Morgan had a stranger stalker, Keenan was a person not known to her, rather his identity was deduced over months. He was also very likely a serial stalker as well. This I added after discovering many stalking and peeping tom incidents within a few mile radius dating back for years.
As I research solutions to these types of terrorizing some of it is very straightforward, such as the findings that stalkers are often socially maladjusted, emotionally immature, insecure and jealous by nature. Like perpetrators of domestic violence, who often stalk their partners, they seek to exert power and control over the victim. According to James Harris, his daughter Brooke complained of Keenan being possessive, and she ended their relationship because of it. An objective look at mannerisms is a good tool to ID your stalker.
At the beginning we had few if any tools to deduce who the stalker was and were limited for a while into seeing which cars were home, and which weren’t, of which lights were on in which houses as ours…only tools. If we could have included a read of mannerisms of the suspects, no matter how crude it might have been. That would have been an improvement in identifying him earlier.
Other advice i read is downright frightening to me. Such as the majority of stalkers are not mentally ill; however a minority, usually stranger stalkers, suffer from mental health disorders (such as paranoid schizophrenia or manic depression) and exhibit delusional thought patterns or behaviors. I would think if this little bit of observation were in the material the Deputies and Detectives had about stalkers they would have been better able to deal effectively with Keenan than they did. Actually they had no material on stalkers of stalking so, anything would have been an improvement really.
There is advice suggesting you should approach the stranger stalker (just once), and tell them firmly to stop, then attempt to involve family members to assist. I question both of these thoughts, as I have been told that his father Wade was quick to bring him to the Sheriff’s office to answer questions, but also quick to opine that he had not done anything wrong. I wonder how he could be so sure and I doubt he would have been receptive to talking his son out of his stalking obsession.
His mother, Jennifer Johnson, to this day will not even admit he was pretty much the schoolyard bully back in grade school, when that fact is well known up and down the valley. So I really don’t see how an attempt to involve the parents would have really been very productive. Most likely the opposite.
His parents and friends are pretty intent on protecting him by whatever means they can, and don’t seem ready to admit Keenan could ever do anything wrong. This I am sad to say is something that has played out many times in cases of stalkers – many, many times they have family members, friends, even people that don’t really know them that well make up excuses, alibis and lies for them. Sometimes I would assume because they want to keep them out of trouble, other times possibly because they themselves don’t want to believe something like this could really happen, and then there are always friends that have been warned not to be “snitches”, or else, as in this case.
Which brings up the third piece of advice which I have found to be a very informative, and a useful tool – that is to get the criminal records of the stalker, especially a stranger stalker. As the claims that he has never been in trouble in his life grow ever louder from all of his family, the list of charges, for a twenty-one year old seem very, very, long. And most all of the charges he has been found guilty of portend to a serious problem if connected with a stranger stalker, as they are in Morgan’s case.
In fact after having had a chance to look over criminal records for all the immediate family and friends, I can see why this is suggested in a stranger stalking situation. I don’t know if the Sheriffs are at liberty to run these records and share them with victims, but I believe it would be a big help.
I think it would be safe to say that successful criminals research their victims first, just as hunters research, and stalk their prey before a successful kill. So in the victims interest – why would you not want to arm yourself with research and facts on those that are threatening to do you harm, as stalkers obviously do.
In all of the people claiming to be friends of the families that have contacted me, I found one to be very telling. He claimed to be a good friend of James Harris, and wished to vouch for his integrity. And then in the next sentence he admitted that Brooke was probably not one to be trusted. Very telling indeed when even Jim’s friends know a thing or two about Brooke and her checkered past.