Encontrei-os-os no ABC News e no Houston Chronicle.

O primeiro é um artigo fascinante, que faz alusão aos motivos pelos quais este tipo de perfil psicológico pode ser difícil de detectar, e o segundo tenta fazer uma reconstrução dos factos, tal como são conhecidos actualmente.

Reproduzo-os abaixo, pelos motivos usuais de volatilidade da net.

Artigo do ABC News

Feb. 7, 2007 — How does an intelligent, successful, seemingly well-adjusted woman snap?

It’s the question many are asking after astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak was charged with attempted murder in what police are calling a love triangle.

Nowak graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. She has a teenage son and two twin girls. Yet, she drove over 900 miles wearing diapers, donned a disguise and, with a BB gun and pepper spray, confronted Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, a woman she believed was a competitor for the affections of fellow astronaut William Oefelein.

On “Good Morning America,” psychoanalyst Bethany Marshall shed light on what might be going on in Nowak’s head. She said mental illness might have driven Nowak to self-destruction.

“There’s a certain category of people who fall into a category of a kind latent mental illness, which is called having a ‘psychotic core.’ It can be covered by having an articulate, accomplished personality,” Marshall said. “But one stressful event can shatter the veneer and reveal the core. It’s like when a pebble hits a windshield and shatters it.”

Marshall suggested that Nowak sought revenge for the lack of a romantic relationship with Oefelein.

“Once a psychological crisis happens, it exposes the primitive part of the mind that seeks revenge when love is taken away,” she said.

If Nowak was mentally ill, NASA might not have known about it.

“If this is a case of ‘psychotic core’ — the illness wouldn’t be visible until that pebble shattered the windshield,” Marshall said. “But it’s also possible that she came down with a mental illness, such as bipolar disorder, recently. In that case, NASA wouldn’t have detected the condition because she didn’t have it yet.”

Astronaut Turned Stalker?

Nowak’s behavior resembles that of a stalker. If not from mental illness, her pursuit of Oefelein’s girlfriend could have stemmed from a latent stalking personality.

“People don’t usually suddenly become stalkers in their 40s. It’s a pattern of behavior that usually begins earlier in adulthood,” Marshall said. “But it’s something that’s more likely than a mental illness, like bipolar disorder, to go undetected for years. So she could have had a stalking-type personality for a long time, but people didn’t know it.”

Marshall explained that stalkers have a very primitive way of thinking.

“Stalkers are very primitive. They’re stuck in a two- or three-year-old’s way of thinking. Adults understand that other people have their own needs and separate concerns. Stalkers, on the other hand, are profoundly immature,” she said. “But unlike mentally ill people, like those who are bipolar, their actions are premeditated. They know exactly what they’re doing and they choose to indulge it.”

Marshall stressed that to truly understand the case and what motivated Nowak’s behavior, it’s necessary to know more about her relationship with Oefelein.

“What fits the stalking typology is if the person has a fantasy of being loved by someone else who in actuality doesn’t love them in return,” she said. “They want to strike out at the love object, but sometimes they will strike out instead at the third party who, in their fantasy, is obstructing that love.”

Artigo do Houston Chronicle

Feb. 10, 2007, 11:31PM
Astronaut Lisa Nowak had everything to lose in her bizarre trek to Florida

By MIKE TOLSON
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

As day turned to night and the miles ticked off behind her, the woman whose image had been carefully chiseled by two decades of hard work was steadily being consumed by personal demons she could no longer control.

Lisa Nowak the astronaut — a smooth-edged stereotype of flag-waving bravery — was about to become another sort of symbol. The scorned woman. The middle-aged loser in a three-pronged love affair. The tabloid target for late-night comedians and jaded headline writers. A joke.

By the early hours of Monday morning, the transformation was complete. Police say she put on a hooded trench coat, a black wig and waited in the darkness. Her intent was unclear, other than to inflict harm and share with someone else a bit of the pain swelling inside her.

Thus, Nowak became one more larger-than-life figure from a community that has seen more than its share. What she apparently could not see, or did not care to, were the reverberations from her act: the ruination of a career; the scandal dropped on the space agency’s doorstep; the damage inflicted on her family, especially her teenage son and younger twin daughters; and to a lesser extent the shockwaves that would sweep through her friends and co-workers and leave them grasping for answers.

Within hours, the 43-year-old Nowak was NASA’s answer to Clara Harris, with one crucial difference. People understood Harris’ spontaneous anger toward an adulterous husband. In this case, it was hard to fathom how Nowak’s love for William Oefelein, a 41-year-old fellow astronaut known in the corps as Billy-O, would ever be served by a decision to sit outside an airport in the rain calculating an attack on a woman who may not have known she existed.

Arriving at the airport

Colleen Shipman was oblivious to what awaited her as her flight headed from Houston to Florida last Sunday night. She had spent the weekend with Oefelein. It was a relationship she was proud of, one that she happily shared with her neighbors, but it was also conducted at long distance, meaning late-night flights and more expense than a 30-year-old Air Force captain would prefer.This trip brought another inconvenience. She arrived at Orlando International Airport at 1 a.m. but her luggage did not make it. That meant another two hours in the airport and the prospect of a sleep-deprived day ahead of her.

Shipman finally got her bags around 3 and walked out of the terminal to the parking shuttle bus that would take her to the Blue Lot. Shipman told police that as she waited in the rain, she noticed a woman in a trench coat sitting on a bench near a taxi stand. When the bus arrived, both got on.

Shipman could not help but notice when the woman exited at her stop. As she walked toward her car in Row 21, she saw the woman following her. She began to walk faster and heard footsteps running behind her.

When she reached her car, a nervous Shipman tossed her bags into the back seat, jumped inside, locked the door and started the car. The other woman suddenly was standing next to her, trying to open the door and then banging on the window.

“Can you help me, please?” the woman said. “My boyfriend was supposed to pick me up and he’s not here. I’ve been traveling and it’s late. Can you give me a ride to the parking office?”

Shipman, afraid, saw that the story did not jibe with her actions.

“No,” she said. “If you need help, I’ll send someone to help you.”

“Can’t I use your phone to call him?”

“No, the battery is dead.”

Shipman took her foot off the brake. The woman was persistent.

“I can’t hear you,” she said, and began to cry and beg for help.

Shipman cracked her window about two inches and told her she would get help.

“Please help me,” the woman repeated, then pulled a small can from her pocket and began to spray Shipman in the face.

The confrontation

Shipman turned her head, closed the window, held her breath and backed the car out of the parking spot. She turned her head back, saw no one, and sped toward the exit. There she told the booth attendant what had happened and asked her to call police. Her eyes began to burn so much she could not keep them open.In those few moments, all that Nowak had achieved — a commendable nine years as a Navy flight officer, another dozen in the astronaut corps that culminated with a shuttle mission last summer, a role model for schoolchildren whose career was to be recounted in a Mother’s Day edition of Ladies’ Home Journal this spring — was dwarfed by what would soon become a tawdry police melodrama.

The fleeing Nowak was spotted within minutes, identified by Shipman and arrested. As police searched Nowak’s duffel bag, her car and a trash can into which she had dropped several items, her potential criminal intent took on a new dimension. In the minds of Orlando authorities, the fleeting assault could not be construed as an impulsive confrontation by a distraught woman. As they see it, Nowak had a plan and the means to achieve it.

Ultimately, they decided to charge her with attempted murder and asked Orlando police detective William Becton to write an affidavit in support of the charge: “The facts that Mrs. Nowak drove approximately 900 miles, urinated in diapers so that she did not need to stop, stayed at a hotel where she paid cash and used a false name and address to register, stealthily followed the victim, while in disguise, and possessed multiple deadly weapons at the time she confronted the victim, as well as spraying the victim with a substance meant to disable a person, create a well-founded fear and give this investigator probable cause to believe that Mrs. Nowak intended to murder Ms. Shipman.”

Items found

The deadly weapons — a small knife, a steel mallet and, perhaps, a pellet gun — were less intriguing than some of the other items retrieved, including several feet of rubber tubing, latex gloves and plastic garbage bags. One might also infer intent from the handwritten directions to Shipman’s Cape Canaveral town house, e-mails between Shipman and Oefelein and a love letter from Nowak to Oefelein. Police have not disclosed details of the e-mails or letter.For her part, Nowak allegedly told police she wanted to scare Shipman into talking to her. Police said she gave no explanation for the assortment of items in her possession. She was only slightly more forthcoming when asked how squirting Shipman with pepper spray was conducive to a conversation.

“That was stupid,” she reportedly said.

Over the following day, news media from around the country descended first on Florida and then Houston, bestowing on NASA the sort of attention not seen since the Columbia disaster in 2003. Nowak’s Clear Lake neighborhood was swarmed and her house surrounded. Neighbors quickly grew weary, finally resorting to posting notes on their doors: “No reporters … no interviews.”

No one who spoke publicly about Nowak, from her neighbors to former classmates to her parents, could reconcile the person they know with the haggard image staring from the police booking photo. She was recalled as a happy high achiever, a devoted mother, a “person of pure goodness.”

Media storm

Of course, cross-country dashes to assault a romantic rival don’t come out of nowhere. A few small pieces of the puzzle emerged: word that something had happened with her marriage in December and that she had separated from her husband, Richard; statements from Oefelein’s former mother-in-law suggesting Nowak may have had a role in the breakup of his marriage; speculation inspired by a photo of Nowak and Oefelein together at a training session at a harsh-weather facility in Canada.The intense media attention to the incident forced NASA to call a news briefing at which little was said other than Nowak had been doing fine at work but that its psychological screening and evaluation process will be reviewed.

“This is a very unique situation,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale. “We were all shocked by what we heard coming out of Florida. … But we do not meddle into the private lives of astronauts.”

Nor does it appreciate others doing it for them. Astronauts are a public commodity bearing collective virtue, regardless of their individual behavior. Officials sent out a memo to astronauts discouraging them from talking to reporters.

Nowak, her career in shambles and facing a potential prison sentence in Florida, was placed on a 30-day leave and removed from all duties connected with upcoming shuttle flights. She returned to Houston after posting a bond of $25,500 and must wear an electronic GPS-monitoring bracelet that keeps Orlando police apprised of her whereabouts. Her parents flew to Houston to support her, and the three have been seen coming and going from her home by reporters still on stakeout duty.

Taking time off

Oefelein asked for and received some time off to be with Shipman in Florida. NASA has said nothing about his future. That he and Shipman are romantically involved is clear. The precise nature of his past or present relationship with Nowak is not. Orlando police said Nowak told them it “was more than a working relationship, but less than a romantic relationship,” a statement so ambiguous as to incite endless speculation.Shipman apparently went back to work at Patrick Air Force Base, where she is attached to a unit that does preparation for military space launches, but not before requesting a restraining order against Nowak. Her application for it contains a claim of “stalking … two months” without further details. She accused Nowak, whom she describes as “an acquaintance of boyfriend,” of using government contacts or computers to obtain personal information about her.

‘Out of character’

None of the three has made any public comments, nor have those close to them, other than Nowak’s parents, who issued a statement citing her 20 years of military service and unblemished record. They called her alleged assault “completely out of character.”"We hope that the public will keep an open mind about what the facts will eventually show and that the legal system will be allowed to run its course,” the statement said. “We ask for your continued thoughts and prayers for our family.”

If one of the prayers was to get the story off of people’s minds, that may have been answered in a roundabout way. The day after Nowak came back to Houston, Anna Nicole Smith died.

mike.tolson@chron.com