These anchorwomen report the news.
We were just paralyzed because he was trying to get into the house.
But when they were stalked by obsessed fans, they became the news.
He would do things that would make me feel like I had no control in my life.
One threat.
It was letters and phone calls and then he finally called and said, I'm waiting for you.
One attacked.
He was holding my neck down and he was punching me.
And one strangled in her sleep.
I said, it's Jen, isn't it?
Don't go away. That's coming up right now on Montell.
Welcome, welcome, welcome and thank you so much for joining us today.
And today we will meet some people who say that just doing their job has put them in their lives in danger.
Take a look at this.
Celebrity stalking continues to make headlines.
David Letterman, Madonna and Steven Spielberg have been pursued by obsessive fans who imagine themselves to be in a personal relationship with the stars.
But while Hollywood stalking makes the news, the people delivering the news are sometimes in more immediate danger.
I know that being in the public eye is my job and a certain amount of attention from fans is expected, but my stalker has crossed the line.
For two years, Detroit reporter Cam Carmen received countless letters and phone calls from a deranged fan.
What you f****** for, what you f****** ripped me off for.
I had to blow your f****** head off.
Stalker Bill Morrison then sat in the station's parking lot, just waiting for her to leave.
For some news personalities, there's little warning.
In 1995, Jodie Woosentracht disappeared on her way to anchor the morning news.
Iowa authorities believe she was abducted by a viewer.
Her body has never been found.
Her case remains unsolved today.
With stalking cases growing in the news industry, a question remains.
Does being on camera make you a target?
Well, our first guest says that she became the story when she was targeted by a fan.
Take a look at this.
Imagine what it's like to never feel safe, whether you're in your car, out shopping, even in your own home.
Our own Cam Carmen is living that nightmare right now.
Living in fear, wondering if you're safe while doing everyday things in public.
Always looking over your shoulder and never knowing when you're being watched.
For me, it's real.
For four years, I've been stalked.
I'm not sure why a man I've never met sends dozens of letters, leaves repeated phone messages, and threatens my life.
What the f*** are you for? What you f***ing ripped me off for?
I had to blow your f***ing head off.
You c***.
Making a point with this Dalvikian homicide, you little bitch.
And October 12th, this deranged call.
I'm right outside the gate of the box of your business area where you work.
And I'm out here waiting for you.
You know, good playing around. I'll be waiting for you. Thank you.
Bye.
Please welcome from WJBK in Detroit, Cam Carmen.
Welcome to the show.
It's one thing to be a person that reports the news, but then actually find out that you're becoming part of the news.
And you are part of the news.
You didn't initially make this a news story, right?
Right. Originally, we just had gone out there when he had come to the station to get me.
We had gone out there with a camera, and we kind of sat with it for a little while.
Didn't know what we were going to do with it.
And I actually went to my bosses and said, you know what?
I think it's time. I think it's time to get out there and get some work done.
And I actually went to my bosses and said, you know what? I think it's time. I think it's time that we do something about it.
Let's back up to where this began. This started in 1996?
Yes, it started a long time ago. He just had begun sending me letters.
And you were, at that point in time, a field reporter? Were you an odd, you were the anchor?
Anchor and weather person at the time. And they seemed a little odd.
But I thought, you know, this happens. We get letters from viewers, and I never answered them back, which was probably the best move I made.
And the first letters that came, it was just, what, I really like the way you do the news? What kind of things did he say?
He would say, I love it when you wear blue for me, because it makes your eyes look pretty. And it's my favorite color, and I know you know that.
Really? And you're looking at this and going, who the devil's this guy? Right? Right.
And then the letters kept coming.
Yeah, they got stranger and stranger. He'd say things like, I know you live on such-and-such street because you told me that through the television, but I went there and you weren't there, and that makes me mad.
Oh, really? It got stranger and stranger.
But you contacted the police. I mean, let's say, what month did this start in? This was in?
Well, I don't know exactly what month it started in, but-
Summertime?
Yeah, it was around the summertime, and I had, he had actually called in that threat. So that was in June, and we had, the police had come and said, okay, well, we're going to watch him.
He's probably okay. He's a little deranged. He's probably not going to come and get you. He doesn't have a car. We've kind of kept an eye on him.
They went by this guy's house.
Right. Right.
They put, they visually saw him. They knew who he was.
Correct. Yeah.
When you saw the picture of this guy, what did you think when you finally saw him?
You know, I actually wanted to cry.
Really? Why?
It just was so sad to me. He looked like he had been beaten up. You know, it was a mugshot. And this picture actually is when he was arrested.
And so he had looked completely different from the mugshot that I had seen to this time period.
He had said in his letters, I weigh 300 and something pounds, but I'm on a diet because I know that you like thin men, and I will lose this weight for you. And he actually did lose the weight.
Well, then on top of this, that started in the process when you started reporting about the fact that you were getting ready to get married.
Right.
You saw his behavior change.
Yeah, it was, he would write to me and say things like, I met your fiance, Tom, which wasn't my fiance's name, and I got into a fight with him, and I think I set him straight.
Was your first reaction, okay, maybe he's got the name wrong, he called my fiance?
Yeah, and it wasn't anything that was close to the truth. So I knew that this guy was just off base, but there was really nothing I could do.
When you actually got married, he left you alone for a little while.
He did for a couple months, and really in the back of my mind I kept thinking at the church that day, the best day of my life, I kept thinking, what if I look in the back pew and he's there?
I still really didn't know what he looked like in person, I just knew that he was a heavyset man, but thankfully nothing happened, and then a couple months later in October we got married in August, in October he started up again.
So now was it just letters or was it letters and phone calls?
It was letters and phone calls, and then that day in October he finally called and said, I'm waiting for you.
And when he called you and said, I'm waiting for you, did he say, I'm waiting for you right outside?
Right outside the gates.
Immediately you called the police.
We called the police, and because there was a previous threat, they came and actually arrested him that day.
So now what did they give him though? What did he get?
Okay, so he made threatening phone calls, kinda, right? He made threatening letters, kinda.
So how do you lock a person up for kinda breaking the law?
What the charge was was misdemeanor stalking, but they had seen that he was so clearly unstable.
They had put him in a forensic center, and he's actually still there today, so.
But if you're in a forensic center, you're only there until some doctor says, I think he's no longer a threat to the community.
Not necessarily to the individual.
So are you living in fear that this guy may get out and start this again?
Yeah, every summer a wonderful woman from the victim services department calls me to say he's coming up for his trial, or his reevaluation.
I'll let you know what happens. And so far every year he has been given another year, but it's only a year at a time, so.
Has the station done anything extra to maybe help to stop this, or thinking about what happens if he does get out?
Are they going to add extra protection?
I'm sure that they will, yeah. My bosses were wonderful with the whole thing. They were very comforting.
One of the best stations in the country. We'll take a break, we'll come back.
Our next guest literally came home from doing a news report and was attacked by a man.
Why? Just because he saw her on TV. We'll take a break, we'll be back right after this.
Well please welcome from WGXATV in Macon, Georgia, Portia Lake. Welcome her to the show.
We're talking today about, I think, I guess this would be one of those really kind of crazy secrets of this business.
Where, you know, nobody really talks about it.
Everybody and their brother and sister want to be an on-air personality, want to be a star, want to be on TV, want to be possibly a news person.
But you don't know what comes along with the job.
You had just started at a station, correct?
I had just started at a smaller market station.
It was Valentine's Day and just shortly after I was coming home from work that evening, Montell,
I was just going through my regular routine and just as I was putting my key in the door,
just that very moment, someone turned me around and just like slammed me against the door
and then slammed me back down to the ground and just started beating me up.
So he was holding my neck down and he was punching me and he was scraping me up and everything,
but never anything that was meant to be a fatal blow.
But he kept calling out your name.
My name, yes.
Now, had you ever seen this person before?
He was dressed.
Could you get a shot or you couldn't get a really good look at him?
He was dressed all in black.
All in black.
You've never seen him? You didn't hear from him at all?
Before this incident took place, did you have anybody writing you letters?
No.
Calling asking for Portia?
I had normal fans.
Normal fans, okay.
But nobody.
But then what was it, about a week or two after this incident?
It was probably, I guess about a month or so later, I got a package on my desk that
it was a baby picture of a little boy and it was addressed to mama with love.
And it came to you?
For me.
Now, this gave you the heebie-jeebies.
Because I don't have any.
You have kids.
No little people.
They don't mind.
You're nobody's mama.
So all of a sudden you're starting to think that this person is still out there.
Now you obviously followed police report.
Oh yes.
Police came, they checked, they couldn't find this guy.
Nothing.
Nowhere.
Still no clue.
You went as far as to change stations, did you not?
Well I did.
I stuck with that because I did not want to quit.
I did not want to be run out of town because of my fear.
I ended up moving across town.
But then months later after I finished out my contract, I went on to another station,
which is where I'm at now.
But now you're working at this other station.
And something odd just started happening there.
The first night.
The first night?
The first night.
Explain to everybody what happened.
There was a woman that called the first night.
You know, she would be on the lines of just admiring a news person on TV and, you know,
complimenting me and my appearance and welcoming me to town.
She did that the first phone call, but then the calls became more aggressive and now she
really, really wants to meet me at some outside location.
When you say they became more aggressive, just so we have an idea, what does she say
to you when she gets you on the phone?
Oh, you're beautiful.
Oh, you're just the most beautiful black woman I've ever seen on TV.
Oh, baby, you're going to be a star.
I'm hoping we can get together for coffee.
Maybe you can come over here.
I just really want to meet you in person, you know, and I want to find out about your life,
how you got to be where you are now.
Do they not put some of this information up on the website about you guys?
Personal enough.
That's that.
That's all I want to reveal.
But then her last one was not only, she said she wanted to get inside your brain.
Yeah, she wants to get inside her brain.
Now you've obviously contacted the police.
Well, at this point, no.
I am at that step.
She hasn't talked to me directly since the last aggressive phone call when she said she
really wanted to meet me, get in my head, and I think she said she wanted to write a
book about me.
I think the woman thing scares me more than a guy seeing me on TV.
She might try to hurt you, though.
That's true.
What have you done differently since this attack?
Since I've moved?
Since you moved?
Every day, I feel like I'm looking in the rearview mirror, just checking to make sure
there's nobody behind me, nobody in front of me, nobody following me.
I always, always, always have made sure that my number's not listed.
I'm just, all these little bitty things, I'm mistrustful.
Did you pick a separate, a different kind of an apartment that has a different kind
of an entrance so that you're not isolated at a door?
I gotta say this, because you know me, I take the opportunity whenever I get it to talk
about trying to stay safe.
For any single woman in this country right now, believe me, there are enough apartment
complexes out there for you to get an apartment that does not have an isolated door.
Think about it.
If you can walk up to your door and you turn around and you couldn't see anybody if you
tried, that should not be the place that you live, because if you can't see anybody, nobody
can see you.
Take a little break, we'll come back.
We're gonna meet a reporter who says that she was stalked for over 18 months, not just,
we won't call him a fan, because it was by a former coworker.
Take a break, we'll be back right after this.
My next guest says that she lived in fear when a stalker invaded her life.
I want you to take a look at this.
In November of 1995, I reported on stalking, a top story in Kansas City.
Stalking happens to those who are well known, actresses, actors, and musicians.
But it can happen to anyone, anywhere.
One woman told me her horrifying tale.
It takes your freedoms away from you.
You don't see what the sun is like coming through your windows because you have to keep
your blinds closed all the time, and you are fearful of going to your mailbox for what
you're gonna find in there again.
You feel completely helpless.
I spoke to law enforcement and justice officials, trying to find this victim, and many like
her, help.
But nobody knew I had a secret of my own.
I needed this information to keep me alive.
Please welcome the author of the book, Breaking News, God Has a Plan, from KSTP TV in Minneapolis,
Harris Feuchner.
Welcome her to the show.
Thank you.
Just like you said that, you were doing reports on stalking, and no one knew the hidden nightmare
in your life.
Well, you know, Montel, when I finished that two-part series, the news director and general
manager and I all sat down, and we realized that I had gotten access to judges and things
in the court system that maybe other reporters wouldn't have even thought of.
So the three of us decided maybe we should come clean about how I had gotten my hands
on those sources and resources.
And really it had just, in the beginning, been planned for me to say one sentence about
the fact that this is how I know I've been through this.
The response from the audience drove a little bit more sincerity on my part to really talk
about it.
And from there I decided to write about it, because as you've seen with your other two
guests so far, our industry attracts it somehow.
In your case, this is a little different, because I mean, a little different, but I
put him in the same category.
You were dating this person, this person who worked at your station with you?
Yes.
In fact, he moved to stalk me.
So he moved across the country.
I met him in my newsroom in Greenville, North Carolina.
We worked together.
He was a producer.
We dated a short period of time.
And when that situation came to a close, it came to a close simultaneously with me getting
another job.
And the one thing, Montel, that I wish that I could do differently, not that it might
have changed anything, but from my own piece of mind, I wish that I had been more powerful
at the time to say, these are the behaviors about you that bother me.
I don't want anything from you.
Gotcha.
But I didn't want to hurt his feelings.
You didn't want to hurt his feelings, so you broke up seeing him?
I wish.
I was in Kansas.
Right.
With you.
Behind me.
Behind you.
Yeah.
And next, did he show up at the station?
Well, I started receiving things and received a phone call from him.
Said, hey, you know, I've come to town.
I'm interviewing around at TV stations.
I said, great.
I didn't make the connection between what was being sent to me.
I mean, dozens of flowers in a week's period, tons of hangups on my home and work machines
on my voicemail systems, and then this person being in the city.
I didn't make the connection right away.
Okay, but still, now, let's just back up and talk about that half without the connection for a second.
First time you got the flowers, what did you think?
Well, they were long stem roses and they were beautiful.
They came anonymously but with a very sweet note.
Love watching you.
Glad you're in Kansas City.
By the end of the week, I'd gotten eight dozen.
And it wasn't nice anymore.
Right.
And then the phone calls start.
Yes.
61 hangups in one night, the first night.
Yeah.
When did you finally get and make the connection?
Because this happened over an 18-month period of time, correct?
Well, it was made for me.
I went out of town with a girlfriend.
We went to Mexico.
And before we left the hotel in Acapulco, I called home to get my messages and my machine was full.
You see, I had left and he didn't know where I was.
And he left all of these messages with the last one being, I'm waiting for you.
And of course, you heard that voice.
You knew exactly who it was.
Yeah.
Immediately.
Yeah, absolutely.
When I come back, I'll tell you.
Did you call the police then?
I called the police but not until after he had actually broken into my home.
Let's talk about that when we come back.
We'll be back right after this.
So, Harris, so you get back from Mexico and then what happens?
Well, that night I had been looking at my vacation photos and I'd left them down in the living room.
I lived in a two-floor apartment.
And I'd gone to bed.
It was in the middle of the night.
And I heard a noise downstairs that woke me up at about 3 o'clock in the morning.
I got up, went to the top of the stairs and looked down the stairs.
And I saw what appeared to be a light go off at the bottom of the stairs.
So I knew somebody was in the apartment.
There was one door out.
I had to go downstairs to get out.
And then I thought, oh, wait a minute.
I don't hear anything again.
Maybe I imagined it.
So I went downstairs.
When I got to about the third step from the bottom, I heard him call out my name.
There were a pair of scissors in his hands.
There were pictures all over the living room floor.
He was going through my vacation photos.
He threw the scissors down and ran for me.
There was a lamp right by the stairs.
He grabbed the lamp.
He had a cord.
He dragged me by the back of my hair and dragged me down the stairs.
I screamed like you wouldn't believe.
And I lived in an apartment complex, and I guess I'm really loud because everybody heard me.
They called 911.
Excellent.
And I was rescued because we heard the sirens.
But you're rescued, but what did they do to him?
Well, he went away for a little while.
Local jail.
It was a big court case, whatever.
They booked him or charged him with misdemeanor trespassing.
He was found guilty for that, but then let go on a home monitoring where they put an ankle bracelet on you.
And he just would make a beeline.
Oh, yes.
I did everything they told me to do, but here's the problem.
Until he committed a heinous crime, the court system felt like it was not powered to do anything.
And the heinous crime would be until he killed you or harmed you.
Terribly. But he would do things that would make me feel like I had no control in my life.
Like what?
He would break into my apartment while I was at work and do his laundry.
And I would get home at night and realize that things were left in places that I hadn't left them,
that there were bottles of fabric softener that I hadn't used that were empty now.
At one point in time, you changed all the locks, did you not?
Oh, yeah.
And he still got in.
Absolutely. He broke into the guard shack of the apartment building.
The apartment complex ended up pressing charges against him.
You asked me earlier, did I call for help? Two things went wrong.
I was very public. There were billboards with my picture on them.
Of course.
Call 911, they know the voice, they see the name come up and the caller ID.
I was ashamed. My life had gone out of control.
This was a person who I had let into my life at one point.
My personal filter, I thought, was out of whack. People would question me and judge me.
The other thing that went wrong was that I honestly thought I could control it.
You know, I'm a type A personality. I can handle this.
Oh, those were such huge mistakes and they cost me greatly for a long time.
He came back and broke into your apartment again.
You walked in and saw him downstairs a second time, did you not?
I left. I moved after that.
He made direct comments about what he was going to do to you.
I was driving a little black Miata and when I got the main anchor job in Kansas City,
I bought myself a convertible.
He took something and etched such horrible words into the paint on that car.
And he did it on the passenger side of the car.
Yeah.
So you probably would not have noticed it for the first couple of days until somebody told you about it.
Exactly. At one point he took apart the engine in the car while it was parked in the garage at my home.
Eventually had to get a bodyguard who felt so bad for me.
He would park his car in my backyard and until I fell asleep, watch the house.
So how did they bring this to an end? He followed you to your new house.
Oh, yeah.
And on a couple of occasions you found him out back.
Well, my neighbors would see him.
So that was a violation.
Yeah, my neighbors would see him.
That would have been a violation right then and there of the restraining order and those things.
They arrested this guy several times. He would just get out.
And for you and me, 90 days in jail or 90 days anywhere away from everything, away from your life,
first of all, my bills wouldn't get paid so stuff would start to get turned off.
Somehow or another he could come out of jail, go right back to his life and go right back to stalking me.
He didn't miss a beat. He was professional at it.
This last go-round though when they locked him up, did they not tell him unequivocally,
you're going to jail for five years if in fact you violate again?
Right. And they got him some psychiatric help.
And the night that they picked him up, he had climbed up onto the roof of the detached garage of my home and my neighbors saw him.
And there were dozens of police officers who'd come because I call 911.
I had heard the noises outside. My mother was with me that night. We'd seen him.
We were just paralyzed because he was trying to get into the house.
And I guess had been sleeping on top of this garage waiting for me to come home at night and my neighbors had called 911.
So by the time I got home there were all these police officers there. I'm like, oh, everything's fine.
They leave. I go in the house. Someone's pounding at the back door. It's him.
And I'm the idiot. The neighbors knew. I was like, oh, you guys are nuts.
They all come back. The police officers do. They capture him. He has a tube of my lipstick.
He used to go through my trash. I couldn't even put my trash at the curb anymore.
When the trash people came, I had to take it to the curb because he would go through everything.
He had my phone bill on him when they arrested him.
And the way that they were able to get him is that, well, mail fraud is a felony.
So he could stalk me until, you know, dawn of next year.
But if he had my mail on, that meant that he had to have broken into the mailbox, which is exactly what he had done.
So now how much time did he give him on this one?
He got about six months with time off for good behavior.
When was his behavior ever good?
Apparently while he was in jail.
But, you know, the thing that really, I think, turned the tide, at least I was praying that it would,
was the fact that he got some psychiatric help.
Stalking is not about love or hate. It's about control.
The book is called Breaking News. God has a plan.
I think if you are in this situation, you can go out and pick up a copy of this book.
It's still on bookshelves right now.
Amazon.com is a good place to get it.
Amazon.com you can go to and get it.
I want to talk when we come back because all of you have talked to police. They've given you plans.
I have another guest we're going to talk to, and unfortunately, a young woman who was killed after being on air for only two months.
We'll take a little break, and we'll be back right after this.
MUSIC
To her family's worst nightmare, I want you to take a look at this.
My daughter, Jennifer, was a beautiful young woman just starting out.
Jennifer had such a drive. As it got closer to college time, she wanted to join the Army Reserves.
She said that would help pay for college, and she'd get to see the world, and she enjoyed serving her country and being involved.
She was proud. Her goal was to be the best TV news reporter.
When Jennifer was done with college, she was hired by KRBC in Abilene, Texas.
She was so excited.
She was very professional, and she would have fun while she was working, too.
She says, I have everything. This is all I want. A job I love, and a great place to live.
So she was excited.
It's been so hard to lose Jen. She was such a good daughter and fun, and just out to start her life. She was robbed of all of that.
Please welcome Sherry and her husband, Tom, to the show.
APPLAUSE
The two of you helped move Jennifer down to Texas, did you not?
Sure, I did. You did all the labor.
You did all the hard work.
Packed the boxes.
You took her down. This was really what she had been living to do, was it not?
She was so excited to do that. She knew it was a beginning spot for a TV news reporter, but she wanted, she knew she had to pay the price to get up to the next pain market.
And move on up.
The night that this happened, someone knocked on your door, did they not? Why don't you back up and tell us what happened that night?
At 5.30, September 16th, Tom was at a meeting, and I heard somebody knock on our door, and I went and answered it.
There was a police officer there, a sheriff. He said, are you Sherry Abell?
I said yes. And he said, is Tom here? And he said, I said no, he's at a meeting. I thought, good lord, what did Tom do?
I thought, what's wrong? And he said, I need to talk to you, and we need to get Tom home right away.
So he said, can I come in? And I said yes.
He started coming through the garage door, and I was going through the laundry room, and right then I knew something's wrong with Jen.
I just, I had this dream before, and I said, it's Jen, isn't it? And he said, yes ma'am, I'm sorry, we need to call your husband.
And of course, you came home, and they told Jen. What did they tell you?
Very bluntly, Jen was dead, and Sherry was crying in the living room. We just crushed.
They found her inside of her apartment.
She'd been sleeping.
Did she not just, she had just done the news earlier though, that day.
Yes.
So now is there, people at the station were concerned because she hadn't come back to work?
Two days before they, she had two days off.
She worked weekends.
So by the time they found her, I think the police had already determined she had already been dead for 24 hours.
Two days.
Two days. I guess this investigation is open, but still to this day, no clues.
No, no, they've checked clues, but none of them have panned out.
And I'm thinking, part of the reason why Sherry and Tom are here is that hopefully maybe someone will recognize Jennifer's face.
They will recognize the fact, of course, you recognize her as being the anchor, but maybe you saw her one day with somebody.
Maybe you saw her pull up to her apartment. There's somebody out there that knows something, and any information you can provide, we'd like to have.
We'll take a little break, and we'll be back right after this.
Just so we make sure that our viewers out there have all the information, that day, did not one of her friends say that Jennifer was shopping with a friend, and they thought that they were being followed by someone in a red car?
Yes, yes.
And enough so that it scared Jennifer enough that she went to her friend's apartment and waited for a while before she continued home. Correct?
Yes.
So if that's the case, again, I mean, I think people in the area might recognize your daughter for being on air and may have thought, oh yeah, I saw her go by and I saw a car go by.
You didn't think anything of it, but right now that kind of information might be what the police need to solve this case.
Please welcome forensic psychologist and author of the book, The Mad, the Bad and the Innocent, the criminal mind on trial, Dr. Barbara Kirwan. Welcome her to the show.
Dr. Kirwan, this is one of those unique kinds of situations, but at the same time it also talks to the entire issue of stalking.
Here are people who are public figures, the eye of the public, they're seen every single day and lifted, if you will, in some ways by our media, lifted to these positions of you should revere.
And then this begins, this process begins. The same person that would stalk one of these ladies, though, would stalk the girl next door. Would they not?
Well, I think one of the things we have to understand is that it's not as unique as we might think it is.
The whole idea of stalking.
FBI statistics will show you that at any given time in a year in the United States, a million and a half people are stalked.
Which is staggering.
Ten million Americans will have either in the past or will be at some time in the future subject to criminal stalking.
So what do you do? I mean, how do you, this is something that's completely out of their control. What do you do?
More and more people are disconnected. More and more people are finding what goes on television more real to them than friends, neighbors, family, which they don't have.
So as you say, when people come into your living room every night and every, while you're having dinner and in the morning you wake up and they're the first person you see, that becomes your reality.
And unfortunately, there is no profile of the general stalker. We can't look in general population and say this person is going to become a stalker.
So what do I know that the three of you, you were all given, or you didn't talk to the police about this completely.
I reported to the police.
You reported. But did they give you like the list of things that you need to do to make sure you can protect yourself? What are a couple of those things you got?
When I kept getting the voicemail messages, they said save them, save everything, save every piece of mail that he sends you. And I did. I had stacks.
Every day I'd get three or four letters. And I saved them and I still have them.
And part of that is because, just so we understand, you're not considered a stalker until they can show some sort of record or over a period of time.
So if you're getting phone calls, first thing you should do is get caller ID. Start logging all those phone calls because when you finally go to the police, they're going to say, well, how long has this been going on?
I have the evidence that it's been going on for six months. That may start the, that just adds on.
One of the things I did, my father suggested that I just go out and spend ten dollars on those throwaway cameras.
And when I would see him and no one else was around, I'd snap a photo.
So that as Cam has said, you can help that case out by saying there is a pattern here and I'd write down what time I saw him.
You know, if it was call ups, hang ups, I would look at the caller ID. I bought a caller ID. Now they're standard with most phones.
And I would write down the time and date. Sometimes I'd even snap a photo if there were 50 or 60 calls in one night to show how many numbers had come in at that point.
But you know, that's being proactive, but at the same time, now your life, the person stalked, you're basically letting the stalker accomplish what they want because they've distracted you from your daily life.
You're living your life trying to see if you can avoid that person. What do you do?
You know, it really is a form of psychological terrorism. It has that same aspect of surprise and being just around the fringe of the law.
But there is about a 30 percent chance that these nasty letters and phone calls you get do end in tragedy. And that is the terrorist aspect.
I've got to take a break. But it would seem to me that if the numbers are now as high as 30 percent, the police wouldn't send a person home when they call them and say, I'm being stalked.
If you're hit, if there's assault, then as you said, you have to do something before the police under the current laws in a lot of the states which do not even have stalker felony laws.
You can't do anything.
Take a break. We'll be back right after this.
The Innocent, the criminal mind on trial, tales of forensic psychologist Barbara Kerwin. Go out and get a copy, please.
Let's just talk about this real quick because we're running out of time. Are there some steps, I'm sure they gave you a series of steps, what are the steps you should go through?
First thing you do is call the police. Second thing you do is what?
Well, second thing is document. In your case, you knew who the person was, cameras, caller ID, all of that kind of stuff.
Third case, never be alone. Don't, which is a horrible thing. It is an invasion of your privacy.
But you have to make sure you're in the most public, secure facilities that you can be in.
You know, you bring up a reason why I stayed on the air. I've had people ask me, well, this guy was targeting you. He can come back.
I've gone on with my life. I'm still on television. I do evening newscasts in Minneapolis.
I have because I've never felt safer than when I'm in front of however many hundreds of thousands of people watch me every week.
Well, Cam's situation is a very different situation. When it's a stranger stalker, the best thing to do is just hang up the phone.
No profanity, no contact, no return calls.
And it may sometimes mean that when the roses first start coming, you might have to offend a few legitimate fans.
But we're living in that kind of a world.
I've got to take another break. But for Latulia, you have done something I think in memory of your daughter that I think is just absolutely tremendous.
You started a what?
It's a journalism scholarship foundation at the University of Montana.
A lot of our friends, past employers, coworkers, people from Texas have donated money and we're giving the first scholarship away.
So we put the address up on the screen. And if any of you, I think it's a really wonderful way to remember someone who dedicated their life to bringing us information.
It might be a way for us to help someone else do the same thing. I've got to take a break. We'll be back.
We're out of time. There was one question that Harris had and that's about orders of protection. Are they truly good when you travel?
I think the police would tell you, and the authorities would say that they are, but they really aren't.
They're supposed to be, but you go from one state to the next, try to get another police department to enforce another police department's order of protection.
It's probably not going to happen. And then unfortunately, we have people who get hurt that way.
Cam is from our station, JBK in Detroit, and Portia from WGXA in Macon, Georgia.
Harris is from KSTP TV in Minneapolis. Make sure you keep tuning in. But just tune in. Leave them alone.
And I also would say, though, to any person out there who feels that they're in that situation,
just by virtue of the fact that you exist does not give anyone else the right to violate you and your space.
And I think too often we sit back and think, oh, I'm not going to do anything, or I'm not going to say anything, or I'm not going to do anything.
And then by the time you decide to say something, it can almost be too late. Do what's right.
When you think you're being bothered and you're being harassed by someone, copy as much information as you can,
get as much as you can, keep a journal, keep as much evidence as you can, and the first sign of anything that seems to be unto words, go to the police.
It's better having the police got a frivolous report than get a report a month and a half later that they have to go find somebody.
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing.
We put Jennifer's Foundation up. I'll put it up again.
If you want to donate, please help us keep the message out there. Get some more people trained to be journalists.
I'm out of time. Join us on the next Montel.