Robert John Bardo

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert John Bardo had a sentence ready when the apartment door opened: "I forgot to give you this." The date was the 18th of July 1989, and the woman in the doorway was the actress Rebecca Schaeffer, a stranger he had stalked for three years. He then shot her. How does a young man from Tucson, Arizona, build an obsession that lasts that long? How did he find the address of a Los Angeles actress who had never agreed to meet him? And why did one killing push the United States to change its laws on privacy and stalking?

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• 2. A Troubled Childhood

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  Robert John Bardo was born on the 2nd of January 1970, the youngest of seven children. His mother, June, was a native of Japan. His father, Philip, was an American non-commissioned officer in the United States Air Force who had been stationed there. The family moved often before settling in Tucson, Arizona, in 1983.

  Reports describe a painful childhood. One of his siblings abused him, and he was placed in foster care after he threatened to take his own life. Mental illness ran in the family, and Bardo was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

  At the age of 15, Bardo spent a month institutionalized for emotional problems. He left Pueblo Magnet High School in the ninth grade and found work as a janitor at Jack in the Box.

  In the eighteen months before Schaeffer's murder, he was arrested three times, on charges that included domestic violence and disorderly conduct. His neighbors also described strange and threatening behavior toward them that nobody could explain.

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• 3. A Pattern of Obsession

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  Samantha Smith, a child peace activist, was the first public figure to draw Bardo's attention. Her return home from the Soviet Union inspired him to travel to Maine and meet her. A run-in with state police over a traffic offense made him worry that he was drawing attention to himself, and he went home. He kept making plans to stalk her until she died in a plane crash in 1985.

  Bardo later claimed he turned to the pop stars Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. Neither fixation became stalking, he admitted, because he could not find a workable way to carry out his plans in New York City.

  Numerous letters to Rebecca Schaeffer came next. Bardo then flew to Los Angeles and tried to get onto the set of the CBS series My Sister Sam, in which she played a starring role. He arrived at the studio gates carrying a huge teddy bear and flowers. Security at Warner Bros. Studios Burbank, then called Television Studios Burbank, refused him entry and encouraged him to go home.

  Warner Bros. Studios Burbank had a policy that executives and actors be told about uninvited advances. Security later admitted that Bardo made very little fuss and left when ordered, so the encounter seemed too trivial to report. More than a month later he returned, this time carrying a knife, and threatened to kill the security personnel. Once more he was ordered to go home. Schaeffer was never told about the first visit.

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• 4. The Address and the Gun

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  The number 21 stood between Bardo and a handgun in Tucson. He first planned to buy one there, but the gun store turned him away because he was younger than the required age of 21. So he asked his older brother, Edward, to buy a Ruger GP100.357 for him.

  In 1989, a year after My Sister Sam was cancelled because of low ratings, Bardo went looking for Schaeffer's home. He hired a detective agency in Tucson and paid it $250 to find her address in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. The agency tracked it down through California Department of Motor Vehicles records. That route through motor vehicle files would soon draw the attention of Congress.

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• 5. Morning in Fairfax

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  The Greyhound bus left Tucson at 7:00 pm on the 17th of July with Bardo and his handgun aboard. It reached Los Angeles at 5:00 am, and he began canvassing the Fairfax neighborhood.

  At Schaeffer's apartment the intercom was not working. She was waiting for a script for The Godfather Part III, which she expected to be delivered to her doorstep. That afternoon she was due to audition for the role of Mary Corleone.

  Bardo showed her an autograph she had sent him years earlier. He angrily confronted her about her performance in Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, a film released a few weeks before. In his eyes, she had "lost her innocence." Schaeffer turned him away.

  After an hour at a nearby diner for breakfast, Bardo returned to the apartment at 10:15 am and rang the doorbell. When Schaeffer opened the door, he held the handgun in the doorway, entered at gunpoint and shot her in the chest. He fled. Police officers arrived just after he had escaped. Paramedics took Schaeffer by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead on arrival thirty minutes later.

  Soon afterwards, Bardo boarded another Greyhound bus, bound for Tucson.

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• 6. Capture and Trial

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  Interstate 10 was where Bardo was spotted on the 19th of July, wandering aimlessly through traffic. He was planning a suicide attempt. He was arrested and held in Pima County jail, then eventually extradited to California. In custody he was housed in a sensitive needs unit, which holds gang members, notorious prisoners and people convicted of sex crimes.

  His 1991 trial turned on his mind rather than on his guilt. His attorneys conceded that he had murdered Schaeffer but argued that he was mentally ill. The forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, testifying for the defense, said that Bardo had schizophrenia and that his illness directly led to the killing.

  Bardo claimed that the U2 song "Exit" had influenced him. The song was played in the courtroom as evidence, and Bardo lip-synched the lyrics. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  In a 1992 interview for 48 Hours, recorded in his prison cell, Bardo said he had not set out to kill Schaeffer. His plan, he said, was to take his own life with the handgun.

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• 7. A Red Paperback

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  A red paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye was in Bardo's possession when he killed Schaeffer. He tossed it onto the roof of a building as he fled. He insisted this was a coincidence and that he was not imitating Mark David Chapman.

  Chapman had carried a copy of the same novel on the 8th of December 1980, when he shot and killed the former Beatle John Lennon. Chapman later said in interviews that he had received letters from Bardo before the Schaeffer murder. In them, Bardo asked what life in prison was like.

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• 8. Laws and Aftermath

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  The Driver's Privacy Protection Act was Congress's answer to the way Bardo had found Schaeffer's address. The federal law prohibits state Departments of Motor Vehicles from disclosing the home addresses of residents. After the murder, the first anti-stalking state laws were also enacted in the United States, including California Penal Code 646.9. The case reached television as well. "Star Struck", an episode from the second season of Law & Order, was partly based on it.

  Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County, California, was where Bardo was stabbed 11 times on the 27th of July 2007, eighteen years after Schaeffer's death. He was on his way to breakfast in the maximum-security unit. Two shivs, which are weapons made by inmates, were found at the scene. He was treated at the UC Davis Medical Center and returned to prison. The suspect was another convict, serving 82 years to life for second-degree murder.

  In 2019, Bardo expressed remorse. "She was irreplaceable. I think about her every day because she should be here. I realize what I've done and I feel a lot of tremendous guilt." As of 2026, he is serving his life sentence at Avenal State Prison in Avenal, California.

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