‘Fatal Attraction’ Defendant Fails to Win Bail Reduction

A judge, saying she feared that a defendant’s “fatal attraction” might drive him to violence again, refused Friday to reduce the $150,000 bail of a young Irvine man who acknowledged stalking a former classmate for seven years before attacking her last year.

After hearing testimony for the first time from the victim in the case, Orange County Municipal Judge Margaret R. Anderson also ordered the defendant, 21-year-old Steven Schumacher, to stand trial on assault charges next month.

“I’m glad to see he won’t be getting out (on reduced bail),” said the victim, 22-year-old Catherine Cline, who went to school with Schumacher in Irvine but says she never knew him. “I’ll sleep better tonight.”

After allegedly attacking Cline outside her home in June, 1989, with a baseball bat, Schumacher underwent psychiatric treatment at Patton State Hospital for a year. But he has now been deemed mentally fit to stand trial and could face up to seven years in prison if convicted in the assault.

Schumacher has pleaded not guilty. His attorney, Frank O’Rourke, has not revealed his legal strategy in defending his client, other than to say that Schumacher, despite great strides, needs continued treatment. The prosecution has needlessly “interfered” with that treatment, the lawyer maintained.

O’Rourke sought at Schumacher’s preliminary hearing Friday to win a bail reduction.

He asserted that the young man who sat stoically beside him Friday was “dramatically different” from the one he had tried unsuccessfully to communicate with and defend just a year ago. And Schumacher no longer wants anything to do with Cline, O’Rourke told the court.

Anderson, however, said she could not be sure that Schumacher does not still harbor psychotic thoughts toward Cline.

During about an hour of viewing the defendant at the defense table in court, she said, “I have not seen a change of expression on (Schumacher’s) face. I have not seen him move. It is as though there was a robot sitting next to (O’Rourke).”

The judge said: “What we have here today is a person who has fixated upon one person--a fatal attraction-type thing. I hate to use the name of that movie, but that’s exactly what it is. . . . She’s very lucky to be alive today.”

Cline herself acknowledged as much during her testimony about the terrifying night of June 19, 1989.

She recounted arriving home in Placentia around 11:30 p.m. and sensing that she was being watched or followed as she walked from the apartment-complex parking lot.

Within seconds, she saw a man--whom she identified as Schumacher--standing with his hands raised above his head, posed to strike her. She ducked, but the assailant made contact on the side of her head with what turned out to be a baseball bat, leaving her temporarily blacked out.

She came to a short time later “screaming for my father,” she said. “All I could think of was just, ‘Get to the apartment!’ ”

Schumacher was arrested a few days later in San Francisco. He acknowledged the attack under questioning by Placentia investigators but said that he only intended to hit Cline once with the bat and that he never intended to hurt her.

Cline was in the hospital for two days. She still suffers from some hearing loss as a result of the attack and has suffered some dizzy spells as well, she said.

Needing only to show that Schumacher probably was responsible for the attack, Deputy Dist. Atty. James Hicks did not enter evidence Friday about the preceding months and years.

But Cline and her family, backed by accounts from police investigators, said Schumacher had been harassing her for several years before the attack, making threatening phone calls and following her. Cline said she wrote to the defendant’s mother to try to persuade her to intercede and has now brought a civil action against the mother because she allegedly did not.

Schumacher himself acknowledged in his police interview that he had been obsessed with Cline for up to seven years, keeping detailed logs of her whereabouts and even buying a van specifically so that he could follow her better.