In 1989, Bardo watched the film Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills. After the ordeal, she founded Victims for Victims, an organization that would support victims and lobby for stronger laws. Remarkably, Saldana lived, though she spent four months in the hospital. Jackson used the address to ambush Saldana, stabbing her ten times. Jackson acquired the phone number of Saldana’s mother and called her claiming to be Bull director Martin Scorsese’s assistant he said he needed her daughter’s address so that he could reach her about a film opportunity in Europe. Bardo copied the tactic used by Arthur Richard Jackson in 1982, Jackson hired a private investigator to get information on actress Theresa Saldana, then best-known for her role in Raging Bull. He turned to a detective agency, and they acquired the actress’s home address for Bardo from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Theresa Saldana played herself in the 1984 film about her attack, Victim for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story.īardo wrote letters to Schaeffer and even attempted to enter the set of the show. Bardo’s obsessions shifted, and eventually settled on Schaeffer through her role on My Sister Sam. Her popularity led to her casting in the short-live Robert Wagner series Lime Street unfortunately, Smith and her father died in a plane crash in 1985. He previously stalked child activist and television performer Samantha Smith Smith gained fame in 1982 when, at age 10, she wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov on the question of peace, and the leader invited her to visit the Soviet Union. A victim of abuse from a family with a history of mental illness, Bardo himself was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Coming out of the show, Schaeffer booked work in a few television and theatrical films.Īrizona native Robert John Bardo had a troubled history. A hit out of the gate, My Sister Sam had a strong first season but was cancelled in the second when ratings dropped. Schaeffer played Patti, the younger sister of Dawber’s Sam. She spent some time pursuing work in Japan before coming back to the States an appearance on the cover of Seventeen led to her casting in My Sister Sam, a CBS sitcom vehicle for former Mork & Mindy star Pam Dawber. Near the end of that year, she began a six-month run on One Life to Live. By 1984, she had moved to New York City where she attended Professional Children’s School while she worked. Schaeffer was born in Oregon and began modelling in her teens. The fallout of the case and trial would strengthen privacy laws and put a spotlight on the danger associated with stalking. 30 years ago, the 1989 slaying of Rebecca Schaeffer drew attention to the issue of stalking as in the near-fatal stabbing of Theresa Saldana in 1982, the perpetrator was an obsessed fan who used public records to track his target. Our increased awareness of stalking today forces institutions to make real change, like the decision by Google this week to pull several potentially dangerous “people-tracking Android apps” from its Play Store. When the cases involve stalking or violence, even murder, they sometimes generate enough attention to instigate positive change, despite the horror of the crime itself. Sometimes, the cases are salacious and the outcomes ruin careers. However, crimes in Hollywood often seem magnified in the media, particularly when they involve the famous. That’s an aesthetic communicated in the work of writers like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy that expose the dark underbelly under the bright lights. Bardo, who carried a copy of The Catcher in the Rye - the same novel Mark David Chapman had with him when he killed John Lennon - took a bus back home to Tucson, Ariz.Crime in Hollywood isn’t much different than crime in any other town. A half hour later, she was dead on arrival at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 357 Magnum from a plastic bag and shot Schaeffer once in the chest with a hollow-point cartridge. On the other side was 19-year-old Robert John Bardo, an unemployed fast-food worker who for three years had been trying to contact his idol. The intercom was broken, so Schaeffer, still in her bathrobe, went down to answer the door. Around 10:15 on that morning of July 18, 1989, the buzzer rang at her apartment in L.A.’s pleasant, middle-class Fairfax district. And in less than an hour, the sweet-faced, 21-year-old actress from Portland, Ore., who from 1986 to ’88 had costarred as Pam Dawber’s kid sister, Patti, in the CBS sitcom My Sister Sam, was to meet with director Francis Ford Coppola about a role in The Godfather Part III. Her spirits were still high from the birthday party she had thrown the night before for her 71-year-old grandfather. The day looked promising for Rebecca Schaeffer.
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