Don’t Soft-Pedal Feeling Threatened

Wendell Bigelow stood in a San Jose courtroom last week and admitted to a judge he shot Sherry Anne Downing in his kitchen last February because she didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Barely 24 hours after the judge had sentenced Bigelow to spend at least the next 20 years of his life in prison, Kenneth McMurry gunned down Elizabeth Lagman for what was very likely the same reason. Then McMurry killed himself.

Both Bigelow and McMurry became obsessed with their victims when they worked with them at high-tech firms in Santa Clara. And after the office romances went sour, they became executioners.

But would Sherry Downing and Elizabeth Lagman be alive now if they’d tried to protect themselves from the men who killed them the way so many women have tried to protect themselves from the East Bay rapist? You have to wonder if Sherry and Elizabeth died because they didn’t want to seem hysterical, because they hoped the threat would just go away.

Cherie Bourlard, a deputy district attorney who specializes in stalking cases for Santa Clara County’s domestic violence unit, sees about 50 workplace-stalking cases every year. And she said not enough women take their fears seriously when they know who’s threatening them. They are embarrassed about being afraid.

But they’re a lot more likely to be attacked or killed by someone they know than by a roaming psycho.

Women aren’t embarrassed about buying Mace or organizing a neighborhood watch to ward off the East Bay rapist, even though the odds of being a random target are pretty slim.

Still, a lot of women get very scary threats from men who know where they live, and they won’t even pick up the phone to tell the cops they’re worried.

“I always tell people to file a restraining order at the first sign of threatening behavior,” Bourlard told me. “The order won’t stop the obsession, but at least it means we can start managing the threats in the court system.”

Over the years, I’ve heard from dozens of women all over the country who tell me how the court system has let them down when they’ve been terrified of a man who won’t leave them alone. Getting restraining orders is time-consuming and useless, they say. They have complained the orders aren’t enforced or cops just laugh when they say they’ve been receiving “threatening valentines” at work.

There is no doubt a lot of cops and prosecutors have screwed up in the past by not taking these kinds of threats seriously or by not pursuing stalkers and batterers effectively - and women have died because of it. But that’s beginning to change.

California has a stalking law on the books, and prosecutors like Bourlard are teaming up with cops to talk about how they can better protect women from stalkers - including treating office valentines as a threat of violence if the valentinesender is named in a restraining order.

“It’s a very onerous process to get a restraining order,” Bourlard admitted. “But corporations around here are starting to get on the bandwagon. They’re realizing this kind of threat translates directly to the workplace, and they can get a restraining order on behalf of their employee.”

That doesn’t mean restraining orders will always save lives, and some women will still be forced to quit their jobs and move out of town to escape someone who won’t take no for an answer.

But at least women should respect their own fears enough to sound the alarm and improve their chances of not leaving the office one day in a body bag.

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