A fan sent her stuffed animals at the studio. She thought it was sweet. Three years later, that same fan paid a private investigator $250 for her home address and showed up with a gun.
A Career on the Rise
Rebecca Schaeffer was 21 in the summer of 1989, and her career was genuinely taking off. She'd starred in the CBS sitcom My Sister Sam, landed a role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III, and had just wrapped a TV movie alongside Eva Marie Saint and Burt Lancaster. She'd grown up an only child in Oregon, the daughter of a writer and a child psychologist, and had left home at 16 with her parents' support to pursue acting — the kind of swift, real success story that made her parents proud enough to carry around her Seventeen magazine cover to show friends.
On July 18, 1989, she was at home in West Hollywood, waiting for a courier to deliver a script. She answered a knock at her door.
Three Years of Obsession
The man at the door was Robert John Bardo, 19. He had been fixated on Schaeffer since seeing her on television three years earlier, sending her letters — one of which she'd actually responded to — and gifts, including a five-foot teddy bear and a bouquet of roses he tried to deliver to her at the studio. A studio security guard turned him away but, struck by how calm and articulate Bardo seemed compared to typical overeager fans, had him personally driven all the way back home to Tucson rather than treating him as any kind of threat.
That wasn't Bardo's first fixation. At 13, he had stolen money from his mother to travel to Maine hoping to meet child peace activist Samantha Smith; nothing came of it, and Smith later died in a 1985 plane crash. His attention shifted to Schaeffer not long after.
His feelings curdled into rage after he saw Schaeffer in a sexual scene in a film, reportedly calling her "no different than all the other bitches" in Hollywood — a sense of betrayal that, in his mind, justified what came next. He had his brother help him acquire a gun and paid a private investigator $250 to obtain Schaeffer's home address through California's Department of Motor Vehicles — completely legal at the time. He took a Greyhound bus from Tucson to Los Angeles, gun hidden in a shopping bag, and knocked on her door.
When she answered, he shot her once in the chest. She died at the scene.
An Arrest the Next Day
Bardo fled back to Arizona. He was arrested the following day, found wandering and shouting in traffic on a Tucson freeway, reportedly disheveled and in obvious crisis. He was carrying a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which he discarded on a rooftop as he fled the murder scene. The detail drew immediate comparisons to Mark David Chapman, who had carried the same novel when he killed John Lennon in 1980 — a connection Bardo has insisted was coincidental rather than deliberate imitation, though he had reportedly written to Chapman beforehand asking what life in prison was like.
At trial, Bardo's defense didn't dispute that he'd killed Schaeffer — they argued he was mentally ill, presenting testimony that he suffered from schizophrenia. Prosecutors, including a young deputy district attorney named Marcia Clark (who would go on to lead the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson trial a few years later), argued that despite his obsessive behavior and psychiatric history, he was legally sane at the time of the murder. In October 1991, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A Law Named for What Happened to Her
Schaeffer's murder became one of the most consequential cases in shaping how American law treats stalking. At the time, there was no real legal framework that treated persistent, unwanted fixation on a person as a serious crime in its own right — it took her death, and a handful of similar cases around the same period, to change that.
California passed the nation's first criminal anti-stalking law in 1990 as a direct result. In 1994, Congress passed the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, which bars state DMVs from disclosing a person's personal information, including their home address, without authorization — closing off exactly the loophole that let Bardo's private investigator find Schaeffer in the first place.
Where Bardo Is Now
Bardo's time in prison hasn't been without incident. In 2007, eighteen years after killing Schaeffer, he was stabbed eleven times by a fellow inmate at Mule Creek State Prison in California; he survived after being airlifted for emergency treatment. He has since been transferred to Avenal State Prison, where he remains incarcerated today, now in his fifties.
In a 2019 interview, Bardo expressed what he described as genuine remorse: "She was irreplaceable. I think about her every day because she should be here. I realize what I've done and I feel a lot of tremendous guilt."
A Legacy Beyond the Courtroom
Rebecca's parents, Danna and Benson Schaeffer, channeled their grief into keeping her memory active rather than letting it fade into a true-crime footnote. Danna took acting classes and wrote a one-woman stage show, You in Midair, drawing on her daughter's own dreams and ambitions. Those who knew Rebecca have consistently described her as lively, brave, and full of promise that was cut short far too early.
Her death is still cited today, decades later, whenever stalking law, celebrity privacy, or the limits of DMV record access come up — a grim but lasting reminder of how a young woman's murder reshaped legal protections most people never think about until they need them.
Sources
Robert John Bardo — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_John_Bardo
How Actress Rebecca Schaeffer's Murder Changed Stalker Laws — A&E Crime + Investigation https://www.aetv.com/articles/rebecca-schaeffer-murder-robert-john-bardo
The Terrifying Rebecca Schaeffer Murder Details — E! News https://www.eonline.com/news/1057267/the-still-terrifying-details-of-the-murder-of-rebecca-schaeffer-a-star-on-the-rise-and-an-obsession-turned-deadly
Robert Bardo Now: Where is Rebecca Schaeffer's Killer Today? — The Cinemaholic https://thecinemaholic.com/where-is-robert-john-bardo-now/