1283: Eva LaRue & Kaya McKenna Callahan | 12 Years Hunted by a Stalker

1283: Eva LaRue & Kaya McKenna Callahan | 12 Years Hunted by a Stalker

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Eva LaRue: The day after filming for that year, we uh, we jumped on a plane and we went to, and we were not there 36 hours in Italy. Then we wake up in the middle of the night, you know, you've got jet lag, you are exhausted. It was like three o'clock in the morning our bedroom door opens up and you know how when there's a light behind somebody, you can't see their face 'cause they're in shadow.

I couldn't see who it was, but it was obviously a man. He didn't answer and he stood there for a few seconds and then he closed the door. In that moment, it was God's answer to me saying, if I want you dead, I will get you a, any country and any city and any room anywhere in the world. So. Relax, because this person came within 10 feet of me and my daughter while we're laying in bed.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating [00:01:00] people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional Hollywood filmmaker, neuroscientist, or real life pirate.

If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today's episode messed me up a little bit. Not going to lie, when this was first pitched to me, I was like, all right, stalker story. Okay. Not exactly rare, but then I watched part one of the documentary and I immediately thought, wow, this is not normal.

Stalker scary. This is next level, deeply psychopathic nightmare fuel, uh, the horror movie variety. [00:02:00] My guests today are Eva LaRue. Yes. From CSA Miami, A show that is still syndicated in over a hundred countries, and her daughter Kaya. And what they went through is so disturbing that at multiple points, I had to pause the documentary and get up and like drink a glass of water.

This wasn't paparazzi nonsense. This wasn't a creepy fan crossing the line. This is a man who wrote graphic detailed rape and murder threats, signed them. Freddie Krueger made it painfully clear that he was not fantasizing, he was rehearsing. So today we're talking FBI profilers Aero Mania, which is like a crazy quote unquote disease that some people have.

Hyper vigilance, sleeping with weapons under your pillow, genetic genealogy, and the kind of fear that never really turns off, especially when you're trying to raise a kid. This episode is intense. It's a little bit scary. It's also a stark reminder of how vulnerable we all are. So if you've ever thought that could never happen to me, well, buckle up.

'cause Eva thought that too.

Now, here we go with Eva LaRue and Kaya McKenna Callahan.

When I was pitched this, [00:03:00] I was like, okay, stalker. That's so common in Hollywood. What's unique here? And then I, they're like, no, no, no. Watch 10 minutes of the docuseries. And I watched part one and I was like, Jen, cancel my lunch thing.

I gotta watch Psych. Psych. Like I can't sleep tonight unless this guy, I know this person is like in prison or dead

Eva LaRue: and now he's out. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, yeah. And it's incredibly scary. You really went through it with this guy. So. Let me back up a a little bit 'cause I think people are already confused, which is, uh, you know, I take pride in confusing people in the first 90 seconds of the show.

So you're one of the main stars on CSI Miami. Give me a scale of the reach of that show. 'cause it's still syndicated in like a hundred countries. You can still catch it.

Eva LaRue: At one point it was in almost every country and it was the most watched show in the world for, for a

Kaya McKenna Callahan: while there. So, I mean, even when we go to um, France, she'll get stopped and they know it as Liz Express, so we always say that to each other 'cause they're like, oh, you're on Liz Express.

We still get stopped in Europe.

Eva LaRue: It's still

Kaya McKenna Callahan: playing in primetime

Eva LaRue: [00:04:00] in Italy and France and some countries. Yeah, so I don't know what it was. I think maybe it was the aesthetic of the show, like just the visuals of the show that it ended up being more popular than the other franchises.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean, it's a good recipe, right?

Everybody likes hot tan people solving crimes in 48 minutes on a beach, and it's like using all this futuristic technology, which nobody had heard of at the time. I'm a former lawyer, I guess I'm still technically a lawyer. And one of the things we studied in law school. Was how juries at the time that this show was really popular.

Juries were like, well, where's the forensic DNA evidence? And the the prosecutor's like, dude, this is a shoplifting case. Like there's no DNA evidence, bro.

Eva LaRue: Oh, that, that's right. They call it the CSI effect.

Jordan Harbinger: You can't get a freaking conviction. It's like that's him on the tape. And then people are like, enhanced.

And it's like, that's not a thing.

Eva LaRue: They're like, which way was the blood spatter going?

Jordan Harbinger: Right? Yep. Ma'am, this is a Wendy's

Eva LaRue: in that shoplifting case.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. In hands. Exactly. So it became really, really hard. 'cause before it was like, yeah, that looks like a person [00:05:00] who shoplifts guilty. Probation.

Eva LaRue: That blurry photo looks like our culprit.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's like that's good enough. And it's like, wait a minute, you didn't run this through the special computer that matches the fingerprint eye retina thing from every person in the world. It's like, that's not real, dude. That's

Eva LaRue: not a thing. And that's the crazy thing. So here I was playing a DNA specialist on CSI for you know, almost 10 years and we're catching our bad guy in 43 minutes, not including commercials.

And in real life, the FBI would not have the technology to catch our stalker for 12 more years.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, right. Yeah, we'll get to that. I have a lot of questions about that 'cause I think it's fascinating. Now in the beginning of the docuseries, you mentioned that when you were young your parents divorced and your mom was actually convinced that your dad was having you followed.

So that was bizarre because what a sort of full circle kind of thing, and you must have grown up feeling somewhat paranoid then as well. Yeah,

Eva LaRue: well, you know, it's weird. I don't remember feeling that, but you know, they say that energy or circumstances tend to follow you through life until you work your way [00:06:00] to the end of them.

And who knew that that would be sort of the foreshadowing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's an interesting parallel, I suppose.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. I, I didn't even know that story for like up until we did, till we started talking about, yeah, it was a lot of things we didn't know kind of about each other, how we felt about certain things or kind of how things really took place once we.

Kind of really talked about the timeline of everything, but that was something I was like, what on earth are you talking about? Yeah.

Eva LaRue: And then, I don't know if you know this, but my sister, she was part of a serial killer case. It must have been like 2009 or something like that. And I got a phone call from my sister.

She was at work and she said, A friend of mine just saw a commercial. The LA County Sheriff's Department is running a commercial with like 53 women's photos. And a friend saw it and said, I was photo number 13, but I'm at work. I can't call. Will you just call this one 800 number and see what's up? So I call them and they say, oh, who do you know in the photos in the commercial we ran?

And I said, I know, number 13. And they said, is she alive or dead? [00:07:00] I said, she's alive. What is this? Like, what is this about? And they said, well, there's a serial killer. Back in the late seventies and eighties, he was a photographer and he would do the typical, I'll shoot your book for you. We'll go out into the Angeles Crest Forest, or we'll go out and shoot in, in Joshua Tree or some remote place.

And sure enough, you know, I think he, he killed like. 40 some women. Oh, and he kept trinkets from

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: Each person that they killed. So, and unfortunately in a serial killer case, because it costs so much money to run DNA on every single case, they pick the three strongest DNA cases and they only run those three.

And then that's what constitutes a serial killer is when you get three convictions. But the rest of those women, 40, some women never got closure to their stories. They never knew for sure if he was their serial killer. So the LA County Sheriff's Department had just gotten a cold case grant, which oddly enough [00:08:00] is how I came on CSI Miami.

My character was a cold case grant. So e and I started opening up all these cold cases to do my DNA. Analysis on. And so they got this cold case grant and they opened up this case and my sister was number 13 in this case because when she was a teenager we went to this weird little, they used to have these things called photo days.

If you were an up and coming actress model and all these, you know, unprofessional photographers would come and shoot your pictures in this photo day weekend. And he shot my sister. But there were dozens of models and actresses and dozens of photographers. And my mom was there with us 'cause we were just teenagers, so nothing happened to her.

But her photos were in his cache.

Jordan Harbinger: Dude, that still is really scary. Really. I mean, the fact that this guy

Eva LaRue: so close, like a close brush and we ended up doing an episode of it on CSI Miami.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I love that. I was in that episode though too. Like it, I feel like we've always had like a weird thread of connects of different

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Like that, that literally happened to [00:09:00] your sister. Yeah. And then we did the episode of it and I was in it and then Yeah, yeah,

Eva LaRue: yeah. We need to have the the connect stop now. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Basically. Yeah. I was going to say this is the wrong kind of small world energy. Yeah.

Eva LaRue: It really

Jordan Harbinger: is. Like you want it to be like, oh my God, do you know the guy I am dating was actually friends with my friend Kyle in college?

And he says he's an amazing guy. That's so great. Yours is like, oh, did you know my sister got in brush with that serial killer in the episode you were in in CS Miami? And then that person knows my stalkers. FBI like, no,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: stop it. Yeah, no, I'm good. I'd like my connect to somehow like connect to Meryl Streep in some way.

Like

Jordan Harbinger: that's the only

Kaya McKenna Callahan: kind of connect I want. You need to, this is connect to, uh, to lottery winners and That's

Jordan Harbinger: right. Yeah. This is like the worst six degrees of Kevin Bacon game ever. Um, so there's a, there's a probably a better joke in there, but we don't have time. All right. So one of the thing I thought was kind of funny is you buy this, you buy this amazing house and you buy it in an LLC.

Shout out to Buffy the vampires slave, right Sarah, for giving you that idea, Sarah, because then your name is not on the property. In [00:10:00] case you get a stalker and you're like, I imagine at that point

Eva LaRue: you're like, I'm like a six on the call sheet at CSI. I'm not like one of the stars on there. It was going to stalk me.

I was, we ended up with four stalkers on that show. Emily had two. David Caruso had one and I had one all at the same time. It was insane.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The David Caruso one, I read about that 'cause I was like, wait, three people on CSI at the same time had a stalker and his was really creepy. I guess they caught her, she was in Austria, so it was like a German lady and she had some weird.

Shrine to him in her house with knife stab marks all over the face and head of the photo. Like

Eva LaRue: she was threatening to kidnap his daughter, threatening to blow up her school, threatening to blow up his house. It was insane. Really

Jordan Harbinger: insane. Literally, these people are insane. Speaking of insane. You get on the show and you start to get fan mail as one does, I mean, I can kind of relate.

No, not really. Um, but how, how does, I'm probably getting different fan mail from you. In fact, I know I'm, 'cause I watched the docuseries. How?

Eva LaRue: That's good. I'm glad for you. I'm glad.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So far so [00:11:00] good.

Eva LaRue: And mine was always good until this

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: You

Jordan Harbinger: know it's funny 'cause I'm watching the docuseries and I'm like, I don't have a stalker.

I guess I need more listeners. I need more listeners. Until I find that group of that core group of like really freaking crazy people.

Eva LaRue: But your listeners are all trying to solve the crime. They're fascinated with how the puzzle comes together.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. They're smarter. Actually that would be scary.

'cause they would be the scariest stalkers, right? They'd be people who like know to wipe their fingerprints off of things. So I don't get any ideas, folks, but tell me how it all begins. Because your fan mail's good, right? You're probably enjoying, like, you sit down with a coffee and you read a couple letters and you're like, all right.

Uh, you know, getting your pedicure, reading a couple letters.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. Most people just want a headshot and a autograph. And this one happened to come to my manager at the time, and he would only open probably every 10th letter or something. He wouldn't go through all the mail, he would just open every few.

And he just happened to open this one and was like, oh my God. And sent it to me immediately and [00:12:00] right away they started coming one right after the next. So even the first one, even though it escalated to become more depraved and more heinous and more disturbed, they started out pretty bad right away.

Jordan Harbinger: So do you think I wondered about this when I watched it?

Do you think maybe you just missed the quote unquote normal ones? Maybe they just didn't get opened or. Did they start super creepy?

Eva LaRue: As far as I know, they started creepy. Could have been coming longer than that. You're absolutely right. I didn't think about that.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. Honestly. Yeah. Even in the docuseries, I feel like when, um, one of the attorneys starts talking about it and how, like the progression of stalking and the actual like mental, where it's like first you think you're in love with the person and then you're upset by the fact that they haven't responded and you're rejected.

I wonder if there were some early, like just purely fan base.

Jordan Harbinger: That's exactly what I was thinking. I was like, wait, the psychologist on the docuseries is like, well, the phase one is this, phase two is this. And I was [00:13:00] like. Homeboy just seems to have skipped a phase three. So like did we miss phase one and phase two, or was he just like in a hurry to get crazy fast?

I don't know.

Eva LaRue: We just skipped right to nuts. And you're absolutely right because they would've gone under the radar before that.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: That's true. You've just been like, okay, that's nice.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. That's the one thing I never thought of. Like literally this whole time.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. They would've blended in with like, oh, you look so pretty in episode six.

I really like you. And you're like, okay, next. Right. It's all the same. And then, then it becomes like,

Eva LaRue: can I have a photo? We maybe sent him a photo at some point.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh.

Eva LaRue: That's crazy. That's a great question. If he signed it

Kaya McKenna Callahan: himself and not Freddie Krueger. Yeah. Like it started off like that. Such a good, wow.

You and I never thought of that.

Eva LaRue: Hmm.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Well, you know what's funny is we keep saying too, people keep asking us the jump off question usually, which is like, well, when did you know it was real? Immediately? Like when you first read that letter, it's so jarring.

Eva LaRue: You're not like, ah, yeah,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: yeah.

Eva LaRue: Just kidding. Yeah.

How funny.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: But like in all reality, that is interesting to think like, oh yeah, did you, we just miss. Whatever the first step [00:14:00] was.

Jordan Harbinger: It's possible. I suppose if you sent him a photo, it's in the evidence from the FBI. Right. It's like the FBI would have that in their evidence trove.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: No, they only have the ones that we gave them.

No, but he's saying when he showed up, like when they busted into the house, I wonder if there was an evidence, like he had a signed photo of you somewhere

Jordan Harbinger: because he had every photo of you on a hard drive from every media appearance ever.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. So, yeah. So crazy. And, but I'm

Kaya McKenna Callahan: wondering,

Eva LaRue: and also, um, the two Steves that solved the case, they said that when they combed through his Facebook and his Instagram, he had left all these lovely flowery messages on our Instagrams.

Like, you look beautiful today. I love this picture, blah, blah, blah. You know, as himself, because he was signing the letters, Freddie Krugers, we didn't know who he was.

Jordan Harbinger: One letter reads, I'm going to say this is going to be gross and I apologize 'cause it's probably a little bit triggering, but Dear Eva, I think about you all the time.

Once I, you and your daughter, I will chop your bodies into small pieces. Like it's so jarring and it's actually much [00:15:00] worse than that. But I think people get the idea. What's going through your head when you read that? 'cause you're probably like on your living room couch just looking at fan mail, right?

You're not expecting anything like this.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. And that, that was not the first letter that we got. I have to say, after about the third one that we got, I stopped reading them. 'cause that was all living in my head and kind of never knew.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: No. Yeah, I didn't know.

Eva LaRue: As a matter of fact, you're probably hearing that one for the first time.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I mean, not that they all sound the same at some points, but I think you get to a point where it's like you block them out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, they blur together.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: You can't hear it every time in different ways. Like, I can't replay it in my mind 'cause it'll drive me crazy. But yeah, up until I want to say he was caught, I really didn't know.

The extent, or even honestly, when we went to court,

Eva LaRue: you didn't know the details.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I didn't know the full details. I mean, I knew at a certain age that it was bad that it was, you know, rape, mutilation, killing dismembering. I knew that in a general sense, but it really, in this whole process, it's, [00:16:00] you never heard the words?

Eva LaRue: Yeah, I never read the letters. She never read the letters. I didn't let her read any of it.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, she was like five right when this started.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. So, you know, so you can't let that live in a kid's head. I just had to be really specific about, this is more than stranger danger. Like, you know, we all talk to our kids about strange, but this was an amped up version.

Just I needed her to know that somebody specific, although we didn't know who it was, you know, to always keep her head on a swivel, but she had no idea what was in those letters until she was in her later teens. Because I knew it would be living rent-free in her head forever.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Traumatizing. And it's traumatizing for you too.

I mean, what's going through your head when you read that and what do you even do about something like that? Because most people don't know where to go or what to do with this.

Eva LaRue: I did not. I did not know. At that point, you feel safe. Nowhere. There's nowhere that's safe. 'cause it's this amorphous threat, right?

You don't know, doesn't have a face or a name or you know, it's not a corporal bot. It's just feels like it's coming from everywhere. So my hair [00:17:00] started falling out. I broke out in hives like for a month and a half, almost two months. I was like a shell. I didn't know how to protect my kid. I didn't know how to protect myself.

It doesn't matter how much security you have at your house, you don't feel safe. I mean, look at the big celebrities with the endless amounts of money to secure themselves. The Brad Pitts, the Gwyneth Paltrows, the Sandra Bullocks, and somebody broke into Brad Pitt's house and was sleeping in his bed.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

That's crazy.

Eva LaRue: And then just recently, I think it was only a year ago in the last year, Sandra Bullock is hiding in her closet or in her pantry or something, and her stalker's in her kitchen. You know, people have asked me, you know, did you have security? How much? Well, yeah, but. I don't have that kinda security, you know, nobody has that.

And even so, I mean, somebody just ran down, uh, Jennifer Aniston's gate two months ago. Like they just ran it down.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, this is, it's, it's crazy. You have to live in like an embassy in order to be safe in Hollywood. This is [00:18:00] actually really just super unnerving. And how many letters are you getting at this point?

And I assume they're all kind of saying a version of the same thing as before.

Eva LaRue: Yeah, they're all saying some version of the same thing. And so in the beginning I didn't know what to do. I went to local law enforcement and they unfortunately, by no fault of their own, but this is just the way the laws are set up.

Unless somebody breaks into your house or lays hands on you, there's really nothing that they can do. And because we don't even have a face or a name. So thankfully being on CSI, one of our tech advisors, Mike Scott, he had been the chief homicide detective for LA County Sheriffs and he put me in touch with the FBI because he said, you know, these letters are interstate letters, so it falls under FBI jurisdiction.

Thankfully. And here's the weird thing to, you know, you can't just be, Hey, one 800, FBI, Hey, I got an issue. You know, you have to kind of have somebody who can connect. And even if you do, they have to be interested enough to even [00:19:00] worry about your case. And I think only because I was on CSI where they.

Fascinated with taking it. And then again, for 12 years that, you know, they would, once a year our FBI agent would sit us down for lunch and say, Hey, just checking in, saying hi, want you to know that your letters are at Quantico. And you know, they've run 'em for DNA and they've run 'em for prints, but we're not getting a hit in codis because as you know, CODIS was the only national database for DNA for law enforcement until the advent of 23 and me and Ancestry, and GEDMatch and these things.

And more than 80% of the people in CODIS are already incarcerated. Because they've already been picked up for rape and for murder and the rest are just John Doe rape kits that don't have a name yet. They haven't been busted. They haven't been picked up yet. So unless somebody was in codis and of course on CSI Miami, everyone in codis, right?

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

Eva LaRue: We, we, we, we only have 43 minutes. We gotta catch [00:20:00] somebody somehow

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Everyone's got retinal scan.

Eva LaRue: Yep. Everybody got a retinal scan?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you can get it from like a camera phone photo that's taken from a hundred yards away. CS man, like, oh, got his retina. Good. Good. That's what's

Eva LaRue: going through that red light.

We got his retina.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. So are you worried that this guy knows where you live? 'cause he's sending them at this point to who? Your manager or your office or something like that. He doesn't know where your house is,

Eva LaRue: right? Yeah. He started sending them to my publicist. So then the FBI would come to my publicist Turk's house and pick up these letters and Turk would have to, you know, pick them up with tweezers.

But they'd already even handled a thousand times, you know, by postal people and all the things. But then he would like take them with tweezers 'cause we at that point could eyeball his scrawling from a mile away and know it was him. And then he'd put 'em in in his Ziploc bag and then the FBI would come to his house and pick them up.

Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, what's scary is, I mean, I lived in Hollywood for a few years. Everybody knows where they film. CSI, [00:21:00] Miami Everybo. I mean, you can't miss it. Those buildings are enormous and it's like there's a huge sign out front that says CSI Miami or something like that. Right. It's so obvious.

Eva LaRue: Right. But you know, when we would go out on location, no one knew what our location was going to be that day.

And you know, when you're driving around LA and you see like an upside down yellow sign with like just letters on it. And that's so that if you're on that particular show, you know what those letters are and you know you're shooting in that neighborhood. But if you're just like a passerby, you would have no idea what show is shooting in that neighborhood until you pull up and you know, maybe you see something.

But whenever we were shooting out on location, there was no way. But, you know, Emily Proctor's stalker would always show up on location.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Eva LaRue: First thing in the morning. Yeah.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Which

Eva LaRue: is

Kaya McKenna Callahan: crazy that they didn't do anything.

Eva LaRue: She's like, who's leaking?

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, someone is leaking the information probably for money or something like that.

That's really scary. Gosh. And, and then of course he doesn't have to barge into the location. He could just like follow you home. The FBI agent said that this was scary in particular because it was very personal, [00:22:00] very specific, and very violent, which is like a trifecta of let's take this seriously. I mean, he is saying, this other letter reads, I will stalk you, punish you, and finally kill you.

You bitch, I'll make your life a living hell. It's so weirdly personal from a guy who doesn't know you, which we'll get. You know, you mentioned earlier that he's like personalizing everything and the way that he says he's going to torture and kill you is so graphic. I, I, again, I won't share it here, but the behavioral psychologist in the documentary.

She says something terrifying, which is that the letter writer's thoughts and writing are clear and coherent, which means that he's much more dangerous because he could actually make good on the threats. And that gave me goosebumps, right? When I heard that if you get a crazy letter and it's written in like cran or something like that, upside down letters, you're like, okay, sure.

But then this guy is like very calm, very specific, very personal and, and yeah, he signs them all. Freddy Krueger, which is just extra gross. 'cause that's like the guy who shows up in nightmares, right? So he is definitely deliberately trying to be as [00:23:00] scary and crazy as possible, but is also not so unhinged that he like doesn't know what day it is or where he lives or something.

This is like a semi-functional human being.

Eva LaRue: Right. And there were a few letters in there too where he said, well, you're on CSI. You're a detective. Come find me. Come find me if you can.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I mean, and he had a job. He had a job in a memory care facility. That's something that you actually do have to be functional to be able to do so.

Yeah, like it definitely was scarier knowing that he was a functional man that really could have made like good on his promise.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll talk more about him in a, in a little bit, but is there a part of you being an actress on CSI, were you thinking like, at first anyway? Oh, good. They're going to take the DNA, the fingerprints, like I said earlier, yell enhanced at some camera footage.

Find this guy, you know, at a Walgreens. I'll

Eva LaRue: do it myself. I know how to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: I'll do it myself. I've yelled enhanced before it screens. I know how this is done.

Eva LaRue: Yeah, just get, let me get a hold of all the equipment that we have. We have the real equipment on set. I, I'll figure this out if you can't figure it out.

I got

Jordan Harbinger: this. It's like, yeah, because basically all the same tech [00:24:00] that you're pretending to have on CSI, it's like, oh. Was there a moment where you were like, wait, this isn't real. I thought this was real.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just assumed, I didn't even know having been on the show, even for those few years, I didn't know that everybody wasn't in codis.

It's assumed that all bad guys were in codis, but you know, if you're not caught being a bad guy beforehand, then you're not in CODIS and, and not only that, but you can have a criminal record. And if you don't have a murder or a rape record, then you're still not in codis.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see.

Eva LaRue: You're only in aphis because APHIS is the national database for fingerprints.

But here's the other interesting thing. When we go to get our fingerprints done at the DMV, everybody, if you have a driver's license, your fingerprints are in your state. The states don't share fingerprints.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I see. I didn't know that.

Eva LaRue: Yeah, there's a national database for fingerprints, which is afis, but that's only if you are a criminal.

But if you're not a criminal and you just went to go get a driver's license, only your state has your [00:25:00] fingerprints. They don't share it across state lines. In case you're criminal, which they normally are, is mobile and goes from state to state.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Do they use it though in the state if you like?

Jordan Harbinger: Probably. I don't know.

That's a good question. But probably, yeah, there might be constitutional issues with that, right? Like I'm giving you my fingerprint so that I can prove who I am and it's like, well maybe it's not constitutional, just I will get a thousand emails about this. Yeah, your hypervigilance must have been off the charts, right?

He's saying things like, be prepared for my arrival. I'm coming for you. No, stop me, I'm

Eva LaRue: around the corner. Stop me. I can see you.

Jordan Harbinger: So let me ask you, are you coming outta era one with your bougie smoothie after a yoga class and like a random guy like me is behind you a few paces in the parking lot, are you in the back of your mind thinking like, is this the guy,

Eva LaRue: first of all, you and I don't air one.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: We do not

Eva LaRue: air one. It's only for in. It's only for influencers and like, it's so ridiculous. Who's buying a $25 fire smoothie? I mean, you gotta be an idiot. I'm sorry. I know people, I know people do. I have friends that go to Eron, but we don't air one anyway. [00:26:00] But yes. You're always looking, oh my gosh. In a parking, how?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Oh yeah. But still to this day, I mean, I'm, you know, I mean, not only as a woman do you in parking garages and places you are alone, are you hypervigilant? But it really was like, and still is where I'm like, could it be anybody? You know, someone could recognize something, someone could, you know, you just, you never know.

And I feel like, especially for you, that whole scene too in the docuseries when they're talking about, you know, you're going to, events still paparazzi's there, you're actively signing things to people while you're walking. You don't know if you're quite literally signing something and they're looking you down in the face and it's him.

Yeah. Like you don't know who it is. It could be anybody at any time.

Eva LaRue: And now they're this close and now they could stab you or now they could shoot. You know, it's, it's interesting 'cause at the end when people saw the picture of him in the second episode, so many people said, well, were you relieved when you saw his photo and when you saw a video of him and he's this, you know.[00:27:00]

Big dude who's got a limp and is, you know, barely getting along. And they said, you must have been so relieved that he, you know, couldn't make good on all that. And I said, of course he could still make good. All he needs to have is a gun.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. He's have to run up on me to be able to, you know, incapacitate me just by shooting me in the leg or whatever, and I can't get away.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Right. Well, I also feel like too, a lot of people started being like, oh, well you must have been so less scared like way. And I was like, I was like, uh, well we didn't find him still for 12 years. So for 12 years I did not know what he looked like. Like I very much thought he was going to be a Ted Bundy type.

I thought he was going to be, you know, athletic, handsome, blend in with the crowd. Well and he wasn't. I was like, that is a man you've noticed in a crowd. Yeah. For the all the wrong reasons.

Jordan Harbinger: That is true. I'm, I will say, if I get a stalker. Nobody who's not an eight or above, please. Yeah. Um, sexy stock is only right.

I know.

Eva LaRue: Like Kai's, like Kai's romanticized. Like I hot.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Well I was like, [00:28:00] I was like, well damn.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Spoiler. The guy's a cross between Job of the Hut and Archie Bunker. Yes. Like this is not a sexy eight. What a That's

Eva LaRue: the perfect, uh, the, yeah, that's the

Jordan Harbinger: perfect. He is the biggest like turd. He is exactly who you would expect from somebody who has all day to write crazy letters to somebody they see on tv.

Um, he is, it's quite on the nose.

Eva LaRue: Plus he has like, what they always say, what they always describe as bey little eyes, you know? And I was always like, what are bey little eyes? This dude actually has beaty little eyes. It looks like he has no whites of his eyes. They're black all the way across like a demon.

Like it's really creepy.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: You are going to die a slow, painful death

Jordan Harbinger: when you hear about these amazing deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Sometimes February makes it look like everyone else has their love life totally dialed in.

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In fact, it's practical advice that you can apply to your life right away. It's a great companion to the show, and you don't have to call the FBI once you start receiving this in your inbox. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to Eva LaRue and Kaya McKenna Callahan.

The fear must have been seeping into Kaya as well, right?

Because even though she was five when this started. You want nothing more than to protect your kids. But we had a recent break in and we were home when it happened. Oh. And I chased the guys kind of off the property. I didn't follow them or anything, but

Eva LaRue: oh my God. Was it more than one dude?

Jordan Harbinger: It was three dudes.

But they were like, I think they were just going to rob us. They thought we weren't home. I went like polar bear and just like charged because I didn't, I couldn't see them. I just saw the glass break and the curtain blow inward from the wind and I felt the cold air at night and we don't have trees in the yard.

So [00:32:00] I was like, I know it's not a tree. This is funny. 'cause this all happens in like half a second, right? I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something hit the window. It's broken. Was it a tree? That doesn't make sense. We don't have trees. What could have fallen? Nothing could have fallen. There's obviously a person out there, or I'm overreacting, but I'm still going to go psycho and yell and scream and charge because if I'm wrong, it's mildly embarrassing and nobody's here but me.

But if I'm right. I'm charging somebody who's trying to break into my house and my kids were in the next room over, oh, not sleeping,

Eva LaRue: God

Jordan Harbinger: and stuff. So, but anyway, the point of this story is that afterwards, my daughter who was three, was like, there's bad guys and I'm going to chase them away because I'm a ninja.

And it's like, you can't hide stuff from kids when it happens. They just know they get it. Of course, it didn't help that the cops came through the house with their guns and stuff, and she saw all of this, right? So it's just, oh no. She knew something was going on, but, and for months after that, even now, she's still like, I don't like any bad guys.

There's no bad guys allowed in my house. You know, she's four. It's almost been like a year.

Eva LaRue: It's stamped, it's imprinted.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, it's imprinted. Right, exactly.

Eva LaRue: It's [00:33:00] really kind of embedded.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah, because I was so young and I feel like with your daughter, it's one of those things that you almost just grow up with it.

You don't know when it starts, but the memory for me, that really sticks out where I was like, oh, this is serious. And there's, you remember a feeling more than you remember words or an actual moment. And it was the moment when the news, I think it was A, B, C or CBS had showed up at our doorstep after the whole gate gate incident.

And um, they had come in and we were not only packing to move because obviously he had found our actual address, but then on top of it, and you know, as a child you're looking to your parents for guidance, being grounded and what their emotions are reflected. And so for me, I think that was a moment where I was like, oh, my mom is afraid she can't hold her fear back from me anymore because it's at our doorstep.

It is quite literally pounding on our door with a camera and lights. As we're like shuffling and packing things up. And so for me that was a moment where I was [00:34:00] like, I need to be afraid because my mom is standing here so scared, shaking, like I don't know what to do. So yeah, it definitely seeped through a lot of all of my life.

I don't know what before. And it's always interesting when people ask like, you know, do you think you'll ever feel back to how you felt before or what life was like before? And I'm like, I don't know what my life was before. Being afraid and being paranoid and being aware there is no before. There's only going to be an after and I don't.

Know what that looks like.

Jordan Harbinger: That's sad and interesting as well. 'cause Right, you were so young. You mentioned earlier the psychologist thinks this person is, and I, I looked this up, it's called an ani, which is a weird term for this person because there's nothing, nothing erotic about this guy. Nothing erotic

Eva LaRue: about it.

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Kind of the opposite. But this is a disorder, a very weird disorder where the person believes that somebody, usually, someone of higher social status is deeply in love with them. And I, I actually had a buddy who had a stalker like this. He's a famous author and this woman that he had dated just literally like decades ago when we first became [00:35:00] friends, she was like, oh, we have to be together for this karmic reason, or something like that.

And he got married and I'm like, oh, surely she's leaving you alone now. And he's like, no. She wrote to my wife and was like, I'll share him with you. And it's like, share, share. It's like, no, you're not getting any piece of this. I haven't talked to you for 15 years. And so basically these people. I look this up, they connect dots that are just not there.

Like you're wearing a blue ribbon in your hair during a media appearance and the person like you

Eva LaRue: knew is my favorite color.

Jordan Harbinger: She did this for me because I love blue and she knows I like blue. And it's like, no, she doesn't know who you are. You freaking psychopath. And people do this occasionally, I have a little diet version of this.

People will say, Hey Jordan, they'll, I'll get a DM on Twitter. And they'll be like, I know you're talking to me. And I'm like. Yeah, I'm talking a lot of you, what's going on? And they're like, no, no, no. I know that that thing you said on that episode with Eva Larou, like when you said the blue ribbon thing you met, that's our code.

And I'm like, what are you talking about? And they're like, the CCIA is watching both of us, and this is [00:36:00] how you're talking to me. And I'm like, well then why are you DMing me on Twitter, dude, if, why don't we just talk on Twitter?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. You're

Jordan Harbinger: just ruined it. If this is safe.

Eva LaRue: Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: let's just stick with this.

None of it adds up. And then a few weeks later they're like, no, you're also in the CCIA A and you're trying to control my brain with your codes. And I'm like, and block, right? Because none of it makes any sense. And they're schizophrenic or something like that. Or have some sort of other delusions.

Eva LaRue: You know, this criminal psychologist was talking about, oh, rod mania, blah, blah, blah.

Why don't we talk about what he really has? But I don't know if that's legal. I don't know if. Your therapist can come forward and be well. Well, but can't they, if you're a criminal, can't they say this person has been diagnosed schizophrenic, diagnosed sociopathic? Can they not? Because it's your therapist, but if you're a criminal, can't they?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I don't think it's like your personal therapist. It's probably with a lot of meaning, but it's probably like a professional can diagnose, but I don't know if it's like their personal therapist can break code too.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean you could probably try to subpoena stuff like that. It would be very difficult 'cause there is a [00:37:00] confidentiality thing.

But if they're. Threatening to murder someone. The therapist has to report that now. He probably just didn't tell his therapist those things were happening.

Eva LaRue: Well, he tried to, he only had a therapist after he was caught. He was trying to, you know, plead that he was, you know, insanity. And they're like, yeah, no, you had a job.

Like you said, you were, you were functioning in the world. You were,

Jordan Harbinger: you're unhinged, but you're hinged enough where you knew what you were doing.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. You could still take care of some lovely old people. Lord knows what you were doing to them in the dark.

Jordan Harbinger: I know. That freaks me out too. Yeah. He worked at like an old folks home and it's just like, imagine he's watching CSI Miami with some 90-year-old and he is like, okay, all right, Deborah goodnight.

And then he goes home and he is like writing this creepy letter to you. Like, I watched you today. Like, it's just so weird to think about.

Eva LaRue: No, but worse. Here was where my mind went. I was, because he was working at a memory care facility specifically. So what were these 80-year-old people who didn't have a memory?

What was he then doing to them at night when no one's around? You know what I mean? [00:38:00] And they wouldn't be able to remember and or tell.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Oh, it's so creepy.

Eva LaRue: You know? The whole thing is just beyond because if he's that depraved,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah. I mean he might also be at a total wimp in real life. And this is just like him sort of LARPing this, well, who knows?

So there are different phases of ERO mania and this stalking part that goes with it's phase one. They're super in love with you. Phase two, they start getting jealous or they start resenting you. Phase three, which is what it seemed like you just straight skipped to is anger and rage. And this stuff is all reflected, or at least the, the latter phases are reflected in the letters.

And it's like this rage that they're love is unrequited. And you started sleeping with a weapon under the bed. I'm wondering what's your weapon of choice?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: A machete.

Jordan Harbinger: Machete?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: No, I mean, dead serious stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: What really?

Yeah.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: No, dead serious. We have a machete.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I thought you would've had like a firearm or something like that.

Well,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: we did for a long time. Like especially when I was married, we had so many firearms. We just locked those up, but we had machetes under the bed.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Wow.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Harbinger: Dang. [00:39:00] That is, that's okay. Did you train with it?

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I learned how to shoot a gun when I was eight. I shot my first shotgun in Montana.

Oh. And we were doing skeet shooting, and then we went to the gun range and I shot Glocks. Yeah. I was eight.

Eva LaRue: I learned to shoot on CSI Miami. So they trained us. And then I used to go with my ex-husband. We used to go to the shooting range a lot. That's when he, he taught Kaya how to shoot. And so we're pretty proficient because unfortunately the statistic is against women who have guns, who keep guns in their room, under their bed.

The majority of women are killed with their own firearm by an intruder.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. They get disarmed.

Eva LaRue: Yeah, they get disarmed. Uh, or they hesitate to shoot or whatever. They're disarmed. So, yeah, I mean, and

Kaya McKenna Callahan: which makes sense.

Eva LaRue: I wanted to make sure I was proficient.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah, same here. And I'm glad I am. 'cause I feel very comfortable.

Holding a firearm safety wise. Doing what? You know, it's heavy. I mean, when you really [00:40:00] hold, like when you hold a gun, a handgun in your hands, you're like, this is a lot heavier than you think. And that's, this is legit. Yeah. So I mean, I'm grateful that I know how to safely use it.

Eva LaRue: And here's the thing, we're not, we're not even gun people.

We're not even gun people.

Jordan Harbinger: No, I get it. I mean, you kind of had to become gun people.

Eva LaRue: We're not like card carrying NRA people or anything. Um, not that. You know anybody who's watching. If you love it, you love it. I don't care. I don't care what you do.

Jordan Harbinger: It just wasn't your hobby.

Eva LaRue: Love what you want to love. It's just not mine, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about Italy, because this was creepy as hell on theme. Creepy as hell.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. So it was the last three months of that particular season for CSI. Um, there isn't even a word beyond terrify. You know, the threat I felt like was coming from everywhere. And I know this is not like all that relatable actors are a minuscule amount of people in the world that are stalked.

'cause there's like 13.5 million people just in the United States that are stalked. Men, women, and children and actors are like [00:41:00] this, many of them. And I know this doesn't sound very relatable, that I happen to have a friend who has a villa in Italy, but he said, you know what, as soon as the show goes on, hiatus, come and stay for the three months of hiatus.

Just come stay in Italy with me. And um, and I thought, yeah, I don't know how to stay safe here. So I did. The day after filming for that year, we, uh, we jumped on a plane and we went to, and we were not there 36 hours. In Italy. Then we wake up in the middle of the night, you know, you've got jet lag and Kaya rolled over and she was like,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I remember it was the mosquitoes too that kept us up.

There was like mosquitoes just buzzing in our ears. Yeah, we were trying to like hide under the pillows. We were exhausted.

Eva LaRue: We were exhausted. It was like three o'clock in the morning and she was like, mama, are you awake? And I said, I am. Let's try to go back to sleep. About 10 minutes later our bedroom door opens up and you know how when there's a light behind somebody in a darkened room, you can't see their face 'cause they're in shadow 'cause the light's behind them.

So I couldn't see who it was, but it was obviously a man. And I said, max, [00:42:00] max. I was trying to be quiet because Kaya was hopefully back asleep and I was like, max, max. He didn't answer and he stood there for a few seconds and then he closed the door. So I thought, okay, well Max is up too. I'm going to. Thank God I got up and I went to the bathroom first.

Took a few minutes in the bathroom and then I thought, I'll go out in the house and see if Max is up. 'cause we're obviously both up. I went out into the house and all the lights were on and I thought, well that's kind of weird. And I walked around. I didn't see Max anywhere I, I didn't yell up the stairs, but I was like, max.

'cause his room and his mom's room were upstairs, nothing. So I went back to bed and the next morning Max comes racing into our room and he says the house was broken into, oh my God. They took the car, they took our jewelry off the bedside stands in our room, in my mom's room. And then in my room we were completely robbed.

Did you hear anything? Did you see anything? And I said, oh my God, he was in our room. He came right into our room last night. I thought it was you. And he goes, no, it wasn't me. I was asleep. So in that, for me, I [00:43:00] know that this is a jump, but because I had been doing nothing but praying for my life and my daughter's life for three months and praying for some sort of guidance and some kind of hope.

In that moment said to me, it was God's answer to me saying, if I want you dead, I will get you in any country, in any city, in any room, anywhere in the world. So relax because this person came within 10 feet of me and my daughter while we're laying in bed. So it's not that the fear went away, but I was able after that to compartmentalize it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. It's like a turning point. Yeah, I suppose and, and it wasn't the stalker, it was just a random robbery. Right,

Eva LaRue: right. But in that moment we were like, oh my God, the stalker followed us here. I mean, completely irrational. Of course, you know, he didn't. But you know, in that moment, just like you said, in a matter of seconds, you're like, the glass broke.

Was it a tree? Was it a [00:44:00] thing? You start to run through all the things and you're like, oh my God. The stalker actually came into our room.

Jordan Harbinger: Did the, did the police, did the Italian police impress you?

Eva LaRue: Not in the tiniest.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What? What?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: No, except, except there Armani suits there. Armani suits.

Eva LaRue: And they're all, yeah.

They're like, yeah, they were hot.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: The cops there are hot.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I love that you were pissed, that you were like, why aren't you taking fingerprints?

Eva LaRue: Why aren't you doing, why aren't you doing, why aren't you taking fingerprints? Why aren't you doing, I was like, do I have to do this for you? Give me your tools.

I can't figure this out. They ca they came in and they were touching everything. I was like, stop touching things. Stop picking things up. What are you doing? You're contaminating the scene.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's like, ma'am, our tools are unfiltered cigarettes. We're not going to need

Kaya McKenna Callahan: unfiltered cigarettes in an espresso.

Like, yeah. Can you give us a minute? Maybe we'll work by like two.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. We're going to be

Jordan Harbinger: back.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: We're go on break.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Like I saw in the docuseries, it was like, don't touch the crime scene. There's fingerprints on the windows and they're like, look, we're just going to look around and contaminate the crap out of this, and then leave and write something for your insurance company.

[00:45:00] Yeah. It's, it's, Hey man, reality comes crashing into your Hollywood image of what police are, so. Back to la you build a fence around your house, it's six feet and unfortunately in Glendale it can only be five eight or something like that. And you have to go before city council and these geniuses give your address out on live television.

How pissed were you?

Eva LaRue: Oh my God. I don't know. Like in the documentary, you can see my face. I had just said I had a, a stack like this and in a manila, I said, here are all the letters from my stalker. This is why I have a security gate and a security fence. I'm just trying to get a variance for the LA for the three inches that I am above the code right now.

And. I said, here are all the letters. You guys have copies of them, but I can give you these ones. If you don't have them on you, I can give you these ones right here to look at. I'm scared to death for my daughter, blah, blah. I go through this whole thing, blah, blah, blah. The next thing they say is literally, okay, well [00:46:00] we need to state your name for the record.

And I said, Eva ue. And they said, Eva UE at 1, 1, 4, 9, blah blah, blah street in Glenton. I was like, oh my God. It's on public tv. Yeah, it's literally on the color from your face. I feel like literally you went pale. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Jordan Harbinger: Unbelievable. Like absolutely the dumbest, I mean, look, they probably run on the autopilot, but like, hello man.

Get a clue.

Eva LaRue: Right. And I do think it was just autopilot. I don't think it was malicious. God, I would hate to think it was malicious. I think it's just what they do.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think it was just their job is boring as hell, and they were like, all right, here's what we do. But it also like maybe pay attention for this one,

Eva LaRue: just so you know, like three of the idiots from that particular council went to jail.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: No, they did not.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. They were skimming money, taking bribes for variances and taking bribes for this. Oh yeah. Three of 'em went to jail. Oh. So we could have bribed them.

Jordan Harbinger: You could have just bribed 'em. You didn't even have to go to the meeting.

Eva LaRue: Would've been nice to sue for having to move. Oh,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I

Eva LaRue: didn't know.

We could have just done that. At that point. You're not thinking about any of those things.

Jordan Harbinger: You're just like, [00:47:00] have next time. Just start with the bribe.

Eva LaRue: Start with the pride. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Um, so the paparazzi of course shows up the next day and I assume you're thinking of great now. If they can find me, he can find me.

Paparazzi are basically just stalkers with cameras and, and a profit mo. Yeah. Right. So

Eva LaRue: we moved in three days.

Jordan Harbinger: At this point, you're in this new relationship with this new fiance. Did you feel guilty? You know, like he's getting the letters now.

Eva LaRue: He started getting the letters and they started out. Dear Mr.

Capuccio, that's how they were addressed. Dear Mr. Capuccio, please pass this letter on to your wife, who I would like to rape and kill and dismember and. Love Freddie Kruger.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's not your fault, but I, I feel like I would've felt guilty. Like it, I, I feel I, I would've still felt bad about that. I'm sure you

Eva LaRue: did.

Yes. I, I felt horrible about that and horrible for his employees that opened the letters at the office, because now they're scared to death that he's going to come to the office looking for Joe and find them like, you know, everybody's [00:48:00] scared.

Jordan Harbinger: Right.

Eva LaRue: Turk my publicist, he has his address. He's, oh my God, what am I supposed to do here?

Everybody was afraid.

Jordan Harbinger: And so of course he finds the house. He starts sending letters to the house, addressed to you, Kaya. What year are we in, of these letters coming by the way, at this point

Eva LaRue: when they started coming to you, they started in 2007. When they started coming to you. It was around 2009.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I thought I was like a teen, or I guess you just let

Eva LaRue: me know.

No, you never knew. Yeah. You never knew. You know. Now, right now.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. Today you are this many years old, like

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Today years old. Yeah. So you're in high school. Kay. At that point, right? This must have been so stressful. You're already in, you're a teenager, you're in high school, and you're worried about like boys and exams, and it's like, oh, and my psycho stalker who might murder us.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. I, I mean, even you referencing where it's like, do you feel guilty? Do you feel bad? Especially just for her husband at the time, it was a very similar feeling for me in the way that I would make friends, you know, starting a new [00:49:00] middle school, starting a new high school, and trying to make friends, and then always having in the back of my mind being like, I have to let them know at some point.

But I obviously don't want to start my conversation with Hi, I am Kaya. I, I do cheer and let's be friends. And I'm funny. And by the way, what comes with being friends with me is like, you might want to look over your shoulder a little bit because I have a stalker. Like, how do you enter a, a relationship at 16 like that?

And every relationship there on, I mean, even now. In dating. It's interesting because I am in a relationship and my boyfriend's dad had to say to him, or you know, obviously this is all coming out at the same time. And he was like, well, do you feel safe? And you know, what if he comes back and what if he starts finding you?

And it kind of freaked me out. I was like, oh my God. Yeah. It's such a burden to put on people because now you are scared by association and you know, you can't be public with people and friendships. I had, you know, in high school it's all about social media and my friends were posting about each other [00:50:00] and we were all tagging each other and tagging our high schools.

And I always had to make it very clear with my friends, you cannot tag me. You cannot put your location and I will not tag you. And I'm like, I don't mean to like. You know, obviously it's almost like a

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're not snubbing them.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: You have to tell. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 'cause at the time, yeah, as a teenager you're like, oh, you're not going to tag me.

But it's like, I am doing this actually for your protection because Right. With association and anything connecting me to you and digging deeper, like you know it, it's all connected. So yeah, that was always the back of my mind thought throughout high school. And

Jordan Harbinger: you were right to do that because he was looking at your, you mentioned earlier he was looking at your social media, leaving little emojis and you're like, ah, random dude, whatever.

But it's like, nope. He was looking at who you were associating with and who you were friends with and what you were doing and like looked at all your photos. What is the cadence of the letters? Are you getting them every week or you getting him every month? 'cause it seems like it's not like a regular thing.

Eva LaRue: No, there was no sort, no sort of regularity to it. We would get a flurry of them. I would just assume that he went [00:51:00] on a. A little psycho spin out and we would get them every day for a week and then we wouldn't get 'em for three weeks. And then sometimes for a while there, when the show ended, when CSI ended, I thought, oh, thank God.

Like maybe he'll just be off of it. And for about six months we were enjoying no letters at all. And then all of a sudden they started again, like fast and furious.

Jordan Harbinger: This is so weird. It's like on his meds, off his meds kind of stuff or like,

Eva LaRue: I don't think he was ever even on meds. Well, he told us when we were sitting in court in his pathetic speech to us.

He said, oh, I wish that I'd had a therapist sooner, because he had a court appointed therapist now and he was on court appointed meds, and he said, and I wish I'd been on meds sooner because I don't think any of this would've happened. We're like, yeah, we wish both for you as well. But so there's, I think that's why he would just go into weird spinouts and then his mom told the FBI that he was a huge all my children [00:52:00] fan, and he used to record it and then play episodes on repeat again and again and again and again, like obsessively.

He was obsessed with all my children. So I think the obsession definitely happened from back when I was at all my children and then escalated. But that's the other thing that we found out since all of this happened, is that of all the women that were murdered in the United States last year, 86% of them were stalked first.

So we know that stalking escalates to rape, and we know it escalates to murder. And that's why the laws around it are so ridiculous. Because if that's the statistic of escalation, the law needs to be, you're not allowed to menace, period. I don't care if you didn't break into their house or you didn't lay hands on them.

If you are menacing someone that needs to be against the law.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean it's harassment, but that's, it doesn't reach the level of like what it is. Right. It's also harassment. If I call you names a bunch of times and you tell me to leave you [00:53:00] alone, right.

Eva LaRue: That's one thing. But when you are menacing somebody like men, like, I'm going to harm you.

I'm going to hurt you. I'm going to lay hands on you. That's different than I'm going to sue you. You're a butthole. Like all the things. Yeah. You know, like calling names and whatever is different than I am menacing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. This is on a totally, totally different level. And in fact, tell me about the close call at school.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah, I mean that's where it all dovetailed. Obviously this is something with 12 years, but you can't live with it at the forefront of your mind every day. So for me, I was just a normal day at high school and I was at the cafeteria and I get an overhead call being like, hi, Callahan, come to the front office.

And immediately I'm like, oh, great. What did I do this time? I'm like, I'm like, I know I cheated on at least three tests in the, in the last week. You know, it's finals week,

Eva LaRue: busted,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: busted. Um, and so I'm, I'm going to the front and, and they tell me, Hey, you know, your dad called and I love my dad, but you know, my dad lived in Palm Desert at the time and he was two [00:54:00] hours away.

And, um, so he was never like the first to contact ever. And so they didn't really know what he looked like or sounded like. So they were like, you know, might go on your phone and you can stand right here, but, you know, contact your dad. And so I'm, I'm texting my dad and, and then I'm texting my mom,

Eva LaRue: but they also said, your dad said he's going to pick you up after school, stand out in front of the school.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. But they were more like, they were kind of suspicious too. They were more like, well, just. Double check with him on your own. And so I'm texting you being like, Hey, yeah, dad called the school saying he was going to pick me up. Have you heard from him? I mean, he would've called you first I'm texting my dad.

Hey dad, are you picking me up? And so she's like, no, I haven't even heard from him. That's weird. Da da da. And I'm just kinda standing there. And the moment my dad texted me saying, no, I never called the school. I hadn't thought about the stalker in the forefront of my mind, but all of a sudden it was immediate where I was like, oh my God.

Like the world just came at a, at a close in. And I just was like, oh my God, it's my stalker. It's my stalker. And so I'm freaking out to the forefront office [00:55:00] lady at my school and she's like, go back to class. You're fine. Like, I don't even know what you're talking about. I was like, you need to call the FBI.

You need to call my mom. We need to get the FBI on the phone right now. So my mom, I, you know, I had the chance to call my mom. And so she comes rushing over and is, is coming to pick me up. Yeah, I mean, and then the FBI showed up and tapped the phones, and the next day or overnight, he had left 19 voice messages, detailing, basically everything he had said in the letters.

But directly to my school so that the poor front office woman had to start her morning at 6:00 AM Listening to those

Eva LaRue: and how he would kill any administrator or teacher or kid that got in the way, A student that got in the way of a team here. The fact that he didn't get more time just for that for threatening a school is really pretty unjust.

Jordan Harbinger: All right, we'll pause right there because apparently threatening to rape and murder someone and their kid is a great place to tell you about our sponsors. We'll be right back.[00:56:00]

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Eva LaRue and Kaiya [01:00:00] McKenna Callahan,

he's threatening teachers, students, and someone particular. Administrators of the school and he is going to kidnap somebody from his school and rape them and kill them and torture them like that alone is

Eva LaRue: three years. Seems okay.

That's fine.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, it's crazy. He gets, he, he, he ends up with such a light sentence. So the FBI gets back to you after a while here, the new agents of the guys who helped catch the Golden State Killer, we had Paul Holes on the show. Actually, he is one of the guys who was involved in that.

Eva LaRue: Yeah, I know Paul.

He's a great guy.

Jordan Harbinger: He's really good. Episode 725. That story is crazy, right? The, the genetic genealogy.

Eva LaRue: Well, and here's the interesting truth about that story. Paul Holes had been on the case for like 20 something years and he was getting ready to retire. And the two FBI agents, well specifically Steve Kramer, who had been a lawyer for the FBI, he was just fascinated with the Golden State Killer case, why it hadn't been solved.

And so he called Paul Holes at one point after listening to Michelle McNamara's, um, podcast and reading her articles on the Golden State Killer. And he called Paul [01:01:00] Holes and he was like, Hey, I'm with the FBI, I'm just a lawyer with the FBI, but how can I help? Like are there any tools that we have that we could help?

I'm just fascinated with why it hasn't been solved. So they kind of create this ragtag team. It was Steve Kramer who created forensics genealogy. He was never allowed to take credit for it because he was with the FBI and the FB. I said to him, murder is not an FBI jurisdiction. Murder is local law enforcement jurisdiction and it's only FBI jurisdiction.

If it's part of a RICO case or part of some other, you know, that

Kaya McKenna Callahan: makes sense.

Eva LaRue: FBI jurisdiction sort of case. So, um, the FBI said to Kramer, you gotta do this on your weekends. Don't be messing around doing this on FBI time. If you're doing this, this is a hobby for you. So two FBI, they did not ever get to take credit for it.

Then the FBI, when the case got solved, Paul Holes and one of the other guys from Colorado, I can't remember his name right now. They took all the credit for solving a case that he literally didn't solve for 25 years by himself, although he is a lovely [01:02:00] guy and he did help do the stuff. It was Kramer who created the technology and, and then when Kramer came back to and and Bush, at that point, Steve Bush came back to the FBI and said, we think we created a brand new technology, the FBI, God bless them.

Were like, yeah, it's a one off. It's not replicable. Sit still. So they kind of went behind their back and our FBI agent at the time, Richard Alexander was, had just gotten a promotion and was leaving our case behind. Somebody else was going to be taking it over and they just happened to be chatting inside the FBI offices and they said, look, we're looking for another DNA heavy case because we need to kind of quietly prove that this is a technology like on our weekends, basically.

And Richard said, please. Take this case. These are my girls that I've been trying to solve their case for 12 years and I haven't been able to do it. It would be amazing. Please take the girls' case. And so our case was the very next case that the guys took after Golden State. Our case [01:03:00] proved that it was a replicable technology and our case ended up being a precedent setting case for the FBI.

It was the first ever adjudicated case with. Forensics technology. So genealogy

Jordan Harbinger: essentially, if they don't have the DNA match in the database, right? They have something, let's say off of a postage stamp or off of a murder weapon. They might not have anybody in the database, but they can go to, I don't know, 23 and me or something like that, A DNA site and go, is anybody here registered?

Who would be a relative of this person? And so with the Golden State Killer, I'm going off memory here, but basically Kramer and Paul Holes, they found that this person's brother had registered and they were like, oh, we found a DNA match for a brother. Or maybe it was a cousin or something like that.

Eva LaRue: It was like a fifth cousin.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Oh, it was really that far off. Okay.

Eva LaRue: Because when they first started uploading the DNA from Golden State Killer into these other entities, GEDMatch and Ancestry and all these things, there wasn't even enough. DNA in those companies in the beginning to get a match at all. So they had to wait. It was [01:04:00] almost like three years or four years that they kept uploading, waiting to get a match.

And then they finally ended up getting a match to a fifth cousin, and then they did the gum shoe old fashioned detective work and basically knocked on doors. And they said they never had a problem knocking on doors saying, hi, FBI, you're related to a serial killer. Can you help us out?

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I would be like, oh, I bet I know who it is.

Eva LaRue: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, it's Uncle Tom, isn't it? It's like, yeah,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: my second cousin, you know, killed that cat one time. I definitely bet it was him.

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: What a freak. Yeah, but of course it makes sense 'cause then you narrow it down from every human on earth or every male or whatever on earth to in Ohio to, oh, okay.

It's somebody who is related to this person. There's a lot of those, but, Hmm.

Eva LaRue: Are they all, are they all men? No, we get down to the last 10 and then how many of 'em live in Ohio then? How many of 'em follow us on social media? And there was one,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, there was one guy following you on social media

Eva LaRue: from that family branch

Jordan Harbinger: and they Id the guy, yes.

He follows both of you on [01:05:00] social media. He was in Ohio where the letters were postmarks, so they knew that they had him. The classic outta shape white dude lives with his mom because of course

Eva LaRue: I always, I always felt like he lived in a basement, his mom's basement.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: You did always say he lived

Eva LaRue: in his mom's, in his mom's basement.

I was always like, he lives in his mom's basement.

Jordan Harbinger: It's very predictable.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: He didn't live in the basement, but you know.

Eva LaRue: And then they still have to match the DNA. So they can't just say, okay, we have a high probability that on that family tree branch of all the leaves on that branch, this is the only one who is a man happens to be from Ohio, follows us, la da.

That's still not enough. They have to stalk him and they have to wait for him to throw out something with his DNA on it. And so he threw out an Arby's cup and they got his DNA off the straw.

Jordan Harbinger: That's amazing. I mean, that must have been, these guys must have been pretty stoked, right? They're watching some idiot throw away a fast food bag and they're like, please don't be a waste of time.

And they get the DN off the straw and they're like, boom.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. And they, I think they knew it wasn't a waste of time. 'cause they knew they had the, they knew they had their guy, but they just had to. But the [01:06:00] crazy thing was they followed him. He pulls up to his house, he walks across the street and puts his Arby's trash bag, the bag of Arby's stuff in a public dumpster across the street.

Which is weird. He didn't like take it into the house and throw it away. And when he went into the house, the guys who were there, it wasn't Steve Bush yet, were like, it was one of those ones where it's just got a shoot like a big huge public trash can with just a trash shoot. And the rest of the thing is locked down and they're like, oh God, now we gotta like, go call the city.

We got a dumpster dive we gotta do like, and so he tells a story about how he went. He was like, well, let me just go see. So he goes over and he opens up the little chute and he said, thankfully somebody had thrown out some blinds and the blinds were sticking up inside the inside. And so the bag of Arby's was hanging on the blinds halfway up the chute.

So all they had to do was like, reach in and grab it. And then they [01:07:00] ran it for DNA. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: That's amazing because that's one of those things where you feel like you could almost. Like, oh, we called the city, but between when the guy arrived, they emptied the dumpster and it went to the landfill and we couldn't get it.

And then da da da. Like, what? And then the guy saw us and he got freaked out and he went to ground for a year and a half. Like it's just, it could have gone totally different. And this was scary. There was a scary moment in the documentary where this FBI agent says, once people are no longer afraid of being caught, that's when they're the most reckless and when victims are the most at risk.

And they thought kind of, he was getting to that point, right? Because he was like, I'm coming for you. I'm calling to school now. Like, I'm clearly just not worried.

Eva LaRue: He was excited. 19 messages overnight in one night.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. He's manic.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. 'cause then you have a real location in the same way, you know, like, it's not just LA anymore.

It's, I know where she's going to be every single day, all day. Yeah. And that was, that was terrifying. I mean, I didn't go back to, thank God it all. Timed out, right? Because I think I was only outta school for like [01:08:00] three days, but when I look back, I was like, I would've had to switch schools. In all honesty, I would've, you know, obviously COVID happened I think a few months later, but I'm like, I wouldn't have been able to go back to school.

I would've had to switch. I would've had to completely change so many things about my life once again, just to be safe. And thankfully, I think it was, yeah, three days later and they were like, we've got him. We're not going to arrest him yet. We're waiting on the DNA. But, um, we've got eyes on him like, you are good.

Yeah. That was so relieving to be like, oh my God. Like the first time in my whole life to feel like I a, was like I could be safe and that I was safe to go to school. And

Jordan Harbinger: of course, as, as you predicted, he lives in his mother's basement, essentially. Right? His mom has no idea, but says, oh, we always watch Davis shows over and over and over again.

Creepy,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: weird

Jordan Harbinger: af

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. The creepiest fact for me is, is when they went in and they were checking his phone and the only two numbers programmed into his phone were his work and my high school.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I wrote that down. The FBI goes in, they're raiding this guy's house. Right. And he, [01:09:00] first of all, he has every photo of you from every public appearance that you've ever done on hard drives and laptops or whatever, and yeah, there's a cell phone with two contacts in it.

One his mom and the other, your high school, not work, not relatives, not neighbors, just his mom and your high school.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: So weird.

Jordan Harbinger: So weird,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: so creepy. Like I, I can't even imagine. Had this gone on longer. How many more times he would've called the school, how much more he would've done. I mean, when I went back to school, I felt really bad for the front office woman that was working there because not that I yelled at her that day, but I was like panicking and she very much was like, I like go back to class.

Like I don't, I think she kind of thought I was trying to like get outta school early.

Eva LaRue: She even said to me is, and when I called the school and I said, I'm coming to pick her up. And she's like, well, do you have a doctor's note? And I was like, lady, if you get in the way of you picking up my kid, I'll run you over.

Yeah. Like literally you won't be worrying about the stalker.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: You are worrying about me.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: But when [01:10:00] I went back and I checked in for some reason and she like looked at me and like almost took my hand and was like, I am so sorry. And I was like, for what? And she was like, I heard the messages. Like you know, I'm the one who answered.

And she was like, I just can't even imagine. And I'm so sorry I didn't take it seriously and da da da. And I just was like, oh my God. Like it was one of the first times I realized, not that it was going to be public, but where I was like, oh my God, other people are knowing. Without me being the one to sit them down and tell them, and, and this is like, I felt really guilty and like that burden to share that, you know, it's almost, you must feel ashamed, which is weird because it's not, it's not our fault.

It's not my fault. But at the same time, you feel so ashamed to have this. You're sharing a burden. Yeah. And sharing a fear. 'cause at some point you get to the point where you're like, well, I can handle it.

Eva LaRue: Not only that, but when you tell people that you feel afraid, the other person is not feeling afraid with you, they're sad for you.

They don't really feel the visceral feeling of fear. But when somebody listens to a message that's aimed at them, I'll [01:11:00] kill any administrator or teacher or a student. Suddenly the fear is embodied. Now you're one of the people that's being targeted and now you're like, oh my God. Like, then it becomes super real.

Not that nobody cares when we tell them,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: but, but it's like you're crying wolf, you know? How many times can you say, I'm scared? I'm still scared. You know, it's 12 years. Yeah. How are you doing? It's like when someone has cancer and you don't want to bring up to the person, you know, how's your cancer doing?

But you are also kind of waiting for them to tell you. But then you, you don't also want to bring into a conversation when you're having a good day with somebody being like, oh yeah, my cancer is dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's still, still here.

Eva LaRue: Still cancer.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's kind of like this conversation you don't ever really want to have, you don't want to make a bad day worse, and you don't want to make a good day bad, so you just kind of don't talk about it.

Jordan Harbinger: How did you feel when you heard he'd finally been arrested?

Eva LaRue: Relief and disbelief, I guess because after 12 years I just, I had stopped hoping that he'd ever be caught. It [01:12:00] was very surreal. The whole thing was, and the timing was so surreal that he had just found your school and the story was so crazy like, and then to top it all off, the poor woman in the administration office, the school or the admittance office or whatever, she was like, well, when does FBI agent Steve Bush come back.

'cause he's hot.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. Our, my school loved Steve Bush. They

Eva LaRue: loved themselves.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: They'd say their husband, they literally would be like our husband, our

Eva LaRue: FBI husband.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. But it was, yeah, but it was like a whirlwind of emotions. I mean, yeah,

Eva LaRue: everything. It was a TV show, but we weren't on the TV show. It was really crazy.

Jordan Harbinger: What was it like seeing this guy face to face in court, so to speak? I mean, actually I know you did it remotely because it, what was the reason for that? They didn't want to give him the,

Eva LaRue: we did it remotely, but we had to lobby for that.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh.

Because

Kaya McKenna Callahan: they were trying to fly

Eva LaRue: him out to la They were trying to fly him to LA to be in the courtroom with us.

He'd never been in proximity to us. And we're like, we don't want to suddenly be in proximity. Can you have like a [01:13:00] tiny bit of sympathy for the victims? Yeah. Like hello? And so finally like three days before they told us, okay, we're going to have him via Zoom. But yeah, we had to beg our US attorneys who had our case to,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I had a lobby for it.

Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, that's crazy. I mean, at least they caved on that because I mean, yeah, that he would love nothing more than to be in a room with you guys after all this.

Eva LaRue: And we said, if you guys bring him out, we won't be in person. We'll be Zoom because it doesn't make sense. You're going to give him a free trip to la and then what?

Leave him here. Then what happens? I don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: What's it like giving a victim impact statement? What goes into those? First of all, I don't even really know what those are.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: You

Eva LaRue: weren't even going to give one.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I wasn't going to give one at all. I mean, you sat and wrote yours prior, which was just kind of detailing more, just detailing everything you've been through, everything you felt, and really laying it all out

Eva LaRue: to give the judge an idea of hopefully you're trying to influence sentencing at that point.

And I don't even really remember what I said other than Yeah, just laying it all out and what it had meant for us [01:14:00] and how many times we moved and how this,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: how it deeply affected us, I guess, in our daily lives. Yeah.

Eva LaRue: Just, yeah. How we'll be affected forever. And then he gave his statement,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: well, he gave his first,

Eva LaRue: he gave his statement first.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I mean, I wasn't going to speak, I was very adamant about not wanting to stand up and speak at all. But he had gone first and one of the things he said was, I hope you can let this go. I hope you can just forget the last 12 years everything that's happened, because now I'm on meds and now I'm in, in therapy and, and now I feel bad.

Um, I hope you can let this go and move on with your life. And in that moment, I looked at my mom and I was like, I'm going up first. I was like, not only am I going to speak, I'm going up first, because I was, I just was like, I was like, this is insane. What do you mean let this go? And I, I felt compelled where I was like, the judge needs to know.

I, I would love to let this go, but I actually can't because A, B, C, DEFG, the entire alphabet. Well, it's

Eva LaRue: rewired your brain completely.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: We, we will never not be hypo hypervigilant. How do you go back after 12 years to [01:15:00] And he's out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, he's out now.

Eva LaRue: So how do we just go? Oh, he's fine now. I'm sure he's totally sane.

'cause people go from insane to sane.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? It gets three years and then three years of probation, which is crazy to me. I mean, three years is, it's a long time for, uh, a bunch of traffic violations or a bag of weed, but it's. Nothing for somebody who'd spent a dozen years threatening to kill you in the most brutal ways possible.

And your daughter, it just doesn't make any sense. What do you think he should have gotten, in your opinion?

Eva LaRue: The max he could have gotten was seven in this case. And I think he should have gotten three and a half for her and three and a half for me. And the thing is, I mean, maybe he would've gotten more if Joe, my ex-husband, had been part of the case, but his letters had a statute of limitation on them.

It had already been seven years since he had gotten letters, so he could not be part of the case. But there was also people that did not step forward. There's another girl from another soap opera from One Life to Live, and I won't say her name 'cause it's her story and not my story, but her mom [01:16:00] called me at one point and said, my daughter is getting these letters.

He references you in the letters and says, if you don't believe me and what I'm going to do to you, just ask Eva LaRue. And they were signed to Freddy Krueger. So I don't know how long she was getting the letters. I never heard from them about it again. And when the FBI reached out to her, she wouldn't respond.

So I think probably what happened was he was off of her. You don't ever want to do anything to reignite their obsession with you. So that's probably why she didn't come forward again, I'm just, I'm just guessing that he stopped writing her at some point.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. Gosh, it's scary 'cause restraining orders and things like that are just paper.

Right. And this guy's out of prison. I think you're lucky that he's kind of older and not physically able, but like you said, he just needs a weapon. Right. It's scary, man. I'm glad you guys are. Okay. How often do you think about this, aside from doing promo for the docuseries every day? Right.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I try not to think

Eva LaRue: about it every day.

Yeah. We try not to.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I don't blame you for that.

Eva LaRue: It definitely [01:17:00] comes up, you know, for me,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I feel like at least, at least twice a week for me.

Eva LaRue: Yeah. Where I'm conscious about it. You know, at, at night, you're always, you know, when the house is quiet and you're always,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I think it's just intertwined with everything, you know, like there's almost no separation where you're specifically being like, oh my God, remember I had a stalker Today, it's just in every way you,

Eva LaRue: it's how you move through

Kaya McKenna Callahan: the world.

It's how you move. Yeah. It's how you move every, everything's in intertwined with it. And, and, and the fear and the paranoia and you know, the fear too, of the fact that this was one man, it doesn't mean it won't happen again.

Eva LaRue: I mean, how are you feeling now that this happened to you? Somebody broke into your house, like there's no way you're not thinking about this every night now.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Eva LaRue: like that. They might come back. Every sound, I'm sure.

Jordan Harbinger: I don't think about it that much. Surprisingly, we made some changes to our security system. I should probably bounce those ideas off you. You probably have fire alarm system.

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Like we have like new lighting and new [01:18:00] sensors and new locks everywhere and stuff like that.

And I've got some other surprises. Should they get further than that? All home

Eva LaRue: alone.

Jordan Harbinger: Little home. Yes, I have little, little toy cars with nails sticking out. I have a, I have a pet tarantula I'm going to put on their face with they coming. I don't think about it every day. But you know what my wife does, and I know my kids do.

I don't know if it's every day. I know they think about it a lot because again, 10, 11, whatever, we're at almost 12 months, eh, 11 months later, my daughter will be like, I'll be like, what are you drawing? She'll be like, oh, it's a sign that says no bad guys. And I'm like, Ugh, these freaking guys. Oh

yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's sort of in the back of her head somewhere.

And then my son will be like, Hey dad. And I'll be like, what? And he'll go Do bad guys. Are they just like everywhere in the dark? And I'm like, no, they're not. Aw. And he's like, okay. You know, it's just sort of so that, that actually is the thing that pissed me off the most. My feeling of like having, being a little bit violated my home.

You know, the glass broken, the property damage, dealing with that, that, that was like. That's like not even making the [01:19:00] top 10 list of things that upset me about this. It's my family being upset about it or my wife going, I always set the alarm when we go somewhere and I'm like, we're going across the street.

And she's like, I don't care.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Harbinger: You know? And she's right. But it's also like, oh, I kind of missed the days where she was like, oh, I didn't set the alarm. Oh, it's our fine. We're only gone for the weekend.

Eva LaRue: Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah. You know, my brother's home.

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: That kind of stuff.

Eva LaRue: No, you're hypervigilant forever when your brain is traumatized like that and your brain is shocked like that.

I don't know if you can ever not have that vigilance, you know what I mean?

Jordan Harbinger: It's tough. I mean, maybe it fades with time or something like that. I guess. We'll see.

Eva LaRue: I'm sure it fades with time and I don't know. For us, as long as the sky is alive, I don't know that it'll really be able to fade for us.

Jordan Harbinger: What's something you can never do anymore and something that you always have to do now?

Eva LaRue: I mean, now I feel like we've really kind of taken back everything. We kind of,

Kaya McKenna Callahan: I feel like I can never. I have, um, like a travel content Instagram, and so I feel like I [01:20:00] can never post my exact location about things. I always post for safety. I was in London a week ago now and I'm just posting about it.

Jordan Harbinger: I do that.

Yeah. I don't post in real time.

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. I feel like I can never post in real time and a lot of my, my friends do. 'cause who cares and I can't. And then what, what would I like to do? Was that that

Jordan Harbinger: what, what's something you always have to do now or you feel like you always have to do now? Like with me, with the alarm system?

Kaya McKenna Callahan: Yeah. It's definitely our security system. I feel like I always have to, um, if someone's following me for too long, you know, like you happen to be going the same way. Um, I always make four lefts just to make sure that they're not four left turns. Yeah. Or I, I, I'll pass my house or I'll, you know, I'll

Eva LaRue: do 'cause no one's making four left turns that isn't following you.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, exactly. Yeah. Unless they're lost.

Eva LaRue: And we know where all of the police stations are

Kaya McKenna Callahan: in. Yeah. In my area.

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez.

Eva LaRue: Wow. And on the way to wherever we need to be going, like wherever, you know, the work is

Jordan Harbinger: what freaks me out [01:21:00] is that like, guys like this just exist. And they're like working at Chipotle, right?

Yes.

Eva LaRue: They live next door to you. They're like here. They're right around you. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Like, oh, the guy who lives with his mom and he is kind of a weird guy, but he's, he's so nice. He cut his, he cuts the lawn, he brings flowers for her on Thanksgiving. Oh. And he threatened to rape and murder this couple that lives five states away that he watches on tv.

What?

Eva LaRue: Yeah. I mean even the gold, the Golden State Killer, he is got two daughters, one of them's a doctor. She went to Stanford. He was like a soccer dad.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Eva LaRue: He's like a normal dude that people, you know, he's bringing oranges to the soccer games for the kids. Yeah. You know, it's his week, but he is killed.

43 people.

Jordan Harbinger: It's so crazy and in like brutal ways. I remember researching that and it was like he would put like plates on the ritualistic and he would, he would like humiliate the guy by putting plate, like making him watch the whole thing. It was crazy.

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Gross, true monsters. Really?

Eva LaRue: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Harbinger: True monsters.

Um, and you dodged yours. Well, thank you again. I'm so glad you're both okay.

Eva LaRue: Thank [01:22:00] you. It was so great talking to you. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you so

Jordan Harbinger: much.

Eva LaRue: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Thank you for coming on and braving la traffic. You guys, you're brave in so many ways, ladies, so many ways the

Eva LaRue: story. Thank you. You're such a great interviewer too.

Thank you. That was amazing. Thank, really appreciate it.

Jordan Harbinger: Thanks. Nice to meet

Kaya McKenna Callahan: you guys. Guys. Take care and safe travel. Yeah, so good to meet you.

Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview from Joe Loya, a man who robbed 30 banks across California, but says the real crime scene was his childhood, where his Pentecostal preacher father beat him over a hundred times before he turned 15.

For 14 months, I robbed 30 banks, sometimes several in one day. I lost all sense that my life was going to be long at all. I just wanted to grab the loot and get the hell outta dodge as fast as possible and go spend it and have fun. That was my ethos, and so I did, because all the crimes I did and all the violence I did.

And starting with my dad, when my mother died, we had received a lot of love from her and everything like that. It's just too much for him. And when he gets angry, now he gets brutal. [01:23:00] Like he may have socked me, he may have choked me, he may have done all those things. Bebe with a bat. He wants us dead. He's using the dead language.

He could kill us or I could kill myself. But this is like, it's just a tough time for me to try and process the grief myself. And I'm being brutalized. I don't believe I have a future. So there's nothing inside of me. Like, oh, I gotta protect my future. I better get a job. I start better, start saving money for the future.

None of that because of trauma is so intense. You're only looking at surviving the next day in front of you. You know? In fact, I'm not made for society. They have all these moralities, but they're too timid for me. I've seen past the curtain, like I become in my heart like this little sociopath looking at like, you guys are falling for the okie-doke.

And I'm not the guy who falls for the Okie. I'm the guy who stabs the Okie do and says, get the hell outta my way. I'm not buying it right. Once upon a time, Joe Lawyer couldn't handle his emotional shit, and so now I'm a criminal. I'm a bad guy. [01:24:00]

In this episode, Joe unpacks the unsettling rapture he felt in the middle of a robbery, and the exact moment, seven years in solitary, forced him to confront what he'd been running from his whole life and the turning point that finally redirected everything.

It's not what you'd expect. Check out episodes 1264 and 1265 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Well, I have to say y'all, I am genuinely relieved that these women are both okay. Wow. What really stuck with me isn't just the fear. It's what never goes back to normal. The things you can't do anymore, the things you always have to do.

Now, the fact that even after an arrest, after prison, after restraining orders, there's still that quiet awareness in the background. Maybe not so quiet that a piece of paper doesn't really stop anyone. This story is horrifying, but it's also a rare look at how these cases actually work, how slow they are, how messy they are, and how much of the burden falls on the victims just to stay alive.

Eva Kaa, thank you for trusting me with this and for sharing something so personal and so [01:25:00] unsettling here on the show, and I feel like we had fun doing it, if we can say that. And if you haven't watched the documentary yet, prepare yourself, go and do that. Links and resources, of course, in the show notes, advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, once again, Wee Bit Wiser, very practical. We'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology relationships, in under two minutes every Wednesday. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about our Six Minute Networking course as well over at sixminutenetworking.com.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who is interested in sort of true crime ish or scary stories like this, [01:26:00] definitely share it with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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