I was in an estate agent’s office with a girlfriend when I heard that Jill
Dando had been shot on her own doorstep. My friend says that I turned pale
and barely opened my mouth for the rest of the day. Like everyone else, I
was horrified that such a lovely woman should have been so brutally
extinguished. But there was more to it than that.
I, too, had been confronted by a murderous madman on my doorstep and the
memory of that day – never far from the surface – suddenly clouded
everything.
A few days later the telephone rang. On the line was the detective inspector
in charge of the Dando case. He asked me a number of questions about what
had happened to me. It was clear that he was trying to establish parallels
between the man who had come to my home (although he was now safely behind
bars) and the killer who had taken Jill’s life. THE letter was on the
standard prison-issue stationery that Her Majesty provides for offenders. I
knew that at a glance. As a high-profile actress in the 1970s and 1980s, I
had often received fan mail and requests for autographs from young prisoners.
But there was something odd about this particular letter which had just
arrived with my morning post. For a start, it hadn’t been forwarded from my
agent’s office but was sent direct to my home address. It hadn’t been
censored either, which was unusual, and it wasn’t franked – so it had not
been posted within the prison system.
I opened it. “I came to do you that day,” the letter began. My mysterious
correspondent, who signed himself Rodney Barnes, then outlined in graphic
detail how he had planned to rape and kill me. Included in the letter was a
diagram of where various mutilations would have been made on my body. “But,”
he added, “you had that baby in your arms and I couldn’t do it.”
Flying immediately upstairs to where my daughter, then aged seven months, was
playing with her nanny, I grabbed her and started to sob. This tiny person
had, unwittingly, saved my life.
Suddenly I was cold with fear. The memory of a brief encounter on my front
doorstep, only two months before, returned in extraordinarily sharp focus.
An encounter that, until the letter arrived, had struck me as no more than a
trifle odd.
It had taken place on an April morning in 1996. I was pottering about our home
in Weybridge, Surrey, and looking after Lucy, our five-month-old baby
daughter. The sun was shining and the daffodils on the lawn had not yet
disappeared. My husband Neil was at the office and our six-year-old son
James was at school.
Lucy was sitting in a bouncy baby chair when the doorbell rang. Inexplicably,
I picked her up and tucked her under my arm on my right hip. I don’t know
why I did that, because the door wasn’t far from the kitchen and I could
easily have left her happily sitting there, chewing on a rusk.
A man was standing on the doorstep. Oddly, instead of looking directly at me,
he presented me with his left profile. I took in that he was wearing a white
jacket, large Elvis-style sunglasses and quite a bit of jewellery – and
assumed that he might be about to try to sell me something.
“Can I take your photo?” he mumbled. “I beg your pardon,” I replied, slightly
taken aback.
“Can I take your photo?” he repeated. “Um, this is a bit unusual. Gosh, not
right now, I’m afraid. I look terrible. I’m sorry, but can you go through
the proper channels?”
“What are they?” “Well, normally, if someone wants to take my photograph, they
contact my agent.”
“How do I do that?” “I’ll give you her phone number – just hang on a minute.”
I then did something totally out of character. I left him standing there at
the open door while I rushed into the kitchen to grab a pencil in order to
scribble down my agent’s number. Only Rodney Barnes knows why he didn’t step
inside and close the door.
When I returned, he was still standing there in profile. I handed him the
piece of paper, apologised again for not being more accommodating and asked
him for his number. To this day I’m not sure why I asked for it, but he gave
it to me. After shutting the door, I remember thinking: “That was weird.”
And: “I bet the number he gave me is fake.”
Half an hour later I rang the number and, as I suspected, it was unobtainable.
Apart from telling my husband about this strange visit, I thought no more
about it until a few weeks later, when I opened Barnes’s gruesome letter.
Afterwards, I shook uncontrollably for the whole day. I felt unable to grasp
the full horror of what might so easily have happened. It may sound bizarre,
but I had long felt deep down, almost in my subconscious, that there was an
invisible shield between real evil and me. My late father had always said
there was an angel on my shoulder, protecting and guiding me, and I had
chosen to believe this. I saw no reason to revise this belief now: after
all, what other explanation could there be for my narrow escape? Barnes, as
I was to find out later, had been on a bitter and murderous rampage against
women – so why would the mere presence of a baby have stopped him?
I rang the local police station and was transferred to CID, who immediately
sent round two detective inspectors to interview me and take the letter away
as evidence. They told me not to worry, that the young man who had signed
the letter was Rodney Barnes, who was in fact locked up – on remand as he
awaited trial for a series of offences.
He had been armed with a gun on the day that he turned up at my front door,
they said, and was in the middle of a violent rampage – seven armed
robberies, a particularly violent rape and seven sexual assaults – that had
started on his birthday, March 25, and ended only when he was captured in
Hurst Green, Essex, on May 14, 1996. And he had made a list of 30
celebrities whom he intended to assault, rob and kill. He called it his “to
do” list. And I was on it.
When he was interviewed about the letter he’d sent to me, he told the police
he had found out where I lived from the elec-toral register in his local
library, that he meant everything that he’d written and that a prison
visitor had smuggled it out of the remand centre and posted it for him.
Nearly a year later his case came to trial. On April 21, 1997, Rodney Barnes
was described by a psychiatrist in court as “one of the most dangerous men I
have seen in my professional career”: a woman-hater, a psychopath and a
schizophrenic who had planned to murder not only 30 celebrities but also
four female members of his family.
Barnes admitted 15 offences and was sent for an indefinite period to Rampton
high-security mental hospital. That afternoon Detective Inspector David
Hills, who had been leading a hunt for Barnes that involved eight police
forces, called me. “It’s over, Fiona,” he said. “He’s never coming out. You
were a very lucky girl.” I sat down and cried.
For me, fame has never been an easy mantle to wear. I certainly never sought
it.
Having started in films at the age of 11 quite by accident (I was “spotted” at
a ballet school) and having made the transition into adult roles, I then had
a fairly successful career as an actress without an ounce of ambition. Some
might dispute that last statement, but not those who know me – I was just
lucky.
Not always, though. At the age of 20 I was starring as Cinderella at the
London Palladium when the downside of fame first kicked in. Unknown to me at
the time, my parents started receiving death threats – aimed at me – over
the phone from a woman who apparently knew my every move. She repeatedly
suggested that I wasn’t going to survive the night.
The police took her threats very seriously, but I still knew nothing about
them; my parents felt that I shouldn’t be distracted from my job. An
intercept was put on their phone but the police were unable to trace the
calls.
Eventually the woman called me at the theatre one day and told me that I
wouldn’t come off the stage alive. All hell broke loose. For the remaining
three months of the run I was escorted on and off the stage by two plain-clothes
officers and had to leave the theatre each night via a tunnel that runs
under the Palladium. The chances of someone taking a pot shot at me from the
back of the stalls seemed unlikely, but the three months of tension took
their toll on my parents. As for me – well, it wasn’t much fun, but I don’t
remember feeling particularly disturbed.
However, 18 years later it was a different story. At 38, I was increasingly
disenchanted with my life in the public eye and was becoming unhappier and
lonelier by the day. Coming off stage with the applause still ringing in
your ears and then returning to an empty flat is the most soul-destroying
feeling in the world. There was definitely something missing.
My career had encompassed films, theatre and television, but I lacked the
ambition to try for the better roles, so I seemed to be coasting and
increasingly directionless. My ubiquitous presence in the media, which
contradicted my real persona (country girl, quiet life), began to grate to
such an extent that I felt fraudulent and schizoid most of the time.
I’m not unaware that, in presenting a glamorous image, I was partly to blame.
But it felt uncomfortable to be the subject of constant comment and
speculation.
Then, halfway through a stint as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, I became
reacquainted with an old family friend – and we fell deeply in love. He
seemed to understand my need to be allowed to relax and be myself and he was
the first man in my life to see beyond my “image”.
By 1996, when Barnes made his visit to my home, I had been married for 18
months and was settled, finally, into the sort of domestic bliss that I had
craved for so long. A low profile suited me, as did having a baby and
bringing up my husband’s son by his late wife. But my idyll had been invaded
by evil and I was shocked to the core.
Distancing myself from my career, I began a new one as an investor in flats
during the buy-to-let boom. We installed a security system with an intercom
so that I didn’t have to answer the door to strangers.
However, in December 1997 I allowed myself to be persuaded to take part in a
small musical revue with a friend. The experience was terrifying. I had
irrational fears and found myself, for the first time in my life, crippled
with stage fright.
Previously, I had starred in big West End musicals, singing in front of 2,000
people without a tremor; and yet I could barely perform in front of 100.
Then it dawned on me. The theatre leaves you vulnerable to stalkers and
overeager fans in a way that films and television do not – because the fans
know exactly where you are, when you are arriving, when you are leaving and
by which door.
This isn’t usually a problem, of course, although I’m convinced there are far
more “nutters” out there than ever before. (In the past, I’d had my fair
share of “stage-door Johnnies” who would follow me around – and, with
breathtaking naivety, I actually had a relationship with one of them for six
months.) But this time I was freaking out. I had a husband, children, a
life. What was I doing? My fears were so powerful that I haven’t stepped
onto a stage since.
Around this time my career as a writer began to take off: I was producing
features for many national newspapers and magazines and eventually landed a
weekly property column in a broadsheet. The synchronicity was perfect: I
could still be creative, with the added bonus that I didn’t need to leave
home.
But still the shadows persisted. Was the Rodney Barnes episode merely the
catalyst that pushed me into saying, “Okay, enough is enough – I’m out of
here”? Or were the psychological repercussions of that experience a great
deal more damaging than I had realised at the time?
I know most people were bemused by the fact that I could walk away from fame
and a decent career just when I seemed on the cusp of a new phase (I had
quit just as I was in talks with the National Theatre, which had liked my
Eliza Doolittle). But I did.
Recently I spoke to the psychologist Dr Pamela Connolly (who did her PhD on
fame) to try to make sense of it all. Not because I regret my decision to
walk away from my career – I never have – but because I’m aware that most
people in a high-profile job would put a Rodney Barnes-type incident behind
them. They might become a lot more wary but they would move on.
“I’m not surprised you decided to give up on a career that you felt put your
personal safety at risk. You were highly traumatised by the threats,” she
told me.
It was only through talking to Pamela that I realised I was displaying
symptoms of posttraumatic stress – such as jumpy nerves, vivid violent
dreams, disturbed sleep, fear of having my life cut short and unexplained
anger. But I hadn’t been personally threatened that day so why had I made so
much of the Barnes incident?
Pamela felt I shouldn’t underestimate the impact of two nasty incidents with
stalkers, even 20 years apart. She also sees fame itself as a trauma and
feels it often produces a split between your true self and your famous self:
“The feeling is so uncomfortable that it can lead a person either to walk
away from fame or to start sabotaging it.”
Of course, what I experienced in no way compares with what Barnes subjected
his real victims to and neither does it compare with being continually
intimidated and harassed by a former lover, friend or complete stranger. Uma
Thurman, Madonna and a whole raft of other celebrities have been targeted by
stalkers who are often no more than overzealous fans, but it’s the
exceptions that stick in my mind.
In 1989, for example, an American actress called Rebecca Schaeffer was
murdered by a stalker when she opened her front door. Since when has it been
dangerous for a “normal” person like Schaeffer, or me, to open our front
doors? We’re not in the Beckham/Kylie/Madonna league, requiring bodyguards
and staff to open our doors and our post. We try to lead a fairly regular
life, as indeed did Jill Dando, who had picked up her dry-cleaning on the
morning that she died.
(The police soon dropped the idea that there were any parallels between my
case and hers. What makes hers unique is that she apparently wasn’t aware of
being stalked and hadn’t received any threatening letters. And now that
Barry George has been acquitted following his retrial, we must assume that
her killer is still at large.)
Motherhood and the passing of the years have dulled any remaining morsel of
dedication that I may have had to a business that served me fairly well for
the first half of my life. When I weighed up the safety of my family against
a few more meaningless years in the spotlight, the decision to put family
first became increasingly attractive. After all, what is fame but a
ridiculous cloak thrown around the shoulders of people who were once
regarded simply as players?
In 1999 we moved away from Surrey. I wanted a rusty Land Rover, two dogs,
wellies and lots of space in which my children could roam. So I sold my
Valentino gowns and we started a new chapter in a rural part of
Gloucestershire, where I now find pleasure in doing the flowers for my local
church. My life is a world removed from how it used to be. It is richer,
simpler, safer.
