Miami’ star spent years solving crimes on TV. Then she became the target of…
Landing a primetime function on CSI: Miami was presupposed to be Eva LaRue’s dream come true. What adopted was a 12-year stalking nightmare.“Being stalked really rewires your life,” the actress, 58, tells Yahoo. “I don’t think you can ever go back to the innocence of thinking or feeling like you’re safe. That innocence is stolen.”LaRue particulars the terrifying ordeal in the new Paramount+ documentary, My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story, out now, on which she served as govt producer. The harassment started in March 2007, two years after she began playing Natalia Boa Vista on the CBS crime present.Her stalker had develop into obsessed together with her years earlier during LaRue’s run as Dr. Maria Santos Grey on the cleaning soap opera All My Children in the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s. Over time, he despatched dozens of letters threatening to torture, rape and homicide her, signing them Freddy Krueger, after the horror movie killer in A Nightmare on Elm Street.LaRue’s daughter, Kaya Callahan, became a target too, beginning at just 5 years previous. The stalker made comparable threats against the little one, tracked down her college and even called pretending to be her father, the All My Children actor John Callahan, claiming he was outdoors and wanted to select her up.LaRue, left, and her daughter, Kaya Callahan, at the premiere of My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story. (Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Paramount+)LaRue and her daughter moved thrice after the stalker discovered their addresses. The fixed worry took a toll on every half of their lives.“You don’t know where the threat is coming from,” LaRue says. “You don’t know if he’s hiding in the back seat, under the car or outside the studio gates waiting to follow you home.”The stress manifested bodily. “I don’t know how to describe the level of terror,” she says. “It’s a full-body takeover. My eyelashes were falling out. I had a huge rash on my face and neck. My body was terrified.”The letters would subside for a few months, and she’d suppose, “‘Maybe he just went away.’ Then they’d pour in again. Even when he wasn’t writing, we didn’t feel safe.”The irony wasn’t misplaced on LaRue how, on CSI: Miami, she performed a DNA specialist who helped remedy instances in under an hour each week. Yet, “in real life, the FBI did not have the technology we were pretending to have on the show,” she says.LaRue performed a DNA specialist in CSI: Miami. DNA would later play a pivotal function in her real-life stalking case. (Cliff Lipson/CBS by way of Getty Images)That lastly modified in 2018 when the same FBI brokers who cracked the “Golden State Killer” case — Steve Kramer and Steve Busch — have been assigned LaRue’s case. Using forensic family tree — a combination of conventional detective work and client DNA databases like 23andMe, Ancestry and GEDmatch — they tracked down her stalker utilizing DNA left on one of his letters.In November 2019, James David Rogers from Ohio was arrested. He pleaded responsible to federal stalking prices in April 2022 and was sentenced to 40 months in jail. LaRue was disillusioned that the sentence wasn’t longer, and the anxiety elevated when Rogers was launched early.Photo illustration: Nathalie Cruz/Yahoo News“After stealing our peace and sanity for 12 years, he gets three and a half years,” she says. “And we get life. We get a lifetime sentence of fear.”Initially, LaRue wasn’t certain she needed to make this documentary. She was nervous about poking the bear or inciting a copycat. Still, she moved ahead, though she says elements of the course of have been excruciating.When she first watched the documentary’s sizzle reel, “I heard his voice detailing all the depraved and sickening things that he had said in the letters [for the first time]. I had to turn it off. I wasn’t prepared to hear his voice making those actual threats.”During manufacturing, LaRue and her daughter stored their therapist’s quantity on speed dial. Ultimately, LaRue says doing the documentary helped them “heal a certain part of us that had not been healed.” The course of also strengthened their bond: “Getting through the anxiety and the terror made us an incredibly strong pair.”Their connection deepened again after the sudden loss of life of LaRue’s ex and Kaya’s father, John Callahan, in March 2020 — just as the stalker was being dropped at justice.“That was devastating,” LaRue says of the loss of life of her longtime All My Children love curiosity, with whom she remained shut even after they divorced in 2005. “It was Kaya’s senior year, and so many things were happening. The stalker got caught, her dad passed four months later — during the first week of the COVID shutdown. It was a really bad time.”LaRue, ex-husband John Callahan and their daughter, Kaya, in 2002. (ABC/Virginia Sherwood)LaRue describes that interval as a blur of grief, worry and survival. She provides, “We couldn’t even have a funeral for John. We had a Zoom funeral. It was a difficult time for us, our relationship, her. I was barely hanging on to sanity.”Still, LaRue holds deep affection for the years she and John shared on All My Children, which was a golden age on the present.“They are my fondest memories,” she says. “Me, John, Kelly [Ripa] and Mark [Consuelos], Sarah [Michelle] Geller, sweet Sydney Penny, Michael [E.] Knight and Catherine [Hickland] — that whole crew of friends. We all started together. We were in our early 20s, and it was our college. We were together all day. It was definitely our family. We’re all still great friends.”LaRue compares her experience on All My Children to being in school. (ABC/Ann Limongello)Along with Josh Duhamel, many of them crossed over to primetime TV and movie.“We really got lucky,” LaRue says. “Before that, it was almost this weird taboo that primetime would not hire daytime actors. Then all of a sudden, within a few years, we were all getting picked up on primetime” — Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ripa and Consuelos in Hope & Faith and Duhamel in Las Vegas. “We just lucked out being in that sweet spot when we all got jobs out of daytime.”Now, with the documentary out in the world, LaRue is concentrated on her next act: creating a scripted drama based on how the FBI brokers Kramer and Busch pioneered the forensics family tree technology that solved the “Golden State Killer” case — and hers.“I want to tell all the stories as they crisscross,” she says. “The way they did it, all the trials and errors, all of the wild goose chases. I already have a [show] treatment.”For LaRue, it’s a “beautiful full circle. It’s taking back the narrative,” she says. “It’s been such a healing journey. I never thought I’d be sitting here.”
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