True Crime Campfire - Every Breath You Take: The Stalking of Dr. Brennan

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Love, hate and obsession have always been pretty close relatives. Anybody who’s ever picked up a Harlequin romance novel or watched a ridiculous rom-com knows that we don’t really get the best guidance from society on how to manage our love lives. Some of us just kinda wing it until we figure it out. Some of us go from train wreck to train wreck, and some decide we’d rather skip the whole thing and focus on hobbies and pets and learning how to keep indoor plants alive. But then there are the ones who—so desperate to latch on to another person that they feel empty without it—weave an elaborate fantasy of the Perfect Love. And when they meet someone who seems to match the dream, they latch on. Even if it turns out that the object of their desire doesn’t want to be latched anymore. The more the dream-partner pulls away, the more feverish the fantasy becomes. And things can get dangerous, fast. Join us for the strange true story of Diane Schaefer, a woman whose obsession with a famous cancer doctor took over her life, and the lives of many others. Sources:Marie Brenner, "Erotomania: The Haunting of Dr. Brennan," Vanity Fair, Sept. 1991The Village Voice: "Stalking the Stalkers" https://www.villagevoice.com/2001/07/03/stalking-the-stalkers/Investigation Discovery's "Tabloid," episode "Love You to Death"Lifetime, "Obsessed," 2002Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Love, hate, and obsession have always been pretty close relatives. Anybody who's ever picked up a Harlequin romance novel or watched a ridiculous rom-com knows that we don't really get the best guidance from society on how to manage our love lives. Some of us just kind of wing it until we figure it out. Some of us go from train wreck to

train wreck, and some decide we'd rather skip the whole thing and focus on hobbies and pets and learning how to keep indoor plants alive. But then there are the ones who, so desperate to latch on to another person that they feel empty without it, we've an elaborate fantasy of the perfect love. And when they meet someone who seems to match the dream, they latch on. Even if it turns out that the object of their desire doesn't want to be latched anymore. The more the dream partner pulls away, the more feverish the fantasy becomes, and things can get dangerous, fast. This is every breath you take, the stalking of Dr. Brennan. Campers, for this one, we're in New York, New York, Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, 1988.

Oh yes. Another tale from the good old shoulder pad loving 80s, y'all. We know you love them. Everybody was frantically trying to solve the Rubik's Cube. Madonna was all the rage, and the kids were doing a dance called Mountains of Coke in the bathroom. Good times. Though I was only about like 11 at the time, and Katie wasn't born yet, but we've seen movies. We know what went down.

Dr. Murray Brennan was in the middle of his workday. at Sloan Kettering. Brennan was a rock star in his field, a world-renowned cancer doctor who often found himself summoned at short notice to treat world leaders and other VIPs. He had a reputation not only for brilliance, but also for an uncommon ability to connect with his patients, a priceless gift for an oncologist. He was sitting at his desk, working on some paperwork, when he heard a little kerfuffle outside the door. It sounded like his secretary was arguing with someone, and a moment later his door flew open and in-walked Diane. Oh boy, not this again.

Diane, you can't be here, he told her, looking past her at the apologetic face of his secretary who'd obviously been trying to keep her out. You have to leave now. But it was clear. Diane had no intention of leaving. She smiled radiantly at him, so smitten that you could practically see the cartoon hearts

just blossoming out her eyeballs as she looked at him. Now, Murray, why are you being like this? I had to come by and see how you were. You haven't been answering my calls. Dr. Brennan barely even looked at her. He motioned to his secretary, call security, and spent the couple minutes it took him to get there, carefully avoiding eye contact with Diane,

who was still smiling at him, even as security escorted her out the door. Ech. Awkward. We've seen it how many times before, campers, a steamy affair, torrid, sweaty little meetings in hotels, and then somebody decides they're not happy being second place anymore, Things get ugly. Threats get made to tell the wife, show up at the workplace, and on and on and on. Or the no longer desire just refuses to let go.

Eiff. Messy. And this wasn't their first scene like this. There had been others. For example, the time Diane had shown up at a nice restaurant where Dr. Brennan and his wife were having dinner, dressed to the nines, every shining blonde hair in place, looked Susan Brennan dead in the eyes and said, I'm going to marry your husband. And for years now, despite Dr. Brennan making it abundantly clear that he'd chosen his wife and she needed to move on with her life now, Diane had been the bad penny, popping up mysteriously everywhere Dr. Brennan went. Conferences as far afield as Milan, Italy, in San Francisco. He'd be on a plane, heading off to present a paper somewhere, and suddenly, there she'd be, right across the aisle. Hey, hello! One time, when he was having Christmas Eve dinner with his family, they heard a car pull up about.

outside. Who was it? Diane, in the back of a limo. If you're going to stalk your ex, do it classy, I guess, right? She called his office so often, usually using a fake name and trying to disguise her so the receptionist wouldn't just immediately hang up on her, that the poor receptionist had once accidentally hung up on an aide to the Duchess of York, who was calling to see if Dr. Brennan could come take a look at her ailing stepdad. That's the kind of doctor he was, sought after by the glitterati, which was part of the reason I think Diane couldn't let him go. Diane, it was becoming increasingly clear, didn't seem to understand the word no, or even the word security, or restraining order.

How did it all go wrong? Testifying about the whole sock at her trial in 1991, Diane described the perfect hallmark movie MeatCute that brought them together in the first place. They met in October of 1982, she said, on a flight to Chicago. Diane was working as a medical writer, and they were on their way to the same conference. Even years later, she remembered every detail of this day, right down to what she was wearing. A navy blue, single-breasted Brooks Brothers blazer, a gray flannel skirt, a beige cashmere cownecked sweater, a burgundy shoulder bag, and burgundy high-heeled sandals.

She knew who Dr. Brennan was. She'd seen him speak at other conferences before, and he recognized her too, she told the court. he said, you changed your hair and invited her to sit next to him. And by the time the plane touched down in Chicago, Diane told the jury they were holding hands. Not her usual style. I usually as shoe gratuitous social touching, she said, but she need an exception for the handsome New Zealand born doctor. Ooh, New Zealand. Oh, love that accent. Keep it in your pants, Whitney. Diane told the jury she could tell Dr.

Brennan was way into her. The man was besotted with me, she later said. I love the vocab on this chick, gravy. Eschew, gratuitous, besotted. Oh, you ain't heard nothing yet. Diane's a bit of a wordy. Yeah, I bet she'd whip any of our asses at Scrabble. She's never balked at a cue in her life.

Once they landed in Chicago, she and Dr. Brennan shared a cab, and he invited her back to his hotel and fade to black. You can imagine the rest. Recall that first night on the witness stand years later, Diane said, I think the smile on my face could have rivaled Scarlet O'Hara after Rhett Butler carried her off the staircase. Oh, wow. Holy Harlequin romance, Batman, that is vomit-inducing. Well, yeah, but this whole case is a lifetime movie, so it's actually completely appropriate. That's true. The next day, Diane and Murray, that's Dr. Brennan's first name to remind you, went out to

dinner, ostensibly to talk about the possibility of her working for him on a research article, but Diane told the jury, it was obvious that the paper was just an excuse to take her out. They had a lot to talk about. She was fascinated by medical research, and he was a brilliant doctor. She told him she'd gone to Harvard, just like him. Diane was smitten. And, I mean, what 40-something doctor wouldn't be flattered to have the attention of a gorgeous young blonde like her?

Naturally, he hired her for the research project, Diane said, but they didn't spend too much time talking shop. The vibe was much more romantic than that. Of course, she knew he was married, but he and his wife didn't live together during the week. He worked a punishing schedule at Sloan Kettering, so during the week he stayed at an apartment in the city. His wife Susan stayed out in the country with their four kids. It was the perfect setup for a little extracurricular, something, something. And of course, now that Dr. Brennan had hired Diane to work for him, she said she got to see him all the time. She knew they couldn't be out about their relationship at the hospital, couldn't sit together in the cafeteria or anything,

but whenever she caught his eye across the crowded room, it made her heart leap out of her chest. And just knowing he was close by and able to come to her anytime she needed him was so comforting. She told her jury about one time that meant a lot to her. Her mom was really sick, probably dying, and she left Dr. Brennan an urgent message to meet her at a hotel close to the hospital. Of course, he came right away, and she got a taste of why the doctor's patients loved him so much. So caring, so understanding. Not like any of the other men she'd been involved with,

who were mostly just a bunch of pathetic lying scumbags. It was, in that moment, sitting in the lobby of the hotel, crying while Mary Brennan comforted her so gently that Diane knew she'd fallen in love. and he'd fallen for her just as hard. But, you know, there was that fly in the Chardonnay, wife Susan, and the four kids. For a man like Dr. Brennan, divorce is a tough proposition. You can lose a lot of money and you can ruin your reputation.

This was especially true in the 80s. So it's the same old story, right? Be patient, my darling, you're the one I really love. She doesn't understand me, but it's complicated and blah-blody, blah. But no matter how passionate and brilliant and fascinating a man is, campers, a girl can get real tired of waiting around. And if Susan Brennan was the problem, Dr. Susan Brennan, I should say,

she'd taken a step back from her own medical career by now to focus on raising the kids, but she was an ER doctor herself. If Susan was the problem, then Diane felt like she knew the solution. She was a little bit subtle at first, just started leaving a lot of real friendly sound and messages with Dr. Brennan's answering service,

knowing Susan would hear them too. And of course, as they would any woman, they immediately set Susan Brennan's antenna vibrating. But Murray just blew it off. Oh, her, she's a medical writer I interviewed once about a job. I barely know who she is. But when Susan Brennan showed up at her husband's office at Sloan Kettering a few days later and happened to ask his administrative assistant if she knew who Diane Schaefer was,

the assistant was like, oh, sure, she's been working with your husband on a research article for the past couple months. Oh, really? Hmm, well, that wasn't what old Murray had told her now, was it? so when he came out of his office to meet her she confronted him you liar you said you barely knew who this woman was now your assistant tells me you been working together on a project for two months but dr brennan insisted no we haven't i interviewed her and looked over a resume but i never hired her i'm telling you i barely know this woman we've spoken to each other like once the admin assistant bless her poor little heart looked back and forth between murray brennan and his wife probably want to sink through the floor she's like but she calls here all the time she's always asking for research materials you never hired her no murray said i didn't the woman must be delusional or something uh-huh susan brennan wasn't sure what to believe i mean after all their years of marriage she wanted to trust her husband but come on at any rate she made it crystal clear that she didn't want any more calls coming in from diane shaffer if that woman called tell her never to call again her services were not required murray said that was fine by him he really didn't have much to say about the whole thing, at first. That all changed when the letters started coming. To Murray, love Diane. They were long and flowery and full of literary and

philosophical references. She talked about how much she related to Ramona from Saul Bellow's novel Herzog, writing, quote, she's very intellectual and cerebrally funny and very much her lover's equal. She told Dr. Brennan that, quote, reading about all these neurotic Jewish men in the Saul bellow book, I assume, has helped me to understand the crazy red-headed Irishman I picked up at the airport one night. And she informed him that sex had become, quote, so important to her after being celibate for years. Oh yes, he'd awakened the woman in her campers. She also called sex the ultimate immortality, which is just so pretentious, it makes me want to hurl myself into the sun. And I thought Le Petit More was bad.

Also, it is bad. It's terrible. Just not as bad as that. Also, she wrote about how stressful she knew Dr. Brennan's marriage had become, implying that more sex with her would be the perfect cure. Naturally. She ended one letter with this bizarre line. I may go to Hawaii to store up the strength I will need to pursue you in 1983.

Oh, good. Get nice and rested. a good tan, recharge your batteries for chasing that man. Good thinking, sis. It's clear from these letters that Diane had it bad for her married lover. This wasn't a woman who was going to be content to be a side chick for very much longer. She was bringing out the big guns, psychoanalyzing Murray's relationship with his wife, holding herself up as the antidote to all his problems. It was at this point when this letter and others like it started arriving in a steady stream in Murray's mailbox that he finally decided he needed to tell Susan what was going

on. He sat her down and laid it all out. This woman, he said, she's been kind of stalking me for a couple months now. I met her once in Chicago, interviewed her for a writing job, never hired her, and ever since then, she's been pursuing me. He told her about the letters, the phone calls, the time when she'd showed up in the lobby of a hotel where he was supposed to meet some colleagues for a drink and said, your place are mine. But he'd never slept with her, not once. So here's Susan Brennan, a sophisticated woman, a doctor herself, having to figure out whether her famous Dr. Hubbs is lying to her or what.

I think most of us would be pretty certain we knew what was going on here and we'd be thumbing through the yellow pages for a good divorce attorney. It was the 80s, okay? People used the yellow pages. They still got left on your porch periodically. They still do, oddly enough. But here's the thing, campers. Dr. Brennan was telling the truth.

He really did barely know Diane Schaefer. They'd shared a cab once, and he'd interviewed her for a writing gig, which he never hired her for. But that was it. Their whole relationship from the very beginning had existed only as a fantasy in Diane Schaefer's head. It was not real.

It was, as prosecutors would later allege after talking with legendary criminal psychologist, Dr. Park Dietz, a phenomenon called Eratomania. Aradomania, aka De Clarembolt Syndrome, is the firmly held delusion that somebody is madly in love with you. Yeah, there have been some real famous cases involving celebrities. David Letterman had a stalker for years, who was convinced she was his wife, broke into his house one time. It was really scary. And I'm sure some of y'all are familiar with the case of Robert John Bardo, who stalked and murdered actress Rebecca Schaefer in 1989. He was convinced they were in a relationship, and when he saw her do it like a sex scene

in a movie, he felt betrayed like she cheated on him, and he found out where she lived, showed up on her doorstep one afternoon, and shot her in the head. Awful stuff. A person suffering from Erotomania believes in their delusion 100%. To Diane, everything she said in those letters was true. Every word she'd later tell a jury about how they met, that wild, passionate first night together in Chicago that gave her the Scarlet O'Hara grin the next morning. It was all real to her.

and that campers is some scary shit for the object of those affections. Now, Dr. Susan Brennan is, it seems to me from reading about her in Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair piece on this case, the kind of woman who likes to be proactive about a problem. Face it, head on. She viewed Ms. Diane Schaefer the same way. And in the early part of 1983, she wrote the first of a series of letters to Diane, let her know she was aware of the situation and was in no uncertain terms and not going to have it. Susan still wasn't 100% sure Murray was telling her the truth about all this,

that he'd never had any involvement with Diane, and this was all completely in her head, but nevertheless, this was her man and the father of her children, and uh-uh. Wasn't going to let this blonde specimen with the 50-cent words in the Saul Bellow quotes write in and steal him. I suspect what chapter asked the most about those letters Murray showed her was Diane's smug attitude about their marriage, especially since, creepily, she seemed to have some real inside baseball

on the actual real problems they were having, like tension about how much he was working, for example, and the fact that she had quit her job to stay home with the kids. In one letter, also, Diana described Susan's quote, charming artichoke hairdo circa Northampton, 1965. Fuck you, right? That had to piss her off. So Susan took pen in hand and wrote to her husband's stalker.

She wrote, You have clearly made the assumption that my husband is available. I suspect that this is based upon. on the premise that any man who spends time in an apartment in the city rather than going home must either, A, have an unhappy marriage, or B, be sexually deprived or both. In the case of my husband, that premise is not even remotely valid. Should you have the unmitigated gall to utter one word of slander with respect to Murray, I will embark on an unmerciful legal campaign, which could result in nothing short of your professional and social demise. Right on, Susan. Damn.

And a few days later, Diane wrote back. no point in you're attempting to communicate with me. You are merely wasting your time and money. I have absolutely no interest in you, your thoughts or anything about you. I think of you about the same way I think of Murray's three secretaries, someone remotely related to him, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to read anything you have written. Wow, you mad, Diane, or what? You know, for somebody so totally uninterested in Dr. Brennan's wife, you sure do bring her up a lot in your letters to him. So now Susan Brennan, was in the fight and Diane took things up a little bit of a notch. One night, Dr. Brennan came home

from a late surgery to find Diane standing in the living room of his apartment in the city, wearing nothing but a slinky nighty and a smile. Dr. Brennan had just gone into his bedroom, found her clothes folded on the bed, tossed him out into the living room and told her to get out. And then he called Susan at their country house and told her what was going on, which good move, bro. I think that's what I would do too, you know, full transparency. And he stood there, talking to his wife avoiding eye contact with Diane, even when she tried to unzip his fly. At that point, he just went into the bedroom, shut the door, and waited 45 minutes until she finally gave up and left.

For God sakes, Murray. Call the cops. Right? God, dude. Diane sweet-talked the doorman to get into the apartment, by the way. It's like, dude, you had one job. It's in your title. Door, man.

Later at her trial in 1991, Diane described this little encounter very differently. She said, late in the afternoon, I finished work and I went back to the building. Henry, the doorman, was again on duty. I said to him, would you let me in to wait for Dr. Brennan again? I went into the apartment. My opaque bathrobe was still there. Dr. Brennan came prancing into the apartment, very obviously drunk.

laughing in a bacchanalian fashion. The phone... I can't. This voice is hard, y'all. She just kills me. The phone rang shortly after. I managed to pick up the bedroom extension. Mrs. Brennan was screaming and she was hysterical. And she said, I am coming out there and I'm going to throw that disreputable slut out the window.

And she said, you're going to get venereal disease from her. Finally, he calmed her down. and we sat down on the couch, and I was sitting on his lap facing him with my arms around his neck and my legs around his back. I said to him, what are we going to do about this? And he started speaking in very abstract elliptical terms. He said, what would make you happy? He said to me, you have completely complicated my life, and I'm not even sure that I mind. Oh my God.

Beconellian, huh? You know, Diane's vocabulary is like if somebody took a rogés thesaurus and just tossed it through a jet engine. You ought to read the trial transcript. I'm not kidding. She's throwing out shit like scabrous and androgynous sobriquet and tautology. Yeah, and she so clearly wants people to ask her what the words mean. We all know those people. Yeah, yeah, insufferable.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Like, I've got a good vocabulary myself. Oh, me too. But she always reaches for 50 cent words where five cent one, would work better. She seems like desperate to feel superior. Yeah, congrats, Diane. You've got that word of the day toilet paper. You can buy it Spencer Gifts. Pin a rose on you. She didn't actually go to Harvard, by the way. She just made it up, which has got to be one of the sad, sackiest things a human being could possibly do, like lie about going to an Ivy League school. Just, ew, that's

cringe. Oh, yeah. She had as many fake credentials as our boy, Anthony Pignitaro. You know, the doctor from a few weeks ago, remember him? Oh, yeah. The scary one with the snap-on toupee. It wasn't long after this that Diane showed up at a nice restaurant where the Brennan's were having dinner with a bunch of his medical colleagues and said to Susan, I'm going to marry your husband. And badass that she is, Susan actually jumped up and chased after her all the way

through the restaurant and out to the sidewalk, but Diane managed to lose her in the crowd. Yeah, and the really wild thing about that was the dinner that they were attending was in Boca Raton, Florida. Not New York. Bitch followed them down there. At some point in all this, I'm not sure exactly how. The Brennan's made the terrifying discovery that he wasn't the first man Diane Schaefer had targeted like this, not even close. She had a long history of zeroing in on successful men, especially doctors and lawyers, and harassing the ever-loving shit out of them until she found a new target that interested her more. One of these had been Dr. Brennan's chief of surgery at Sloan Kettering, a renowned, also-married doctor named Jerome DeCoss.

Dr. DeCoss actually had a dossier on Diane filed with the hospital administration along with a long letter detailing her harassment of him, which was intense and really similar to what Dr. Brennan was dealing with now. In the letter, Dr. DeCoss said he'd come to believe that Diane might be dangerous and he wanted the file there as evidence in case anything happened to him. This file, by the way, was thick as a dictionary and went back 10 years. That's how long this woman tormented Dr. DeCoss, and this is not uncommon. Stalkers have staying power. It's really scary. So just a few highlights from his decade of hell. She followed him to conferences.

She somehow managed to get an ID card to the hospital so she could show up at his Grand Rounds presentations. The hospital had to change the flip and locks because of it. And they had to check their phones to make sure she wasn't somehow bugging him. because she always seemed to know exactly where Dr. DeCost was going to be. She called Incessantly. She used fake names. Once, she followed him to a conference in San Francisco, got a hotel room right next to his under an assumed name,

and slipped a note under his door that said, Just for tonight, I'm on the other side of the connecting door. I would like to spend some time with you. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to say anything. Just leave your side of the door unlocked. See how simple life can be? Yikes. Thanks, by the way, to Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair for these direct quotes.

Her article on this case, which is called Erotomania, The Haunting of Dr. Brennan, is terrific. Diane also developed all kinds of weasily little ways of getting information on Dr. DeCos, techniques she'd later use on Dr. Brennan. Just one example. She got herself listed in the phone book as D. DeCoss, so she'd get phone calls that were meant for him or his wife. Holy shit. Dr. DeCoss had tried to press charges, but the stalking law in the 80s were pure trash, and he didn't have any luck. And Dr. Brennan soon got a taste of how Diane viewed the men she harassed after the bloom fell

off the rose and she'd moved on to the next poor bastard. In one of her letters to Dr. Brennan, Diane called Dr. DeKoss, the species serpentous jeromis Decosis, commonly known as the snake, and but a flake of dandruff in the universal scheme of things. Oh, wow. It was all pretty confusing, really. I mean, here was a woman who gave every appearance at first glance of having a woman. plenty going for her. She had a good gig as a medical writer. She was smart and articulate. She was

pretty and well-dressed. She had friends, most of which later expressed the same idea. Diane had so many advantages. Why was she such a hot mess? For her part, Diane seems to have blamed most of her troubles on her childhood. She had nothing good to say about her parents, despite the fact that she'd chosen to live with them until she was 26 years old. She told Vanity Fair, I was born under a cursed star. Settle in, everybody, right? Diane grew up in Yonkers, New York. She told friends she grew up in a, quote, slum, but according to Vanity Fair,

her parents owned a pretty two-story house in an elegant neighborhood. Her dad was a lawyer. Diane grew up an only child, and from the jump, she seemed to strike people as a bit of an odd duck. She didn't get along with the other kids.

She almost sounds like a female version of Niles Crane from Frasier. You know how he talks about going to elementary school and a suit and tie in a briefcase? That was Diane. Her mom dressed her up like a little professional woman. She wore $100 shoes to school, and that's in the 60s. She always had perfect hair and makeup, but she also had a massive stick up her ass,

that pretentious Scrabblechamp vocabulary and air of superiority. It rubbed people the wrong way. I can't imagine why. Nobody's exactly sure which of Diane's childhood stories to believe, for what I suspect are obvious reasons. According to her, her mom was an abusive monster who used to beat her up on a regular basis, even once she became an adult. And her mom did have issues, including some... toll-curlingly awful anti-Semitism, which you can read more about in Brenner's article

if you're interested, but seriously content warning some unpleasant racist language. One of Diane's friends did confirm to Vanity Fair that she'd overheard Ms. Schaefer yelling at Diane a lot, and on one occasion she overheard a slap. As for her dad, most people remember him as pretty passive, standing in her mom's shadow, just kind of getting along to get along. According to Diane, her parents kept her isolated, wouldn't let her have a social life. Not exactly the story her classmates told about why she wasn't popular in school, but that was Diane. take on it anyway. But it was probably more complicated than Diane made it seem. Her mom and dad

both tried to fix her legal troubles for her once she got arrested. Her dad called out the prosecutor at one point and begged her to drop the charges against Diane. He said, she's sick. She hasn't really done anything to break the law. But as a psychologist who once evaluated Diane told Vanity Fair, it doesn't really matter whether all Diane's perceptions of her childhood were quote unquote, real, or exaggerated. They were real to her, just like her romances with Marie Brennan and Dr. DeKas and the whole parade of others. Diane lived in a fantasy world a lot of the time. She told people she'd gone to Harvard. She made up fake resumes. She told people she'd been married to a preacher at one point. She told multiple people she was a doctor who'd lost her license to practice.

She told one fellow medical writer that she'd lost her career as an anesthesiologist because she'd killed her own child. Now, why you'd want to make up a lie like that, I cannot imagine, but Diane is, I think we can see a bit of a weirdo, so maybe she just liked any kind of attention at all, whether it was good or bad. I don't know. Calling Diane a bit of a weirdo is like calling Ted Bundy a slight murderer. Fair enough. And there's another surprising facet to her life, which she wrote about in some of her letters to Dr. Brennan. For years, she worked as a new dancer at a place called Honeybuns. Later, as...

I know, the name kills me every time I think about it. Later, as a burlesque dancer at the Kit Kat Club, under the stage name, I swear to fucking God, Susan Brennan. Wow, way to stick it to her romantic rival, I guess. That is bananas. She wasn't very good at the job, though, mostly because she didn't even try to hide how much she loathed her customers. She called them pathetic and lonely.

When she got a job later working one of those booths in a porn shop, you know, the ones where women perform one-on-one for the guy, she wore a black leotard and just kind of sat there glaring at the customers. One guy who paid to watch her there said she came across as cold as ice and clearly miserable being there. He never requested her again. That's sexy. Yeah, I mean, maybe some guys are into it, but it doesn't seem very popular.

Right. And by the way, at that job, she went. by the name Jerry, which is what everybody called Dr. DeKos. Oh, my God. This is a very specific type of revenge for her, I guess. Yeah, it's really weird. She made a lot of friends among the other dancers, though, told them her whole line of bullshit about being a doctor who lost her license,

and of course she told them all about her hot and heavy affair with Dr. Murray Brennan, internationally known cancer doctor. As much as she seemed to hate working in the sex industry, She made sure to tell Dr. Brennan all about why she did it in her letters. Y'all buckle up for this shit because you're going to fall out of your chair if you don't. She told Dr. Brennan she was, quote, trying to become an avatar of Aphrodite. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

And she talked about how Phyllish Slaffley was one of her personal heroes. Now, this is the woman who thought women should be domesticated and spend their lives in the service of men, or else we couldn't be total women. That's fine with me, by the way. I mean, I'll gladly be half elephant or five-eight's tulip or what the fuck I got to be if I can avoid that gross nonsense. Schlaefley was instrumental in tanking the Equal Rights Amendment in the 70s. Worked real hard to help us dig a trench back to the 18th century. Good job there, Phil.

So that was one of Diane's idols. God, it's like peeling an onion with this woman. Ain't it just one horrifying layer after another? Okay, so back to the personal hell Diane was putting Murray and Susan Brennan through. Susan, getting involved, didn't do anything to back her down. If anything, it seemed to light a fire under her to go after Dr. Brennan even harder. She started leaving nasty messages form at the hospital. Real fun, I'm sure, for this distinguished doctor to have his colleagues here and stuff like that.

And despite all her usual erudition, Diane had a mouth on her like a truck driver when she felt like it. And the messages were the least of it. Diane embarked on a campaign to find out as much about Dr. Brennan and his family as she possibly could. She'd call his friends, pretending to be somebody else, and fish for information. She wrote to other high-profile doctors who knew Dr. Brennan and tried to pump them for dirt about Murray and Susan. She found out his mom's phone number in New Zealand, for God's sakes, and managed to plumb her for info, too. His little old mama! Unbelievable. And, of course, she kept on following him all around the world, even to Italy, always popping up at taxi stands at airports, and trying to

trying to slip into the same cab with him, staring at him from across the aisle on planes, leaving notes under the door of his hotel room, telling him to come to a room to get laid. Sometimes she'd wear a disguise, like a black wig and sunglasses, like a flipping parody of a spy in one of those old pink panther movies or something. At one point, she even managed to score herself a temp job at the hospital just so she could lurk around the place and watch Dr. Brennan. Yeah, creepy. Finally, in the summer of 83, the Brennan's had had enough.

Together with Dr. Jerry DeCost, Diane's previous victim, they went to the DA's office to file an official complaint. An assistant DA heard their stories and brought a grand jury together to look at the case. They brought in Diane and she acted all contrite, said she knew she needed help, and if they'd just drop all this, she promised she'd get it. That was apparently enough for this prosecutor, who, much to the Brennan's horror, decided not to take the case any further. Diane mentioned this in court proceedings later on, by the way, and she seemed to find the whole thing kind of funny. She called him a mindless mermidian, which I had to look up. It means somebody who's intimidated by authority. It's that word of the day toilet paper again.

She said Brennan had distorted the truth when he said they'd never had a relationship. In her head, that was probably true. So shocker of shockers, Diane did not seek psychiatric help, and she did not stop stalking Mary Brennan. In fact, she got worse. More calls, more letters, more sexual propositions, more everything. One of the worst things for Susan Brennan was how much Diane knew about their marriage and the fault lines in it. That's one of the reasons it took her so long to finally believe that Murray actually had never been involved with Diane. She felt like if you've never had a real conversation with this woman, how does she know all this stuff?

Well, of course, it was because she was a flippin' evil genius at what we now call social engineering, like the hackers used to figure out people's banking passwords and stuff. She was getting it from all these conversations under false identities with the Brennan's friends and neighbors colleagues. It's amazing what you can get people to tell you when they think you're harmless. One of the wildest things Diane did to get inside baseball on the Brennan's was to call up his old university in New Zealand and telling them he'd been in a bad accident. It was probably going to die. She sweet-talked them into sending her all his records, you know, so she could write a nice, detailed obituary for him. And then when Dr. Brennan showed up at the university a few months

later for a guest lecture, they were like, oh, my God, you're alive. Oh, my God. She also joined a racquetball club where a bunch of the Sloan Kettering staff played and befriended one of Dr. Brennan's researchers. Once she'd cozyed up to the guy enough, she told him Dr. Brennan was refusing to leave his wife for her and asked him if there was anything he could do to convince him. Oh, my God. Hey, so, hey, so would you mind to talk to your boss about the illicit affair he's having with me?

Hey, thanks. Finding out every tiny detail she could about Murray and Susan Brennan had become Diane's full-time job. One, she certainly couldn't afford on her medical writer gig, so she used Daddy's Amex to help subsidize her. And she had champagne taste, y'all. In one of her letters to Dr. Brennan, she bragged about never flying coach. It was first class all the way, even on short trips. She said, I like the better quality food service. I like boarding at leisure.

I bet she pronounced it leisure, don't you? Yeah, you're right. A hundred percent right. She also bragged about her skill at talking hotels and restaurants into giving her discounts because she was a medical writer. She'd be like, you know we're curing cancer here, right? And that's all it would take. Damn, I got to try that sometime. Right?

Her letters got weirder and weirder as the years went by, by the way. At some stage of the game, remember, the stalking. went on for eight years. She started writing Dr. Brennan in the voice of a fictional character, Dr. Cecilia Taylor Thompson. The premise was that Cecilia was an elderly psychiatrist Dr. Brennan had met on a plane, and she just happened to be intimately acquainted with Diane. Okay, hang on. So did she want him to actually think that this person was real and that these letters were from this Dr. Cecilia or whatever? Oh, no, no, no. Diane knew he, knew it was her. She just thought of it as a fun little, her words, literary device that allowed

her to write about herself in third person. Okay. Yeah, that does sound fun. Nothing gets a man's blood of burning like a saw bellow quoting elderly shrink with a hyphenated last name. Stop, stop. I can only get so turned on. Okay. Jesus. So this would on and on getting progressively more invasive and scary until finally she decided to kick it up a notch. She started leaving truly scary messages on the Brennan's answering machine, stuff like, I'm sick to my stomach. I'm in such a rage right now. I really don't know what I'm going to do. That's why I didn't come in today, because I was really afraid I would kill you if I saw you. Fuck. In another call, which Dr. Brennan had the presence of mine to tape, she said,

I can't live while you are alive on this earth. I'm going to kill you. kill you or kill myself. I am degraded by your being alive. Shoot yourself or jump off a building so your spleen ruptures and you suffer before you finally die. Jeez and crackers bitch, too. It gets worse. She called him the Antichrist. She told him, I want to see you hooked up to a hospital bed with tubes running out of every orifice. And then when you're laying in your hospital bed paralyzed, you can think of me and get aroused in your head if you have a head left. Fucking hell. She was going balls to the wall at this point.

Must have been absolutely terrifying. And that particular call ended on a really charming note, as I recall. She said, what was it? Oh yeah. I would like to see you vomit from chemotherapy. Wait, you'll find out what rape is one day. Jesus. Which is just weird as much as creepy, that last part.

But the worst part by far was when she started threatening the Brennan's kids. She told him she hoped their daughter, quote, gets raped and ends up a neuter. And she said she hoped one of their sons didn't live to see his next birthday. Now, that was over the line. Poor Susan, alone at their country house with the kids most of the time, started sleeping with a fire poker, just in case. Everybody's nerves were on edge. And throughout all of this, the lawyers the Brennan's kept talking to just told him to write it out, ignore her, and she'll go away, and blah, blah, bullshit, blah, just infuriating. at some point in all this though the timeline on this case is kind of hard to pin down with the info that's available now i guess just because it's such a kind of an old case but at some point dr brennan managed to get her up in front of a judge on some charge or other diane showed up impeccably dressed as always and of course represented herself and she did it so well coming across as a well-spoken heartbroken young woman who's just been having trouble letting go of her lover that the judge bought it and let her go great

Here's the thing, though, and I love this so much I want to marry it. A couple days later, she started stalking the judge. I should you not. Apparently, she wasn't a faithful, obsessive, like she was willing to stalk a sidepiece while she was waiting for Dr. Brennan to come around. So this judge, bless his heart, got a good close-up look at what Dr. Brennan, Dr. DeKoss, and a lot of other men before him had gone through. She wrote him letters, too.

Here's an excerpt from one of them. Try not to swallow your tongue. Surely you were aware, since I did nothing to hide it, that I've been rather wildly attracted to you from the start. As an orthodox Aristotelian by way of Anne Rand, my adult life has included devastatingly long periods of absolute celibacy. Fear not that one day, overcome by lust, I will burst into your courtroom and leap over the bench and let my fingers insidiously creep under the black silk judicial robes. She's like an alien who learned about sex from. Anne Rand and like a few ripped out pages from Playboy

Oh my God She's Anne Randy Oh my God, which is coincidentally My Roller Derby name Mine's hell in a handbasket But yours is better An Orthodox Aristotelian By way of Anne Rand

My God woman Wouldn't it just be simpler to wear a sign That says I am a pot of human poison Ugh Anywho Now that she'd shown her true colors To a judge shit finally started moving along.

The DA began showing an interest, especially when investigators uncovered just how many dudes had had the Diane Schaefer treatment over the years. A steady stream for pretty much our entire life. Prosecutors launched a four-year investigation to gather enough evidence on Diane to bring a case for something beyond simple misdemeanor harassment. In the meantime, they granted the Brennan's and the judge

a restraining order, which Diane repeatedly violated. So there were seven or eight arrests in the time they were investigating her for the big case, none of which came to much of anything. Just pissed Diane off more and got Dr. Brennan more angry answering machine messages. It also got Diane a mandatory psych evaluation, which was really what the Brennan's and the prosecution wanted in the first place. They didn't feel like she belonged in jail. They realized she was suffering from a delusion and they wanted her to get well. These are good eggs. You know, they're nice people. But nothing they did seemed to make Diane back off. As her fictional character, Dr. Cecilia Taylor Thompson, Diane

wrote that she was psychic to the point of being telepathic and could use her clairvoyant abilities to figure out where he was at any time. Diane was a busy bee during this time. She showed up at a conference just to sit in the front row of one of Dr. Brennan's lectures and flip him off the whole time because she's a mature put-together woman. And she kept up her pursuit of the judge, the poor bastard. She kept getting arrested for violating the order of protection and the judge made her start seeing a probation officer, a woman she hated for her bad fashion sense and, quote,

androgynous style. Meanwhile, the Dr. Cecilia letters continued, despite the restraining order. One talked about Diane's morning routine. She, meaning Diane, wakes up each morning with a female equivalent of what you men so charmingly call a piss erection. Oh, no. Wait, do they? I don't think they do, but carry on.

here at True Crime Campfire will spare you the gory details but the next few lines are about you know dial in the old rotary phone patting the bunny flicking the bean and then

she said she keeps an enlargement of a color snapshot of you in a magnificent silver frame on her bedside table and she uses it to make things go a little faster Jesus Christ please won't someone anyone teach this woman how to seduce a man i'm gonna lose my

fucking mind i know she's so bad at it oh she's seducing men like men try to seduce women that is a thought well because men are like oh i would i totally jack off to to a picture of you and you're like you're like no thank you please uh i'm good and like a man might enjoy that if he was into you, but like just somehow the way she says it every time, it manages to just be horrifying. It's like she's mentioned, oh, I keep it in a silver frame, like, bitch, calm down. A magnificent silver frame. Oh, God.

In yet another letter, Dr. Cecilia wrote, I believe you have to make the most difficult decision of your lifetime. Whether to marry her or put her in prison, the feminists would say the two. Two states are almost indistinguishable. For years, Marie Brennan had no intention of doing the former, but couldn't seem to achieve the latter. But now, finally, she'd violated the court's order too many times, and she'd done nothing to try and get help for her delusions. And at long last, it was time to put the habeas gravis on Ms. Diane for aggravated harassment. By the way, charming commentary on the women's movement there, Diane Rand.

I, motherfucking, roll. Mm-hmm. When they arrested her, among her personal effects were medical IDs, frequent flyer cards for various airlines, a box of stationery for her many important letters, and an address book. In the book, there were detailed travel schedules for Dr. Brennan, phone numbers, and addresses for his colleagues and neighbors, and various odds and ends of info about his kids and friends. Oh, and they also found a rubber glove, which for some reason just makes a chill run down my back. Yeah, that's incredibly creepy. Because of the strong potential of Diane latching on to one of the attorneys or judges or jurors involved in this case, the court set it up so that every single person involved in the trial from judge to jury was female.

Smart. Diane never met a man in authority that didn't make her want to climb their fire escape at night and watch them sleep. They set her bail higher than she could manage just because they knew what a potential danger she was becoming up to her targets. And boy, did she hate it in jail. Apparently, this is a shocker, I know, her fellow inmates didn't really appreciate her snotty attitude. For example, she was mad. Just prepare yourselves because this hit me like a fucking train. She was mad because they didn't have bathtubs in jail.

Apparently, her highness was too fancy for showers. Oh, my God, dang. Like, maybe you're thinking that, but wouldn't you know not to say it to your fellow inmates at Rikers? Like, you just wouldn't, I don't, what is this woman inside of the woman's head like? This must be a wild ride. Her performance at the trial was value for money. She trotted out her big old dictionary and a quees and art vocabulary. She fangirled all over Dr. Brennan, and she told quite the fantastical tale about their non-existent relationship.

And of course, Dr. Brennan took the stand and refuted every bit of it, with plenty of proof to back him up. For the jurors, it must have felt a little like looking at a hologram. You turn the case one way, you've got a story of a passionate love affair that ended badly and broke a sad woman's heart, a woman who found herself unable to let go of the man she considered the love of her life. You turn it the other way, and you've got an eerie story of a totally imagined affair, a fantasy that turned darker and more dangerous as the years went by. Diane talked to writer Marie Brenner about her case while it was still going on, and her attitude about it was interesting. She kept saying she felt like her very womanhood was on trial. Apparently, Diane thought she could only connect with herself as a woman if she managed to make some powerful dude fall in love with her.

I guess a lot of us feel that way at one point or another in our lives and our Hallmark movie culture really doesn't do a lot to dissuade us, but most of us don't take it to the stratosphere like this. The jury, thank God, sided with the prosecution and found Diane guilty. She was sentenced to two years in Rikers Island, the maximum sentence allowed for the charge, and she seemed just totally baffled as to what she'd done wrong. In Diane's mind, this whole thing was nothing more than persecution.

The prosecutor just didn't have anything better to do than go after her. Dr. Brennan was caving into pressure from authorities and his wife. Nothing was her fault. Paranoia seems to be as much a part of Diane as the blood in her veins. Everybody's out to get her. The prosecutor, the police, the attorneys, the jury, the press, her parents, her probation officer. The revolving door of men she stalked and harassed over the, years, all of whom inevitably went from the most perfect creatures on God's green earth to, as she

described one of them, the lowest form of life. But here's the thing, Diane, when you can't get along with anybody, when your entire life has been a parade of conflict and rejection and, you know, restraining orders and stuff like that, it's you. Okay? When you clash with everybody you come across, there's a pretty good chance it's you. And if you lack insight to the point where you make it all somebody else's fault every time, then you're never going to get any better. You're never going to have the life you want. You're going to spend all your time beating your head against what's going to feel like an immovable wall. But the thing is, it's not a wall. It's a door. And the key that unlocks it is just a little bit of self-examination. But you've got to be brave enough to do it. Now, would Diane

Schaefer have turned violent if she'd been left unchecked? It's up for debate. I mean, she never did anything violent in eight years, so you might argue that it's unlikely she ever would. But it's worth noting, as we said earlier, that the famous criminal psychologist Dr. Park Dietz worked on this case. Now, he's an expert on erotomania. He actually wrote the first definition of it in the DSM-3R. And according to the Vanity Fair article, he found that she fits seven out of the ten markers he usually sees in assassins. So I'm not ruling it out. And even if she never would have acted on any of those threats that she made against the Brennan's, imagine what untold hell she put them through in that eight-year span. Imagine sleeping with a fire-poke

every night and being afraid that somebody's going to take a shot at one of your kids as they're getting off the school bus. That's terrifying. And imagine how much more she could have done if she hadn't been put in prison. According to investigation discovery, by the way, Diane quickly developed an obsession with the prison psychiatrist on Rikers Island, so she stayed true to form, even behind bars. And frustratingly, there is not a lot of info on what happened to her after her release. And I did look. If anybody knows, please let me know. But as far as we're we know, just because there's no more news stories on it, she did move on from the Brennan's, much to their relief, I'm sure. And I didn't put this in the script because I just forgot to,

but I wanted to add this in because I thought it was such a good point. When Katie and I were texting about this the other day, you said that she seemed to want the kind of man that like a woman would write in a romance novel, not like a real man. She wanted this like cardboard Word cut out, Hallmark movie. Yeah. I thought that was such a good point. She's like, I mean, even going back to her description of how she was sitting in his lap with her arms around his neck, that's such a, like, you would read that in like a $5

paperback that you find at Walmart. You know what I mean? Yeah. And she actually said the words, your place or mine. Like people don't say that. People don't talk like that. What? But people do talk like that in bad romance.

novels in Lifetime movies. Yes. Correct. Yeah. I thought that was so perceptive. Anyway, and I forgot to put it in the script. So anyway, fun little PS to this story. Dr. Murray Brennan is now Sir Murray Brennan, having been knighted in New Zealand for his

services to medicine, which, damn, you know, talk about an illustrious career. And he seems to still be practicing, which is amazing. Good for him. And one more little PS, a PPS, if you will. One of my dear friends and former theater teachers, Canadian actress Laura, Mitchell was actually in the TV movie based on this case in 2002. It's called Obsessed. It's terrific. I freaking love Lifetime movies and it's one of my favorites ever. And Laura played the prosecutor. So go watch it if you can. It's really good. So that was a wild one. Right,

campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, get your fire pokers and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we wanted to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. you so much to Sarah, Amira, Erica, Donna, Melissa, Brooke, Laura, and Kristen. We appreciate you to the moon and back. And y'all, if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking

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