Officer Tells of Arrest in Slaying of Actress

The day after actress Rebecca Schaeffer was slain, obsessed fan Robert John Bardo sobbed and told a policeman, “You’d better arrest me now, I shot somebody,” the officer testified Thursday.

Schaeffer, 21, a star of the sitcom “My Sister Sam,” was shot to death July 18, 1989, when she answered the door of her Fairfax district apartment.

Tucson, Ariz., Police Officer John Norton said he was summoned a day later by a man who said there was a person on a freeway ramp “acting strangely.” Norton, who has since retired from the force, said he saw Bardo walking up and down the exit ramp in the path of traffic. “He was acting kind of strange, like he was a little disoriented,” Norton said. The 21-year-old defendant’s lawyer seized on Norton’s description to press his theory that the former janitor was mentally ill and unable to premeditate Schaeffer’s murder.