The first laws criminalizing stalking in California stemmed from the 1991 trial of Robert Bardo, a high school dropout and loner from Tucson who tracked down and fatally shot 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer at her West Hollywood apartment. The lead prosecutor was Marcia Clark — known for famously losing the O.J. Simpson murder trial that happened soon after.
Bardo had a history of mental illness and showed serious signs of disturbance in high school, says Christopher Goffard, Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for the LA Times who wrote about this case as part of a new series on famous Los Angeles crimes. Goffard adds that Bardo had difficulty maintaining a job and wrote letters saying “the devil must kill” and “I’m going to be the next Hitler.”
He taped every episode of the 1980s sitcom My Sister Sam, in which Rebecca Schaeffer played a bubbly teenager named Patti Russell. He eventually took a Greyhound bus to LA and showed up with a teddy bear to the Burbank studios where she worked, but security guards escorted him back to his hotel.
Rebecca Schaeffer (front, lower right) appears with cast members of "My Sister Sam," 1986. Credit: Mario Casilli/mptvimages.com via Reuters Connect.
In addition to Schaeffer, Bardo was fixated on pop stars Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, as well as Samantha Smith, a teenager who pleaded for world peace in a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov during the Cold War. However, Goffard says Schaeffer was the only person he successfully found — by paying a private investigator $250 for her home address in West Hollywood.
What happened when he got to her home was the subject of contention during the trial. Bardo claimed that the murder wasn’t premeditated, but Clark proved otherwise.
“He says that he appears at her door. Once they have a few words, he goes away, he comes back, he wants to give her a gift. And she callously brushes him off as if she's too busy. … And he says he was provoked by her callousness, and pulls out the gun and shoots,” recalls Goffard. “Marcia Clark studies the tape as he's recounting this to a psychiatrist, and notices that as he reenacts pulling out the gun, he reaches his hand behind his back and mimics pulling out the gun. So as his words are at odds with his physical gesture. And to Marcia Clark, this gives her the element that she needs for first-degree murder lying in wait — because the gun concealed behind the back is the lying in wait element. And it's a bench trial, they weigh the jury, and the judge finds him guilty of first-degree murder and sends him away for life.”
Clark demonstrated that the killing was not impulsive or spontaneous. Bardo had brought the gun from Tucson to LA.
Interestingly, Goffard points out that Bardo had a copy of J.D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye with him at the crime scene— which was also in the possession of Mark David Chapman (who killed John Lennon) and John Hinckley (who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan).
Goffard recalls that when he recently spoke to Marcia Clark about this case, she said that the desire for fame is what motivated Bardo. She also emphasized that the public was very naive about stalkers at the time.
Goffard says this was a hugely consequential case because it led to the mass establishment of anti-stalking laws — first in California, then in other states, the U.K., Italy, Germany, and Japan. These laws allow for the conviction of people who maliciously harass others and make credible threats, he explains.
Currently, Bardo is still serving his life sentence at Avenal State Prison in Kings County, California. Goffard says Bardo recently saw an Orange County-based private eye talk on TV about stalking, so he penned a letter to him, offering to lend his “insights on how a stalker thinks” to help prevent future incidents.
“Whether he's sincere, whether he's seeking further attention, it's hard to know. But the private eye I did talk to said that he was going to see a psychiatrist, and with him, maybe pay him a visit and see if there was anything to learn from him.”