Woman says North Texas police ignored stalking case. Experts say she’s not alone.
The calls from the man Virginia Pritchett met at the food bank seemed innocuous at first. The man occasionally called and asked if the 65-year-old woman could give him rides to Walmart or the Dollar Store in exchange for gas money, which she often did. The man seemed gentlemanly and harmless, although she noticed he had a drinking problem.
By April, the man was calling Pritchett up to 40 times a day, she said. The voicemails he left were laden with curses, threats and vulgar language.
In July, Pritchett was terrified and desperate. She went to the Mineral Wells police station and spoke with a police officer, explaining the threats and fear she had faced for five months. She had recorded the hours of voicemails the man left her on a cassette recorder and played them for the officer and, later, a detective.
Pritchett said a detective told her that what she was experiencing was not stalking and that he personally knew the man calling her. He told Pritchett he would personally call the man, who used to be a corrections officer, and ask him to leave her alone.
Eight months later, the man has not been charged with anything. He was never arrested and Pritchett’s case was not sent to the county attorney’s office. Pritchett feels that police did not take her case, or her fear, seriously. Each day, she is afraid her alleged stalker will resurface either with another threatening phone call or with a visit to her home.
“So much is in the hands of the police when it comes to things like this,” Pritchett said. “And it’s so easy for cops to do the wrong thing that can pull the bottom out from under the victim.”
Mineral Wells initially responded to requests for comment from the Star-Telegram, but did not answer subsequent questions. In an initial email, Lt Darby Thomas said the department would provide a response because “there’s always more to the story.” Darby did not respond to subsequent emails or questions.
Pritchett’s case is not unusual. Preconceived notions about what stalking is, and a lack of training for law enforcement about it, can leave victims more isolated than ever, said Patrick Brady, a criminologist who studies stalking.
When Brady talks about stalking, he has another name for the crime — homicides in slow motion.
“These perpetrators start to realize all the vulnerabilities of the victim,” Brady said. “And that they can get away with this because the cops aren’t going to do anything.”
‘I know where you live’
Pritchett first met the man she says stalked her at a food bank in November 2020. The Star-Telegram is not naming the man because he has not been charged with a crime.
The two ran into each other at the food bank several times, each time chatting briefly. She started to give him rides home in December because he did not have a car and lived a few blocks from the food bank. Pritchett, whose father was a World War II veteran, helped the man secure his VA benefits when the man told her he had not been receiving them.
He called more and more. Sometimes he wanted a ride somewhere and other times he wanted Pritchett to come to his house. The two briefly dated, Pritchett said, but she ended the relationship when she realized he had a severe drinking problem and he started to act jealous of her friends and even repairmen who came to her house.
In February, Pritchett hit a deer and was waiting for a tow truck when the man started to call repeatedly. She ignored the calls as she dealt with her crashed car. In the voicemails, he accused her of avoiding him and sounded angry.
He started to call dozens of times a day, sometimes in the middle of the night, to ask her to come over. She told him to stop calling her, but he persisted. He accused her of cheating on him, cursed at her and said he would “(expletive) up” anyone she dated. The man has a military background and worked at a local prison, which made Pritchett worried he had a gun.
In an hour worth of voicemails Pritchett recorded and shared with the Star-Telegram, the man verbally abused her and threatened to show up at her home.
“I think I know who your sugar daddy is and when I find out, it’s gonna be great,” one message said.
“I know who you’re with and I’m going to (expletive) his world up,” another says.
The messages continued, pouring in dozens of times a day.
“Your little boyfriend you have now, he’s going to get his (expletive) kicked. And you can go ahead and get your (expletive) kicked with him, OK?”
“I’m done playing this game.”
“I want to know what the (expletive) is going on.”
On July 30, he called her again.
“Don’t avoid me,” the voicemail said. “I know where you live.”
What is stalking?
The general public may think of stalking as someone being physically followed or watched in their home by a stranger, but the reality is more complicated. Stalking is more common, more dangerous and more complex than most people realize, said Brady, the criminologist who has researched stalking for a decade.
Stalking victims can face abuse through physical means, but can also be terrorized through social media or phone calls or texts.
Legally speaking, the Texas Penal Code defines stalking as when a person, on more than one occasion, knowingly threatens someone and causes “a reasonable person” to feel fearful. The law also applies if the perpetrator threatens the victim’s family members or someone else the victim has a close relationship with.
Texas’ statute, like most states’, does not specify threats need to occur in-person in order to be considered stalking.
About 3.8 million people who were 16 or older were victims of stalking in 2016, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2020. Of those, 67% said they were stalked primarily through technology or social media.
No matter what form stalking takes, the motive is control, said Katharine Esser with the Women’s Center of Tarrant County. In that sense, stalking falls within the same realm as domestic violence and sexual assault, Esser said. Like those interpersonal crimes, stalking can cause intense trauma — regardless of whether the stalking happens online, over the phone or in person.
The terror stalking victims feel is a “special kind of fear and hyper anxiety,” said Kim D’Avignon, special prosecutor with the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.
“Because literally everywhere they’ve turned, that person has been there,” she said. “When you talk to them, it’s terrifying to think what they go through.”
Harassment and stalking are separate offenses, but can overlap. Harassment is more similar to bullying, while stalking involves the threat of property damage or physical injury to the victim or someone the victim knows.
In the past five years, Tarrant County has prosecuted about 250 cases that include a stalking conviction, D’Avignon said.
Going to the police
On July 7, Pritchett reported the man to Mineral Wells police, according to an incident report. The report categorized the alleged offense as disorderly conduct and harassment. Pritchett said the officer told her the case could not be considered stalking since “he didn’t come after you with bodily injury.” Even so, she hoped the case would move forward as at least a harassment charge. She next spoke with a detective assigned to her case.
According to Pritchett, the assigned detective said he knew the man who was harassing her. The detective described the alleged stalker as “a drunk,” Pritchett said, and told Pritchett he would personally give him a call and tell him to leave her alone.
In the weeks after she talked to Mineral Wells police, Pritchett got two more voicemails from the man in July, according to a July 23 police report. In one voicemail shared with the Star-Telegram, the man says, “Don’t avoid me. I know where you live.”
Two months later, Pritchett called the county attorney’s office about her case. An employee told her they had no record of police sending the case over, she said. The man had not been charged with stalking or harassment.
She went back to police, this time with the stalking penal code in hand. She spoke with a sergeant, who said he would reassign her case.
“So it started all over again,” Pritchett said. “And (the detective) is a nice, nice man, but he said the same thing — that stalking mostly happens in person. I could not believe this was happening again.”
A police officer helped Pritchett block the man’s phone number, but he called her from another number. She looked into moving houses, but cannot financially afford to. She asked the county attorney’s office about protective orders, but said she was told those only apply in domestic violence situations. However, according to Texas law, protective orders can apply to situations in which a person is a former partner, such as in Pritchett’s case.
The Palo Pinto County Attorney’s Office did not respond to questions about Pritchett’s case.
“I did the right thing, I took all the tapes, went to the police, I didn’t hold anything back. And I have been made to feel… like I did something wrong by going to the cops,” she said. “It shows you every bit why women are so dang scared to stick up for themselves in situations like this.”
‘Lack of understanding’ about stalking
Police rarely arrest stalking suspects on stalking charges alone. According to the Department of Justice, only 5% of stalking victims reported their stalkers were arrested.
Brady, a faculty member at the University of Colorado, hosts training for law enforcement on how departments can better assess stalking cases. Sometimes, officers might not understand that stalking is far beyond “a lover’s quarrel,” he said.
“It’s the lack of understanding of how somebody else’s behavior is destroying somebody else’s quality of life,” Brady said. “And so saying that it hasn’t been physical to me shows a lack of training and a lack of priority for these cases.”
In stalking cases, the onus might be put back on the victim, Esser said. Victims might be met with scrutiny if they have not blocked the person’s number or gotten a new phone, for example. For people who run online businesses or cannot change their number, those solutions might not be so simple.
“It’s so focused on what the victim needs to do,” Esser said. “We see that in working with sexual and domestic violence, too. We’re always trying to do education in our community .. putting it more on the perpetrator”
Police departments typically require about 13 hours of domestic violence training, which may or may not involve stalking, Brady said. Without training, officers might not know how to investigate stalking cases, which can be complicated due to the broad scope of incidents one case can involve.
If a stalker breaks down a person’s door after months of threatening messages, for example, the case might be considered breaking and entering if the officer doesn’t look at the case as a whole, Brady said.
Some officers simply might not take stalking behaviors seriously, Brady said.
“I understand to (some police), some things might not be considered serious,” Brady said. “But they are the ones there to enforce the law, they are not there to interpret the law. So just because officers don’t think that it’s serious enough doesn’t mean that’s what the law says. And the law says that stalking is this repeated course of conduct that creates a standard of fear or distress in victims.”
All forms of stalking can cause severe trauma, Esser said, and result in post-traumatic stress disorder for victims. For that reason alone, “it should be taken seriously.”
Stalking turned violent
In October, Pritchett and her friend — who is living with Pritchett because her house burned down — heard pounding on Pritchett’s front door. Pritchett and her friend were afraid to answer the door, but she saw a truck outside the house that looked like a pickup truck that the man’s friend owns.
Pritchett had already gone to the police at that point, and said she told the Mineral Wells detective on the case about what happened. He said she would have had to have talked to the man to prove it was him.
“I had to talk to him?” Pritchett said. “I’m not stupid. He could have been holding a gun.”
Stalking victims are at risk of being physically assaulted or killed, research shows. The majority of victims are stalked by someone they were previously in a relationship with, according to a 2020 study on intimate partner violence and stalking. The study found that in 19.3% of cases where someone assaulted their partner, the assaulter had previous stalking behavior.
As a prosecutor, D’Avignon works cases where stalking has turned physically violent.
“I have seen that case and others similar to that when it’s a harassing behavior and it’s building, building, building,” D’Avignon said, “And it ends in something terrible.”
In 2018, a 23-year-old woman in Ohio reported to police someone was sending her strange messages and had sent her a video of herself inside her home. Ellie Weik repeatedly reported someone was stalking her, but, as her friends told the Cincinnati Enquirer, police did not do enough to investigate. Four months after first contacting police, Weik was killed. In April 2019, the man who stalked her was found guilty of her murder.
In any stalking case, the potential for violence and future victims is high, Brady said.
“And why do we have to wait until someone gets hurt before we actually do anything?” Brady said.
Challenges in investigations, prosecutions
Stalking cases can be some of the most difficult for police to investigate and prove, according to law enforcement.
Legally speaking, stalking can be done completely electronically, such as through phone calls and social media. But prosecuting a stalking case that occurred entirely through calls or messages is not easy, police said.
Arlington police detectives Alex Vara and Tracey Dixon investigate their fair share of stalking and harassment cases in the Domestic Crimes Unit. Harassment cases are more common, they said, and stalking cases often initially are reported under other crimes, such as a break-in, property damage or criminal mischief.
Stalking cases are typically time intensive and complicated to investigate. The two detectives might spend months piecing together interactions that to an outsider might seem mundane — such as the delivery of a dozen roses — but to a stalking victim indicates a threat — like that the stalker knows where the person lives.
Dixon recently investigated a case where she tracked a stalking suspect’s movements by analyzing his cell phone’s data. Dixon got a search warrant for the suspect’s location data and used it to track his whereabouts over a three-month period. She realized the man had been inside the victim’s house “so many times that she didn’t even know about.”
In all criminal cases, police have to think about whether a district attorney’s office will accept the charges the department recommends. For stalking charges, repeated phone calls or social media messages alone will likely not be enough, Dixon said.
“We have to filter through these (cases),” Dixon said. “Is this a person who is heartbroken and trying to get you back? Or is this above and beyond and a jury would find this to be inappropriate conduct?”
The DA’s office is reluctant to take stalking cases that do not involve the tangible threat of bodily injury, Dixon said, because case law is not as strong in cases based solely on repeated calls or messages.
When a case relies entirely on calls or electronic messages, Dixon said, the perpetrator may be able to argue their messages are protected under freedom of speech.
“That’s why we tend to look for more things that are a little more physical and tangible,” Vara said, “like the fear of bodily injury and property damage.”
In his research about how police and prosecutors handle stalking cases, Brady has seen prosecutors hesitant to take on stalking cases. When Brady and other researchers analyzed four years’ worth of prosecutors’ notes on stalking cases, they found many prosecutors don’t feel they have enough to prove that a stalker intended to cause fear.
Many times, the crime is leveled down to disturbing the peace. In Texas, stalking is a felony that can result in a two- to 10-year sentence, while disturbing the peace is a misdemeanor punishable with up to 180 days in jail or a fine up to $2,000.
Even in stalking cases where police prove a person physically tormented a victim, the case might still end with a weak sentence.
In Dixon’s recent case in which she used the cell phone data, the man broke into the victim’s house multiple times and “would mess with her head to make her scared and afraid and feel tormented.” The man was sentenced to five years of probation.
Resources
Dixon and Vara emphasized people should not be discouraged from reporting possible harassment or stalking. Victims should always document everything and police can work with them and develop a safety plan.
Brady recommended stalking victims keep a record of everything and reach out to advocates for help, if possible. He also suggested victims conduct a SHARP assessment (Stalking, Harassment, Assessment, Risk Profile). The assessment outlines safety strategies and considerations that are unique to a victim’s situation. The assessment can be done online at coercivecontrol.org.
Victims of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault or other interpersonal crimes can contact the Women’s Center of Tarrant County’s rape crisis 24-hour hotline at 817-927-2737, general counseling services helpline at 817-927-4000 or the main office at 817-927-4040.
