Once upon a time, I was just a girl going to college. As a double science major in biology and botany, my days were generally spent going to class, labs, and then, home again, reeking of formaldehyde. I was living downtown in student housing and, on the weekends, would go out dancing with my friends. Pretty typical college student lifestyle but somewhere along the way, Raul A. Diaz found me and turned my life upside down. By the year's end, post-Diaz, I was in fear for my life, had changed my hair color three times, had moved, been forced to drop out of college and disappear forever.
I'll never forget the evening that Diaz first made his presence in my life known to me. I was in my small studio apartment busy making dinner while my cat was watching tv when the phone rang. When I answered the phone with the typical hello, I was greeted with a raspy low voice asking me "what kind of panties do you have on?". I was chilled for a second but then, figured it was one of my male friends playing a prank on me. I started laughing and asked, "Pippet, is that you?", fully expecting my friend to come clean. Instead, the same voice said "I'm not Pippet". After several minutes of back and forth, I realized that it really wasn't my friend playing a prank and quickly hung up the phone. That was the first time I spoke to Diaz. For the next few days, the same person kept calling and asking that same question, over and over again. I hung up the phone, every time, sometimes after shouting "leave me alone!" or "stop calling me!" over the receiver. I was getting about 5 or 6 phone calls a day and the strain of it was starting to show. Still trying to make light of the whole thing, one evening when I had friends over, he called again and one of them took the phone from my hands to say in falsetto, "why do you want to know what kind of panties I have on?". Diaz promptly hung up on them. Although I half heartedly laughed at the exchange, something inside me was sinking. My grades were already starting to slide just after the first week. It felt like there was something terribly discordant in my world. There were nights where I stopped answering the phone entirely. It seemed to me that whenever I answered the phone, it was always the same voice on the other end asking the same inevitable question.
In December of 1992, after two weeks of these phone calls, I knew that I had to do something. I couldn't concentrate in class anymore and worse yet, I was falling asleep during some of the lectures for sleeping at night was becoming difficult. That afternoon after coming home from the lab, I called my phone company to report the problem. The customer service representative was unsettled by what I told him and offered me two options. The first was that I could simply change my number and eliminate receiving the calls entirely. The second was where I filed a police report, which would allow Qwest to put a phone trap on my phone that would log every incoming call to my number. I mulled my options over for a second. It was so very tempting to just change my number and end it right there yet something inside me was screaming that that was a very bad idea. I told the Qwest representative that I was going to file a police report. Even he said he was relieved that I chose to do that, too, feeling that same dread that I was feeling, too. That dread turned out to be universal for something about the incidents were disturbing to the Portland police officer who took my report. Working together to resolve the situation quickly, by the next day, the phone trap was on my phone. For one month, it would log every call coming into my home in the hopes of catching the caller's identification. Every time I got one of these calls, I was to record the time and date of the call. In the end, they would compare my notes to the calls recorded on the trap and hope to catch the caller.
For a month, I took each call and dutifully recorded the time and date. To cheer me up during a rare snowfall, my friends brought over makeshift sleds one night and we spent the evening, sledding down one of the steep streets near my apartment building. It was a great night and I remember laughing and feeling relaxed. At one point, a man had stopped underneath a streetlight to watch us sledding. I remember noting him in his long black leather trench and long dark hair pulled back into a low, tight ponytail and for a moment, he and I locked eyes as my friends and I slid past. He smiled at me and I beamed back, thinking that he was just a random person who stumbled across us and was enjoying our merry making in the snow. We were acting like little kids. What wasn't there to like? By the time Christmas arrived, I was so grateful to finally be free of it and spent the weekend at my grandparents' home in Tacoma where I felt safe. I was so tired that I curled up at the bottom of one of their immense chairs and fell asleep like a cat. I slept that entire Christmas, only to awake for Christmas dinner. The month of having to take every call was nearly over though. I steeled myself for the time remaining until the caller would be caught. Just a few more days and it would all be over. That's what I thought.
The month ended and I handed my notes over to the police. Within an hour, they called me back with the report that they had possibly identified the man calling me. To make sure that my case against him stuck, though, they asked me to take one more call. This one, they said, would be the last but I would need to actually talk to him and try to get him to talk for as long as possible while recording the entire conversation on my answering machine. They would be sending a police officer over to wait for the call so that I would feel safe during the conversation. God knows I did not want to have that conversation but when the police officer arrived, he affirmed that it was very important. Keep him talking as long as possible. Find out all that he knows. It didn't take long for that conversation to take place. He was calling so much by that point that it was maddening. I'll never forget that conversation for as long as I live. It started out with the same raspy voice asking me what kind of panties I had on and I responded with a question myself--"Why do you want to know? You don't even know who I am." My blood ran cold when he told me that my name was Stephanie and then told me my full name. My thoughts were racing wildly for I didn't understand how he knew my whole name. I was only listed in the phone book by my first initial, surname and phone number. I challenged him as to still not knowing who I was or what I even looked like but he described me perfectly. Then started telling me where precisely I lived, what car I drove, which window on the 15th floor of my apartment building was mine and what door in the hallway was mine, too. He knew when I had classes, when I came home. It became very clear why he was asking me every day what kind of panties I had on--that was the only thing he couldn't possibly know. I cannot possibly describe what I was feeling as this went on. If fear was a wind, then I was a wild whirlwind. I was absolutely terrified. After he was done, I couldn't take it any longer and blurted out, "You're trapped" just before slamming down the phone. I must have been wild eyed when I handed the tape over to the officer who had been standing nearby throughout.
Everything changed. He never left my side and instead, a second police officer--a female, soon arrived at my apartment, too. They told me that they would stay by me until he was apprehended. A friend made the mistake of coming over during this period and it was terrifying to watch both officers ready their gun before demanding that he identify himself. It's almost laughable because my friend was also carrying a gun at the time. He heard their guns click on the other side of my door and readied his own. After a brief stand off and my intervention, soon my friend and I both were stuck waiting with the two officers, so plainly ready for anything to go down. It all felt so surreal. People say that just the smallest amount of this story sounds like it came from a movie. Well, that's what it felt like to me at the time, too. I was so dissociated, I couldn't even feel anymore. Everything was just happening around me like a movie though with a keen awareness that this was my life.
Diaz had left his home on foot soon after the phone call with me had ended. According to the Portland police, they entered his home with a warrant for his arrest and searched the premises. It was during this search that they went into his basement and found that Diaz had built a shrine to me there. A homicide detective was called in on the spot to examine the shrine and more police officers were called to start hunting for Diaz. He was finally apprehended after two hours on the middle of the Burnside bridge. I was told by the police that they blocked off both sides of the bridge to arrest him. This was no simple prankster. Raul A. Diaz was someone that had long been known to them since he was just a kid. He was a diagnosed sociopath with a violent criminal record stretching from the time he had turned 18, who had had a juvenile record stretching even before that. He was considered to be very dangerous but had always just skirted the system so that his jail terms were always short. Mostly assaults. Diaz had no record of ever doing anything like he had done with me. The homicide detective said that, with me, Diaz had stepped from violent offender to a violent sex offender. The shrine, he said, indicated that the situation for me was escalating dangerously and that eventually, I would be murdered by Diaz. They showed me his mugshot and I realized that the man under the streetlight on that snowy night had been Diaz. Sometimes danger can be right before you with a light shining down on it and you can still be blissfully unaware that your life is in peril. He had taken that step into the light so that I would acknowledge him, just one step closer to death.
I was told in no uncertain terms that my life was forever changed by one sick, violent sociopath's obsession. I had to hide and hide for the rest of my life. Because of the level of information that Diaz knew about me as per the recorded conversation,, nothing was safe--not even the DMV. My life would be filled, out of necessity, with vigilance. Never be found. Always change my driver's license the day that I was to move and never have it be my current location. Always leave it one behind in a cold trail for him to follow. Avoid as much connection to the address of my residence as possible including bills being put in other names. A lifetime of lost friends and missed reunions who fell out of contact and could never find me again for even my family would not part with any information about me because of Diaz. That's been my life and for years, it was painful but easy. Over the past few years, it's been a constant fight. As privacy rights declined, the risk to my children and I inversely increased. It's become harder and harder to keep my children and I safe. Some people don't care and, frequently, it seems that many people out there don't care much for their privacy. They give it away freely and this allows for an ever more pervasive intrusion and release of information for everyone including those whose lives depend on privacy.
Today, I am happy to report that, according to the Portland Police, Diaz is likely to be dead. Although I will remain vigilant for it is not absolute, I feel free enough to share this whole story publicly without fear that Diaz will read it himself and only feel empowered over the impact he had on me. The incident with Diaz happened in a time where there were no stalking laws. The judge presiding over the case called me, himself during his deliberation and voiced his absolute distress and apology for not being able to protect me better. Diaz, this man whose apprehension required the blocking off of a major bridge in Portland, served three days in jail for the crime of telephonic harassment, two years of mandatory psychiatric care, a two year no-contact restraining order, and was ordered to do 14,000 hours of community service for the total crime of what he had done. There was no limitation on community service. It was the least that the judge could do. Even though now there are jail sentences and some greater protections of victims of dangerous stalkers like myself, I am keenly aware that somewhere out there, there are women whose lives have been led just like mine was for 19 years, living in constant fear and struggling to hide their current location in defense of their lives.
Three days ago, for the first time in 19 years, I discovered that my current location, despite all of my efforts to hide, was publicly released. It took three full days to get that information removed from one single website. It took calling the CEO of the website at his home and more. It was three days of sheer terror and lock down for my children and I. In a way, I am oddly grateful for the incident for, thanks to the efforts of another homicide detective for the Portland Police Bureau, she searched through the records to come to the conclusion that Diaz was most likely dead. Yet it's important to know that these things don't just happen in movies. They happen in reality and for those who think that privacy isn't that important, well, before Diaz, I had taken care in keeping myself protected and this is my story. Sometimes danger can be right before you, standing in the light, and you can still be unaware. You'll never know how dreadfully important privacy is until it's too late. Be careful, be vigilant, and most of all, be safe.
