Stopping a Stalker: A Cop's Guide to Making the System Work for You

by Robert L. Show; Plenum Trade, 1998

Interestingly, although celebrity stalkings often receive considerable media coverage, the most common victims are not stars like Jodie Foster, Olivia Newton-John, Sharon Gless, Vanna White, Michael J. Fox, David Letterman, and others. The largest number of stalking victims are ordinary people who have for some reason had another person fixate on them. These stalkers can be complete strangers or, as in the incident in Dana Point related earlier, someone who is only a casual acquaintance, but more often than not the stalker is an ex-spouse or ex-intimate partner who feels he or she has been wronged in the breakup of the relationship.

Leigh Penn, an obsessed fan of actress Sharon Gless (of the television series Cagney and Lacy ), broke into Gless's home in 1990, and then, when she found Gless wasn't there, barricaded herself in a bathroom with a semiautomatic rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition, holding the police at bay for several hours. A year earlier, Gless had obtained a restraining order against Penn. Penn later told the police that her plan had been to sexually assault Gless, murder her, and then commit suicide.


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