Warning: This article contains discussion of abuse and rape threats which some readers may find distressing.
When the FBI apprehended Eva LaRue’s menacing stalker, they were shocked by what they discovered in his residence.
The CSI: Miami actress, who gained prominence in the early 1990s as Dr. Maria Santos Grey on All My Children, has disclosed in a revealing documentary that she was pursued by an obsessed fan for over ten years.
The chilling letters from the unidentified individual, who assumed the alias ‘Freddy Krueger’, the fictional antagonist from the horror series A Nightmare on Elm Street, graphically elaborated on his twisted fantasies, including plans to murder and rape both Eva and her daughter, Kaya.
Despite having DNA evidence, it took the FBI several years to apprehend him.
In My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story, the 58-year-old actress shared that it all began when she secured her ideal role on the CBS cop series and relocated to the quintessential Los Angeles neighborhood, Glendale.
LaRue’s former co-star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, renowned for her portrayal in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, advised her to purchase her home under an LLC to prevent potential stalking incidents.
“At the time I thought, why would I end up with a stalker? I’m not the star of the show, why would anybody wanna stalk me?” LaRue said.
However, in March 2007, the initial horrifying fan letter from ‘Freddy Krueger’ was delivered to the studio.
The letters quickly became more frequent and increasingly violent and descriptive. They described his intentions to ‘rape her until her nose bleeds’, mutilate her, torture her, and even target her then three-year-old daughter.
After efforts with the police proved futile, the FBI escalated the case and assessed DNA on the letters. Unfortunately, they failed to get a match. The sole piece of evidence they had was that the mail was sent from Ohio.
LaRue said: “I wish there were words to describe how I felt at that time when those letters started coming right after the next because terrifying doesn’t fit that bill, it is a full body takeover.
“There’s nowhere to hide. Outside of work, off set, that was when I was most hyperaware. Because I was afraid there could be someone waiting just off the studio lot, kind of lying in wait.
“He would write in the letters that he was always watching me, just around the corner. You don’t know who it is, there’s nowhere to hide from an amorphous threat.
“Those words and those threats were absolute psychological terrorism and they turned our lives upside down.”
When Kaya turned five and the letters didn’t stop, LaRue had to have a ‘delicate conversation’ with her about stranger danger.
The deranged stalker continued to focus on the young girl, threatening to make Kaya his ‘sex slave’ while promising to pursue LaRue ‘until the day [she] die[s].’
The mother lost her hair and eyelashes and struggled with eating, experiencing a mental breakdown from living in ‘terror’ while trying to protect herself and her daughter.
“My body had a visceral reaction to the overwhelming fear,” she said.
LaRue built a ‘fortress’ around their home – but the city council took issue with her 6ft tall gate and, during the hearing, announced her address publicly on a livestream.
“What Sarah Gellar said kept us safe all this time,” LaRue said in the doc, adding that paparazzi swarmed her home the next day, forcing them to move out under the cover of darkness within two days.
In June 2016, she said her ‘worst nightmare’ came true when a letter landed in their mailbox – addressed directly to Kaya.
In summary, it detailed taking the high schooler hostage, impregnating her, making her his child bride and eventually dismembering her body, like he planned to do to her mom.
Things escalated in October 2019 when the stalker breached another boundary by calling Kaya’s school and posing as her father to retrieve her that day.
He then left 19 terrifying voicemails on the school’s answering machine, asking the school to pass on the message from ‘the man who is going to rape her, molest her and kill her’.
Ultimately, the FBI utilized new technology to trace DNA using genetic genealogy, and they found a match for their Ohio suspect, 58-year-old James David Rogers, whom they arrested at his home in November that year.
When searching his home, the FBI agents recalled in the documentary how they made some disturbing discoveries, with several devices and a computer containing a ‘lot of images of Eva’ on them.
However, one officer said he found one particularly harrowing item – Rogers’ cellphone.
On it, he said the stalker only had two contacts in his phone.
“One was his mom, and the other was Kaya’s high school,” the officer revealed.
Meanwhile, Rogers’ stunned mom told cops that she had fond memories watching All My Children with her son, recalling how he would watch it ‘over and over and over again’.
“I couldn’t help but think to myself, ‘This is where he first became infatuated with Eva,'” the agent said. “And mind you at this point, the mom did not know that Eva LaRue was the person we were there for.”
Rogers eventually admitted to all the charges against him, including two counts of mailing threatening communications, one count of threat in interstate communications, and two counts of stalking and violation of federal law, which resulted in a three-and-a-half year jail sentence followed by three years of probation.
That’s what LaRue said of her stalker, adding: “Only three and a half years? After tormenting us for 12? That’s it? That’s all our life was worth, that’s all our traumatization was worth?”
Rogers was released early last