Nowhere to Hide

TISHA JACKSON WAS SCARED, AND SHE KNEW ONE THING: She had to get out of Independence. One balmy night in June 1993, she and her mom sat up talking, smoking cigarettes, and looking at maps, carefully planning a route out west. At midnight they started packing Tisha's car full of everything she would need to set up a new household, along with Tisha's traveling companion, a rotund brown and white tabby named Kitty. Tisha wanted to get on the road before the sun came up. There was less chance of being followed that way.

Lack of sleep wasn't a problem -- the adrenaline rush took care of that. At 22, Tisha was ready to start over. Fearing for her life, she set out to flee the violent ex-boyfriend whose stalking had escalated to death threats in the four months since Tisha had broken up with him for the last time.

As Tisha's mother, Pat Stanger, helped her daughter prepare to head across the country to Washington state, she was mostly unaware of the worst of what had been happening to Tisha that spring. She had heard some of the menacing messages Tisha's ex, "Bob," had left on the answering machine at the house the women shared. But she didn't know that Tisha was parking in a secured area reserved for doctors at Park Lane Medical Center, where she worked as an administrative assistant for doctors. She had no idea that the hospital's private security guards escorted Tisha to and from her car every day. She didn't know about the frightening notes left on Tisha's car or that someone had broken into the office where Tisha worked and had trashed it. She just knew her daughter would feel freer somewhere else.

"I understood," Pat says, sitting in the living room of the home she now shares with Tisha on 15 acres in Holden, Missouri. "I took off to Texas once in '71 or '72. Tisha was just a baby, so I packed her up and took her. I had gone through that, where you just need to get away. I knew I was going to miss her, but I had to help her."

Tisha hugged her mom, got into her car, and pulled out of the driveway. She was terrified that Bob was watching. Hurtling through far western Iowa on I-29, she kept checking her rearview mirror. She didn't shake that nervousness until she'd been on the road for more than 12 hours. Her car had 97,000 miles on it, and she hoped it would make it through the mountains without breaking down.

"I was so scared the first day, but I was determined that if he was following me, I'd lose him. I was on a mission. I was really stretching every gallon of gas, and I was going, like, 90 miles an hour," Tisha remembers. "I made it all the way to South Dakota, and I was so relieved. I called my mom from the hotel room that night and I was like, 'Mom, I'm okay!'"

The next day Tisha made it to Washington. For a few weeks she stayed with her brother, Dale Jackson, and his wife, who lived in an apartment in Tacoma near Fort Lewis Army Base. Dale was an artillery specialist, and he had encouraged Tisha to move out west where he could keep an eye on her. While Tisha stayed with them, she filled her days by scanning employment listings, interviewing for jobs, and hunting for apartments. Tisha wrote letters to her mom, telling Pat about her job prospects and the sweet, good-looking guy she had begun dating. It never occurred to her not to put her return address on the envelopes.

Only her mother, her grandparents, and her father, Gary Jackson, knew where she really was. She had told all of her friends and other relatives that she was moving to South Carolina, where a close friend of hers lived. She hoped the rumor would reach Bob, to throw him off her track.

In Washington, things finally started to gel for Tisha. She found an apartment and a job, and she was seeing her new boyfriend almost every night. "It was just great," Tisha recalls.

After a few weeks in her new place, Tisha got her phone installed. One afternoon about a week later, when she was alone in the apartment, her phone rang. She picked up the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Tisha." It was Bob's voice. "I'm down the street."

Tisha panicked. How had he found her? Her heart pounded and she began to shake.

"I'm here. I'm right down the street," Bob sneered. "I'm at a pay phone at a convenience store down the street and I know where you live and I know who you're hanging out with. I'm gonna kill him and I'm gonna kill you!"

Click.

Tisha had disliked Bob from the moment she'd met him. In the fall of 1987 she was a senior in high school and had been raped over the summer by a stranger, a man police called the Westport rapist, who had never been caught. That fall she dropped out of Fort Osage High School. She was depressed, and all she wanted to do was sit around at home.