Margaret Mary Ray

Margaret Mary Ray (1952 - October 5, 1998) was best known for stalking American television talk show host David Letterman and retired astronaut Story Musgrave.

Ray suffered from schizophrenia, which her mother said manifested itself in her late twenties. Mental illness had run in Ray's paternal family. Schizophrenia had plagued Ray's father, who died of a heart attack. Both of her older brothers also suffered from schizophrenia, and both took their own lives in 1973 and 1977).

Ray briefly enrolled in a nursing program at Marquette University, then married and had five children. After her marriage disintegrated in the mid-1980s, she developed an obsession with David Letterman.

Ray first made the news in 1988, when she was arrested for driving Letterman's Porsche, stolen from his driveway, with her 3-year-old son. She claimed she was Letterman’s wife and that her son was their child. Over the next several years, she was arrested a total of eight times on trespassing and other counts. She left cookies and an empty whiskey bottle in the foyer of Letterman's Connecticut home, and left books and letters in his driveway. At one point, he found her sleeping on his tennis court. One local police officer claimed he had dealt with Ray so often, they were on a first-name basis. She was eventually sent to Niantic State Prison for 10 months for harassing Letterman.

Ray’s exploits became a staple of supermarket tabloids and Letterman himself publicly treated it as a joke. In 1993, before taking his late-night show to CBS, Letterman's "Top 10 things I have to do before I leave NBC" included, "Send change of address forms to that woman who breaks into my house." Another quip occurred on Letterman's first show on CBS, where he joked that because of him being on the air an hour earlier every day, Ray was breaking into his house that much earlier than normal. However, in an interview with Barbara Walters, Letterman noted he never mentioned Ray's name on the air, and said that he had great compassion for her, often declining to press criminal charges against her. "I wasn't comfortable with the humanity of that," he said.

After being released from prison in the early 1990s, Ray's attentions shifted to astronaut Story Musgrave, to whom she wrote letters, made telephone calls, and sent packages. In 1994, she posed as a reporter and interviewed him at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. In September 1997, she showed up at his home in Osceola County, Florida. She claimed she and Musgrave were writing a book together: "I love Dr. Musgrave ... I would die for him." Ray eventually served time in Florida for harassing him as well.

In August 1998, she was released and settled in Hotchkiss, Colorado, living on Social Security disability benefits and performing odd jobs. In October, she committed suicide by kneeling on a railroad track in front of an oncoming train in Colorado.

Both Letterman and Musgrave publicly expressed sympathy upon her death.

External links

• Picture of Margaret Mary Ray