Approaching and Stalking Public Figures—A Prerequisite to Attack
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Commentary: Approaching and Stalking Public Figures—A Prerequisite to Attack Park Dietz, MD, MPH, PhD, and Daniel A. Martell, PhD The concept of studying approaches to public figures (i.e., physical pursuit or stalking) arose as a proxy measure to aid in the development of tools to prevent assassination, a low base rate event. In this commentary, we review the origins of this concept and the historical record of public figure attacks in the United States that formed the empirical basis of the concept, we describe case examples of approaches toward public figures in the United States that did not result in injurious attacks, and we provide a synopsis of our findings on the ways in which communications predict approach. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 38:341–8, 2010 Public figures are besieged by a constant onslaught of nalists, and the public have taken in assassination. unwanted attention from mentally disordered per- Before the 1980s, the only empirical studies of these sons in search of identity, love, power, relief, and populations focused on psychotic visitors to the contact. Within this population of mentally disor- White House1 and other government offices,2 but dered persons in pursuit of public figures are those the 1980s saw additional studies of psychotic visitors who would and do assassinate heads of state, govern- to the White House3,4 and the first study of the re- ment leaders, the leaders of social movements and lationship between communications and physical businesses, and celebrities from the worlds of enter- approach.5 In the two subsequent decades, a handful 6 tainment, news, and sports. The public learns of all of studies (cited by James et al. ) has continued to of the killings, some of the attacks, and hardly any of contribute to our knowledge base. 6 the voluminous letters, telephone calls, e-mails, and The central finding of James et al. in their study visits that warn of impending attacks or, to be more of abnormal attentions to the British Royal Family is precise, would warn if they were made known to the that those who engage in abnormal communications appropriate parties and if those parties could discern toward the Royal Family are significantly more likely which features of the many communications and to approach physically if they evidence mental illness visits are predictive of attacks. and grandiosity, use multiple communications, em- Those who pursue public figures—and from ploy multiple means of communication, and are con- whose ranks most assassins in Western cultures are sidered to be driven by motivations that concern a drawn—were all but neglected by the research com- personal entitlement to the prominent individual. munity until the 1980s, despite the gravity of the These findings beautifully replicate the earliest em- problem and the considerable interest scholars, jour- pirical studies of the relationship between abnormal communications to Hollywood celebrities and mem- bers of the U.S. Congress and physical approaches Dr. Dietz is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sci- 5,7,8 ences, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA; toward those public figures. This replication is President, Threat Assessment Group, Inc., Newport Beach, CA; and the virtue of the scientific method: it produces repro- President, Park Dietz & Associates, Inc., Newport Beach, CA. Dr. Martell is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehav- ducible results. ioral Sciences, Semel Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA David Geffen Significant portions of those early studies were School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA. Address correspondence to Park Dietz, MD, MPH, PhD, 2906 Lafayette Road, Newport Beach, CA never made readily available to the public, but rather 92663. E-mail: [email protected]. were provided to only a handful of investigative Disclosures of financial or other potential conflicts of interest: None. agencies (the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Capitol Volume 38, Number 3, 2010 341 Commentary Police, and the FBI) and to the National Institute of (4) Mentally disordered persons communicate Justice, primarily to avoid their misuse by those seek- with public figures at rates much higher than ing to mislead investigators, frighten public figures, the rates of physical approach. or carry out a successful assassination. In the inter- (5) A behavioral science capacity to predict from vening years, concern over the publication of inves- their communications who among the men- tigative methods has all but evaporated, perhaps one tally disordered will approach a public figure of the effects of the Information Age. would assist in the prevention of attacks on Because it is now more widely recognized, as public figures by making subject-specific in- stated by James et al., that “Approach is a behavior of terventions possible.5 particular concern in the protection of public figures . .” (Ref. 6, p 329), we thought it might be of inter- We therefore conducted empirical investigations est to readers and for the historical record to delineate of two populations: those who pursued celebrities in how the study of approach behavior and its predic- the entertainment industry and those who pursued tors was first conceived. members of the Congress of the United States. We The concept of studying approach behavior arose reduced the number of descriptive and predictor as a solution to a methodological problem encoun- variables from over 3,000 in the pilot study to a few tered in designing a research proposal submitted to hundred and were able to provide descriptive statis- the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in September tics for representative samples of these persons and 1983. NIJ had solicited proposals that would help their behavior. Most important, we determined illuminate the problem of attacks on public figures, which features of letters indicate greater or lesser risk and one of the central problems in devising a means that the subject would attempt to gain physical prox- of doing so was the low base rate of such attacks. imity to the public figure, making an attack possible, and constructed predictive scales that could be ap- Although the prediction of very low base rate events 5 is beyond the reach of the methods of the behavioral plied to letters by trained clinician raters. sciences, an event as important as assassination com- The historical study of attacks on public figures pels efforts to overcome this mathematical barrier. played an important part in our conceptualization of Criminologist Frank Zimring9 suggested that inves- these events, and a condensed version of our obser- tigators explore proxy measures to compensate for vations on these attacks from the public record and the inability to study rare events, such as assassina- some examples of the approaches we studied are given in the following section, taken nearly verbatim tions. We did not explore the particular proxies 5 Zimring suggested, but another came to mind in from our 1989 report to NIJ. reading about past assassinations. In 1989, our logic was this: Attacks (1) Most if not all attacks to date on American Table 1 gives examples of attacks on public figures public figures by the mentally disordered in the United States that fulfill the following criteria: were preceded by pre-attack signals in the form of threats, inappropriate communica- The assailant was mentally disordered. tions, or inappropriate visits concerning The attack would have been foreseeable if pre- some public figure, but these signals were attack signals had been reported and interpreted not necessarily detected, reported to the rel- without error. evant parties, or correctly interpreted. A public figure was injured in the attack. (2) Each instance in which a public figure has The pre-attack signals emitted by these offenders been injured or killed by a mentally disor- were chiefly inappropriate communications to a dered person has occurred when the subject public figure, inappropriate visits to a public figure, and public figure were in close physical or statements to third parties of their intention to proximity. harm a public figure. Note that in many instances, (3) Mentally disordered persons approach pub- the public figure who was contacted, visited, or lic figures at rates much higher than the rates threatened was not the one who was later attacked of attacks. and injured. Moreover, the communications to third 342 The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Dietz and Martell Table 1 Examples of Attacks in the United States in Which a Richard Lawrence in 1835; on President Nixon by Mentally Disordered Offender Injured a Public Figure After Giving a Pre-attack Signal Samuel Byck in 1974; on President Ford by Lynette Victim Offender Year Fromme and again on President Ford by Sara Jane Moore in 1975; and on actor Michael Landon by Abraham Lincoln, President John Wilkes Booth 1865 James A. Garfield, President Charles J. Guiteau 1881 Nathan Trupp in 1989 (during which two guards William McKinley, President Leon Czolgosz 1901 were shot and killed at Universal Studios). Neither Theodore Roosevelt, former John Schrank 1912 Byck nor Trupp achieved proximity to their in- President and presidential candidate tended victims during the crimes. Other examples Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana Carl Austin Weiss 1935 have never been released to the public. Eddie Waitkus, baseball player Ruth Ann Steinhagen 1949 We know that several of the assailants who even- John F. Kennedy, President Lee Harvey Oswald 1963 Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. Senator Sirhan Sirhan 1968 tually succeeded in injuring a public figure had and presidential candidate stalked them previously while armed, but had not William Lennon, Lennon sisters’ Chet W. H. Young 1969 acted because of circumstances they saw as unfavor- father Jim Hicklin, radio personality Edward Taylor 1973 able. It is likely that there have been many such in- John Lennon, singer Mark David Chapman 1980 stances that were never detected.