Yeardley shares a personal story of being targeted and stalked at a time in her career when her success and notoriety as an actress were starting to get some much sought-after traction. Brought up to assume she can handle whatever comes her way without asking for help, Yeardley quickly finds herself in over her head. Zibby, Detective Dan and Detective Dave help her unpack the details of this cautionary tale.
Read TranscriptYeardley: I remember he put both hands on my shoulders and he looked me in the eye. I remember he repeated my name three times, “Yeardley, Yeardley, Yeardley. I wanted to call you last night and tell you I love you, and I’ll take care of you and don’t worry-
Zibby: Oh, shit.
Yeardley: -and then he left.”
Yeardley: I’m Yeardley.
Zibby: And I’m Zibby. And we’re fascinated by true crime.
Yeardley: So, we invited our friends, Detectives Dan and Dave.
Zibby: To sit down with us, and share their most interesting cases.
Dan: I’m Dan.
Dave: And I’m Dave.
Dan: We’re identical twins.
Dave: And we’re detectives in Small Town, USA.
Dan: Dave investigates sex crimes and child abuse.
Dave: Dan investigates violent crimes. And together, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases, including assaults, robberies, murders, burglaries, sex abuse and child abuse.
Dan: Names, locations and certain details of these cases have been altered to protect the privacy of the victims and their families.
[music]Yeardley: Today on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dave.
Dave: Good morning.
Yeardley: Detective Dan.
Dan: Hello, everyone.
Zibby: And this episode is dedicated to a story of yours, Yeardley.
Yeardley: Yes.
Zibby: I’ve heard this story a few times over the course of our friendship, but I’m really pleased you’re going to share it with our Small Town Family, because how this story comes about might be specific to your notoriety, but the universality of your response to this event is, I think, really relatable.
Yeardley: Thank you. I hope so.
Zibby: Okay. So, set the stage for us.
Yeardley: Okay. It was 1993. And to give you some context, Herman’s Head had just been canceled, but had been on the Fox Network for three years as a sitcom. The Simpsons had exploded into the stratosphere as a half hour episode in, basically, January 1990, so we were really still very much on the upswing. And my first marriage had just collapsed.
Two other things that were happening at the time. My first husband and I, we‘re going to call him, Jeff, had split up. I remained in the little house we had in the San Fernando Valley in California. While I was there and before Herman’s Head was officially canceled, I started to get these anonymous love notes on my front door in the middle of the night. And the context was, “If I can’t have you, nobody can.”
Zibby: What?
Yeardley: So, my first husband was gone. So, I was there by myself. My house, it was this tiny little bungalow house, like, two bedrooms. It was 1,100 square feet. You could just walk right up to the front door. So, it wasn’t like, if people have this notion that I lived in this fancy gated community behind a lot of big walls. That wasn’t the case at all. And so, it was really, really unsettling to open the door every morning, and this note would flutter to the ground.
Zibby: So it was, like, taped to the door, and then you’d open the door and it would flutter to the ground?
Yeardley: It was actually stuck between the door and the door jamb.
Zibby: Oh, my God.
Yeardley: Yeah.
Zibby: Did you think this was your ex? Because wording, like, “If I can’t have you, no one can,” immediately would point to, as if somebody had once had you and now doesn’t.
Yeardley: Yeah, that’s true. I didn’t really, because we parted on pretty good terms as well as one can. The marriage was only two years long. We certainly had left each other. When something falls apart like that, I certainly didn’t take it in any sort of cavalier way. But it wasn’t particularly acrimonious. We didn’t have any children or anything like that.
Zibby: Got it. So, did you go to the police with these notes?
Yeardley: No, but I did go to the security guy on Herman’s Head when we were shooting at Sunset Gower Studios. It was run by this guy who was an LAPD SWAT guy who had a private security company on the side. His name was Paul. And so, I brought him the notes.
Zibby: How many notes? Like, how long had this been going on before you brought it to Paul’s attention?
Yeardley: It went on for about two weeks before I brought it to his attention, which seems now much too long.
Zibby: Like, every night for two weeks?
Yeardley: No.
Zibby: Oh.
Yeardley: About every third or fourth night. So, when I brought him the notes, I think I brought him three notes. And in the end, there ended up being five notes. What happened was Paul had a team. They were firefighters and off duty cops. They staked out my house. They sat in a car across the street, down the street to see if we could catch the guy. We never caught him. There was one night where a guy in the middle of the night, it looked like he was walking up to the house, and they think that he spotted them and he turned around and left, sort of veered away. And after that, the notes stopped coming.
Zibby: The notes themselves handwritten?
Yeardley: Yes.
Zibby: How long? One page? Like, five page out of a notebook?
Yeardley: Yeah. No, on a small pad of paper. Not an entire page. Not necessarily well-written sentences. Often, sometimes peculiar, disjointed haiku like, but that is affording too much sophistication to it. And signed with this creepy little face, a smiley face with hair standing up.
Zibby: Like, little sprigs of hair?
Yeardley: Yes. Mm-hmm. A little fan of hair.
Zibby: Smiling.
Yeardley: Yeah.
Dave: So, is there anything unique about the handwriting style? Is it block letters, like you’d see in a ransom note, or is it print, is it cursive?
Yeardley: It was a combination of print and cursive, written in pen. Sometimes it was only a couple or three lines. The longest one, the last one, which really said, “I want to take you to heaven and make you mine,” really set off a bunch of red flags for Paul and his team.
Zibby: How about you?
Yeardley: Oh, I was terrified.
Zibby: Yeah.
Yeardley: Like, I stopped sleeping. My bedroom in that little house, actually, the windows faced the front yard. So, the idea that he was literally feet from my head when he would stick these notes between the door and the door jamb was really unnerving to me.
Zibby: That’s terrifying.
Dave: Where does this fall in relation to when Rebecca Schaeffer had her incident with her crazed fan?
Yeardley: Ah, that’s such a good question. Somebody want to look up when she was murdered?
Zibby: Yeah. We’ll google it.
Dan: Got it right here. July 18th, 1989.
Yeardley: Right.
Dan: So, just a few years.
Yeardley: So, Rebecca Schaeffer had been murdered three or four years before this happened. Because of Rebecca Schaeffer, the laws in California about the address you can put on your driver’s license changed, because it was a private detective who went to the DMV, looked up Rebecca Schaeffer’s address that was on her license, which was also actually the apartment she was in. And this guy went under the auspices. He was a fan, a crazed fan, brought her flowers. She came down to get them and he shot her.
So, now, in California, you don’t have to put your actual home address on your driver’s license, but you are supposed to give them your home address. So, it’s in the database that only authorized personnel can see– Again, impulse control. I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s enough. But they did change the law. So, people were definitely on edge. As I learned, there’s certain language like, “I want to take you to heaven and make you mine,” that law enforcement goes, “Okay, okay, that’s not good.”
Zibby: Yeah, I should say so. So, what do they do about that?
Yeardley: Well, like I said, they staked out my house for six weeks. Really expensive, by the way.
Zibby: [laughs]
Yeardley: Yeah. But they never caught the guy. At the same time, I was going to a gym. I think it was 24 Hour Fitness. I just go by myself. I would go in the morning and I would just take classes. There was this trainer there. His name was Ken. He approached me and said, “Hey, I see you work really hard here. I would really love to train you. I could really do great things.” And I was like, “Umm, I don’t know. Okay.” And he said, “Listen, just give me a chance, okay?” And I’m like, “Okay.” So, [crosstalk]
Zibby: Well, I have to ask you about that, because you say, “Oh, okay.” And what people aren’t seeing is that you’re rolling your eyes. So, did you have some inner hesitation or at the time, you were genuinely charmed by the idea and went with it without that sense of caution?
Yeardley: Right. It’s a good question. I think my obsession with always trying to make myself better in some way either– We always joke about it, Kitty, that we– [chuckles] If somebody says, “Hey, I can [chuckles] make you happier, more fit, more smart.” In some ways, I feel like I’m incredibly gullible that way. It really speaks to whatever deep-seated insecurities I have. So, he said, “I could really whip you into shape.”
Zibby: So, it sounds like he was appealing to that perfectionist in you that wanted to go the extra mile. And so, that was what you were being pulled into without considering anything else. That was where the blinders went on.
Yeardley: Absolutely. I do think that’s true. And so, I started training with Ken. This was several months before the anonymous love notes being left on my front door. Things were fine for a while. He worked me harder than I worked myself. I liked that. I’m a hard worker. I like to be challenged. But then things started to get weird where when we would say goodbye, first, he wanted to hug me, then he would try to kiss me.
Zibby: What? On the mouth?
Yeardley: Yeah. And I would turn my cheek. I remember being afraid to say, “You can’t do that.” And then, he started to buy me clothes. I would never wear them, never. Like, I am the most modest person at the gym. I was like, “I’m just there to get the job done.” It was not about being seen or seeing people. I just wanted to get there, get the sweat on and get out. And so, he bought me those little boy shorts, super tight and this sports bra. I was like, “Yeah. No, I’m not wearing that.” He brought me a couple of outfits. And then, the pièce de résistance was that he said, “I have a real estate deal going. I want you to invest in it.” The irony was is that he was homeless and living in his car.
Zibby: Did you know that at the time?
Yeardley: I did not.
Zibby: Okay. So, he’s buying you clothes. He’s going in for kisses on the lips when you say goodbye. Do you, at this point, think to yourself, “He’s making romantic advances, or he’s just one of those guys that behaves a bit too close for comfort, but oh, well”? Are you just finding reasons that make it easier tolerate or are you on alert?
Yeardley: My default was always, “I can handle it. I can handle it.” That’s gotten me into some trouble sometimes where I feel like my overdeveloped sense of independence has made me not ask for help sometimes. And so, I think it was that when he asked me to invest in real estate and then I realized he was living in his car, I called him and said, “I can’t invest in your thing.”
He was pretty unhappy about that. And I said, “And by the way, I’m late for The Simpsons almost every time I train with you. So, I got to cut that out. We need to not.” So, I stopped training with him and I quit that gym.
Dan: How long were you training with him? Months? Weeks?
Yeardley: Months. I would say, probably three months.
Dave: I was sitting here smirking, because everything you’re saying is checking. As a sex crunch detective, I’m checking grooming boxes, testing the boundaries physically with touch to see how far you’ll go. Real good with social cues. I’m guessing that you weren’t jumping, running to these embraces.
Yeardley: Oh, no.
Dave: You’re not giving off any body language or other nonverbal cues that, “Hey, it’s okay to kiss me on the mouth.”
Yeardley: I would try to get out of the gym without even saying goodbye. I would just say, “Byem see you, Ken.” And then the next day, he would say, “Hey, how come you didn’t say goodbye to me yesterday?”
Dave: Right. He’s built this whatever persona that he’s got some sort of real estate opportunity. He’s a liar. He’s a manipulator. He’s not good with rejection. All these things, I’m sitting here going, “Check, check, check.” So, that’s why I was smirking, because I’m like, “She’s getting groomed.”
Zibby: Oh.
Yeardley: Which I didn’t certainly know at the time.
Dan: Well, I think with the investment, if you actually agreed to it, he’s building some obligation in you that you’re going to have to stick around him.
Yeardley: Absolutely. And the investment was massive. It wasn’t like, “Hey, I need 5 grand.” I remember it was something like 50 grand. He knew who I was, obviously. I had done a lot of television. I’d been quite successful in the very early part of my career. I shot out of a cannon when I started in show business. I was very lucky in that regard.
So, he would see me on television. I had done a bunch of movies. I now had The Simpsons, which was exploding into the stratosphere. So, I’m sure the perception that I was this rich, young actress was definitely what was going on. But that’s not even the story I was going to tell you about being stalked. That’s just the backdrop.
Zibby: Oh, God.
Yeardley: Yeah. [chuckles] So–
Zibby: Oh.
Yeardley: So, after Ken, and then the weird love notes and the heartbreak of the marriage falling apart, I decided I needed to move. I then learned that you can buy a house in California in the name of a living trust, because house purchases, those records are public record. So, in order to further protect myself, I decided that– At that point, I had a business manager. He said, “We’re going to buy your new house,” which I bought in the Hollywood Hills. “We’re going to buy it in the name of a living trust, and you will not appear as the trustee.” So, I felt pretty good about that you wouldn’t be able to just go downtown, look through public records and then know where I live.
[Break 1]
Zibby: So, now, you’re in a new home at least.
Yeardley: Right. I bought this house. Beautiful little house, sweet little house. I loved it. It was pink. [laughs] It just needed a little bit of work. It needed some coats of paint. I had the hardwood floors refinished. It needed a new tile floor in the kitchen, and some new counters. And so, I started to hire people, I hired this floor guy, and I said, “I need kitchen tile.” And he said, “Okay.”
Well, what I found out is that a lot of people who come and say, “I’m the floor guy,” he doesn’t actually lay the floors. He then subcontracts it out and that’s what happened. So, he subcontracted out somebody to do the hardwood floors and somebody to do the tile floors. The guy who did the tile floor, his name was Vince.
I remember when he came over to meet me with the floor guy, he looked at me a little too long, and he made a really concerted effort to make intense eye contact with me. I thought, “Okay. Well, look, the job’s like a week. It’s fine.” I wasn’t living there at the time. I was still living in the little house in the valley while this work was being done. Here’s the first red flag. At the end of that meeting, he says to me, “I knew when I saw you on TV that I’d meet you someday.”
Zibby: Uncomfortable.
Yeardley: Yeah. And I was like, “Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, here I am.” [chuckles]
Zibby: Did you mark that as a red flag in the moment? Again, I’m trying to track how much of this in the moment was showing up for you, and what you were doing about it.
Yeardley: Yes. It’s funny that you asked that, because as I was reviewing this story which I had written about in my journals years ago, I don’t address that question. But in hindsight, what I know is that even at that point in my career– So, I’d already been an actress for 10 years at that point. In 1993, I was like 29.
The truth is that when you’re on television, when you are remotely well known, people say the most remarkable things to you. People, today, ask me, “How much money do you make?” People come up to you and say, “Oh, my God, you’re much prettier in person,” which is. I know they mean it as a compliment, but it’s [chuckles] really kind of– It’s a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.
So, people welcome themselves to an opinion of you in a way that I don’t think happens if you’re not in the public eye. And so, for somebody to say, “I knew when I saw you on TV, I’d meet you someday,” isn’t actually that much out of the ordinary for my profession,-
Zibby: Right.
Yeardley: -for my world. Now, again, it made me uncomfortable, but I think I thought, “You know what? I can handle it. It’s no big deal. I’m not even living here.”
Zibby: That’s how you categorize it.
Yeardley: Yeah. So, Vince does the tile in the kitchen. And off the kitchen, there was a bathroom, a little toilet and a sink, a powder room. Because it also had tile, he’s like, “We need to retile the little bathroom.” I say, “Yeah, of course.” He says, “You need somebody to move the toilet.” And I was like, “Okay.” And he goes, “Well, my brother’s a plumber.” I’m like, “Okay.” He goes, “Yeah, no problem. I’ll get him to do it.”
So, his brother comes and moves the toilet, and he finishes the thing. And then, toward the end of the first week, he says, “You know, this electrical isn’t quite right. It looks really old.” The house had been built in 1946, I think. And I said, “All right.” He goes, “Yeah, I have a friend who’s an electrician.”
So, basically, the long and short of it is, he built a case for being able to stay longer and longer and longer. After about three weeks, the floors were done, the kitchen was done. And I moved into the house. There were still maybe a few more days of work for Vince to do some stuff. And so, there I am in the house, which, by the way, has almost no furniture. It literally had a couch in the living room and a bed in the [chuckles] bedroom. And that was it.
I’m sitting there living alone in this new house that I love, and it’s Sunday, and my phone rings, and I answered it and it’s Vince. And he says, “I need to talk to you.” And I’m like, “Okay. What’s up?” And he goes, “I can’t tell you over the phone. I need to come over and see you in person.”
Zibby: No, that’s a negative, Vince.
Yeardley: Yeah. I’d say, “What is it that you possibly need?” And he goes, “No, I really need to see you.”
Zibby: Oh, God.
Yeardley: So, he comes over. He has this Indian burn on his neck, and his face is red. He comes into the house and he sits on the couch in the living room. I said, “What’s going on?” And he says, “I’ve just had two people killed for you and I want $20,000.”
Zibby: Whatta?
Yeardley: Yeah. [chuckles]
Zibby: I’ve heard this story, and it still blows my mind, the minute this piece comes out. Like, “What?”
Yeardley: It’s so like a bad lifetime movie.
Dan: Well, of course, his name is Vinny too.
Zibby: Yeah.
Dan: He’s got mob ties.
Zibby: Vinny.
Yeardley: [laughs]
Dave: I still haven’t heard a red flag. I don’t–
[laughter]Yeardley: So, I actually remember thinking at the time that $20,000 didn’t seem like enough money for two murders.
Zibby: Really?
Yeardley: Yeah.
Zibby: What a funny thought to have in the middle of that.
Yeardley: I know. I can only attribute that to the strangest things occur to you when you’re under stress.
Zibby: Hmm. Yeah.
Dave: So, I’m guessing you’re already going there. But did he give you an indication about who these characters were that he felt the need to take care of?
Yeardley: Yes. So, he said to me that these two guys had been following me for weeks, and that he had been following them. And he said, “You’re really not very aware, Yeardley? I noticed that you almost never look in your rearview mirror when you’re driving.” And that started to freak me out. And he said, “These two guys, they know everything about you. They know your Social Security Number, your alarm code to the house, your telephone number. They know your ex-husband’s telephone number, where he lives. They know where your mother lives and her telephone number. And they know where your agent lives and all of his contact information.”
Zibby: Good God.
Yeardley: I really started to flip out at about that point.
Zibby: Yeah, no kidding.
Yeardley: I knew he kept a gun in his truck, because he had shown me.
Zibby: He had? When?
Yeardley: While he worked for me. I, of course, would go to the house every day to make sure everybody was doing everything that they said they were going to do. He showed me his truck, and he showed me the gun he keeps in his truck, and he said, “If you ever need anything, you ever need any help, I’m here to help you out.” I could tell or I had this suspicion that he had this crush on me. But again, I thought, “I can handle this. The job won’t be that long. He’s married anyway.”
Zibby: How old was he?
Yeardley: He was probably in his 30s.
Zibby: Good-looking guy?
Yeardley: Not really. I’m going to say, he had a mullet.
[laughter]Zibby: But did he have this suave thing? Like, was he trying to present as handsome, good looking, or was he kind of grubby? What was your visual intake of him?
Yeardley: He definitely wanted to present himself as the alpha, as the tough guy. He was phenomenally unattractive to me. His demeanor was greasy and untrustworthy.
Dave: So, set the scene for me on this. He drops this, “Hey, by the way, I just took care of two problems in your life. I need $20,000.” You’re in the living room. What’s the proximity? Are you sitting? Are you standing? Is there anything in between you? Like, I’d be looking for the nearest exit.
Zibby: Yeah.
Yeardley: [laughs]
Zibby: Yeah.
Yeardley: Yeah. So, he’s sitting on the sofa with me. There’s nothing between us.
Dan: Is he between you and the door?
Yeardley: Yes.
Zibby: Oh, God, I hate this because it’s a good question and it’s a horrible answer.
Yeardley: Yes. He says that he actually had the guys taken out for me. I remember he told me that one of the guys who was following me was really wealthy, that he was a pilot and he was going to abduct me to Canada, Canada, where he was going to have me all to himself, that he lived in a remote location and nobody would ever find me again.
Dave: I saw that movie as misery.
Yeardley: Right.
Zibby: [laughs]
Dan: Every statement that he makes, he’s playing it off as these other people. But it’s his own fantasy that he’s living through these, I’m guessing, fictitious people that he’s conjured.
Zibby: Did you believe him? Or, as he’s telling these things to you, were you going, “Oh, this feels more and more fabricated. This is you. Not reality”?
Yeardley: I do remember thinking, “If this is true, oh, my God.” And if this isn’t true, “Oh, my God.” Like, “Who would do that? Who would tell such a massive lie to intimidate me and extort money from me?” It was just so far beyond my imagination.
Dave: So, George tells his story yesterday, and he notes that when suspect walks by him into the room where they did the interview, he recognizes, and I’m paraphrasing, crazy just walked by.
Yeardley: Right.
Dave: Are you having that realization, “I’m sitting on a couch with crazy right now”?
Yeardley: No. I do ask him for pictures. I say, “Well, how do I know that you did that?” He gets really angry and says, “You fucking don’t believe me? I look out for you.” And I’m like, “Okay.” Well, even if he’s lying, he now seems really dangerous to me. So, I say, “Well, where are the bodies?” Like, “What did you do?” And he says that he had followed these guys who were following me to a bar in Hollywood, taken them out back. The guys he had hired to kill them did the job, put them in the trunk of a Mercedes. The bodies were now being driven down to a cement factory in Mexico where they were going to be mixed into a load of concrete.
Zibby: What?
Yeardley: I know. So much detail that now I’m really starting to not believe him, but I– This doesn’t happen to me.
Dan: Is this the best performance of your life?
Yeardley: Mine? You mean to stay calm?
Dan: To stay calm and try to talk your way out of this situation? Because I would imagine, when you first hear those things, you’re thinking, “Okay, I got to remain calm, but I have to get him out of my house. How am I going to do that?”
Yeardley: Yes. So, while he’s sitting on the sofa, his pager goes off. He looks at the number and he goes, “It’s the guys who make the hit. If I don’t call them back, I’m screwed.”
Zibby: Come on. It’s like, he wrote a bad Hollywood script-
Yeardley: Yes.
Zibby: -that he’s now–
Yeardley: Cast us both in.
Zibby: Yeah.
Yeardley: So, he uses the phone in my kitchen. I can hear the conversation through the receiver. The guy on the other end says, “It’s done. I want my money.” Vince says, “Okay. I’ll be there soon.” He hangs up. He says, “They’re demanding their money. If I don’t give it to them, I’m fucked.” I said, “Well, listen, I don’t have $20,000 just sitting in my bank account. It’ll be a huge red flag to my business manager if I just write you a check for $20,000.”
He goes, “I know. So, here’s what you do. You write a check to my brother, the plumber for x amount of dollars, you write a check to my friend, the electrician for x amount of dollars, and then one to me and just say, it’s all for work. And then, you leave it in my electrician friend’s mailbox.” And I said, “Okay. Well, I just really need to think about that.” And he goes, “Really?” And I said, “Yeah. Yeah. This is pretty serious.” And he says, “Yeah, well, also if you go to the police, we’ll both be killed.”
Zibby: Of course. No way out.
Yeardley: Yeah.
Zibby: Only one option.
Yeardley: So, I said, “All right. Well, I guess you probably should go and meet that guy. I mean, I guess he’s waiting for you.” And he goes, “Yeah.” I remember he put both hands on my shoulders, and he looked me in the eye and he said, “Yeardley–” I remember he repeated my name three times. “Yeardley, Yeardley, Yeardley. I wanted to call you last night and tell you I love you, and I’ll take care of you and don’t worry.”
Zibby: Oh, shit.
Yeardley: And then he left.
Zibby: My God. This is absolutely insane.
Yeardley: it’s so unbelievable. Every time I hear it, I must admit, I’m actually, really embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t know what to do. So, I just sat down on the couch and wondered how I was going to get out of this. Like, “How I was going to get protected? How I was ever going to feel safe again?” This, if you recall, really being the third event over the course of six months that had started to shake me to the core.
When I started out as an actress, certainly one of the things I wanted, and I never made any bones about it, was I want to rule the world and I wanted to be famous. I knew that was one of the ways that I had chosen to measure my success. And now, that I was really becoming quite well known, these really awful things were happening. In retrospect, it was the first time that being famous gave me pause. I went under in some ways. It began a cycle of introversion with the exception of my actual work that lasted for about 10 years.
[Break 2]
Yeardley: So, there I sat on the sofa. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t call the police or contact Paul, the SWAT guy, for about 40 hours. I actually, offhandedly confided in a friend about 40 hours after Vince had come to my house, I remember it was a Tuesday, and said, “Yeah, I don’t know this thing happened where he came over, this contractor who’s been working for me, and he– The weird thing is, he has keys to my house, you know? Because he’s been in my house without me for three weeks. And then I moved in just a few days ago, and he told me that he killed two people for me. It’s probably not true, but, God, it’s fucking scary.”
This friend of mine was like, “Fucking hell, Yeardley, you have to go to the police. What is wrong with you?” I was like, “Well, he said that really bad things would happen to me if I did.” And he said, “Yeardley, Yeardley, Yeardley, you have got to go to the police.” And so I was like, “Yeah. Okay.” I really thought the police wouldn’t believe me. So, I went to Paul, instead.
Zibby: Meanwhile though, is Vince not expecting to hear back from you? Because 40 hours is a long time when you’re trying to extort money, and God knows what else from someone.
Yeardley: Yes, 40 hours is a long time. I do remember that Vince had imposed a deadline, but I was in this fog. I had no sense of time, and I was completely paralyzed and I didn’t know what to do. When I wouldn’t sleep at night, I actually considered possibly writing those checks he wanted for the money, because I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that somebody would go to such lengths to deceive me. So, I thought, “Could it possibly be true?” But at the end of the day, there was no way I was going to write those checks. That was just not ever going to happen. Not ever.
When I went home after I had met with my friend– It was in the day, like, we’d had lunch. While I was home, Vince called me and said, “Hey, you didn’t leave me any money.” “And remember, I said, I need you to give me some time to think about this.” And he said, “Okay. I can give you till Tuesday.” So, I do remember it was Tuesday. He called me up and said, “You didn’t leave me any money in the mailbox.” And I said, “Yeah, it’s true.” I said, “Here’s the thing. If you did what you said you did, I cannot possibly condone that. And if you didn’t do what you said you did, why would I leave you any money?” And he said, “Oh, I see how it is. I do all the work and you say, fuck, Vince.” And I’m like, “I got to go.” I hang up and I leave my house immediately.
I drive, like, two miles away, and I call Paul, and I am wrecked and I say, “I’m afraid to go home again. I need you to come.” Sorry. 25 years later, you didn’t think it would be that. So, I said, “I need you to help me.” So, he meets me on the side of a road. He actually meets me on the side of Mulholland Drive. If you don’t know it, Mulholland Drive is this very scenic road on the top of the Hollywood Hills.
So, I meet Paul in this turnout on Mulholland Drive. And he said, “Jesus fucking Christ, Yeardley. Okay, tell me the history of this guy.” And I said, “Well, when I first met him, he said this weird thing to me, that he always knew he would meet me one day.” I said he kind of gave me the creeps, because I felt like he had this crush on me. Oh, yeah. There was this time that he showed up at my house at 09:00 PM, and told me that his wife had kicked him out, and thrown all his clothes onto the lawn and he needed a place to stay.
Zibby: Say what?
Yeardley: Oh, did I leave that part out?
Dan: Mm-hmm. You did.
Zibby: Yes, you did.
Yeardley: Oh. Yeah. [Zibby chuckles] So, that was a few days before he showed up on the Sunday to tell me he’d had two people killed for me.
Dan: I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to let you know, “Hey, I’m available now. I’m available to you, if you want me.”
Dave: And he’s creating some urgency.
Yeardley: Yes.
Dave: It’s like a salesman.
Yeardley: [laughs] So, then, I told Paul that the last thing Vince said to me was that he had these two people killed for me. He said, “What took you so long to call me?” And I said, “I thought I could handle it.” And that speaks to that hyper developed independence that I have cultivated all my life. I was so ambitious. I remember feeling like, I have to be and am eager to be the driving force behind that ambition.
And so, I think that coupled with this innate impatience, made me, I just didn’t want to rely on people, because I feared disappointment more than anything. In my career, it’s been a tremendous asset, because I just would set my sights on something and then I would go get it. It didn’t always turn out the way I am thought it would, or the way I hoped it would. But I was always on a trajectory. I’ve never been without a goal. It’s just how I’m wired. But the downside is, is that I also very rarely ask for help, and sometimes too late.
Zibby: Yeah, I really get that.
Dave: So, Paul recognizes the state of mind you’re in and has the, “Why didn’t you call me earlier?” Is he starting to game plan with you and letting you know what the next steps are?
Yeardley: Yes. So, he says, “Hire my guys. We’ll stick out your house again.” So, they do. Meanwhile, Vince has left his tools in my garage, and he says, “I want you to go back to the house. I’ll be with you.” I still had a landline at that time. I had a cell phone, but I had a landline too. And he says, “I’ll be on the extension. Call him and tell him to come get his tools.”
So, I do that. I say to Vince, “Listen, we’re done here. I really need you to come get your tools, and I need you to do it today.” There is a tiny noise, like Paul, he swallows, or he– There’s a tiny noise on the extension, and Vince goes, “Who’s there?”
Zibby: Oh, no.
Yeardley: “Nobody. Nobody. I’m here by myself.” And he hangs up on me. After that, we can’t get Vince to call me back. I start to leave messages saying, “I’m going to throw your tools out.” About three days go by. Paul then has already been calling Vince as well and says, “Listen, I’m here. I’m with LAPD SWAT. Just want you to know, I’m helping Yeardley out, just need you to come get your tools.”
Finally, finally, after several days, he calls Paul back. And Paul says, “Now, I don’t want you to come to the house. Now I’m going to bring you your tools. Where do you want me to bring them?” And Vince says, “Let’s meet in the parking lot of a Taco Bell tomorrow.” And then the next day, about an hour before the meet, Vince calls Paul again and he changes the location. And that sends up a red flag.
Zibby: Where did he change it to?
Yeardley: He changes it to like an Arby’s or something. [chuckles] And so, Paul hangs up with him and he says, “Listen, it’s probably nothing, but when they change the location at the last minute, that’s a red flag for us. So, here you go,” and he puts a huge Nickel Plated .44 on the kitchen table, and he says–
Zibby: Is that a gun?
Yeardley: It’s a massive gun, the size and weight of my head.
Dan: It’s a hand cannon.
Zibby: So, he left you a gun?
Yeardley: Yeah. And he says, “Don’t let anybody in. If Vince shows up, shoot him.”
Zibby: What? [Yeardley laughs] Did you even know how to fire a gun, Kitty?
Yeardley: No. I was like, “What are you talking about?” And he goes, “I’m serious. Unless it’s me, don’t let anybody in. The front door was right by the kitchen, and there was a little bay window. So, Vince could presumably just smash the bay window and not have to come in through the door and get in through the kitchen window.”
Zibby: This is nuts.
Yeardley: And then Paul leaves. The question of, why I didn’t say, “Listen, keep your gun. I’m going to go stay with a friend until you call me and tell me it’s okay”?
Zibby: Yeah.
Yeardley: I don’t know. But I remember, I then sat on the sofa for two hours and just waited for Paul to come back.
Dan: Goofy Loop.
Zibby: Yeah, Goofy Loop. It’s a very strange thing to look back in hindsight at something outside of the framework and see, “Wow, I could have made so many other decisions that just simply don’t show up in your consciousness as an option under that kind of duress.”
Yeardley: It’s so embarrassing.
Dan: Well, I think it’s easy for people outside of that situation. I imagine for you, it’s like you’re on this huge wave and it crashes on you. You have no control. You’re just a rag doll getting tossed around in this wave. But for us, people outside that situation, it’s easy for us to look in and possibly criticize the decisions you’re making, but we’re not stuck in the wave.
Yeardley: That’s very generous.
Zibby: I think the tendency is, for victims in general who don’t want to, or agree with or feel as though they’re victims, will take the information that’s present and justify it to make it okay in the moment, and to feel normal, and to not feel like a victim, and compartmentalize or rework, reframe the information. Especially, for somebody who’s so determined to make everything okay and get it done, I think that the trap can be and might have been in your case, that you’re taking all this information and shrinking it down to a manageable size for you in order to feel like you’re still on top of it. And it’s the refusal to be a victim which can backfire.
Yeardley: That is really beautifully said. I would say, that over the years, I’ve thought about this thing that happened to me, of course, from time to time, and why was it so hard for me to ask for help? I would say that in my family, it was just never okay to be a victim, to be a victim implied that you had some weakness. We just didn’t exhibit weaknesses in my family. It isn’t that we didn’t have them. We just didn’t exhibit them.
Zibby: Right.
Dave: So, I’m just curious. How long are you sitting in the house? I think you said it was a few hours.
Yeardley: It was a few hours. At least two hours and I remember, Paul comes back and knocks on the door, like bum-ba-dum-pam. It’s a rhythmic knock. So, even though we hadn’t set up a knock, you go, “Okay. Well, that seems pretty specific.” I looked out the little peephole and it was him. I opened the door, I said, “How did it go?” He had this smile on his face and he goes, “Listen, Yeardley, the guy is, I think he’s basically harmless, but he’s definitely off, so I think you should watch your back for a while,” which was singularly unhelpful.
Zibby: Yeah.
Yeardley: And he says– Paul confirms to me, “By the way, I’ve heard stories like this a thousand times. It’s just a scam to extort money from you to somehow get close to you.”
Dan: So, how does he handle Paul then?
Yeardley: Basically, Paul went to Vince and said, “Here are your tools. If you ever come within 10 miles of Yeardley again, I will find you and I will take care of you. I will end you.” And Vince, I guess got the message. I then had surveillance on my house for another six weeks, 24-hour surveillance. And twice, I lived on a dead-end street at that time, a little cul-de-sac, and twice Vince drove by in his car. And of course, they went after him. After that, I never saw him again. I did subsequently find out that he ended up in jail for domestic abuse-
Zibby: What?
Yeardley: -against his wife, the one who I guess maybe she really did throw him out of the house. That I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t doubt it, based on there had been multiple calls about domestic abuse against him. I was afraid to be alone in my own house for years to come.
Dan: Wow.
Zibby: Yeah. Makes sense. So, how did it change how you do things?
Yeardley: Well, I never got any mail at the house again. I had a PO box. Like I said, my house was bought in the name of a living trust. I just did everything I possibly could to not be accessible by any records. It’s an enormous amount of effort. It’s emotionally and internally exhausting to be that vigilant, and in subtler ways to live with that much anxiety all the time.
It’s not quite like that now. But with the internet, you just don’t know. For instance, I get ambushed at the airport by Simpsons fans quite often. They show up, they know I’m coming. Somehow, they already know I’m going to be there and they show up with a whole bunch of Simpsons stuff to sign. And usually, they’re pretty nice, and they just want a picture and they want these autographs.
But if you think about it, to put it in context, if you’re a private person and you haven’t announced to anyone or on social media where you’re going to be, and then a group of strangers shows up, that would probably put you on pretty high alert, or at least, it would give you pause. So, with my fans, oftentimes I ask them, “How did you know I was going to be there?” And once in a while, one of them will say, “Oh, I know someone at the airlines, and they told me that you were going to be on this flight.” What do you say to that? Isn’t that a security breach? Not to mention, really illegal? You don’t know. You don’t know that it’s not going to be another Rebecca Schaeffer.
There are no metal detectors as you enter the doors to get to baggage claims. Somebody could certainly have a weapon. I choose not to live in that space, most of the time, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that it sometimes keeps me up at night.
Zibby: I think what’s powerful and might be painful for you when I’m sitting here across from you watching you tell a story and you welled up a couple of times, is that no matter how successful you are, how much life you’ve lived, how much money you have or how resourced you are, how much security you’ve created, that no one, not even you, is infallible to falling prey.
There may be some part of you, and I know this is true for me, that even with the stories that we’ve come through, there’s a part of me that still feels, if I’m being really honest with myself like, “I might be caught up in that goofy loop again.” That’s scary. That’s vulnerable. And that also means that equates to needing somebody else, which–
Yeardley: Which we don’t like to do to me.
Zibby: Which is hard, because there’s that avoidance of disappointment or the admission that we can’t do it all on our own. But I think it’s really powerful to hear, and it’s timely to hear.
Yeardley: I do think it’s something that you said in your episode of the Goofy Loop, where when the second guy came out from under the car and grabbed your feet, you realized that you were outmatched. I think that even though it was just me and Vince on the couch, his statements were so outrageous.
The fact that he was pledging his allegiance to me, telling me that he loved me, it was all I thought, “Okay. Hmm.” And he has a weapon in his car and I don’t. He’s bigger than me. To your point, I think you just go, “What’s the fastest, safest way for me to get out of this?” He hasn’t yet laid hands on me. So, maybe if I just remain calm and sort of, yes and him– yes and his reality, he will go, and then I can figure it out, even though it took me 40 hours.
Dan: I think you did a masterful job. How do you know he didn’t have a gun with him when he was in your house?
Yeardley: I actually think he had it in his waistband.
Dan: I absolutely do. And if you would have said, “Get the hell out of my house,” what’s the reaction you get from him?
Dave: That wouldn’t have deescalated the situation.
Dan: No, you did a great job.
Dave: Yeah, you did. That’s the agility that Zibby showed in her experience, and countless other people do when they’re trying to deescalate and navigate the waters of danger that they’re in to try to find a way to the other side.
Yeardley: Nobody prepares you for that. I think that’s the takeaway.
Dan: I also think that your survival instincts are spot on. You did a great job at staying safe, even if you didn’t feel like it then.
Zibby: Yeah. Hear, hear. Thanks for sharing that story.
Yeardley: Thank you. [chuckles] [music]
Yeardley: Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith, and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave.
Zibby: This episode was edited by Logan Heftel, Yeardley Smith and Zibby Allen.
Yeardley: Music for the show was composed by John Forrest. Our associate producer is Erin Gaynor, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.
Zibby: If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, head on over to smalltowndicks.com. And become our pal on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, @smalltowndicks. We love hearing from our Small Town Fam. So, hit us up.
Yeardley: Yeah. And also, we have a YouTube channel where you can see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes. And we’re part of Stitcher Premium now.
Zibby: That’s right. If you choose to subscribe, you’ll be supporting our podcast. That way, we can keep going to small towns across the country and bringing you the finest in rare true crime cases, told, as always, by the detectives who investigated them. Thanks for listening, Small Town Fam.
Yeardley: Nobody’s better than.
[music]Yeardley: Hey, Small Town Fam, it’s Yeardley. I hope you’re enjoying Beyond Recognition, our special six-part limited series from all of us here who bring you Small Town Dicks. And for anyone who’s wondering, and it does seem like a few of you are wondering, I want to assure you that Small Town Dicks is coming back in September, as usual, per normal, with a full season of great cases told as always by the detectives who investigated them. So, don’t fret. Small Town Dicks isn’t going anywhere.
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