A Horrific Attack
On March 15th, 1982, Arthur Richard Jackson waited for Theresa Saldana outside her West Hollywood home, armed with a five and a half inch hunting knife. When she exited her residence, the stalker ambushed her out of the blue in broad daylight, and violently attacked. He did so with so much force and ferocity, that the blade bent. One of the thrusts punctured a lung. Fortunately, a Good Samaritan rushed to her aid, and subdued the stalker until the cops arrived. The critically injured Saldana survived, but required a four-month stay in a hospital. The Scottish stalker got a fourteen-year sentence for attempted murder, but even behind bars, he continued to torment his victim. From prison, Jackson made numerous threats against both Saldana and the Good Samaritan who had saved her.
Jackson flooded her with letters, and wrote that if he couldn’t kill her because he was behind bars, he had friends on the outside who would. If they did not, he added, then the first thing he would do when released is find her and finish what he had started. Understandably, Saldana lived in fear for her life, and suffered all kinds of mental anguish. She became an advocate of stalker victims, and in 1984, she played herself in a movie, Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story. She followed that up in 1987 with a book, Beyond Survival, in which he recounted her experience and subsequent struggles. As to Jackson, he was deported to Britain after his release from prison, and died there in 2004 at age 68.