Fall ‘17: Haunting Legal Issues
Simply Obsessed: What Makes a Stalker? by Stephen Steinberg As a Columbus City Prosecutor, I have prosecuted numerous criminal cases over the past thirteen years that involve stalking. Additionally, being a prosecutor offers a clear view into many weird and creepy stalking situations that my colleagues are prosecuting. The examples I give below are just a sampling of the spookier stalking behavior that I, or my fellow prosecutors, have encountered. One stalker waited in the bushes of his former girlfriend’s house after having texted her a mix of pleading and menacing messages. Another wrote two long novels about his former girlfriend, casting himself as an aggrieved hero and his girlfriend as a seductive villainess; then he contemplated writing a third. Another stalker faked his own death, sent funeral notices to his victim, a woman he wanted to date, and faked correspondence from his sister informing the victim that a puppy would be sent to a kill shelter if she failed to appear at his funeral. When I learn about these cases, I ask myself why stalkers are behaving this way: what are the goals that this behavior is attempting to accomplish; what were the initial motivations for the behavior? I can never answer this satisfactorily, and creepy human interaction always baffles me. Experts, however, do classify stalker behavior by motivation and goals.
Pamela Kulbarsh, a psychiatric nurse who has worked with law enforcement, authored an article on Officer.com, in which she describes three types of stalker obsessions: the simple obsessional stalker, the love obsessional stalker and the eroto-manic stalker. A simple obsessional stalker usually knows his victim well. Frequently, this victim is a former spouse, intimate partner, co-worker or even boss. Mending the relationship or exacting revenge for a perceived wrong motivates a simple obsessional. By contrast, a love obsessional stalker does not know their victim well. These stalkers develop a love obsession or fixation on their victims. A love obsessional is motivated to make the victim aware of their existence and to make the victim fall in love with them. An eroto-manic stalker deludes him/herself into believing a victim returns their love. The love contemplated is not limited to erotic love, but frequently some higher spiritual love. An erotomanic often believes the victim is their perfect match. The former boyfriend hiding in the bushes was a simple obsessional stalker who had also sent text messages in which he had alternately pleaded for reconciliation, threatened retribution and catalogued the victim’s wrongs. The stalker was seeking to mend the relationship and exact revenge for the fact that the victim had left the relationship.
44 | Columbus Bar L aw yers Quarterly Fall 2017