My stalker stated he’d rape and dismember me. Then he turned his wicked sights on my seven-year-old daughter, says EVA LARUE. I’ll always remember the horrific day he discovered her faculty…

A plain envelope, the address written in unremarkable handwriting, it looked like any other piece of fan mail.

Yet reading its contents – filled with threats of rape, violence and abduction – actress Eva LaRue felt gripped with icy terror.

‘I knew immediately this wasn’t a prank, there was such an overwhelming sense of depravity and darkness in the words,’ recalls Eva, who was then 40. ‘It was obvious this person was dangerous.’

Chillingly, her initial assessment proved correct. For this depraved letter would mark the beginning of a terrifying 12-year stalking ordeal, which left her in fear for her life – and for that of her young daughter Kaya.

For as the threats against Eva ramped up, her deranged ‘fan’ began targeting Kaya, too. His twisted campaign, including more than 100 threat-filled letters, would come to define her childhood – culminating when he targeted her at school, aged 18, in a terrifying episode that left Kaya and her teachers traumatised.

But at first, Eva – an Emmy award winner who starred in CSI: Miami and long-running American soap opera All My Children – hoped the threatening letter, sent to her publicist in 2007, was a one-off.

After all, the same sender had previously sent her fan mail expressing admiration and love for Eva.

But this letter was different; dark and violent. ‘Any hope quickly vanished when another letter, and then another, arrived at my publicist’s office,’ says Eva, now 59.

The letters were signed ‘Freddie’, with the author likening himself to Freddy Krueger, the serial child killer from A Nightmare on Elm Street. ‘Someone was out there who wanted to harm me,’ she says.

The first had arrived two years after Eva joined the cast of CSI: Miami, in which she played Detective Natalia Boa Vista. She was living in Los Angeles with Kaya, then five, after separating from Kaya’s father. ‘My home address was private because when I’d moved to LA, my friend Sarah Michelle Gellar [star of Buffy The Vampire Slayer] had advised me not to buy it in my name for safety reasons,’ explains Eva.

‘I remember thinking, “Is this really necessary? I’m not going to have to worry about stalkers like she does.” Thankfully though, I took her advice.’

Initially, Freddie’s threats were solely directed at Eva. ‘From the grotesque sexual acts he wanted to perform, to keeping me as a sex slave and dismembering my body, reading the letters was like having an out of body experience. The fear was overwhelming,’ she says.

‘He wrote that he was watching me, that he was in LA, and I had no way of knowing, was this true or not? It felt like there was nowhere to hide, wherever I went, he could be there.’

After reporting the letters to the local police that year, Eva was stunned when they told her there was nothing they could do unless this person broke into her home or physically harmed her.

Thankfully, a retired homicide detective was working as an adviser on CSI: Miami at the time. ‘With his help, I was put in touch with the FBI and they began to investigate my case because crime by mail falls within their jurisdiction.’

Frustratingly, despite the letters – which continued to arrive with varying frequency at her publicist’s office – being covered in the sender’s DNA and fingerprints, there were no matches in any police databases.

‘We remained completely in the dark about who this malevolent presence in my life was.’

Eva could do little but increase the security at her home, installing CCTV cameras and high gates around the property, sleeping with a gun close to hand. ‘I still didn’t feel safe. I knew of much bigger stars who had endless money for security, and stalkers had still managed to break into their homes.

‘Plus, I couldn’t hide away. I had to work, earn and support my daughter. I’d look at every man in the street, thinking, is that him? I’d collect Kaya from school and take her to the park, fearing he was watching us. His invisibility was terrifying.’

Kaya was seven when, in 2009, the letters also began to threaten her.

‘It was heinous,’ remembers Eva. ‘He wrote, in explicit detail, about kidnapping us and raping us before killing us. He said, “I will kill you both and chop your bodies into small pieces . . . I am going to enjoy destroying you b***h . . . there will be no place on this earth I can’t find you”.

‘Even reading Kaya’s name in his handwriting, it made me sick.’

The only brief respite Eva felt in her overriding fear for her daughter was when Kaya went to stay with her father, who lived a few hours away.

Kaya, who is now 24, was then unaware of the horrors her mother was coping with, yet she knew something was amiss. ‘I remember just knowing she was really anxious and on edge, but I didn’t know why. She would talk to me about “stranger danger” and never going anywhere with someone I didn’t know.’

In 2010, Eva’s address was accidentally made public during a local authority meeting about the installation of security gates at her home. ‘The meeting was televised and, knowing my stalker could now find our home, within 48 hours Kaya and I moved in sheer panic,’ Eva recalls.

‘I was constantly in fight or flight mode and the toll on my physical and emotional health was significant. I suffered from stress-induced hair loss, rashes and gastric problems, while sleepless nights and days living on adrenaline left me completely fatigued.’

Later that year, Eva married businessman Joe Cappuccio.

After their wedding was covered in magazines, the stalker – presumably enraged by her new marriage – detailed ever more grotesque, ­violent fantasies in his letters.

‘Joe moved into our new home in a gated community and, no longer living alone and now in a more secure location, I did feel a bit safer, although I continued to keep a weapon in the house,’ says Eva.

Behind the scenes, the FBI continued to investigate Eva’s case. Behavioural scientists studying the letters concluded that Freddie was a dangerous erotomaniac – a person with a psychiatric disorder in which they believe someone is in love with them.

As Kaya entered her teenage years, Eva had no choice but to tell her daughter more about the sinister backdrop to their life.

‘I still kept the letters secret as they were simply too depraved to share with her, but I made her aware I had a stalker who wanted to harm us,’ says Eva. ‘For years he’d been writing that he was watching us, he knew where we were and I had no idea if that were true or not.’

‘It broke my heart having to be so open and scare her, but especially as she became a teenager and wanted more independence, I knew she needed to be on her guard too.’

For Kaya, the impact on what should have been a carefree time of life was profound.

‘It was something I kept very private, only confiding in close friends,’ Kaya says. ‘I feared if people knew I had this crazy stalker they’d avoid me. But also because I had a deep fear he would try to get to me through a friend, and I was putting people I cared about at risk.

‘My mother was very clear that I needed to be extremely careful on social media, never revealing my location, not sharing details about my life in the depth friends were able to. He could be watching my posts and use them to get to me.’

Kaya would later develop anxiety and depression, little surprise given ‘the prolonged strain we were both under for so long, fear never far from our minds’.

In 2012, CSI: Miami came to an end. ‘I wanted to hide away, to keep us safe, but I also had to earn a living,’ says Eva, who continued acting.

‘If a fan approached me for a photo or autograph, my heart would race, fearing this was just a ruse to get close and harm me. On the red carpet at events and premieres, I’d look out into the sea of paparazzi and fans and wonder, is he out there watching me?

‘Knowing that continuing to have a public profile was only fuelling his obsession with me, I felt incredibly torn, my love for my job overshadowed by my fear.’

In 2014, Eva and Joe separated, the strain of the stalking having contributed to the demise of the relationship. Once again, she and Kaya were on their own.

‘By then, I believed this would never come to an end, unless Freddie found us one day and made his sick threats a reality.

‘Looking back I really don’t know how I kept going – trying to live as normal a life as possible, but with this perpetual undercurrent of fear and anxiety running through every day.’

In 2019, there came a terrifying escalation in the stalker’s behaviour. Freddie phoned Kaya’s unsuspecting high school pretending to be her father.

‘I was asked to go to the school office and was told my dad had called and he was coming to collect me,’ says Kaya, who was by then 18, and fully aware of the depraved contents of the letters.

‘I almost blacked out with terror because I knew immediately this was the stalker. Dad lived several hours away and would never have shown up out of the blue like that. I insisted my mum was called and refused to return to my classroom, I was so scared he could be in the building. It was utterly terrifying.’

Racing to the school, Eva was frantic with fear.

‘Suddenly, this was escalating beyond the letters and now Kaya was his focus,’ she says. ‘We were both incredibly scared and emotional when I collected her, and we drove around, taking a detour to our home, in case he was watching and following us.’

That night, to the horror of the staff, Freddie left a series of voicemails on the school answer machine threatening to rape and kill Kaya.

Mother and daughter spent the next few days at home, Kaya too frightened to attend school and Eva unwilling to let her out of her sight. ‘The rest of my life had this stalking backdrop to it but I had always seen school as a sanctuary of sorts,’ says Kaya. ‘Now that security was gone.

‘It felt so invasive, so frightening and with college on my horizon I thought, “Am I ever going to be able to live a normal life like everyone else my age?’” Yet amid this terrfying time, finally – after years in limbo – there came a major development in the FBI’s investigation.

The case had been passed to two agents who had pioneered a new method for identifying DNA samples: uploading it to genetic genealogy websites such as 23andMe, which had grown in popularity, in the hope of finding a match or identifying relatives of the suspect.

The method had recently been used to catch serial killer Joseph DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer, 40 years after his spree of 13 murders.

Now, it had snared Eva’s stalker too. After identifying some of his relatives, detectives had narrowed Freddie’s location to a small town – and they had him under surveillance.

‘When they told me they believed they’d ID’d my stalker – a man living in Ohio, 2,000 miles from LA – and were days away from arresting him, I was speechless,’ she says.

‘To hear this, and feel a glimmer of hope that this nightmare may soon be over, I broke down.’

A few days later came the call that would change Eva and Kaya’s life.

Care worker James David Rogers, 55, had been arrested and charged with two counts of mailing threatening communications, one count of threats by interstate communications and two counts of stalking.

‘It was the most surreal moment of my life when the agents emailed me a photo of him, and I finally laid eyes on my tormentor,’ Eva says.

‘Looking at the mugshot of the beady-eyed, 50-something man, I felt such an overwhelming mix of emotions.

‘Relief that he was finally in police custody, anger that he’d stolen my peace for so long and robbed my daughter of a normal childhood, and joy that finally my stalking nightmare was over.’

Kaya also felt immense relief at Rogers’ arrest – and anger.

‘This had been my whole life, more or less. I had no memories of a time before this and I felt angry and frustrated. Why had he chosen us to terrorise?

‘Mum says she’s been changed by this experience, but I don’t know who I would have been if it hadn’t happened because I grew up through it.

‘I am an anxious, shy person. Is that because of what happened? Did it shape me into this? I will never know.’

Because of the pandemic, Rogers didn’t stand trial until 2022, spending the 2020 lockdown under house arrest with an ankle tag, before being moved to a prison on remand.

His obsession with Eva had, it transpired, begun in the early 1990s when she had appeared on All My Children, and spiralled from there.

After his guilty plea, both Kaya and Eva read out impact statements. ‘Originally I wasn’t planning to speak that day,’ says Kaya. ‘But when Rogers said he hoped we could “move on” from what he’d done, I was infuriated that he was getting a chance to speak. I wanted to appeal directly to the judge to give us justice.’

Yet the sentence – just three-and-a-half years out of a possible maximum of seven – was a deep disappointment.

‘Neither of us felt it was enough compared to the 12 years of hell and psychological terrorism we had endured,’ says Eva.

In January last year, Rogers was released and will be on probation in Ohio until 2027.

‘For now, we feel safe but I don’t know if that will change when his probation ends,’ says Eva, who still lives in LA.

‘Being stalked changed who I am. I remain hypervigilant about my safety and Kaya’s. I have felt a terror that most people will, thankfully, never experience.’

Kaya, who graduated from the University of Arizona in 2024, echoes her mother. ‘I’m still very vigilant about my safety. It can be hard to trust new people.’

Last year they worked together on a documentary about the experience, My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story.

Why, after finally finding peace and safety, did they choose to risk drawing Rogers’ attention back to them – or inciting a copy cat?

‘I thought long and hard about making it,’ says Eva. ‘I knew it was a risk. But ultimately I decided I wouldn’t be silenced, I would speak out for all the people who have lived through this sort of hell, some of whom ­haven’t survived it.

‘Kaya and I did, together, and now we are looking to the future.’

My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story is available on the Crime+Investigation TV network.