by Leslie Rule
Valerie arrived within minutes, but she didn’t knock on the door. Instead she called out, sounding somewhat muffled. “Melissa, can you hear me?”
“Yes!” Melissa yelled, wondering why her friend sounded so far away.
“Shanna’s not here!” Valerie shouted. “Go ahead and open the door!”
The door to the apartment opened inward, and when Melissa opened it, she was stunned to see that the doorway was completely blocked. “Shanna had piled everything in front of the door. It was weird things like barbells and dumbbells and mini cabinets and bookshelves. She pretty much built a fort! I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the apartment without help!”
Valerie had to dismantle the wall of items stacked seven feet high. She moved it, piece by piece. Finally, the doorway was clear, and Melissa was free. “I called Dirk and left a message. I said, ‘I don’t know what you want me to do. Shanna left a lot of stuff in the middle of the hallway. I’m assuming it’s yours.’ He ended up leaving work early and came home.”
Dirk glanced at the cluttered hallway. “Yup. This is the stuff I left over at her place.” Melissa was clearly rattled, and while Dirk tried to be sympathetic, he couldn’t understand why she was as upset as she was. He agreed it was rude of Shanna to return his things in such a reckless manner, but she hadn’t done any real damage. But Melissa felt threatened on a visceral level. Shanna’s dark energy was almost palpable, and the jilted woman wore it like a heavy coat. Melissa tried to avoid her, but that was not always possible. Whenever they crossed paths, she felt drained afterward.
The only person who understood was Valerie. While Dirk told Melissa she was overreacting, Valerie agreed she had good reason to be frightened. But Shanna had to remain in Melissa’s life because she was Peter’s mother, and he was Dirk’s child. Melissa was growing increasingly attached to Dirk, so it looked like they were all in the mess together, one big unhappy family! Melissa hoped that Shanna would settle down, but her rage seemed to just keep building.
“Whenever Peter was with us, Shanna was always getting stranded somewhere. She would call Dirk and say that her car broke down, and she needed him to come get her. She would do anything she could to interrupt our relationship. Sometimes she had Peter with her when her car broke down, and Dirk did not like the idea of his child being stranded in the middle of nowhere, so he’d rush to help.”
Melissa loved the fact that Dirk was such a devoted father, but she was bothered that Shanna used that to manipulate him. They had been together about two months, when they were jolted from a sound sleep at 2 A.M. “There was a big bang on the front door,” Melissa recalls. “Dirk said ‘Who was that?’ and I said, ‘Who do you think it was? It’s Shanna! Go get the door!’ But she wasn’t at the door.” Melissa glanced out the window and saw Shanna in the moonlight, running across the yard toward the parking lot. “She’s there!” she cried. “She’s running to her car!”
“Well, I guess she’s gone,” Dirk said, and they went back to bed.
The next morning Melissa went out to her car, a black Mitsubishi Eclipse. She took one look at it and gasped. “My car was keyed, and I mean, really, really keyed. The scratches went up and down and all around. I loved that car, so of course I was upset. It ended up being $3,700 worth of damage.” But no one had actually seen Shanna vandalize the car. “My mom used to work at the police station, so I asked her if anything could be done. She said I could report it, but nothing would come of it, because no one had witnessed the vandalism. I felt like there was no point in reporting it.” Melissa wanted Dirk to see the damage, but he was at work. She called to say she was on her way over.
“Shanna’s here, too,” he told her.
“Oh great!” Melissa snapped sarcastically. “That’s just wonderful!” Sure enough, Shanna was there, in the parking lot with her toddler in her car with her. Melissa parked her Eclipse, and Shanna approached and said, “I want you to know I didn’t do that to your car.”
“I think you did, Shanna!” Melissa responded with a concerted effort to stay calm. “I think you lie a lot. I think you are a confused, troubled woman.”
Soon another message was left on Dirk’s answering machine. “Melissa,” Dirk said. “I think you’re going to want to listen to this.” He pushed the button to replay the message, and Shanna’s remorseful voice filled the room, her apology punctuated with sobs. “I just want to let everybody know that I’m sorry for how poorly I’ve been reacting. I just remember what it was like when we were a family, and how you played with the kids, and I just miss you!”
“She sounded sincere,” Melissa recalls. “It was genuine. It made sense. The man you love had a family with you, and he doesn’t want to be with you anymore, and it hurts. I get it.” Was Shanna truly sorry? Melissa wondered if Dirk’s ex was mentally ill. Maybe she had no control over her actions. She had compassion for her, but that didn’t make her less afraid.
Shanna followed up on her apology with a special treat. Home-baked chocolate chip cookies, six in all. Four were in a container marked “Dirk and Peter,” and two were in a container labeled “Melissa.” All six cookies appeared identical, and a chill tiptoed down Melissa’s back as she considered a possible reason why Shanna had segregated two for her. “Dirk!” Melissa cried. “She’s trying to poison me!”
He laughed. “She’s just trying to show her nice side.”
“I don’t think so,” said Melissa. She threw her cookies in the trash. She has no idea if Dirk ate his cookies but doesn’t remember anyone getting sick. Shanna’s presence seemed constant. Sometimes she parked outside and sat in her car. Sometimes they glimpsed her driving by. Even when she wasn’t keying Melissa’s car, leaving antagonizing messages or presenting her with suspect cookies, the threat was always there. It was almost worse when things were quiet. What was she planning to do next? Melissa’s normally calm demeanor was replaced by a chronic case of the jitters. “At the time I was a pharmacy tech. And all of a sudden, guess who’s in the pharmacy tech program at Vatterott College?”
The college had recently established a new campus in Omaha, and Shanna Golyar enrolled there and began training to become a certified pharmacy technician. Of all the careers she could have pursued, why did she pick the exact one Melissa had chosen? Was it just a weird coincidence?
When Melissa looks back on her relationship with her stalker, she divides it in her mind into phases. “First it was the rage period,” she explains, adding that the next phase was so peculiar she wasn’t sure how to classify it. It began when Shanna decided to become a pharmacy tech. Melissa tried to shrug that off as a fluke, but then Dirk mentioned that Shanna had extensions put in her hair.
“What does it look like?” Melissa asked him.
“Well,” Dirk said slowly, “now that I think about it, it kind of looks like your hair.”
Melissa felt a prickle of dread. Surely this was not a coincidence! The same job and now the same hair? What was Shanna up to? “I never saw the extensions because they didn’t last long. They fell out. Dirk said that they were put in by a friend of hers who was in cosmetology school. She was still learning, and it didn’t turn out right.”
The fact that Shanna’s extensions had fallen out didn’t give Melissa pause, but the mention of a friend did. Somehow, she could not picture the hostile woman hanging out with a pal, sharing giggles and gossip. “She has a friend?” Melissa asked.
“Well, they’re not really friends. Shanna doesn’t really have friends,” Dirk said, explaining that the budding cosmetologist was an acquaintance who lived in the same apartment complex.
“Don’t you find it weird that she never has friends?” Melissa pressed.
He admitted that it struck him as little odd but that he hadn’t given it much thought. He also felt that there was nothing alarming about the fact Shanna was shopping for a black Mitsubishi. Dirk was relieved to know his son would be riding in a more reliable car, and he agreed to cosign on it.
“But I have a black Mitsubis
hi!” cried Melissa. “Dirk, can’t you see what’s going on here? She’s going to have the same car as I do, she tried to make her hair like mine, and she’s going to college to be a pharmacy tech!”
“What’s your problem?” Dirk countered. “She’s trying to better herself!”
Melissa was frustrated that he couldn’t see what was so obvious to her. She told him, “I don’t have any problem with her wanting a better car. I don’t have a problem with her wanting an education. I don’t have a problem that she’s trying to make herself feel better by looking nice. But it bothers me that she’s doing all of these things to portray me! Dirk, there is something really, really wrong with her! This is so unhealthy. She needs help!”
“You’re overreacting,” said Dirk. “She’s just jealous of you because you’re with me, and she wants to be with me. That’s all it is.”
Except for their difference of opinion on Shanna, Melissa and Dirk got along great, and in the middle of the stalker drama, they married, and Melissa gave birth to a baby boy, Craig. Melissa was thrilled to be a mother, but now she had a biological link to her stalker. Their sons were brothers!
When they moved to a bigger apartment, Melissa had strict criteria. “Me being the nervous wreck that I was, I said ‘Okay, I want an apartment that requires controlled access. I don’t want it on the first floor. I want it on the second or third floor.’ I wanted it higher up, so that she couldn’t just get in through a window. She would need a ladder—if she were going to go to that length. After we moved to the new apartment, we got letters from her about how much better her life was now that she was no longer with Dirk.”
It would have been nice to believe that Shanna was sincere, that she’d finally let go of her obsessions and was enjoying a fulfilling life. But it was obvious she was still focused on them when she sent a letter to Melissa at the drugstore where she worked. Prickling with apprehension, Melissa ripped open the envelope and read the enclosed note. She would have been devastated if she’d believed Shanna’s lies. “I didn’t believe a thing that came out of her mouth! Not one thing!” Melissa stresses. “She claimed that Dirk was cheating on me with her. And she sent pictures.” Melissa scrutinized the blurry images, allegedly of Shanna and Dirk in bed together. “It looked like them, but for all I knew, those pictures were from the time they were together.”
The envelopes of photos of “the affair” continued to arrive over the next week. Melissa trusted Dirk. She figured that Shanna was just trying to get between them again, though one of the photographs startled her. “It was a photo of Dirk without his shirt on, and it showed the new tattoos on his arm. He was in bed, but it wasn’t our bed. Dirk was upset when I got all of those pictures. He went into a state of disbelief.” Melissa assured him she didn’t believe the lies. She assumed the photos were altered in Photoshop, with the new tattoo added. “‘This is right up Shanna’s alley,’ I told him. ‘Why are we so surprised? She has no boundaries. She has no limitations. She’s always coming up with something.’”
The stalking rattled them both, though Melissa was far more bothered by it than her husband. The hostility, after all, was focused on her. Shanna had never keyed his car or trapped him in the apartment with a barricade of furniture. Dirk, however, did not like seeing his wife so troubled. He, too, wished Shanna would stay out of their lives, but the fact she was the mother of his son meant that he was forever connected to her. Despite the troubles with Shanna, Melissa and Dirk had some good years together. He was attentive and loving to both his sons, and she was impressed by what a wonderful father he was. She remembers how he patiently tolerated the kids’ TV shows he found so annoying. “Peter loved Barney, the purple dinosaur. Dirk hated that dinosaur, but whenever Barney came on the television screen, Peter would get so happy, and jump up and down, waving his fists in the air with approval, that Dirk couldn’t help but smile.”
When he was a preschooler, Peter helped them ready the room for the new baby. Melissa agreed with her husband that it was important to make the child feel secure. They didn’t want him to be jealous of the new baby, so they did what they could to make Peter feel included. Dirk held Peter up, and one by one, Melissa put the colorful Baby Toons decals in the little boy’s hands. The youngster then “smacked the stickers to the wall to help decorate for his new baby brother.”
Dirk would continue to be a devoted father, but there came a day when he was no longer devoted to Melissa. He asked for a divorce. They’d been together nearly four years, and she’d hoped their union would last a lifetime. “I didn’t want my marriage to end. He did. I remember thinking, ‘Well, at least Shanna will be gone.’ That’s what I thought.” Melissa was wrong.
Dirk moved out and eventually became engaged again. If his new fiancée had problems with Shanna, Melissa never heard about it. While Dirk and Melissa shared custody of their son, it seemed Melissa had gotten full custody of their stalker! Shortly after the split, Melissa took her Eclipse for an oil change. “I think I’m already in your system,” she told the shop’s receptionist.
“Oh, here you are,” said the receptionist, checking the records. “You were in here not too long ago.”
“It’s actually been quite a while,” said Melissa.
“No, you were here recently. You brought in your 2001 Mitsubishi Gallant.”
A Gallant? Her car was a Mitsubishi Eclipse, but Shanna drove a 2001 Gallant, a similar model to the Eclipse. “I’m sorry?” Melissa said, so stunned she wondered if she’d heard right. “What kind of car?”
Someone claiming to be Melissa had the Gallant serviced at the shop. It had to be Shanna—Shanna who’d copied her hairstyle, followed her into the pharmacy field, and purchased a car so similar to hers—was now using her name!
Possibly the most disturbing thing about the incident was the fact that it had occurred after Melissa’s breakup from Dirk. Why would Shanna continue with her strange stalking of Melissa? Shanna had initially picked on her because she was jealous of her relationship with Dirk. But Shanna was well aware of the divorce and knew Melissa was no longer an obstacle. Why was she continuing with her campaign to harass her? The one shimmering lining in the dark cloud of Melissa’s divorce was her knowledge that she’d be free of the stalker who had kept her on edge for nearly half a decade. But Shanna was not yet done with her. “I always thought she was going to leave me alone after I was no longer with Dirk because I thought that was the reason for the stalking. But she kept at it. After I found out she had used my name, I was worried about identity theft, so I signed up for identity-theft protection.”
The program Melissa chose made it easy for her to check her own credit history for discrepancies. “I recognized everything on the report, except for one thing. A year prior someone had opened an account for a five-hundred-dollar credit line. It was maxed out, and nothing was ever paid. Then the account was closed.” It was a black mark on Melissa’s otherwise perfect credit. “I looked up the company online and saw it sold cleaning supplies.” For a fraction of an instant she wondered if Shanna was the thief but quickly dismissed the idea. “It could have been anybody. I couldn’t think of any reason why Shanna would need five-hundred-dollars’ worth of cleaning supplies.”
Years later she learned Shanna had started a house-cleaning business, and only then would she realize her stalker had used her credit, but at the time she discovered the fraud she had no evidence of that. Melissa never saw a bill for the unpaid debt. “My guess is that she used my name, my information, but her address, so I was never aware I was being charged for those things.”
Melissa moved in with her mom after her breakup with Dirk. One of the more peculiar things occurred about a year and a half after the divorce. Dirk was picking up their son when he mentioned, “Oh, Shanna said that she saw you at the grocery store, and she says, ‘Congratulations.’”
Melissa regarded him quizzically. “Excuse me?”
“Shanna says you’re pregnant.”
“I can assure you, I’m not pregna
nt!”
“She just wanted me to tell you that.”
“Okay!” said Melissa. “Whatever.” She forgot about the odd exchange until three weeks later when a package arrived for her in her mother’s mailbox. It was a sample from an infant formula company, and more samples began to arrive regularly. Puzzled, she phoned the company and asked why she was on their mailing list. She was told, “You signed up online for free monthly samples.”
“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding,” Melissa said. “But I didn’t sign up to get samples. I don’t have a baby and have no use for formula.” The company representative thanked her for calling and said they’d remove her from the list. She tried to shrug it off as a mistake. “But about two months later, I started getting the samples again!” Could Shanna be behind it? She had, after all, made a point to ask Dirk to congratulate her on her nonexistent pregnancy just weeks before the first formula packet arrived.
Melissa didn’t want to jump to paranoid conclusions. “I thought maybe it was a fluke.” Still, she couldn’t overcome the eerie sensation that someone was watching. If Shanna was behind the formula confusion that would mean she knew Melissa’s parents’ address. How would she know that Melissa was living with her mother, and how would she know the address? Could Shanna have followed her there? The idea heightened Melissa’s anxiety. She couldn’t drive to the grocery store without glancing in her rearview mirror to see if she was being followed. If a strange car turned when she did, her heart dropped a beat, and she held her breath until she could be certain Shanna was not behind the wheel of the vehicle on her tail.
