DRAMMENS TIDENDE 27TH May 1995
BADGERED AND HUNTED FOR THIRTEEN YEARS
For thirteen years an insane man has been making obscene telephone calls and has been stalking Heidi Schøne (31) from Nedre Eiker. This man has sent Heidi more than 400 obscene letters and threatened the lives of both Heidi and her family.
The man is obsessed with Heidi and has followed her movements for many years. For a long period he had a private investigator following her, and he has also several times shown up at Heidi's home and harassed her sexually.
Heidi reported him to the police many times but the police can't do much as long as he does not attack anybody physically.
TERRORISED FOR 13 YEARS
For thirteen years, Heidi Schøne from Nedre Eiker has been terrorised and chased by an insane man who has threatened to kill both her and her family.
After thirteen years of hell Heidi is now telling her story to cast light on the problem she knows that far more people than herself are struggling with; she is being chased by an insane man who is obsessed with her, and she feels powerless. She has on several occasions reported the man to the police, but their response is limited unless he attacks someone physically.
GAVE HER ADDRESS
The nightmare started when she was eighteen years old and gave her address to a half-German, half-Arab man living in England, who she met when she was an au pair. This was to become the start of years of derision for Heidi and her family. For thirteen years the man has been making obscene phone calls to Heidi and sent her more than 400 letters - all of them with perverse contents. She has also been sent books about AIDS and abortion and audio cassettes about herself.
"The worst part though are the 'reports' about me that he has sent my neighbours, family, friends and colleagues in which he is making a number of coarse and false statements about me", says Heidi. She has moved 5 times during all these years and has had several secret addresses. Each time, the Englishman, who works as a lawyer, managed to find Heidi, by means of threatening the lives of the neighbours until they tell him where she is.
"It is an enormous strain on you when you discover that your neighbours have received these 'reports' before you have got to know them yourself", says Heidi.
GOES TO NORWAY
Heidi and her husband, Runar, have since January lived in a new house at Solbergmoen. All of her neighbours have received scandalous 'reports' which claim that Heidi lives a very wild life, and is a morally destroyed human being.
"Even though the man lives in England, he has flown to Norway eight or nine times during these years and has come to my door. The first time I let him in, because I thought he came as a friend, but the next time he came I was already becoming afraid of him, because he had wanted to know where I was if he called and I was not at home", says Heidi.
The next time when he showed up, she slammed the door in his face; he has attacked her door with a knife and scratched obscene words on the door. He has also vandalised the neighbours' doors and written 'I am going to get you' on the windows.
"I changed between being terrified by the man and being totally irritated with him. I have begged, cried and raved when he has called to make him stop bothering me, but it doesn't help. When he started making frightening telephone calls, he calls on hourly intervals the whole night through", Heidi says.
Heidi deeply regrets that she gave her name and address to the man thirteen years ago.
"I was young and stupid and had then a completely different impression of the man than what I have today. I noticed that he followed me on the ferry between England and France, but I didn't give it much thought. We got in touch, had a cup of tea and met four or five times during the ten months I lived in England. We had never had any kind of relationship", says Heidi.
What she couldn't know was the 'nice man' would become completely obsessed with her and spend the next few years following her smallest moves. For a while he had a private detective follow her. Heidi, her family, and her friends have all been threatened by this man, who has also threatened to kill her 9 year old son. In 1988 Heidi was sent funeral cards by the man who told her 'her days were numbered'.
In 1990 the man brought a friend to Bergen, where Heidi was staying, in order to get her. Heidi managed to alert the police who apprehended him and kept him in custody for two days.
"The police didn't have enough on him to charge him and had to release him. The only thing they could do was take him to the plane, and the terror continued", says Heidi, who felt powerless in the face of the methods of this man. After marrying Runar a couple of years ago, the harassment became worse than ever. Immediately after the wedding, she received a letter in which the man wrote that he would have loved to have been there at the wedding night. Only in the last month, she has had more than 40 letters and countless numbers of telephone calls, all with the same message, that she is living a morally depraved life, that the Englishman hates her and is going to get her. The words in the letter are not suitable to print but they are very mean and perverse.
When the man calls, he yells and screams into the receiver and throws curses. Heidi recorded one of these calls and has delivered most of the letters, reports and the cassettes to her lawyer, who is now considering suing the man for defamation, stalking and reduced quality of life.
The last letter arrived about a month ago.
"Early on I cried when I received these kind of letters, now I just wonder when it will end", says Heidi.
Recently she found out that the man is known to the police for a similar case in England, where he is said to have harassed a younger woman. Not long ago he received a restraining order saying that he was not allowed to come near this woman and Heidi is hoping to get something similar done for her. Heidi knows that the man's mother has tried to commit him to a mental hospital, but the man is obviously one of those most difficult psychiatric cases where the person is too sick to be imprisoned, but too well to be committed to an institution.
"The judicial system has to be able to protect normal human beings against insane people", says Heidi, who is exhausted after years of harassment.
Englishman's Comments:-
Although in Drammens Tidende there is not one reference to my being Muslim, they credit me with being "half-German, half-Arab". This is an accurate label but one must remember that Germany invaded Norway in World War Two and the word 'Arab' is often synonymous with the word 'Muslim'. The reference to "half-German, half-Arab" was used in this context as a derogatory term. The contents of this article are nauseating for the wholesale perversion of the truth. I never made a single obscene phone call, let alone continuously over a thirteen year period. Come on you wankers of the press; your desperation is pathetic! As if it was not possible to record one single obscene phone call in thirteen years. Besides which, Heidi had no phone at all from 1988 to 1993. When the newspaper said Heidi recorded one of my calls, no evidence ever subsequently came out on this aspect.
As far as all my "perverse, unprintable letters and cards" are concerned, I would love the press to have printed them in full. Then all will be able to see what total bollocks their claims were.
All these attacks against me in the newspaper articles were complete fabrications by Heidi and I now had the task of trying to counter those gross defamations and terrible lies. None of the newspapers had named me. But why not? Any guesses? One thing that did occur to me was that when Heidi spoke to the press, surely she would have had no idea that I myself would have got hold of the press reports as, of course, she was not to know I was instructing a lawyer at the same time in Bergen and it was he who alerted me to the newspaper articles. Thus from Heidi's point of view she would assume that no-one would have known any better from the stories she was telling, making them, therefore, versions of fact instead of what they really were, total fiction.
