Celebrities Face Continuing Risks From Obsessive Fans

Though the most infamous cases of injuries to celebrities and their families trail into history and include the kidnaping of the Lindbergh baby, recent headlines tell a continuing story involving obsessive individuals and the dangers they can pose:

February, 1989: Tina Ledbetter of Camarillo, a 26-year-old shipping clerk, is charged with five counts of making terrorist threats, accused of sending more than 5,000 letters to “Family Ties” star Michael J. Fox, threatening to kill him, his wife, Tracy Pollan, and their unborn child, allegedly because she disapproved of his recent marriage to Pollan.

November, 1982: Actress Theresa Saldana suffers multiple stab wounds in a knife attack outside her West Hollywood apartment. The assailant, Arthur Richard Jackson, a Scottish drifter with a long history of mental illness, testifies at his trial that Saldana, with whom he had become obsessed after seeing her in one film, was the “divine angel” sent to accompany him on his journey to heaven. Jackson, now an inmate at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, is scheduled for parole June 15, when, the INS says, he will be deported to Great Britain.

October, 1980: Beatles fan Mark David Chapman, 25, signs out as “John Lennon” on his last day as a security guard in a Honolulu condominium. In December, he flies to New York and guns down John Lennon as Lennon enters his co-op apartment complex.