My sister is 14 years older than I am. I have no other siblings, it’s just the two of us. When I was 3 years old she started dating this guy that was quite a bit older than she was. She was a senior in high school at the time. I’m not exactly sure how my parents felt about it because I was too young to be included in these conversations, but I know that they probably weren’t too happy. The only things I remember about him was that he drove a big car and, in my 3 year old mind, he wasn’t bad looking. His name was Fred.

Here is a picture of my sister and me. I was the mascot for her high school drill team.

My sister broke up with Fred. From what I have gathered is was an ugly breakup. She left for Kilgore College when I was 4. We were living in Corpus so it was, at that time, about an 8 to 9 hour drive. He followed her up to college and my parents had to get the college security involved. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but it was about to get worse for us in Corpus Christi.

We started receiving obscene phone calls at all hours of the night. We didn’t know who or why they were calling, but my parents finally found out that someone had written our phone number on just about every sleazy bar bathroom wall there was. My parents fully believed that it was Fred who had done it since we had had so many problems from him.

Then one day my mom got a phone call from a women she didn’t know. She told my mother that she had gone to San Antonio with Fred and while they were there he had told the woman that he blamed my mother for him and my sister breaking up. He told her the only way he knew to ruin her life was to kidnap her youngest daughter, which was me. The woman was freaked out about it because, as she told my mother, he was serious and she thought he was crazy. My mother got in touch with the police, but because she didn’t have this woman’s phone number, this was way before caller ID, they couldn’t do anything. They did come out and show her how to shoot a gun and told her that if he was climbing into our window to shoot him and drag the body inside.

By this time I was 5 years old. Everything was going smoothly. We would still get phone calls, but we had someone go into every bar restroom in Corpus and if they saw anything about us they made sure it was taken care of.

Fast forward several years. It was a Sunday morning and my parents and I were getting ready for church. The phone rings and I answered it. There is a man on the other end and he asks, “Stacy, how old are you now?”. I asked, “What?’ and he repeated what he had asked me. I told him “I’m 11.” and he hung up. I went into my parents bedroom because for some reason the call really made me anxious. My dad just looked at my mom and said something like, never tell anyone how old you are on the phone. Now mind you, I had absolutely NO idea that he had threatened to kidnap me. I still ran around outside with my friends and came in when the street light came on or my Aunt Norma rang the big bell. It was life as usual.

A couple of years go by. We live out in the country. My dad was Principal of the school that we lived right next door to. Our house was kind of tucked away behind the school. My grandfather, on my mother’s side, lived with us 6 months out of the year and with my aunt in Mandeville, LA the other 6 months. That arrangement had been going on for years. One day our phone rings and the man on the other end of the line asks me, “Stacy, where is your grandfather?”. We had recently taken him back to Louisiana for his 6 months with my aunt. Luckily my dad was standing right there when the phone rang and he took the receiver from me and told Fred not to call us ever again. I still didn’t know the extent of the situation.

Now we have moved into the city of Corpus. I was getting ready to graduate high school. My cousins, who lived in this tiny town in Texas near San Antonio, came down to go to the graduation. We were all sitting around the kitchen table talking when my cousin told my mother that they had the weirdest thing happen to them recently. This guy walks up to their home, they lived on a dairy farm far from anything and down a dirt road, because he had car trouble and asked to use their phone. I need to mention that they are the ONLY people in Texas that have our last name that we are related to. It is also a very unusual last name. He asked what their names were. When they told him, he asked if they had relatives in Corpus. They told him that they did and confirmed that it was our family. The very next question out of his mouth was, what is Stacy doing now. They didn’t know not to tell him, so they told him I was graduating from high school and told him where I was going to college. My mother’s face turned white and she asked my cousin, “What was his name?’. My cousin couldn’t remember so she called out to her husband in the next room and he said, “Oh, it was Fred, Fred Lerma”. My parents told them what had been happening for years and they felt so bad for telling him anything about me. They said he just seemed so nice and what a coincidence it was that he happened to have “car trouble” right by their house. They told my parents that all he really wanted to talk about was my family and mainly me.

This is when my parents had to tell me what was going on because now that he knew where I was going to be going to school and the fact that it was several hours away meant I had to be very aware of my surroundings. It really did freak me out now that I had all of the pieces to the puzzle. My parents had told me when I was younger that if I ever saw Fred near our home or anywhere that I should immediately tell them and not to speak to him but to just get away from where he was. I did think that was a little weird at the time. One day I was playing outside and a car that looked just like his pulled around to our house. I jumped up and ran inside to tell my mother but it turned out to just be a friend of my sister’s coming to visit. Even though I was very young I still remember the fear when I saw that car.

I have no answers to why he did this. My sister doesn’t like talking about it and my parents are both deceased. I never heard anything about him after my graduation, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t still keeping tabs on me. I couldn’t figure out why there was a big gap from when it first started until the phone calls started, but when I googled him I found out that he had enlisted in the army.

Here is his death information and the picture of him that I found on his social media.