Stalking Knows No Limits, Except Political

One day this summer, the former Scottish drifter who brutally stabbed actress Theresa Saldana was moved from his cell in Vacaville State Prison west of Sacramento to a high-security jail near London to await trial in a 30-year-old slaying.

That he had been moved to another continent after completing his California sentence for the 1982 attack on Saldana brought no consolation to his victim.

“I consider him still a threat to kill me,” Saldana said the day Arthur R. Jackson left the country. “There are still many miles to go. Until he has been convicted there, I cannot be totally relaxed.”

Whether separated by an ocean or the width of the United States, stalking victims live in fear. They file charges in court and get restraining orders; some even succeed in getting their stalkers temporarily behind bars.

But if a victim moves to another state to escape a stalker, the protection of the courts does not follow. There is nothing in federal lawbooks that makes anti-stalking restraining orders enforceable across state lines.

Trying to close the legal loophole, Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) has been pushing through Congress a bill that would make interstate stalking a new federal crime and require a five-year prison term for violation of a restraining order if the stalker were to cross a state line. As a California state senator, Royce authored in 1990 the first-in-the-nation state law that made stalking a crime.

But like most things that matter in Washington, the federal bill became entangled in politics. And with less than a month remaining in the congressional session, the bill’s future is uncertain--at least for this year.

The proposed federal law has been widely accepted in the House and Senate. It is, after all, a cause with many famous faces: Saldana, Madonna, Jodie Foster, Michael J. Fox and television sitcom star Rebecca Schaeffer are among the Hollywood celebrities who have been pursued by stalkers. Schaeffer was shot to death on her doorstep by a fan in 1989.

The recent release of “The Fan,” Hollywood’s celluloid tale of a stalker who follows a celebrated baseball player from state to state, also has given Royce a vehicle with which to publicize his interstate anti-stalking legislation.

In presenting his case before Congress, however, Royce largely cast the problem as one that victimizes ordinary citizens--people like Northern California resident Kathleen Gallagher Baty, who was terrorized for more than 12 years by a former high school classmate.

The obsessed stalker repeatedly ignored restraining orders and once held her hostage at knifepoint, Baty told a congressional panel. He went to prison and she moved to Florida to escape him, she added.

But when the stalker was released from custody two years ago, he cut off the electric monitoring bracelet ordered as a condition of parole and was en route to Florida before being captured in Nevada, she testified.

“In so many instances, stalking is not just contained in one city or state. The need for a national law is imperative,” Baty told reporters in May when the bill passed the House and was sent to the Senate.

There, the legislation had a strong ally: Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), herself the victim of a stalker who broke into her campaign office and drove an ice pick through one of her posters.

The bill was on course when an unexpected legislative maneuver threw it into the path of the powerful National Rifle Assn.

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) successfully added a provision to prohibit people convicted of domestic violence from possessing firearms. That one move stirred the debate and the opposition of the pro-gun lobby, and made the anti-stalking bill controversial.

“The Lautenberg amendment has held it hostage,” Royce says. He concedes that there is not enough time remaining in the session to muster political support in the House for the new version of the bill.

The next best chance for Royce’s cause could come next week, when the Senate votes on the Defense Department’s authorization bill. Hutchison has succeeded in getting the anti-stalker provisions added to the final House-Senate conference version of the defense bill. If approved by the Senate, that legislation will then be sent to the White House for the president’s signature.

Hutchinson was able to link the two bills because the anti-stalker legislation includes provisions banning stalking on federal premises such as military bases and post offices, where several incidents of deadly violence have occurred in recent years.

Royce shudders at the thought that his second attempt at a federal anti-stalking bill might end in failure. “That’s depressing,” he says. “But I think we will get it passed.” If not, then he will just try again next year, he says.

Baty is less forgiving of the political process that is holding up the bill. Should it fail to reach the president’s desk this year, she says, she will be “absolutely disgusted that political agendas mean more than the safety of the public.”