Chris was arrested and charged with solicitation to commit murder and booked into the Jefferson County Jail. "He told the police that he needed the money to pay his attorney fees for my cases," Betty says.
A couple of weeks later, one of the detectives assigned to her case called her. "He said he'd received a tip that Chris's dad was putting up everything he owned to get Chris out. Then he called again and said a bondsman had called him from the jail, that Chris was doing the paperwork and would be out in half an hour."
Terrified, Betty called Newell. "He told me to leave my car and get a friend to drop me off where he could meet me," she says. "For the next few weeks, I went underground."
Betty lived with Newell and his family. He drove her to work in the morning and picked her up at night.
Meanwhile, Newell stalked the stalker. He began following Chris and his family. It was their turn to get paranoid. He introduced himself to Chris's brother, who seemed almost relieved to finally know who the silver-haired man in the big car was.
Newell asked for a meeting with Chris. "When they met, Michael let him know, 'Anything happens to Betty--I don't care if it's your fault, someone else's fault or her own fault--I'm coming after you," Betty recalls.
Newell now says he tape-recorded Chris confessing to vandalizing Betty's cars. More frighteningly, Chris admitted that before the relationship even started, he was letting the air out of Betty's tires just so she would call him to come fix them. "He was creating a dependency, which is classic for these guys," says Newell.
The meeting with Newell seemed to shake Chris, but only for a week or so. Then one day Betty looked in her rearview mirror and saw that he was following her. She called Newell at home. "I said, 'He's right beside me,'" she says. "Michael asked where I was and said, 'I'm on my way. Bring him to me.'"
She led Chris to a parking lot where Newell confronted him. "Let's just say Michael put the fear of God in him," she says. "I mean, I had friends who said they would go after Chris, but Michael was the first one who actually did anything to stop him.
"The police didn't scare him. The system didn't scare him. He knew how to lie and how to use the system...But Michael scared him, you could see it in his eyes."
Newell did more than try to intimidate Chris. He met with prosecutors and finally persuaded them to combine the misdemeanor cases to charge Chris with felony stalking.
"Michael knew what buttons to push," Betty says. "He made it work like it was probably supposed to work in the first place."
Betty concedes that Newell, who drives a car with EQLIZR license plates, is "eccentric."
"He told me once, 'I'm the only one who'd take a bullet for you,'" she says. "But he was also the only one who did what he said he would do."
Chris was found guilty of the solicitation-to-murder charge and sentenced to six years in prison; if he gets time off for good behavior, he'll be released sometime in the year 2000. He then agreed to plead guilty to the felony stalking charge in exchange for a deferred sentence and two years' probation.
Newell says Johnson has already written and called him several times from prison. "He just wrote saying I'd be 'proud' of him because he just got married in prison," Newell says. "It only tells me two things: He's found a new victim and he wants to convince me he's no longer a predator. I don't believe it."
Betty says she can only hope that when Chris gets out, "he'll have moved on with his life. But I'm worried that he's just sitting in there plotting how to get me.
"The way he thinks, it's because of me that he needed money for an attorney and got into trouble. It will be all my fault."
If Chris hasn't moved on, Betty knows who she'll call. "The system failed me," she says. "Michael Newell didn't."
Coming next week: Alan Prendergast on the state's byzantine treatment system for offenders; Christine Brennan offers a victim's-eye view of domestic violence.
