[birdsong]
[man] I don't consider myself a stalker.
I thought stalking was more watching somebody, like a Peeping Tom.
Ashley and I, we were like brother and sister.
Just a great friendship.
[woman] I thought, "Anything could happen now."
"I don't know what to expect."
"This person that I clearly don't know at all,
the damage he caused, I will carry it my entire life."
[man] I didn't think there was any harm in it.
I didn't want to cause no harm to her.
I would never even...
even touch a hair on her.
[man] I'd rather be considered a murderer than a stalker,
you know what I mean?
[woman] I wanted the intensity of, like, of her feeling watched.
[man 2] Anybody can be a stalker.
[man 3] It's all boogeyman talk.
[man 4] I'm not still that crazy. Like... [chuckles]
[birdsong]
[man] You look straight into the lens.
- Just there. - There.
- Okay. Right there. - If you look through, can you see me?
[Corpus] I'm looking straight at you.
- [man] Looking at me. - [Corpus] Okay.
- Try it again? - [man] Yes, please.
My name is James Corpus. I'm in prison for stalking.
[birdsong]
[Corpus] I grew up in St. John, Indiana.
I had a great childhood. I had parents that never broke up.
But I grew up basically kind of a nerd,
and I have always been... pretty much on my own.
I never depended on anyone, or never had a kind of a backbone to...
or someone to lean on.
[Corpus] It was pretty bad.
I didn't wake up in the hospital for a few days.
My jaw was broken in three different areas.
My nose was pushed in, which crushed my nose cavities in.
My eye sockets were crushed.
The accident did have an effect on not just my looks.
I mean, just... people treated me differently.
They just felt pity on me.
[Corpus] I was working for a friend of mine that owned a restaurant.
She came in to help him out, to manage it.
In the beginning, Ashley and I did not exactly get along,
because we were both managers, we were both leaders.
But then I sat back and realized that she knew what she was talking about.
And I listened to her.
Ashley was very good to me.
We got really close, as I... extreme, like, best friends.
[birds calling]
My name is Ashley Manfre...
and I'm a stalking survivor.
I met James at a restaurant where we worked together.
He was my line cook,
and we became very good friends very quickly.
We spent a lot of time in the kitchen, just being silly and having fun.
James was in an accident when he was a teenager, I believe.
And he was not initially liked
by many people.
I took that very personally, when somebody was set back by him,
because the way he looks or talks or walks.
That made me uncomfortable.
And if that was me, I would want somebody next to me to stand up for me.
I had developed this sense of protection,
that I needed to protect him from the people that...
could hurt him.
[birdsong]
[Ashley] Years had passed. I had my party rental company,
and he reached out to me asking if I had any work for him.
Apparently he had just got out of jail from some DUIs.
So I brought him into this new company, and he would do odd jobs for me.
He would set up equipment and help me in the office.
He was here all the time.
He saw wherever I was stressed and just picked those stressors out,
and took some of that on.
That just always made me feel that I could trust him.
So James had become very integrated into my life, into my family life,
into my business.
My family accepted him as part of our family.
[Ashley] So, buddy, what do you wanna be when you grow up?
- James. - [Ashley] You want to be James?
- Yep. - [Ashley] Why?
I can play video games.
[laughter]
[birdsong]
[Corpus] Being close to her family was extremely, like...
To me, it was awesome.
It was like being accepted by someone else's family.
Just be social with them...
It was like... I've never really did that with anyone else's family.
It was always... I've always been on my own.
I've never...
been actually accepted with anyone.
This was actually my first time.
And... and it was actually pretty cool.
[Corpus] I had started drinking more.
I just felt stuck in this small town.
During one night, I was drinkin' a little too much,
and I just wanted to go up to Chicago.
I knew she had a van she wasn't using in her backyard.
So I decided to go in it and start it up and take off.
I was so intoxicated, I got the van stuck on the side of the road.
My aim was never to steal the van.
It just popped in my head.
After the issue with the van, the trust started fallin' apart.
That was... that was the issue.
[cicadas chirping]
[Ashley] The police informed me that night that the van was stolen,
and that James's phone was in the car.
The police told me, "Well, obviously he did it."
I didn't think that this could be possible.
I didn't think that he would steal from me, ever.
I just felt that there could be another... option,
or another... another reason, or another way...
than "James did this."
[Ashley] We were with the police for hours that night,
and when we got back to the home...
[sighs] ...my door was open.
I... I just kind of brushed it off.
Things just didn't make sense at that point.
So we decided we were gonna go to bed.
I went upstairs to tuck my son in and make sure he was okay.
And there James was in my son's room, on his couch in his bedroom.
I shook him. He had fallen asleep.
I think he was on something.
I don't know if it was... if he was drunk or it was drugs.
I have no idea. Um... He just wasn't right. I'd never seen him in this way.
I was just so confused, and still trying so hard
to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But he couldn't answer me why he was there.
I questioned him about... about the car, and why his phone was in there,
and he... he just gave me all kinds of excuses
that made me feel uncomfortable.
And I didn't want him, in the state that he was in, in my house at all.
[Ashley] James was arrested after he admitted to stealing the van.
[water running]
I felt guilty.
I didn't mean for that. I didn't want for him to be in trouble.
But I felt very betrayed by him,
and I was very confused of why he did what he did,
and what just happened,
and still trying to put the pieces back together.
I can't explain how suddenly our friendship started separating,
but I think it mostly had to do with, uh...
just me taking things that doesn't belong to me.
Well, I mean, for instance, the van.
For taking that.
She trusted me, she knew...
she knew that I knew where all the stuff, everything was.
[man] Did you take any other things?
From her? Um...
I took some money from her,
out of the business account, to pay off a phone bill.
And due to that transaction, I kind of emptied out her account,
because I didn't know how that... how that worked.
So I hurried up and put it back into her account.
And she...
that really stopped all the trust, between her and I.
Um... I think it's the second one. No, it's the brand-new one. In the pink.
Whatever had happened with James, I just was continuing to... to live my life.
But soon after James was released,
I had a phone call from my school, 'cause I was still in college,
and my school needed a payment, and my card was declined.
[notification chime]
I thought that was very strange.
And I had to give them another card. Declined.
[notifications chime]
I've never had any of my cards ever declined for anything,
so I was very... confused.
I logged into my bank account,
and everything said zero.
[notification chimes]
And my heart just dropped.
I was so overwhelmed and in a panic,
and in that moment, I just flashed that,
"Oh my gosh, my whole business can be stolen from me right now,
and how will I pay my bills?"
[Ashley] James had transferred money from my account directly into his.
All the money that I had worked so hard for,
all of those sacrifices we made were just gone, just like that.
And the more I uncovered, I found more and more things
that I didn't know I needed to look for.
He had found the credit cards
that I had thought were locked in my office in a drawer.
He was using those credit cards and charging them up.
The statements were coming in.
He would get the mail, he would throw them in the garbage,
and I never saw them.
Altogether, I lost over $120,000
from the fraud that James did.
[birds calling]
I felt very betrayed by him.
I thought, "Anything could happen now."
"This person that I clearly don't know at all, somebody who, uh..."
What, 12-plus years of friendship?
And knowing them, I didn't think that this could be possible.
[Corpus] I spoke to Ashley right after I got out of jail,
because I wanted to reconcile our friendship.
I didn't know how to get back to be friends with her again.
How did I do this? Why did I screw this friendship up?
Someone that actually wanted to...
uh... help me out and make me... make my...
have me achieve my goal.
I wanted to resolve the issue,
pay off whatever dues I owed them,
and see if they could... we could resolve it outside of court.
I was not threatening.
I was just more apologetic than anything.
[Ashley] So, I had asked him for space,
and I had asked him to please just leave me alone.
But he didn't respect that wish of mine.
And he kept calling on different platforms and calling and texting,
calling from his cell phone, his home number,
Messenger calls, Snapchat.
There was all these different ways he was communicating with me.
He said he wanted to talk about what happened,
and that he loves me,
and he doesn't want to do anything to hurt me.
I just was feeling overwhelmed.
So the police said that they thought
it was in my best interest to issue a restraining order
to just get him to stop.
[Ashley] He was served the papers for the order of protection, and afterwards,
I think a day or so later, he was contacting me again.
[notifications bleeping]
He texted me and called me from his cell phone,
his mom's cell phone, his sister's cell phone, Facebook.
I needed to feel safe again,
because I was starting to feel scared at that point.
[man] What we see when we deal with stalking behavior,
we see that that stalking behavior escalates.
It could start off as text messages,
then it goes to repeated phone calls,
then it's social media postings,
and then come specific threats.
My name's Mark Kurkowski.
I'm a former law enforcement officer.
And one of my focus areas is training law enforcement prosecutors
and other practitioners in the field,
looking at how stalking can co-occur with other crimes.
[Kurkowski] So, I think with James, and the behaviors he was showing,
we see that it's about possession,
and it's about a relationship that he did not want to end.
He started off by texting Ashley,
and then calling her,
and then calling her repeatedly.
When she tried to stop that behavior, he resorted to other means,
contacting her sister and other family members,
trying to persistently get to Ashley, whatever means possible.
It continued even after getting orders of protection,
even after multiple arrests and judges telling James not to contact Ashley,
he continued to do so.
When we look at escalation in stalking cases,
we want to look at what is called DIF patterns,
duration, intensity, and frequency of that stalking behavior.
That's a big concern, when we see both the DIF patterns
and those threats escalate.
That's when we really need to step in and make sure
that there's a safety plan enacted.
[birdsong]
[Ashley] I think once he reached out again,
after the order of protection was in place,
I got scared.
James had known the code to get into my front door,
the key code inside of my car.
And I just felt increasingly nervous.
I needed to take action and precautions to make sure my family was safe.
We had to change all the locks on my house.
I didn't drive anywhere by myself.
Every single place and thing I did, I did with somebody else.
I was terrified to be alone.
I went through and just adjusted my life very dramatically,
because "If this has happened, what could be in front of me?"
"Anything is possible."
And that was terrifying to me.
There was no line that he wasn't going to cross at this point.
[man] The term "stalking" means
"a knowing or intentional course of conduct
involving repeated or continuing harassment of another person,
that would cause a reasonable person to feel terrorized,
frightened, intimidated, or threatened."
My name's Tim Brown. I'm a supervising attorney
with the Lake County, Indiana Prosecutor's Office.
And I was assigned Mr. Corpus's case after he was charged with stalking.
[Corpus] What I thought stalking was, was more...
more, um...
watching somebody, like a Peeping Tom.
Uh, someone that... that's into voyeurism.
But I didn't believe "stalking" meant more of like, uh...
"Okay, you broke a no-contact order."
That's... that's a stalking?
I didn't realize that would...
How is that? It... it's confusing to me.
If someone's out there to apologize to someone,
to make amends, does that make me a stalker?
It just...
It's crazy.
I... I didn't see myself as a stalker just because I'm...
I want to persist, uh... being friends with this person.
[Brown] So it's apparent that Mr. Corpus
doesn't personally feel that he's a stalker.
We don't go off how someone personally feels in the state of Indiana.
We go off the definition of what stalking means.
So, if you look at the stalking charge that was filed against Mr. Corpus,
that case involved repeated phone calls to Miss Manfre.
Repeatedly attempting to apologize to someone
in violation of a no-contact order
can be considered a form of stalking
if it intimidates or places fear in the victim.
And we believe that Ashley had every reason to be scared of Mr. Corpus.
So his claim, he merely wanted to apologize to her?
Okay, that's fine.
But that does not mean that that behavior does not amount to stalking.
And, in fact, it did.
[birdsong]
[Ashley] There was a... a huge sense of relief.
I remember just a huge... [exhales] ...breath come out of me
that I didn't realize I was holding back for so long.
I think I was more relieved that...
he couldn't keep hurting me
or finding ways to...
disrupt my life if he was put behind bars.
[Ashley] I was doing something at home, and the doorbell rang.
It was the sheriff's department for Lake County
telling me that they needed me to come in to the courthouse for questioning.
I remember driving there not knowing why we were going there, what it was about.
I was kind of confused.
"Why? Because I feel like I've already said everything multiple times."
I remember sitting there in the detectives' conference room.
And they asked me to sit down and draw a map of my house.
And I thought that was so bizarre, because they gave me no context.
Why would I possibly need to draw a map? I just did not understand.
So I drew the map for them and I handed it over to them.
And I remember watching their eyes just get very large,
and they both looked at each other, completely in awe.
[man 1] Okay, now you said his name was James Corpus?
- [man 2] Yeah. - [man 1] Okay.
Uh... what did he contact you for?
- [man 2] Um... I mean I got the plan. - [man 1] What...
[man 2] He drew the plans, everything out in my pocket.
[man 1] He... he drew the plans out?
[man 2] He drew the whole layout of the house,
camera systems, alarm systems, codes for everything...
[man 1] Codes for the systems. Okay.
[man] It was November 30th of 2018.
I was alerted to a jail tip that we received on our Telmate system.
After reviewing the jail tip, we were able to pull up a, uh, individual
who had, uh, information against Mr. Corpus.
My name is Christopher Adams.
I'm a sergeant with the Lake County Metro Homicide Task Force.
This inmate was provided a map by James Corpus.
Also included with the map was an additional piece of paper
with the potential victim's name,
and passwords to various items within her residence,
such as her, uh... security system,
uh, passcodes to a vehicle that was located in her residence.
The drawing also had areas where there may be cameras.
So all these things added up, uh... to, you know, a conspiracy.
And he said, "If I could... if this bitch either shut up or disappear."
"You know what I mean?"
"Man, the house is loaded with stuff," and everything.
Like, "You could pay me." He's like, "And I get money to you."
"If I can get you a gun, you go do the job."
[man 1] He asked you to either shut her up or make her go away?
[man 2] He said, "I want her silenced, I don't care how it happens."
[man 1] "I want her silenced, I don't care how it happens."
[keys jingling]
The inmate stated that James Corpus wanted him to, uh... silence a witness.
James said that he didn't want this witness
to come forward against him in his trials.
That inmate understood that "silenced"
uh, meant that he had to kill someone for James.
Uh... He... he explained that to James,
and James just said he wanted her silenced.
[man 1] What's, uh... what's the lady's name?
[man 2] Ashley Manfre.
[Adams] An individual who commits these types of actions,
and who is determined to commit these types of actions
to the point where you don't end your criminality
even after you've been, uh... taken into custody,
that type of person is willing to do anything.
I believe I was wrongfully accused of...
being a part of conspiracy and murder.
I've had no intentions to hurt her or hurt her family.
I was socializing with someone that I shouldn't have.
He took advantage of my kindness
and he...
said I hired him to kill Ashley.
Which I never did.
I had some personal stuff I'd written down from Ashley's home,
like her house plans and her...
Just, I jotted certain things down, uh...
like... like what her house looked like and stuff,
and I put it in my room, and put it in my cell.
What this guy did, he came in and...
he went into my cell and grabbed all my paperwork
and took it straight to the sheriff's office.
Said I hired him to kill her.
His words were to "take her out."
I don't even know if I heard anything after that. [sighs]
I just... The world just kind of stopped in that moment, and...
someone who says that they love me and they would never hurt me
now wants me dead.
And it was just this nightmare that I was living.
[birdsong]
[Ashley] The police made me feel that... they had everything under control,
and they caught the gentleman, and that I shouldn't have to worry.
But... I feel like James is very smart.
So when they tell me I'm safe and I shouldn't worry,
I literally did the opposite.
[Ashley] The day after he was released,
I started feeling like I was being watched.
Maybe it was just weird coincidence, or timing was strange,
but different places I went, I felt...
Even the grocery store, I just...
I felt like I was being watched everywhere I went.
[cicadas chirping]
About two days after this gentleman was released,
I was standing in my kitchen.
It was, I don't know, maybe 11 p.m. or something.
I saw two flashlights kind of walking towards me,
and they were moving... as if someone was walking.
My motion detector light went on,
and I could see that there were two people walking up to me.
They were wearing all black, with black hoods over their heads.
Behind me, there's 56 acres of fields and forest,
so there shouldn't be anyone there.
I'm just watching these people get closer and closer.
I ran and grabbed my phone, and then I went and grabbed my gun.
And I made sure every single door and window was locked.
I had called 9-1-1.
I was standing there shaking and crying, and just so scared.
[cicadas chirping]
Never in my wildest nightmares would I have imagined
sitting in the position I was sitting in, fearing for my life.
[siren approaching]
[Ashley] They arrived, but the police did not find anything.
I spent, I don't know, six hours or so watching, all night, in different windows,
trying to see if someone was gonna come back up to my house.
That was terrifying.
[birdsong]
[Ashley] Now, no one will know...
[scoffs] ...that he hired someone to kill me.
No one will know.
It's not on his record.
So anywhere he goes, anyone he becomes friends with,
anywhere he works
has no idea what he's capable of.
They have no idea.
James took a lot from me.
The thing that he took that I can never get back
is my sense of security.
That hole will always be in my life.
[Corpus] I am very remorseful for what I've done.
I feel extremely terrible.
I didn't realize that I was such a bad person.
Today, I probably consider myself as harming her emotionally.
But back then, I didn't think that.
I was not thinking that at all.
[Corpus] Did I conspire to... to murder Ashley? No.
I didn't want to cause no harm to her.
It was...
It was all false. It was all made up.
[man] So why did you draw the map?
I was probably just bored, and I just drew it up... drew it out.
I just... I take notes and I draw a lot of times.
But it was nothin' to...
nothin' to go with, uh... any kind of conspiracy or any of that.
It was not even supposed to be seen by anybody.
Did I know about any intruders appear on Ashley's property?
No, I have not.
I never knew.
[man] When did you find out?
I never found out.
I don't know.
That's the first time I'm hearing that.
I never, never, ever would ever hire him to do a...
uh, have another person hurt her.
I would...
That's just ridiculous.
Do I believe I'm a stalker?
Actually, I don't. I mean...
the way I behaved with Ashley, I have never done that before.
I...
It's not like me.
It's just... I wanted to be like her.
I... wanted to be...
what she had.
She had a great home, great family,
and I just felt like I...
I felt like I had sort of the rights to...
I don't know, get, uh...
Uh...
I... [murmurs]
I wanna resolve it, I wanna fix it, but it's too late.
I've... It might be too late. It might not be.
[birdsong]
[bleeping]
- I like that she's got face paint on. - Mm-hm.
I don't like...
[Ashley] After all this happened with James,
it completely tore my world apart.
...thing, you can enter another one up there...
[Ashley] But I realized one day...
that I had been giving him so much control over my life for far too long...
that in some weird way, he was still winning.
He still had some sort of handle on me, or he had some sort of...
hand around my neck.
[birdsong]
Getting over what James has done has been a decision to just...
put him in my past and move forward, and not let him...
take over any more of my life.
I decided not to be the victim anymore.