What the Stalker Has Done to the Rest of Us

There’s no use talking about anything but the Night Stalker. That’s all anybody’s thinking about nowadays. One man, and he’s changed the way millions of us live our lives.

There are the obvious ways. Sections of my neighborhood now are lighted up at night like a movie set, and houses where I had never noticed pets now have dogs tied up to the front porches. Me, I’ve screwed shut the peephole window in my front door so it can’t be forced open.

Down at the mini-mart, nighttime business has fallen off, according to Len behind the counter. The men still come in for beer, but hardly any women come in, he said. “And those that do, joke about it. They say they might get killed if they walk to the store but they’ll die for sure if they run out of cigarettes. None of them walk, though. They drive, and they usually got a friend with them.”

At the neighborhood barbecue joint, the manager walks the waitresses to their cars after closing time and once accompanied a waitress home because there was no one there to greet her. He checked out her apartment before she went in.

“It made her feel a lot better, but you know, I was nervous about it,” he confided. “This guy just shoots you, bang--no reason, no warning. I don’t know what protection having a man along is with a guy like that.”

Attitudes changed overnight. When the police helicopter flies overhead, it screws up the FM and makes the TV picture flutter. Neighbors were complaining until the Stalker made his debut in Orange County a week ago. Now the neighbors would like that helicopter to hover over our block all night.

At one of the neighborhood bars--the one with all the elderly regulars--no women have been seen for a week, the bartender said. At another, which caters to a younger crowd, women still show up, but they come in with men. That has put a crimp in some of the single men’s evenings, the bartender said.

On this particular night, there were 18 people in the bar, only one a woman. Everyone was talking about the Stalker. There was no other topic of conversation.

“I’m not worried,” the woman told me. “Everything at my house is locked up tight, and I’ve got an electric garage door opener. All you got to do is be alert.”

I asked whether she had any other protection. “Yes,” she said, “I got a gun, and I’m good with it, too.” She had bought it when the Hillside Strangler was making his rounds. “I had a friend show me how to shoot, and I must have spent a hundred dollars on bullets at the shooting range. If you’re going to have one of those things, you better know how to hit what you’re aiming at.”

At the bar, a man in coat and tie said his wife had bought a gun, a revolver, only a few days earlier. “I’ve always been against guns in the house,” he said. “I’m not for gun control, but I think having a gun around the house--especially when you got kids--is dangerous as hell. They find it--I don’t care where you hide it--and when they find it, they have to pick it up, and then they just have to point it at something and pull the trigger. It’s irresistible. That’s probably more of a threat to my home than this Night Stalker.

“But how am I going to tell my wife not to buy a gun? She knows how I feel, but she’s really scared. She told me she was going to do it, and I didn’t say a word.

“She puts it up during the day, then when she goes to bed she puts it on the bedside table. Then she listens all night for funny noises. You hear all kinds of funny noises at night when you’re listening for them. This guy frightens me, but I’m scared of that gun, too.”

The guy sitting next to him suggested that the Night Stalker may change his habits now that more people are arming themselves. “I’ll bet he’s thinking now, ‘Maybe they got a gun in there. Maybe I’ll be the one that gets shot.’ Maybe he’ll stop going into houses. It’s one thing to be attacked on the street but it’s another thing to be attacked in your own bed.”

The man said he owns a shotgun, which is loaded and always within reach. “I know what I’d do to anyone who came into my house now. I’d shoot them and find out what they wanted later.”

The man in the suit said it’s hard to disagree with that. “If this guy’s standing in front of you with a gun in his hand, there’s really only one thing that might save you: a gun in your hand. That’s just common sense.”

But, he said, back during World War II his father worked the swing shift at an aircraft factory and bought a .45 automatic pistol for his wife as protection from intruders.

The father came home one night, came into the bedroom, turned on a light and found his wife sitting upright in bed, the pistol clasped in both hands, the barrel aimed directly at him.

She was trying to fire it, but apparently at least one of the multiple safety catches still was on. As he moved slowly around the room and talked soothingly to her, she kept the gun trained on him, still trying to pull the trigger. Her eyes were open, but she was dead asleep.

He finally took the gun away from her and she lay back down without a word. She remembered nothing about it the next morning, he said.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “They’ll catch this guy, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get that gun out of my house.

“If sometime there’s an accident and someone gets killed by it, even if it’s five years from now, it’ll be the Night Stalker that did the killing. That’s what the son of a bitch has done to my family.”