Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - 'CSI' STAR ACTRESS ESCAPES VICIOUS STALKER, THREATENED WITH RAPE & MURDER

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

For 12 years, Emmy award-winning actress, Eva La Rue lived in fear of an unknown stalker. The actress received hundreds of letters addressed to her and later, her daughter, that detailed threats of rape, murder, dismemberment, and more. The stalker signed the letters as "Freddie Kruger," the fictional serial killer. LaRue and her family moved several times, even out of the country, in the hopes that the stalker would not be able to find them, but the letters seemed to resume mere days or weeks after each move. The stalker even called Kaya's school, posing as her father, in an attempt to kidnap her.  Investigators identified DNA on the letters and cross-referenced that material with DNA information from commercial genealogy providers to identify relatives of the stalker. FBI agents were able to narrow down their suspect to 58-year-old James David Rogers, and a DNA sample collected from a discarded straw confirmed he was the stalker. Rogers was sentenced to 40 months in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of mailing threatening communications, one count of threats by interstate communications, and two counts of stalking. Joining Nancy Grace Today: Eva LaRue - Emmy-winning actress, EvaLaRue.com, Instagram: @evalarue, Twitter: @imevalarue Stephen Kramer - Former FBI Attorney, President: Indago Solutions, Indago.ai, Led the team that identified the Golden State Killer, Co-Founder of the FBI's Forensic Genetic Genealogy (FGG) Program  Scott A. Johnson - Forensic Psychologist, 32 years specializing in addressing sexual predators, Author: "Physical abusers and Sexual offenders", ForensicConsultation.org Stephen T. Busch, Former FBI Special Agent, CEO, Indago Solutions, Indago.ai, Co-Founder of the FBI's Forensic Genetic Genealogy (FGG) Program See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Have you ever seen CSI Miami? Because I have, and it's incredible. And one actress that is especially incredible is Eva LaRue. Now, what you may not know is that this screen star and her little daughter have been stalked, stalked with threats to rape and kill her, to rape her little daughter. I have a daughter. I think I'd lose my mind

if someone said that to me about my daughter or my son. And how did she live for 12 years with this threat hanging over her and get up and perform in front of the camera and raise her child the way that she did. This woman's got to have nerves of steel for Pete's sake. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories.

Thank you for being with us here at Fox Nation and Sirius XM 111. 12 years. This woman, this star, stalked by a maniac, threatening unspeakable acts on not only her, but her little girl. Take a listen to Eva on Access. The letters started coming just totally out of the blue. Take a listen to Eva on Access. was going to kidnap my then five-year-old and myself. I was a single mom at the time and that he was going to hold us hostage, keep us as sex slaves. He was obsessed with impregnating my baby.

Okay. Whoa. Okay. Obsessed with raping and impregnating her baby girl, holding her hostage and keeping her and her daughter as sex slaves. That was Eva speaking to access. Joining me right now, an all-star panel of guests, but special guest, evil LaRue Emmy award winning actress. You can find her at evil LaRue.com. She's also on Insta and Twitter.

Eva, I just, I just don't know if I should try to rush toward you to get your autograph or hug you and pat your back and tell you how sorry I am after everything you've been through. I mean, I've read your story but what really

got me is the threats on your daughter. I cannot even imagine that happening. Eva, when did this whole thing start? This whole thing started in 2007 when I got the very first letter. But you're absolutely right. The only job that we have as parents is to keep our children safe.

And when that is taken away from you by all counts, and every day you don't know if you can keep your only child safe, you feel like you've completely failed. It's one thing when the stalking threats are coming to you that has its own terroristic fear that comes with it you know every every day but when it's when it's aimed at your daughter your baby girl you know because it all started happening when she's five now she's 20 but so her entire um you know for me you know her entire growing up she's had, this anxiety, although she didn't know what was in the letters.

When she was little, I still had to make her very aware of keeping her head on a swivel, of knowing as much as she could that there are people out there that might want to take her, that might want to take me, that, you know, that are threatening us. But I never let her know what was in the letters until much later when she was a teen. And even so, she didn't find out about some of the most heinous things he wanted to do to us until we were actually in the courtroom that day. I didn't want her perseverating on that her entire life during her formative years.

Eva LaRue, star, CSI Miami, and so much more. I'm just trying to get my mind around what you must have thought when you got the first letter. Were they not signed by, quote, Freddy Krueger? They were. I think he thought that was funny. I think he thought that was a joke. There were many of the letters that said, you know, you're a CSI. Come find me. Taunting you. Take a listen to our friend Mario Lopez.

We all know Mario at Access Listen. Most of the stalker's threats are far too vile to share on television and they eventually began to mention Eva's young daughter, Kaya, who was only five years old at the time stating I would think you would want to stop me for your daughter's safety you should be very scared of me you know very often Eva my children my twins John David and Lucy are old enough to go online now and they have gone on and they said, Mom, why did this person say this about you? It'll be like, you're ugly.

Why are you on TV? Or I hate you. You should die. And I try to say, listen, you know what? There are always people that are going to hate you and dislike you no matter what. You know, and they say, Mom, you're trying to fight the bad guys. I know, but it doesn't matter that's not everybody doesn't see you the way you see yourself ignore it they don't even know you just forget it

because in life you're going to have to deal with people that bully try to bully you or threaten you or make you feel bad or but when you got that letter that that first letter, did you think, well, I'll never meet him. I'll never see him in person. Or did you think, wow, this is a real threat? Oh, my God, no. I thought immediately it was a real threat. I had no idea where he was, where the letter was coming from. I didn't know if he lived down the street.

I didn't know if he lived down the street. I didn't know if he was already following me. I didn't know if he, I didn't know what he knew about me, like where we, I worked, where she went to school. We didn't know anything. And that was where the greatest fear was is we were constantly looking over our shoulder. We didn't know if he was going to show up on the doorstep at any, at any moment. At the time, David Caruso had a stalker and Emily Proctor had a stalker. And their stalkers, they knew who their stalkers were. Not that that was better.

That's the problem with stalking. It's such an amorphous. There's so many gradations of it, right? And each person's story is so very different. David Caruso's stalker lived in Europe, was madly in love with him, and when he didn't respond to any of her letters, she started saying, I'm going to blow up your house. I'm going to kidnap your kid from college.

I'm going to hold her hostage until you come and marry me and love me. She ended up being put on the no-fly zone, but this went on for months and months. He was scared to death. He was scared. Emily Proctor, her stalker, showed up to her house, walked in her house, zone but this went on for months and months he was scared to death he was scared that emily proctor her stalker showed up to her house walked in her house but was a nice kindly stalker so it didn't

you know nobody was too worried for her which is shocking because people i mean as you know for all the stories people go from being a nice kindly peeping Tom to a murderer in not much time. I had one of my, I guess I'll say stalker, was stereotypical. He thought I was sending him messages over the airwaves and I didn't think much of it until he

showed up in the lobby of CNN in New York with his suitcase for us to start our life together. This was after I was married and had the twins. Okay, guys, take a listen again to our friend Mario Lopez. She's beloved for her role as Maria Santos on All My Children and as Detective Natalia Boavista on the hit show CSI Miami. Eva played a DNA analyst, which became a cruel irony when she started receiving

letters from a stalker during her second full season in 2007, and the FBI was unable to determine who was sending them. Okay, that kind of stumps me right there. Let me go out to Stephen Kramer, former FBI, now lawyer, president, Indigo Solutions. Stephen, when you get a written letter like Eva LaRue did, well, many of them, we can't find out where the postmark's from, get DNA off the stamp, nothing, no fingerprints? Oh, of course we could. I mean, that was one of the things that was done early on in this particular case is getting the DNA off of the envelopes, off the stamps. And the FBI was able to get DNA. And they took that DNA and they put it into the National DNA Index System, which is called, as you probably know, the CODIS system.

And there was no hit. And it went on for 10 years like that. Where do you think they got the DNA off the stamp, Stephen? I believe it was off the stamp on some of the letters or off the envelope. Some of the envelopes didn't have DNA on it. And so they have to get it from a different envelope. But they got dozens of samples. There were 37 letters, right, Eva?

No, and there were more than that. Somebody said that there was. Really? Yeah, there was somebody reported that there were 37, but there's been some inaccuracies in some of the reports but yeah no there were there were more than 100 letters that came over 12 years oh my stars yeah let's go to steven bush joining me former fbi special agent and ceo of indago solution steven thank you for being with us i guess when these now over 100 letters came at the beginning, we didn't have touch DNA. Yeah, Nancy, that's right. The DNA was taken off of these letters from the licked portion

of the envelopes in most cases, and in some cases from the stamps. And as Steve Kramer mentioned already, each time those profiles, they were STR profiles, the ones that go into CODIS. The FBI put those profiles into CODIS and that produced what we call a case to case match. So what it told us was it said, hey, the same guy that sent the first letter, sent the second and the third and the fourth. But we don't know his identity. We don't know who that person is because his identity is not in CODIS, although his DNA is. Got it. So you put his DNA in, basically off the stamps on this,

100 plus letters of threats to Eva. But he obviously either hadn't been arrested or had a government job where he had to give DNA so you couldn't get a match. I get it. I get it. I get it. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Eva LaRue joining me, as you heard earlier, star on All My Children, on CSI Miami.

It goes on and on, all of her hits. But yet, she was stalked all these years, and her daughter. For all of you out there listening now that have been stalked, think about it. Here we have this glamorous Hollywood star, and even with FBI consultants, this guy is hard to stop. Eva, what were the original threats in the letters? I heard Mario Lopez say he couldn't even say them on TV. And how did they develop over the next hundred letters? You know, right out of the gate, they were really horrifyingly deviant and evil.

I mean, and they would even talk about satanic rituals and, you know, marrying us both and holding us hostage as sex slaves and impregnating my daughter. And then in literally nightmarish detail, talk about how he was going to, you know, continually rape and then disembowel and dismember my daughter in front of me and then do the same to me so it just it went and it would seem to always be um some variation on the thing every single letter were they coming to your office or your home initially the very first

letter went to my manager's office he didn't have my home address thank God at the time and they were going to my manager's office and then eventually he found my home when it when it first happened I was so scared I was literally I was absolutely terrified and I had a couple of weeks left at that point at see on CSI Miami before we went on hiatus that year. And the second we went on hiatus, a friend of mine said, you know what, I've got a I have a house outside the country, and we're going to be there this summer. Just come stay with us as long as you want. We I took my daughter and we fled the country. That's how scared I was. I just I packed everything up.

And we fled the country and we were gone for a couple of months. I was just hoping that he might show himself in some way that somebody, local law enforcement could catch him. Anybody could catch him. But that was not the case. So when I came back to work, CSI hired me security. So in fear, she flees the country with her daughter, her only child, after threats that the two of them would be raped and disemboweled. Threatening to disembowel a little girl in front of her mother? I dismember her. They flee the country.

Listen. At one point, Eva and Kaya even moved out of the country, fearing for their lives. But soon after moving back even with a hidden address another letter arrived i am going to take my revenge upon you and your daughter there will be no place on this earth that i can't find you the stalker then located and started calling kaya's school leaving horrifying messages can you imagine not only are you being stalked, but your little girl also being stalked. Listen to Kaya. It was intimidation and fear and psychological and emotional terrorism on a whole different level.

What were your earliest memories? Something had happened where our address was leaked and we were actually in the middle of the night packing up all our things. And then I remember being so young, just being like really settling the effects of what it is to, you know, not only have a mom in the spotlight, but to also have someone emotionally terrorizing you. I'm just trying to understand how did your address get leaked, Eva? Well, I mean, that's kind of a whole other story. But because we had, you know, we had a gate, you know, gate and hedge issue in and I had to, I was at the city at getting a variance for these things. And the city leaked my address on the online camera you know on their online court camera um they said my

address on the online court camera and immediately it was out and um and then even the news cameras came like a couple of days later saying we see that you have a you know you're trying to get a variance for the book and i was like how is that news but you all just found my address and within about a week uh the letters started coming directly to my house. So he must have been watching every single thing about you. Yes, he was. Well, we didn't know who he was, but he was on our social media. Steve and Steve both found him, you know, following us, following Kai and I both on Instagram and me on Twitter.

And so he was following everybody. And then now both Steve and I were sitting at lunch the other day and he just put in my name and past addresses came up. Thank God my current address didn't come up in there. Because I had to move, obviously, overnight, and I bought my next house in an LLC. It's not registered to me. And then even so, seven years later, he found that address, and I had to buy my next house in an LLC. Stephen Kramer, former FBI in Doggo Solutions,

how did he keep finding her? That's a very good question. We don't know. I think he was just diligent on the Internet, diligent following Eva. And eventually, you know, he would get lucky that he tracked down, for instance, Kaya's high school. She was at a private high school. He somehow managed to find that either through social media or other means. We aren't exactly sure how he did it, but that was also part of the concern is, yeah, he's mailing

these letters from, we believe, Ohio. That's where some of them are postmarked, but he could be in Los Angeles. He could be following her around. We did not know that. So those were some of the major concerns that we had about trying to identify this guy and apprehend him as quickly as possible. Yeah, between that and the threat of disembowelment, rape and dismemberment, you, the two Steves, have your hands full. I'm going to go to Scott Johnson, forensic psychologist joining us. But Scott, I want you to hear this. You heard earlier where the stalker would actually call. He tracked down the school where Eva's daughter attended.

Take a listen to this. My senior year, when I was called into my front office. Your dad says he's going to pick you up. Yeah. Stand out in front of the school. Yeah. So then I was like, I texted my dad. I was like, yeah, what are you doing here?

And he was like, no, I never called the school and I'm not here. And it just clicked and I went oh my god it's my stalker you are hearing Eva's daughter talk about an attempt to kidnap her from her school posing as her dad and we all know that if the kidnapper can't get close enough to the child to speak through the window, it's a hop, skip, and a jump to grab the child. Any way you can get them by the arm, the clothes, the neck, the collar, and yank them into the car, it's all over in less than 30 seconds.

Take a listen to more of what Eva's daughter, Kaya, fast forwarding a little bit it's 2015 now you're you're 13. the letter started being in particular addressed to you i have such severe anxiety even now to this day because for me it was just so paralyzing to go to school and to not know you know if i was going to get picked up or if i was going to come home one day and my mom was just going to be found dead on the floor you know um, Eva LaRue, Emmy Award winning actress, speaking out to all stalking victims right now. The fact that my daughter says, Mom, Mom, I love you. You're my world. The fact that Kai had to worry about coming in and finding you dead.

Can you imagine? No, I cannot. Yeah. And she said that she started having those fears at about six years old. And she said, you know, she had the fear of her coming home, her backpack and her holding her little, you know, lunch pail and coming in. She said she always was afraid opening the door. Like, was she going to come in and find her mother, you know, dead on the floor? Like that was a fear of hers for her whole life.

She literally, she deals with anxiety constantly. Just trying to take that in. I mean, every once in a while. I mean. I mean, that kind of trauma changes your brain chemistry. Yes. Yes. You're right.

My daughter will have dreams. She'll go, Mom, Mom, I dreamed something happened to you. And I think it's like that thing you love the most, your fear that will be taken away. And now the letters start coming to your daughter. How did you get through that emotionally it really is psychological emotional terrorism on a whole different level it just it just is when you're constantly in fear it really changes everything about who you are and how you operate how did you hook up with the two ste, Stephen Bush and Stephen Kramer,

both former FBI, also president and CEO of Indago Solutions. How did you hook up with them, Ava? Well, Steve Kramer and Steve Bush are absolutely, just for the record, absolutely my heroes. They are angels walking on earth. Like they, when, when it, when the motto protect and serve is brought up, they are the paradigm of that.

Because for 12 years, I had one FBI contact agent who was in charge of my case. And he was lovely. And every year, we would get together and he would tell me any updates on the case. But up until then, if someone's not in CODIS, there's just nothing they can do. There's no way to identify this person. And what's ironic is being on CSI Miami, everybody was in CODIS, right? We always got our guy, every person, everybody who was a bad guy was CODIS, we? We always got our guy. Every person, everybody who was a bad guy was in CODIS. We got a hit. In 43 minutes, the case was solved. Well, in reality, not everybody's in CODIS. 80 plus percent of the people who are in CODIS are already in jail. And the other percentage of them

are people who are John Doe's because they're in there from rape kits or murder, you know, or crime scenes, but they don't have, they don't have a name yet. Right. Um, so cut to Kaya's senior year and all of the, the confluence of all these things just happened at once where he found Kaya's school.

I believe he found her via Instagram. You mean like she posted something or one of her friends posted a picture with her in it. And then you can see the school banner in the background. Oh, exactly. All you have to do is go down a little wormhole on on somebody's Instagram. And even if they don't have any information in their photos or on their photo page, you can just you can go down a wormhole seeing who tagged her in other pictures and go to a friend to their instagram for instance like if i don't put my location and you see a picture of jackie and myself and i don't reveal anything but then you see jackie's name then you

go to jackie's instagram and bam exactly there it is you see um you know Westwood High School or whatever in the background and it's all over and that's exactly how he found her and he called the school pretending to be her dad and told uh the administrator at the school to tell her in class uh your dad's get stand outside in front of the school I'm gonna pick you up after school and um And then she texted me right away and she said, mom, dad, you know, her dad at the time, he's since passed away, unfortunately,

but her dad lived in Palm Desert two and a half hours away and he and I were great friends. There's no way he was going to come to town and not tell me that he was going to come pick her up from school. Not only that, she's a senior in high school. She drove herself to school.

She doesn't need to be picked up from school. So she immediately says, mom, oh oh my god is dad in town this sounds really fishy and so i called her dad and her dad was like no i'm not in town so i raced to the school and i said i'm picking my kid up from school you know and all her whole life i've had to tell every school she went to this is the issue please be on the lookout she has a stalker but we never had a reason to be you know worried until that point and so the school was you know thought oh well this has got to be a misunderstanding i'm sure it's not a big deal i bet they did because they were about to send her outside to have her dad pick her up. She could have been missing immediately. Immediately. Immediately. It's so fast. And you think, oh, I can't be dragged into a car. Yes, you can. You can. Even an adult,

a female especially, one grab, if they're strong enough, can get you right in. They don't even have to use physical force. If he had a gun, had a knife, whatever, he could have, you know, just made her get in the car for fear of getting shot or stabbed. What was going through your mind, Eva, when you're racing to the school? Oh, my God. I mean, I thought he's at the school. He's stalking the school. He's near the school. He's got his eye.

He's there. He's somewhere around the school because now he knows where she is. Now he knows where she is every day. So I raced to the school. I pick her up. I call the FBI. And I find out that my point person had been promoted to another department. And they tell me, your new agents that are in charge of your case will call you in the morning.

I'm like, oh, dear Lord in heaven. Yeah, I need to talk to somebody right this second. Please don't make me trash the phobes because I'm getting really close to it. Scott Johnson joining me, forensic psychologist joining us out in Minnesota. 32 years specializing in sex predators, author of Physical Abusers and Sex

Offenders. You can find Scott Johnson at ForensicCconsultation.org. Scott Johnson, I mean, what kind of, I mean, I don't agree with, but I get, I love you. I want to marry you. You got to divorce your husband and marry me. He's all wrong for you. That kind of letter versus I'm going to disembowel your daughter after I rape her in front of your eyes. That's a whole nother thing, Scott Johnson. Right. So you're dealing with someone who's

a psychopath and obviously a sadistic psychopath because he's getting off on the fear he's instilling. But the most dangerous part of this is these are his obsessions. And for 12 plus years, he's been following and acting on his obsession. And so to instill fear and paranoia is part of what he gets out of this as a thrill. And so that's the power play for him. He's a psychopath. Now, when you say psychopath, for those of us that are not educated psychologists like yourself, I'm just a JD.

What do you mean by that? Well, he has an abnormal brain. Okay. Limited fear, limited remorse, anxiety, things like that. But he has a need to hurt people. And he gets off on terrorizing people. When you say get off, do you mean he enjoys it, he laughs about it, he relives it, or he actually sexually masturbates to it? For this particular offender, probably all of the above because he's tied so strongly specific sex acts that he wants to do in with the mutilation and everything else.

So to him, it's just one big power play. And the sad part is, and not to try to make this sound, whoa, whoa, it is a whoa, whoa issue because he probably won't stop until he is either A, locked up permanently, or B, he successfully does what he wants to do. And so this is one person. You left out, we kill him. Yeah, that's what he wants to do is to kidnap, rape, disembowel, and kill.

And unfortunately, someone like this, he's not going to stop until he can do that because that's what he lives for. And the proof of that is 12 years of specific obsessive behavior. 12 years. Because I was trying to figure out, Scott Johnson, and I learned this about five years into prosecuting violent felonies in inner city Atlanta. I would always wonder why, why?

One day I was sitting in the courtroom looking over at the defendant. I was trying. The jury wasn't there. And I thought, why ask why? Why do I care why? I will never prove why. All I need to know is who did this thing and how I stop him. But I am wondering why right now.

What gratification would he get out of just sending letters and threatening her and scaring her and her daughter? Well, and that's the interesting part because that's where many stalkers stop is they might send some letters a couple phone calls but he's persistent with this which means he's really invested he's got his his you know his whole life right now of obsessions is around unfortunately these these two uh you know victims and i'll call them victims eva larRue is with us. You're hearing the voice of Scott Johnson, forensic psychologist, joining us out of Minnesota. You can find it at forensicconsultation.org. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace Eva LaRue, I'm just trying to stand in your shoes for a moment. Every time a new letter would come, how defeated, exhausted, afraid would you be?

I mean, you could have a perfectly wonderful day, and then you see the letter, and you know immediately what it is. I knew the writing. I would have been able to identify the writing from across the street. I remember the two times that I opened the mailbox and he had found my address, my actual home address and pulled the mail out of the mailbox. And literally it felt like I had, somebody had tased me. That's what it felt like. It was like an electrical shock through your system. That's like, Oh my God, he found the house.

Oh my God, we're out. We have to move. Did you ever think there would be an end in sight after 12? I really didn't. And then, and that moment when they told me that my FBI agent who had known everything about the case had left the case.

Yeah. I got a phone call the next morning from my new FBI agent in charge of the case. And that was, that was Steve Bush. And overnight that night, he, when he had been at the stalker had been acting like he was her father. And the school was,

the school was not efficiently freaked out like i wanted them to be and but overnight right he he called the school and he left a message on the answering machine at the school detailing all the things he had detailed in the letter so by the time they got to school the administration got to school in the morning they were appropriately completely freaked out. And it took that to make them realize how much they screwed up. They were about to send your daughter out for a stalker to grab her. Yeah, they were.

Now, that actually wasn't their fault because when they first got the phone call, they had no idea that it was anybody other than the dad. But when we ran to the office and said, oh, my God, this is the stalker. Wait a minute. Shouldn't there be some kind of verification even because i mean anybody can call you i'm her dad have her outside and grab her and be gone exactly oh okay guys you earlier heard eva larue emmy award-winning actress i just can't say it enough she has been the star of so many hits. You would know her name or her face anywhere, but it's not just her. Her daughter's been dragged into this. You heard her mention her two heroes. Okay. So far, we haven't been able to get a DNA match. We've got his DNA off the stamps, off the letters.

But there's nothing to match it to. Joining us, forensic psychologist Scott Johnson, Stephen Kramer, Stephen Bush. When did you believe you had a break in the case? So it's important to understand a real brief timeline, Nancy, of kind of how we got to that point. Steve Kramer and Paul Holes had already led the team in 2018 that solved the Golden State Killer case. And you can imagine the phones start ringing off the hook at the FBI. Everybody wants to solve their case. If they have DNA of an unknown suspect, they want to solve the case. And so Steve and I form a program at the Bureau to start doing this. And that leads us into early 2019, when a very astute supervisor at the FBI assigned me full time to do

this. He transfers me up to the Los Angeles office. I arrive at my new desk, and I find a binder, a three ring cheap government binder that on the outside of it, it says evil LaRue threat letters, and it has an FBI case number. And I'm a curious guy. I'm an investigator. I open up this binder and I start reading these letters. That's when I first learn about the case. That's when I first realized this is a horrible, horrible thing that has happened to this innocent woman and her daughter. The next question I have is, do we have adequate DNA? We call the FBI laboratory. We figure out that there's DNA all up and down this case.

And that's when we knew, Nancy, once we have suspect DNA, Steve and I are confident that we can solve these cases. And we had to take that DNA and send it to a private laboratory to get the profile. It's different than the CODIS profile. It's the profile that you need to do genealogy. And at that point, we know we've got a lead to start working on to find a solution to this case. And what was the profile?

So the profile is called a SNP profile. It's an acronym that stands for Single Nucleotide Polymorphism. It's the same as the profile you get if you send your saliva to Ancestry.com or 23andMe. And what that profile does is when we take it and we upload it to public databases, it doesn't tell us who the bad guy is, but it tells us who his relatives are. And by relatives, I mean people who share genetic code with him, people who share DNA with him. And it could be very small amounts, a half a percent, a quarter of a percent. But from those folks, we are able to reverse engineer and triangulate a family tree to determine the source of that DNA, which in this case was the suspect.

And then you start looking to see who resembles that DNA that's in town. Guys, take a listen again to our friends at Access. What they didn't know is at the exact same time, two former FBI agents were using new DNA technology that led them straight to Eva and Kaya Stalker, and they were on their way to arrest them. They literally went out the next day. They've got to go and stake him out, wait for him to throw out something that has DNA on it. And it was an Arby's cup and they got the DNA off the Arby's straw. It's amazing. Okay. You were just hearing Stephen Bush talking from Indago Solutions, former FBI special agent, Stephen Kramer, former FBI attorney, president Indago Solutions. Tell me about that moment.

I remember it really well. Steve Bush and myself were actually doing the genealogy. And that was, you know, sitting on our computers, building these family trees, as Steve Bush mentioned, trying to figure out, you know, all the relatives, who could be the person that was sending these letters. We were actually doing it on a saturday afternoon uh at home and as we came across the family and we narrowed it down we found an individual who actually lived in ohio he looked good age-wise we obviously didn't know what he looked like it's not a five-year-old boy or a 90-year-old man so he's in the pot of suspects i got you exactly exactly uh so we started looking at a little more carefully we started scrubbing some of the social media going to eva's uh instagram facebook accounts and seeing you know the people that followed her and we were able to determine that this person that we were

looking at was actually following her also one of the many thousands of people on her social media so that was like the big break that's when steve and i looked at each other kind of gave each other following her also, one of the many thousands of people on her social media. So that was like the big break. That's when Steve and I looked at each other, kind of gave each other the high five, said, this is our guy. Okay, who followed him into Arby's? That would have been me. Steve, you want to take that?

Yeah, so actually, this is one of the nice things about working at the FBI is when you have a suspect that lives out of state. You got a field officer. Yeah, you call that field officer and say, hey, Ohio, can you guys help us out? I will never be able to look at Arby's the same way again. Thinking about how this cracked the case. Guys, it's been a horror story so far. But is there a happy ending? Take a listen to our cut nine.

Our friends out of NBC4. An Ohio man, he's been sentenced to prison in Los Angeles after admitting that he harassed a TV actress and her daughter for more than a decade. 58-year-old James Rogers of Heath was sentenced to 40 months in prison. Rogers admitted to stalking, threatening, and harassing actress Eva LaRue for 12 years. Straight out to Eva LaRue. The guy's in jail for 40 months. I think we could have done a little bit better, but I praise God he's in jail.

We know where he is. Reaction. Yeah, I am disappointed that he didn't get the minimum. The minimum on this case was 46 months, and the maximum was 57 months. For 12 years of being stalk being stopped he only got three years i i don't know how somebody can take 12 years of your um your safety and um and mental health and only get three years but but at least he got something i mean there's always i mean you know

nancy there's always the possibility that they get nothing yes that they only get probation you know he's been identified he's behind bars and how are you going to prepare for when he gets out eva well that's the thing too and i have to say i'm so grateful to the u.s attorney's office for even taking the case because you know the u.s attorneys have piles and piles and piles of cases that are not going to get adjudicated. And I don't even know what would have happened had they not taken the case. You know what, Eva? You are so right.

He would still be free and stalking. I just got to ask, Stephen Kramer or Stephen Bush, who is this guy, James David Rogers, age 58? What is his story? You know, it's crazy, Nancy. He was a certified nurse's aide. He was a CNA that worked at an old folks home, a senior living facility in Ohio. He had no prior criminal history that we were aware of.

He lived with his elderly mom in her small place in Ohio. And so he had no previous criminal history. He was not a guy that was on our radar screen. And he had no wife and children, a girlfriend, a nothing. Not that we were aware of, no. So he literally is the lonely white guy living in his mom's basement. Profilers all over the country are skipping up and down the hall right now because they were right. You know, the fact that he is a psychopath and he's been under,

you know, he's managed to avoid being on the radar. And I want to interject this one piece that, you know, that may affect supervision and everything else is he knows how to work the system. And, you know, he's a victim. He's got this. He's got nothing except psychopath for a problem. And so but he'll apologize. But they're empty apologies because he loves to do what he does and you know licking the stamps and things i would think actually probably wasn't a

mistake many most psychopaths don't care if they leave evidence because they want to see if people are too damn dumb to pick up on it which of course steve and steve picked up on that. But I mean, this guy just doesn't care until the job is done. Well, all I can say right now is for this moment, Eva LaRue and her daughter can breathe easy but because of his light sentence, they got to gear up and

pronto for when this guy, James David Rogers, walks free. Nancy Grace, Crime Story, signing off. Goodbye, friend. This is an iHeart Podcast.