I might know about.”

            “Uh, okay, okay,” she said calmly, as if distracted. “I have to go.”

            That night at home I picked up a ringing phone to hear her voice and hung up before she could finish a sentence. For the next two hours the phone rang repeatedly but I did not answer. When Strong arrived back at the house I told him not to answer either. I had decided to end all communication with her. She would be easy to ignore now that I no longer needed to visit the courthouse daily. I believed I might never see her again.

Later, after studying the psychology of the narcissist personality, however, I would learn that my new strategy that night had merely set the stage for a new dimension in our relationship because I had denied the one thing she actually needed the most: an opportunity for confrontation. And I would learn on our anniversary the next day that confrontation was the one thing she really could not live without.