Investigation Discovery Takes on Stalking

If there’s an issue that’s tailor made to receive help from media it’s stalking.

A subset of domestic violence, stalking largely is a misunderstood crime by the public and—hard to believe—by legal authorities. Stalking is not just something that happens to celebrities. Far from it.

And it’s a crime that’s vastly ignored by its victims as a crime. Let’s repeat that. About 60% of stalking victims don’t report incidents of stalking to local police, the Dept of Justice estimates. One of the reasons is that most victims don’t know help is available, Catherine Pierce, acting director of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, says. Another reason is that often they aren’t taken seriously by authorities. When they report repeated incidents as a crime, sometimes it’s too late.

It was too late for Kristin Lardner, a college student who eventually was killed by her stalker in 1992. Lardner’s stalker started out well. Michael Cartier was cute, she once said, and she dated him. When he beat her, she broke up with the man who’d eventually kill her.

This pattern is familiar. Some 76% of intimate partner femicide victims were stalked by their partner. 67% had been physically abused by their partner. This is another reason why stalking isn’t reported much. Victims don’t want to believe that their former partners are dangerous, so they tolerate actions that legally constitute stalking. The stalkers also mix their crime with pleasantries. Not long before he killed her, Cartier sent roses to Kristin and promised to leave her alone.

Kristin’s story is well known in the D.C. area. Her father, the former Washington Post journalist George Lardner, has written extensively about his daughter’s death and stalking.

Ironically one of the major hurdles in tracking down stalkers is the legal system itself. “Judges want to see blood…evidence of damages” or they won’t convict someone of stalking, says Mark Wynn, a former police officer who’s trained police, prosecutors, judges, legislators, health care officials and victim advocates in all 50 states. Wynn spoke at a Town Hall meeting at Justice to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.

Lardner agrees with Wynn’s assessment. In many cases, he says, “judges are the worst of the lot…and they act like it.” Judicial bias against taking stalking seriously is “rampant,” he says. In Kristin’s case her stalker, Cartier, had been able to slip through the system, despite having a rap sheet “as long as my arm,” Lardner says. At the time of Kristin’s murder there was an outstanding warrant for Cartier’s arrest and he had violated his probation. He should have been in jail.

In Cartier’s case and in countless others, the judicial system mistakenly thinks “it’s too expensive to be tough” with stalkers “at the outset,” Lardner believes. The end result is that too many stalkers are allowed back out on the streets.

But judges—and certainly the majority are good ones, who take stalking seriously, Wynn says—are not the only group needing education. All legal authorities, police and even some victims need to recognize what constitutes stalking and how it can be combated, a panel of experts said during the Town Hall meeting.

That’s where cable comes in, specifically Investigation Discovery (ID). Following in the footsteps of Lifetime’s excellent work against violence aimed at women, ID has pledged to “shine a Klieg light on the misunderstood problem” of stalking, ID’s chief Henry Schleiff tells us.

Schleiff attended the Town Hall and ID’s Paula Zahn moderated the session. The two later met with Attorney General Eric Holder and other domestic violence officials at the White House to discuss the issue. “We are actively creating more opportunities to elevate the national conversation [on stalking] and we…look forward to involving our cable affiliate partners in similarly related events this year,” Schleiff says.

Indeed, the Town Hall pointed out education and awareness programs that are making a difference. Even Lardner admits he’s not as pessimistic as he was. “All 50 states have stalking laws now,” as opposed to the 20 that had them when Kristin was killed, he says.

Needless to say, with the digital age comes more tools for the stalker: mobile phones, email. Stalkers have even been known to hook up GPS devices to victim’s cars in order to follow them. Fortunately, these devices leave footprints of a digital nature. “There’s always a digital trail,” says Cindy Southworth, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Wynn, the trainer, had an idea for ID’s programming on the subject. “If you highlight successful” [education programs on stalking] you can shame other localities into doing more, starting their own programs, he said. “You’ll empower advocates to say ‘if they can do it there, why can’t we do it here?’”

If ID’s efforts can get just one local authority to fund stalking awareness training for judges, police and the public and it helps one victim, perhaps even saves one life, it will have been worthwhile.