My Husband Believes this Explains my Love of Buffy and Veronica Mars

I went to college in the late 80's. A former friend from high school also went to the huge university I attended. He and I had had a nasty break in our senior year. He had been manipulative and controlling of me and others during our association, almost irreparably damaging a very dear friendship, not to mention trying to hurt the dear friend herself with a combination of emotional blackmail and outright larceny.  The way he treated those I loved and me proved he could be intentionally, casually cruel, and I had made it very clear I wanted nothing more to do with him. Attempting to re-establish contact with (read: "control over") me, he left me a signed, handwritten, threatening note in my residence hall mailbox in the first weeks of our freshman year.  He demanded that I listen to him (I had hung up on him when he called) and he informed me that if I did not respond within a set period of time, he "[knew] what could hurt [me] most." The campus cops' response? 

"We can't do anything until he does something else."

"What sort of 'something'?"

"Something more extreme than leaving a note."

"Are you saying you can't even go talk to him about this until he physically injures me?"

"Yes."

I have rarely felt more angry and more helpless in my life. I was a first-semester freshman: what "friendships" I had created were of the newly-made, fragile sort, and few (if any) believed me when I said I was frightened of this person. The apathy of the campus cops, the disbelief of my fellow freshmen, my rawness at living hundreds of miles away from home for the first time, all of these combined to make me feel very alone, isolated, and scared.

My story is fortunately anticlimactic. He didn't follow through on his threats (to be honest, I wasn't sure what he meant when he said he knew what could hurt me most - not that I wanted to find out), but I spent a lot of energy looking over my shoulder and paying attention to where I was and who I was with for some time (in doing so, I learned there is a vast gulf between being prudently aware of your surroundings and feeling hunted).

Would he ever have done anything? Was he really the sort to snap and actually injure somebody, or just a controlling creep with a penchant for mind games? I don't know. I am glad that my story does have such a narratively weak ending, but that weak ending somehow doesn't diminish the anger I can still feel about that event in my life and how it was handled by so-called "authority" figures.  Stalking laws may not have been in place then, but there's a lot more latitude on a college campus than in normal civic life.  I believe that more could have been be done.  Also, unfortunately, have a really hard time believing that things have changed all that much.