Obsessed: The Stalking of Theresa Saldana

Saldana, a rising young movie actress, was attacked by a knife-wielding psychopath outside her West Hollywood home in 1982 and nearly killed. The stalker was Arthur Jackson, a paranoid schizophrenic born in Scotland. Forensic psychiatrist Markman ( Alone with the Devil ), who testified at Jackson's first trial, and journalist LaBrecque ( Lost Undercover ) have done a notable job of analyzing the etiology of Jackson's psychosis and of attempting to penetrate the stalker's bizarre logic, which involved an identification with a bank robber named Joseph Cretzer, who died in a riot at Alcatraz in 1946. Jackson believed that if he killed Saldana and was executed for it, he, Cretzer and the actress would be united in heaven for eternity. That Jackson got 16 years in his first trial in 1982 for attempted murder and almost six years in a second trial in 1990 for writing threatening letters to Saldana is incidental, the authors believe, to the bigger issue raised by the case, which is the inability of the U.S. justice system to give either protection to victims or treatment to the mentally ill. The book delivers an important message, but whether general readers will be drawn to what is essentially a psychiatric case history is questionable. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)