This is My Story - Part 4

Just as I’m beginning to move on with my life… I’m newly married with the best little baby and our future is bright. I had all the typical PTSD symptoms. 😰 Horrible night terrors, angry outbursts, anxiety, avoidance… but we learned to manage and live with it and time seemed to calm it down... Until the harassment started. It Starts with Letters 📝

This neighbor (IN PRISON) and his family started harassing me less than a year after turning 18. His family would come into my work and try to talk to me and give me letters from him. They would watch me and creep through the store intimidating me. Eventually after refusing the letters at work his Mother started showing up at our home or my fathers. One time David almost broke her van window pounding on it while screaming at her. 🗣 He would consistently write letters to my dad or to me but mail them to my dads or grandparents address.

I eventually moved on to working out of the public at a machine shop. 🗄Thankfully I was never bothered there but I was worried every time a car drove by or a person walked by. That rush of anxiety that they would begin bothering me there and risk my job! 😰

The letters were eerie and put me in terrible “funks”. He would write about how much he loved me. How I lied and needed to tell the truth. He would somehow know everything about me! 😳 He knew when I was pregnant, engaged, & married! He knew when I had a miscarriage or moved. He slowly over the years admitted to more and more but not even what was exposed in court. He even told me about ANOTHER “relationship“ he had with someone close to me that I still don’t know, to this day, who it is. Although I have a pretty good guess. 😢

He even admitted in a letter to my father that he had my oldest sons birth certificate pulled from public record to see who was listed as the father!!! He claimed this is proof that I’m a liar because he knew I was with the boyfriend at the time but my husbands name is on his birth certificate. My husband raised my oldest since he was just a few months old and legally adopted him when he was 4. That’s ONE thing he didn’t know! 🙄

Desperate for it to Stop

Every time I had to deal with his family, the letters, the police, it was like the trauma came flooding back and any progress I’d made with time was washed away like sand in the tide. 🌊 The police couldn’t help. The prison wouldn’t help. The detective that worked the case supposedly talked to him but it didn’t last. Eventually I got desperate and wrote letters and e-mails to the Ohio Attorney General at the advice of my brother in law. Finally they contacted the prison and got the letters to stop! His Mother tried one last ditch effort to write me a letter from her, questioning my Salvation for being a liar, along with pictures she had of me as a kid. 🤢

It Continues to the Internet

It didn’t take long for him to find ANOTHER loophole. He began writing about me on Social Media 🙃 from Prison!!! He would write out what he wanted to say then send it to a friend or girlfriend and have them post it to a profile they would make for him. And now he wasn’t so “friendly” in his letters, he was about halfway through his sentence and now he was angry! 😤

So now I wasn’t just getting these letters privately. Now it’s out there for the whole world to see. HIS “version” of events, awful things about me, putting info about me out to the world! Whatever he wanted to say about me. Offering REWARDS 💰 for info about me and others involved! He even knew when we moved to SC and made a big announcement to me to “not f^<€ up anyone else’s life in that state”.

My father, husband, and I spent countless hours reporting the profiles to Facebook (Sex Offenders are NOT allowed to have a Facebook Profile per their standards). One profile would be taken down and shortly after another would pop up. THEN he got even MORE creative and made a ”Facebook Page”. Pages have different rules than profiles so our attempts to have that one removed failed. At least it did for a while… I’m actually not sure how/why it was removed or maybe I just couldn’t see it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Freedom Florida

He consistently reached out to family members and friends of mine to try to convince them of his story. It’s like this nightmare just wouldn’t end! Then… radio silence. We were living in Florida ☀️ and I think for the first time in over 15+ years, I may have actually had day(s) pass where the memories didn’t haunt me every day. But sometimes, it was just as bad. He basically kept me updated on what he was doing for the last 10 years and now … nothing. It made me very nervous. His release was approaching and I tried not to think about it.

Another break… let’s move on to what’s been going on recently! In the next post…

With Healing Love ❤️,

-Vanessa ✌🏻 (Workman Hands 🤲🏻)