(CNN) In March 2007, the threatening letters started.
Sometimes handwritten, other times typed, they arrived in the mail at Eva LaRue’s home in Southern California from an unidentified sender going by the name of “Freddie Krueger,” who threatened to rape and murder her and her small daughter.
For more than 12 years, the letters—more than three dozen of them—continued to arrive, posing a relentless psychological threat that left the “CSI: Miami” actress and her family hesitant to leave their house.
Early letters included LaRue’s daughter, who was then 5 years old. However, messages addressed to the child started to arrive in 2015. Additionally, the stalker started calling LaRue’s daughter’s school and claiming to be her father and that he was outside waiting to pick her up.
But in 2019, the FBI was able to utilise DNA from the envelopes and run it through a database, producing a list of the suspect’s relatives. This was made possible by genetic genealogy, a method that was employed for the first time in California to apprehend the Golden State Killer. Their investigation ultimately took them to a small Ohio town, where they apprehended a 58-year-old man after obtaining his DNA from a used Arby’s straw.
James David Rogers was given a 40-month federal prison term on Thursday. The Heath, Ohio, man entered a guilty plea in April to two counts of stalking, one count of making threats over interstate communications, and two counts of mailing threatening letters.
LaRue told him at the sentence in a Los Angeles County courthouse, “I forgive you, but I cannot forget.” “The terror will always be with me.”
12 terror-filled years
LaRue, a seasoned actress and former beauty queen, spent several seasons playing a doctor on “All My Children.” Her seven seasons on the crime drama “CSI: Miami,” which ended in 2012, are perhaps the reason she is most well-known.
Her character worked as a DNA analyst for the Miami-Dade Police Department, which turned the discovery of DNA on the envelopes carrying the threatening letters into a suspect impossible to identify into a terrible irony.
On “CSI: Miami,” LaRue was in the middle of her second full season when the first letter arrived at her door. Others quickly adopted.
According to a 2019 federal indictment of Rogers, one of them allegedly said, “I am going to f**king stalk you till the day you die.”
“No location on this planet will evade my search for you. I’ll sexually assault you, “the stalker also threatened to rape and get pregnant with LaRue’s daughter in a subsequent letter.
The fictitious killer from the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” horror film series, “Freddie Krueger,” signed the letters as himself. Many of them had Youngstown, Ohio, as their postmark.
LaRue admitted to CNN that she was so scared that she ultimately sold her home and relocated with her family to Italy, where they lodged with a friend for a number of months. The letters started arriving at that address as well, she claimed, so she went back to California and purchased a new home under the guise of an LLC, a corporate structure that offers limited liability protection, in an effort to hide her identity.
Federal prosecutors stated in a sentencing memorandum that LaRue and her daughter “drove circuitous routes home, slept with guns nearby, and had discussions about how to get help fast if [Rogers] found them and tried to hurt them.”
By avoiding receiving mail and packages at their actual address, the defendants “tried to anonymize their addresses as much as possible,” according to the prosecution. “all in vain The messages — and the dread of the victims — always followed them wherever they went.”
The family first began getting letters from LaRue’s daughter in 2015. She was about thirteen at the time.
“For the past seven years, I have been the stalker. I now have you in my sights as well “The indictment states that the first one was read. One more said, “You appear to be really attractive in your google images. Are you prepared to be my child’s mother.”
What the FBI did to stop the stalker
The FBI obtained DNA from several of the envelopes, but it wasn’t until 2019 that they were able to identify the owner thanks to genetic genealogy, a new field that had previously been used to identify the Golden State Killer.
Genetic genealogy has developed into a useful tool for law enforcement officials trying to solve ancient crimes, in part because of businesses like 23andMe, Ancestry, and GEDmatch. In order to locate any relatives of the deceased who could have provided their DNA for testing, authorities upload a DNA data file to a public database. Then, using traditional detective methods, they create family trees and eliminate potential individuals until a lead suspect is identified.
However, before they can make an arrest, detectives still need to collect a sample of the suspect’s DNA and find a match.
