Rebecca Schaeffer, a 21-year-old actress, was shot and killed at her front door in 1989 by a fan who had hired a Tucson detective agency to find her home address. The agency pulled the address from California DMV records for $250. The case led to the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act.
What happened
On July 18, 1989, Robert John Bardo rang the doorbell of 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer at her Fairfax District home in Los Angeles. When she answered, he shot her once in the chest. She died at the scene.
Bardo had stalked Schaeffer for about three years. He sent fan letters and tried to reach her on studio lots after she appeared on the sitcom My Sister Sam. Through all of it, he did not have her home address.
How he found her
Bardo hired a detective agency in Tucson, Arizona, and paid $250 to find Schaeffer's home address. The agency pulled it from California Department of Motor Vehicles records. At that time, anyone willing to fill out a form and pay a small fee could request driver address information from a state DMV. The agency did that, lawfully under the rules of the day, and gave Bardo the result.
Bardo was convicted of first-degree murder in 1991 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Why this case still matters
Congress cited the Schaeffer murder when it passed the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act in 1994. That law bars state DMVs from disclosing driver address data to the general public. California passed the first state anti-stalking law in 1990 in response to the same case. Both laws closed one path: DMV records sold as a paid lookup.
The people-search broker page took that path's place. The mechanism is the same, a name in and a home address out for a fee, but the data now comes from public records, mailing lists, voter rolls, and prior subscriptions that brokers aggregate and resell. The DPPA does not reach those pages. Some state laws do. New Jersey's Daniel's Law lets covered officers, judges, and immediate family in the same household require data brokers to remove their home address, and sue brokers that fail to.
What this means for your own exposure
For a sworn officer, a judge, a federal agent, a nurse, or anyone whose job follows them home, a broker page is the current version of the DMV request that led Bardo to Schaeffer's door. The name-to-address lookup is the step this kind of case depends on.
An address on a broker page ties your name to where you and the people you live with actually sleep. Removing that address breaks the lookup at its source. The DPPA closed the DMV path. Broker pages replaced it, and those pages have to be found and removed one at a time.
See the Driver's Privacy Protection Act and Daniel's Law for how each law works.
What reduces this risk
The detective agency Bardo hired ran an early version of the business model behind today's people-search brokers: pay a fee, get a home address tied to a name. The DPPA closed the DMV-records path in 1994. It did not reach the broker pages that now do the same job, aggregating a home address from public records, mailing lists, voter rolls, and prior subscriptions. For someone whose work follows them home, removing that address from broker pages breaks the name-to-address lookup at its source. That is the step broker cleanup performs.
Public sources
- Robert John Bardo — Wikipedia, 2026-04-01
- Rebecca Schaeffer — Wikipedia, 2026-04-01
- Sitcom actress murdered; death prompts anti-stalking legislation — History.com, 2020-07-18
- How Actress Rebecca Schaeffer's Murder Changed Stalker Laws — A&E, 2021-07-18