her and followed that with a frantic message: I can hear him! He’s coming! Then there were no more messages, not for many long and agonizing days. Amber was left picturing her best friend being viciously attacked, maybe even killed. She contacted the police and Nancy, though she spared Cari’s mother the frightening details. Amber was a nervous wreck, and her tiny infant surely sensed her anxiety and suffered, too. After days of silence, more disturbing texts appeared. Amber was never given a specific location. The texter never asked about Amber’s baby, or mentioned anything that convinced her that Cari was behind the messages. But Amber was afraid to cut off the communication. What if it really was Cari? If there was even a small chance that Cari was the one texting her, Amber would not abandon her.
Meanwhile, the stalker continued to harass Dave. He tried to ignore her and continued to meet women online. If he could catch his tormentor lurking outside, he would follow her and find her hideout. Then the cops could arrest her. In the meantime, he planned to keep dating, if she didn’t scare away all of his dates!
He was grateful to Liz for having the guts to stick by him, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t restless. He still got mad when she couldn’t contain her jealousy, and he broke up with her regularly because of it. The breakups didn’t last long because the stalker would always do something horrendous that would send them scurrying back to each other for comfort. While he was glad that he could talk to Liz about the problems, their conversations got old very fast because they all revolved around the stalker, what the stalker had just done, what the stalker was planning to do, and how they could catch and stop the stalker. Dave estimates that “our conversations were all about that for 99 percent of our relationship.” There had to be more to life than being stalked and talking about being stalked!
One Friday night in mid-June, Dave was visiting Amy and his kids when he received an email with the subject line, Now at your place, and the message read:
I know you’re there. Hello. Do I need to break the sliding door to get you to talk?
The sliding door was in his apartment, and the stalker apparently figured out he wasn’t home because she emailed him again a couple of minutes later: I told you I was coming to see you tonight. You weren’t there. I took out a window. I hope your whore inside was scared and never comes back . . .
Dave arrived home that night to find a brick had shattered a bedroom window. He called police to report the damage. Though the stalker had seemed to think he had a female visitor, it wasn’t so. The apartment was empty when the window was broken. Multiple emails and texts continued to come in each day, often many an hour. On the twenty-third of June, one email threatened: I’ll kill her. She stole my heart. She broke my dreams. She stole my future when she took you away from me. That whore will die.
The next day another appeared: I will remove all your whores. All that will be left is me. You left me for that ugly whore. Now I destroy your life.
The last week of June, Dave got up one morning to find his car had been keyed. Scratched in giant letters along one side of the car were the words: Dave loves fat whores. The stalker took credit in an email: I keyed your fucking car. Let people know you like fat whores.
The next day, another email laced with threats popped up: I will kill that nasty-ass whore Liz for getting in between us and every fat ass that you have been with. Then I will kill that loud-mouth kids’ mom of yours for getting in my business. She thinks she knows what’s going on. Wait till I cut her throat.
In addition to being beaten down by the stalker, Dave was also once again feeling stifled by Liz’s incessant nagging, and he pulled away. He met a woman online he was very attracted to. Sally was a voluptuous blonde in her late thirties. “She seemed to have her stuff together. She had a job and a couple of Volkswagens because that was her thing.”
As always, his harasser seemed to know exactly what was going on in his dating life. One of the emails