GARONE: I was the victim of a crime, but...
I have strong feelings about thinking of myself as a victim.
And that's something that
I've really determined
I don't want to identify as.
One day, after I had been married for several months,
I came home,
and at the doorstep was a box addressed to me.
When I opened this package and saw was in it,
I was so disgusted.
I just need a second. Sorry.
[quietly] Sorry.
♪♪
[sniffles]
♪♪
It created a dark mystery in my life
that remained unsolved for a really long time.
All told, it went on for about nine years.
He was the puppet master
pulling these terrible strings behind the scenes.
There's just a revulsion and horror to that.
He's a monster, and he needs to be put away.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
[banging on door]
[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
GARONE: I've never known my parents together.
They separated when I was six weeks old, and shortly
after that, when I was a toddler, we moved to Arizona.
So I was raised primarily by my mom.
My mom met Gary Hardy at church when I was
eight years old.
They were both in a music and drama ministry at our church,
and that's when they really began to get to know
each other.
And right around the time I turned nine was when they had
their first date,
and six days later they got engaged,
and three months later they got married.
This is a picture of our new family
on my mom and Gary's wedding day.
I remember on this day I actually felt
overjoyed for them. I saw how happy my mom was.
This was a happy day for me.
I see in this picture sort of the culmination of what I think
my mom had been waiting for for a long time,
to find someone to share her life with, to raise her kids
with, to be a partner with,
and I understand why she was so happy.
Around this time was when I had a conversation with my mom
and Gary and told them
that I would be calling him dad from here on out.
I remember Gary when I told him this having an extremely
positive emotional reaction.
I think he might have even cried, saying that this was
so important and special to him.
He was so glad that I would be calling him dad.
I have wondered a lot if I factored into Gary's...
Let's call it targeting... Of my mom and our family.
I see a child who had a lot of innocence,
and things were about to change
and change pretty dramatically.
He fooled all of us for 13 years.
♪♪
I think even from early on, I had
a somewhat of a sense of mistrust toward Gary.
When my mom and Gary got married and he moved into
our home, Gary was a very affectionate person...
AS GARY: Okay, kiddo. Time for bed.
...both with my mom and myself.
He was a hugger. He loved to give hugs.
What? No hug?
GARONE: But I did not like Gary's hugs.
They were too long, and they were too tight.
Gary's hugs always felt possessive to me, and that
just gave me a bad feeling, made me uncomfortable.
But what can you do? You hug back.
It always felt like he wanted more
from me than I wanted to give.
I think I felt obligated to hug in return,
so I would just hug him back, because that was
the expectation, and that was clearly what he wanted.
But in those moments, I was always
hesitant, wanting it to end.
I think I was probably usually the one
to pull away first from a hug from Gary.
I think it's easy to, especially maybe as a child,
just ignore those feelings or brush them off.
You accept what you're given when
you're a child, and it seems normal.
This is a picture of Gary.
Yeah, it's a pretty good snapshot of who Gary was.
Always wore a polo shirt.
He liked to wear a hat like this.
He had a belly.
He wasn't a glamorous guy, like, I look at him in this picture,
and I think what a dweeb, he doesn't look cool at all.
Gary appeared to be like a goofy, fuddy-duddy dad.
♪♪
There was one time... I must have had
a really terrible nightmare.
And I remember my mom wasn't there.
I don't know where she was, but it was just Gary.
And I remember going in in the middle
of the night to tell him this.
Hey, you. What's the matter?
- I had a bad dream. - A bad dream? Come here.
I was raised in a Christian household,
and Gary seemed to be every bit as much of a faithful
Christian as our family was, and...
this is really difficult.
But he had me sit in bed with him, and he prayed for me.
Come here. Come on. Right here.
All right. Bad dream, huh?
Close your eyes.
And...
even though, you know, oh, he was praying for me,
this should be a good thing,
it was just the most uncomfortable,
reviling feeling that I had from that.
I had the sense that he didn't really want to comfort me
and help me feel better from this horrible dream,
but that he was turning it into an opportunistic thing
for himself.
And he would bring up that story subsequently
many times about how wonderful that was
that I came to him in my hour of distress,
and I let him comfort me.
[inhales deeply]
Oh, sorry. This is, like, really...
[makes sound of disgust] Um...
All right, beat it. Go to bed.
GARONE: I had a hard time even
articulating to myself what I felt about Gary.
Even when I did
acknowledge the feelings I had, I would rationalize them away.
It didn't seem like something that was worth sharing,
even with my mom.
But I remember thinking I... no matter what happens,
like, if I ever have a bad dream again,
I'm not coming to him for comfort.
♪♪
Going into ninth grade, I was really excited.
There were some opportunities that were
only available to the ninth graders.
One of them was this pom squad cheer line kind of dance team
that a lot of my friends and I had tried out for.
They had said that they would inform us
by mail if we had gotten onto the team.
So every day, I was checking the mail with some
anticipation to see if I had gotten this good news.
One afternoon, I decided to go check the mail,
and inside there was a package addressed to me.
The return address said AJHS JAG.
AJHS was Anderson Junior High School.
And the name of this cheer squad was JAG line.
So I thought, this is it!
Got my acceptance, and it was nice and thick,
which is always a good sign for an acceptance.
So I pulled open the top,
and I pulled out what I expected to be good news.
And instead it was a stack of black and white
pornography
that looked like it had been photocopied onto these pages,
page after page.
The horror and revulsion was immediate.
To this day, I can remember
what I saw on the first page of it.
It just shocked me to the point where I was
shaking and crying.
I do recall first thing just showing it to my parents
and saying, "What is this?
What is going on here?"
Gary called the police and filed a police report.
AS GARY: What kind of sicko would do something like this?
"Who would do this to my daughter and why?"
And, "Let's get to the bottom of this."
I believe they asked me a few questions, whether I had
any enemies, whether I had any ideas of who might do this.
OFFICER: Can you think of anyone at school who would do this?
- No. - Whoever it is,
you better find him.
GARONE: I felt thankful at that point that
Gary was there to make the police report.
Ultimately, they just took the contents of the package,
filed a report, and we never heard anything
about it after that.
I think Gary saw himself as some sort of
hero in his own bizarre
superhero story,
that he was getting away with this.
I am not gonna let anything happen to you. Okay?
It was scary to not know who would want to do this
to me and why.
Not to have any answers about this was frustrating,
and it created a dark mystery
in my life that remained unsolved for a really long time.
This is a journal that I kept in 2003 and 2004.
This is where I would express my thoughts,
maybe tell my secrets,
and you'll notice that there's pages and pages of writing,
and then right here, right about in the middle,
it stops,
and there are blank pages for the entire rest of the journal.
Typically, I kept my journals in my bedroom,
but I would
take them all over the house to write in them.
And I know that there were times that I did leave them elsewhere.
I never worried about anyone reading my journal.
I figured that everybody in the house
knew that this was off limits to them.
But one day, I was looking for
my journal, and I couldn't find it.
I could have sworn I set it
down in the living room on an end table.
What's the matter? What are you looking for?
I can't find my journal.
GARONE: Gary's reaction about my missing journals seemed
like everybody else's in my family.
Just sort of mystified. "I don't know.
"What do you think happened to it?
Where do you think you left it?"
I thought I left it right here.
Retrace your steps. Maybe it's in your bedroom.
There was never any indication, any suspicious activity of his.
I checked, it's not.
GARONE: So when it disappeared once,
it didn't seem all that strange.
But when it happened multiple times,
there seemed to be a definite pattern.
I'm sure it'll turn up somewhere.
GARONE: My journal would go missing once every few months,
it seems... it would just disappear,
and I'd have to start a new one.
I'm not a very absent-minded person.
It didn't make sense for me to only
be losing this one type of thing consistently,
and the reason for that
I can realize now, Gary enjoyed reading my private
thoughts that I would never have confided in him,
and this was a way of
just taking that for himself without permission.
♪♪
After receiving the first package with the pornography,
I was skittish about checking the mail.
But as days went by, and then
weeks and then months with no further incidents,
I definitely felt a sense of relief,
and it seemed to confirm that this was a one-time thing.
About a year had passed since I received the first package,
and one day after school, again, I went to check the mail.
This time, there was an envelope addressed to me
again with no return address
and the stamp was upside down.
I just had a sickening feeling,
but I opened it,
and this time, it was just
8-by-10 color photos again,
explicit sexual acts,
and it had a message scrawled in what looked like
red lipstick, saying,
I love you, I want you, I need you!
And it was signed with the name of a boy
from my school who I had a crush on who was
a foreign exchange student. His name was Hans.
But I knew
it could not possibly have been from him,
because it resembled the first package so much.
And at the time I received the first package,
I didn't even know this boy.
He wasn't even in the country,
so someone knew that I liked this boy
and was messing with me.
Gary was the only other person at home with me,
and I immediately took it to him.
And I remember sitting with him on my bed,
sobbing, and him putting his arm around me, hugging me,
comforting me.
We were looking at the envelope
and saying, "Who could do this?
Why would anyone do this? What is this about?"
I think the person that sent this
isn't mad at you.
What do you mean?
Gary said to me, "Well, you know, when someone puts"
"a postage stamp upside down,
you know what that means, right?"
And I said, "No, I don't know what that means," and he said,
"It means I love you."
It's kind of like a secret code.
I just remember chills going down my spine
at that thought that...
That this is someone's sick way of telling me
that they love me?
It was that much more disturbing.
It's okay.
Looking back, it's no surprise to me that this happened on
a day that I would be alone in the house with Gary.
My guess is that was intentional.
He could be the hero.
He'd be the comforter, saves the day,
but at the same time
witness my pain and anguish that he had caused.
That makes me very angry,
and it's pretty revolting to think that
he might have done that with a very calculated intention.
♪♪
When I was in high school, my mom went to a therapy group
on Monday nights,
so that would take her out of the house for several hours.
My brother had already left home for college,
so it would just be me and Gary alone in the house.
I increasingly had a sense sometimes of Gary looking at me
in, uh, maybe an inappropriate way.
I've never been a provocative dresser,
but at those times when I wore something that was maybe
a little out of character for me,
maybe a little bit low-cut or a little bit tighter,
I would notice Gary
just eyeing me,
looking a little bit too long at me.
And I think as a woman, you just get a sense when a man is
looking at you in a... In a different kind of way,
with a different intention.
But I was able to rationalize it
again and think, eh, I'm probably making it up.
Okay, I'm out.
GARONE: Everyone else in my family didn't
seem to have these feelings about him.
My mom loved him, was happy to be with him.
So that makes it easier to rationalize
and explain it away.
[indistinct talking on TV]
He confessed to my mom that he had a...
pornography addiction.
Obviously, he probably is the one that sent me
these packages.
I would sometimes do some clerical work for Gary in
his office, and he would take me
out to lunch at fancy restaurants.
When we would go out for these lunches,
he would do little things to make it appear
that maybe I was his date instead of his daughter,
and that might look like putting his hand on my back
to lead me into the restaurant
or reaching out for my hand across the table.
It made me feel gross and uncomfortable,
and it made me feel like he was trying to use me as a prop
for some sort of ego stroking
gratification of looking like he could be out to a nice lunch
with a woman less than half his age.
I just love it when you come by
the office and we can spend some quality time together.
GARONE: But even though it creeped me out
and I didn't like it, I would kind of tell myself,
maybe it's more benign than I want to think it is.
Even though you might think, oh, well, obviously,
he probably is the one that sent me these packages... didn't
necessarily connect in my mind to the packages.
Cheers.
He's never, like, made a pass at me.
He's never grabbed my butt... It was all subtle enough
that you could kind of just sweep it under the rug.
♪♪
When I was 15, I found out that Gary was being
let go from his work for viewing pornography
on his work computer.
[distant shouting]
My mom and Gary would fight behind closed doors
most of the time,
so we would hear sort of muffled arguments.
[distant shouting]
He confessed to my mom that he had
a pornography addiction.
It definitely came as a surprise.
It felt awkward and strange to know that Gary,
my dad, was into this type of thing.
Looking back, I think finding out that Gary had a problem
with pornography should have been a really strong indicator
that he was the one who had sent me these packages.
But at that point in my life,
I had been told pornography is everywhere.
Every man you know looks at it, and it's all over the place.
Right? So because of that,
I had a sense that it wasn't all that uncommon for someone
to get caught up in this.
Don't worry, we'll work it out.
GARONE: My mom let me know that she and Gary were going to work
through this by going
to therapy together, and because his reaction to me
receiving these packages was so comforting,
it just didn't add up.
Even if he likes to look at it, too,
it doesn't mean he would harm me in this way.
♪♪
I graduated from high school, and I was still 17 when I moved
out of the house, and I went across the country to a college
outside Chicago.
When I went away to college,
I really enjoyed a period of no incidents of harassment.
That was beautiful.
It was really nice for
at least the first two years.
That was all the more convincing that whoever
had done this to me was someone I knew in high school.
The summer before my senior year of college,
I got engaged to the man who's now my husband of 16 years.
When I got engaged, things begin to happen again.
And it started with my email.
- Oh, my God. - What happened?
I would get signed up for all sorts
of subscriptions that I didn't sign myself up for,
and often times, they were sexual in nature.
So lingerie catalogs, for example.
It happened again.
I didn't send these.
And then it turned into a much bigger
violation when friends of mine began to receive emails,
not really from me, but from my account.
At least one friend received some of
the very romantic and very personal emails
I sent my then fiance, so clearly, someone had
access to my email and was doing a lot
of untoward things with it.
Let me try something.
I think I can figure out where these emails are
coming from.
So my fiance at the time, who was studying computer science,
knew a lot about how to trace emails.
- Huh. - What?
GARONE: It turned out that the emails were coming from
Chandler, Arizona, which is where
I was raised and where my parents lived.
Finding out that these emails were coming
from my hometown was a big revelation.
We need to call your mom.
We told my mom and Gary where this
was coming from, and he spun that like crazy.
He had an explanation, you know, about it
had to be somebody from high school.
He turned it into,
"Well, see how this is evidence? All along,
"I've been telling you, some weirdo
at your high school who was doing this to you."
His reaction to it was convincing.
It seemed like no matter how many times I'd changed
my password, inevitably,
some strange or inappropriate new thing would happen.
But sometimes when I would come home from college,
I would log into my email on Gary's computer,
thinking nothing of this.
What I didn't realize was that he had a program
on his computer that was tracking
and saving my keystrokes in order for him to get
my password.
And that's how he continued to hack my email.
♪♪
I heard his footsteps, it felt
a little bit like I was being watched.
Mm.
This picture is from my wedding day.
This is me and Gary.
He looks very strange.
He doesn't look happy.
When I got engaged, he seemed really frazzled by that.
He felt a sense of possession of me.
During our father-daughter dance,
I was very uncomfortable with the way he was holding me,
and I kept trying to pull away,
and I think he was picking up on it
and just refused to release his grip a little bit.
I just feel really grossed out thinking about all...
All of those circumstances surrounding that day.
Leading up to my wedding day,
I had gotten my wedding dress back from alterations,
and it was ready to go for the big day.
So I went into my bedroom to put the dress on.
It was nighttime, and Gary had said he was
going to be taking out the trash right then.
He'd be right back to come see me in the dress.
My bedroom was on the side of the house next
to the side yard where we would keep the trash cans.
I was getting undressed, and I heard his footsteps
on the side of the house where my window faced,
and I heard the sound of
the pail being dragged across the gravel.
And then I heard these sounds stop.
It just gave me this sort of chilling sense.
I felt a little bit like I was being watched,
especially because there was a section of my blinds
that was actually missing.
I've wondered, why exactly were those blinds missing?
There was a lot of just telling myself,
it's your imagination.
Maybe it was our cat... our cat would go behind the blinds,
get playful, and poke out a little section.
I'll never know for sure if it was Gary outside,
but I felt watched,
and I just made sure to turn my back to the window
as I got changed.
This is my bedroom,
and I can see this piece of the blinds that's turned down.
When this wedding dress incident happened,
there were more of these blinds that were turned down.
But you know what strikes me when I look
at the blinds and where that piece is missing,
turned down, that's not where the cat would have been.
Cat was not 4 feet tall.
Even if she jumped up on the windowsill,
she couldn't have poked her head that far through
the blinds, so I think that's pretty interesting.
Looking at this, I suspect that it would have been Gary
who did that in order to be able to look into the room at me.
♪♪
One of the scariest parts about these years of harassment
was that no matter where I went, it followed me.
Even after I got married and moved into my own apartment
with my husband,
at least a couple of times, my journal would go missing
from our home again.
And, at this point,
it wasn't just my journal that was missing.
Occasionally, pieces of my underwear would go missing,
as well.
And I thought, maybe I'm absent-minded or it
got eaten in the dryer... just a classic thing that happens.
So I tried to explain it away with that sort of rationale.
But when it happens enough times,
you begin to get suspicious that someone's taking these things.
-I feel like a crazy person. It happened again?
- What's missing? - GARONE: At one point,
the lingerie that I had picked out and worn for our wedding
night went missing from my dresser drawer,
and I knew it couldn't have gotten lost in the wash.
So I knew someone was coming into my apartment
and had to have taken it.
Maybe we should get the locks changed just to be safe.
And all we could think was maybe we were leaving our door
unlocked sometimes without realizing it,
not remembering... What we didn't realize
was at one point, Gary took our apartment key and made
a copy, so he was able
to access our apartment at any time.
All of these things really did put us
on edge, me and my husband.
And so a time went by, we did feel very shaken up
and very paranoid.
♪♪
One day after I had been married for several months,
I came home, and at the doorstep was a box
addressed to me.
But I didn't recognize the name or the return address.
Seemed a little strange.
I wasn't expecting anything,
but on the other hand, I guess foolishly maybe
I didn't learn my lesson, and I just...
You still get excited to get a package in the mail,
so I wasn't thinking much of it.
I opened the package,
and inside was a sex toy,
and on this object was a printed label
with my husband's name on it,
taped to this thing.
This was much more extreme and invasive than
the other packages that I had received in the past.
This one had me spiraling
and just terrified.
I was so disgusted
and so disgusted that someone was thinking
of me with this thing in mind.
[quietly] Sorry.
I'm sorry, I didn't expect to get emotional.
Okay.
I went to enter my apartment,
and the door was unlocked, and I was
not sure if I had left the door unlocked.
I was in just such a... A state of upset
and disarray, so I called my husband first to say,
"Can you please come home and be with me?
I do not want to be alone."
I think we've been broken into.
Call me back as soon as you get this.
And unfortunately, he was tied up in a meeting
30 minutes away.
And so the next person I called was Gary.
It's Sarah.
His office was right around the corner from our apartment
at that time, and he came rushing over.
He was kind of all business,
like, I'm gonna be here to, you know, be
your protector, and we're gonna call the police.
We're gonna find out who did this to you.
He played the hero.
He looked behind all the doors.
I remember even a sense of almost like anger on his part.
"Who would do this to you?
"I can't believe this is still happening to you.
"Can you believe that they found you again after all these years,
after all these moves."
I can't believe somebody would follow you all this time.
I am gonna take care of it. Okay?
He investigated the whole space.
And then he called the police and filed the report
about this incident himself.
I think Gary was very skilled at the game
that he was playing.
He was very good at it.
He knew how to exhibit all the right behaviors on
the surface so that I could never suspect
that this was him, but then, if I ever did,
he could have all this evidence to point to.
"I'm not like that. I'm like this.
Look how I treat you." It's such a mind game.
It makes me angry. It disgusts me.
I think keeping us in suspense, keeping us guessing,
I think somehow to Gary that felt exciting,
that he was getting away with this.
♪♪
[phone ringing]
I got a phone call, and a detective
introduced himself and said,
"We think we've found your harasser."
And then he asked me if I knew someone named Gary Hardy.
GARONE: Not long after the police report
was filed about this most recent package,
[phone ringing]
I got a phone call.
Hello?
And a detective introduced himself.
And then he asked me if I knew someone named Gary Hardy.
I knew what was coming next,
and in that moment, I think I had two feelings.
One was horror, and one was relief,
and when I explained that was my stepdad,
the detectives said, "We think we've found your harasser."
Oh, my God.
GARONE: The detective informed me that Gary's secretary
had filed a separate police report
of her own, because Gary's secretary opened his mail as
part of her job.
And one day, prior to me receiving this package,
she opened a package that contained a sex toy,
and she closed it up, pretended never to have seen it.
And lo and behold, a few days later,
this thing arrives on my doorstep.
The day that I called Gary to come help me,
he went back to the office afterward and told his
secretary exactly what it was that I had received.
And at that moment, she realized this was
the same object she had seen in his office.
She put the pieces together
that this was Gary doing this to me.
And so she filed her own police report.
♪♪
Once we knew that this most recent package had come
from Gary,
we knew that all the other packages
and letters and email hacks had to have been him.
Thinking about all the times Gary had
come to the rescue, supposedly, and tried
to be the hero in each situation,
it just made me sick, and it made me angry
that he had played me in that way.
But ultimately, even though it was
a horrible revelation to find out the truth,
there's a lot of freedom in that and a lot of relief.
There was also grief.
There was the sense that everything we knew
about our life as a family was a lie,
and that everything was going to change from here.
He did willingly go to the police station
and was arrested there.
This is an email that Gary sent to me
on July 19, 2005.
"To Sarah, I'm ashamed of what I did to you.
"I realize saying I'm sorry doesn't come close
"to healing the pain and anguish
"I have caused you the past 10 years.
"My actions were despicable, deceitful, and tormented
"you in ways I cannot even imagine.
"I'm so ashamed at how I could possibly assault
"and deceive someone whom I did love and cherish.
"You were a precious gift entrusted to me
"by your mom and by God, and I abused that gift,
and I'm very, very sorry."
I didn't believe this at all.
You've done these behaviors for 10 years.
Now you're sorry? Why? Because you got caught.
And they still are just kind of silly,
meaningless words to me.
Maybe also because words like this
imply a genuine relationship.
And I don't want a genuine relationship with him.
A line that bothers me from this email is
"you were a precious gift entrusted to me by your mom
and by God."
I don't think of myself as a gift to be given or to be had,
really, unless I so choose.
♪♪
Gary received a plea bargain that would have given him
something like one or two years total in prison,
and he chose not to take it,
and I'm very happy about that.
Ultimately, I think Gary's, like, great dream here
would have been to have some type of
sexual relationship with me.
That's what I think was really the goal.
But if not that, I think he wanted to be sort of like this
Prince Charming in my life,
this savior, hero, God, who I just looked up to
and thought was so amazing
and who was just this great daddy,
and even saying those words makes me wanna vomit.
It's appalling. It's... it's disgusting.
It's infuriating.
And I just really rejoiced to know that he would be put away.
Justice was being served,
and I did not have to think about him for 20 years.
♪♪
I don't wish him ill,
but I don't want to see him free in society.
I think he's in the place he needs to be,
and I wish that he could stay there for the rest of his life.
I try not to worry about what may happen when Gary is
released from prison,
but I can't say that I don't have any concerns.
I hope that he has no vendetta against me, my family.
But at the same time, when I find out he's getting released,
I'm going to be protecting myself in every way possible.
Not to say he couldn't
turn his life around, become the actual
upstanding citizen he pretended to be,
but I wouldn't trust it if I saw it.