Lee Gilman*, a twenty-five-year-old art director, attracted the attention of her West Los Angeles neighbor. The two dozen white Chrysanthemums left at her door while she was away one day were accompanied by a message that read, "I've been admiring you. You're beautiful." Signed "Stanley," the note had a happy face at the bottom.

Over the next month, her faceless admirer wrote her rambling letters, several of which contained pages of incoherent poetry. She'd walk down the street to the market, be gone just twenty minutes and return to a new missive. Each contained the same line: "If you want to meet me, leave a note under the left rear tire of your MG."

The underlying message couldn't have been clearer to Lee. Somebody was watching her every move. At night she would sit in her tiny house with the lights off and look up at the four-story apartment complexes that rose high above her on either side to see if she could spot the silhouette of someone looking down. "I was totally paranoid by this point," she said.

She called the police who told her they could do nothing until the author of the notes actually did something to her. Not a comforting notion. Afraid, she called an ex-boyfriend who drove up on his motorcycle and stayed with her late into the night. "I didn't count on your motorcycle friend," read the letter she received the following day. This time, a sad face replaced the happy one at the bottom of the page. Finally, Stanley stopped writing. "I guess you're not going to respond," read his final note, his signature happy face cut through with a dotted line.

Lee heard nothing more and never saw a trace of him. A month later, however, her cat disappeared. That day, when she opened her mailbox, she found her cat's collar, so mangled that it looked like it had been put into a Cuisinart. Since the collar tags listed only the cat's name and Lee's phone number, whoever put it there had to be familiar enough with her to know the cat was hers.