Prominent Political Family Stalked Mercilessly by Campaign Employee Who Couldn't Move on from Lost Election By Virginia Chamlee

“Look how close I can get to you,” read the letter Kathleen Tobin Krueger took out of her mailbox in 1993.

It continued: “See, I could kill you right now if I wanted to.”

The wife of then Texas Sen. Bob Krueger would go on to testify about the letters — which came from her husband’s former employee who had worked for him for a decade.

As PEOPLE detailed in a 1993 story, Krueger, her husband, and their children were “stalked by a former employee who has rung their doorbell repeatedly, screamed obscenities over the telephone and delivered countless death threats.”

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Initially, the Kruegers complained to police, but were told there was nothing the authorities could do unless the harasser tried to harm them physically.

The saga had begun while Bob was working as a rancher and businessman, mulling a run for the U.S. Senate.

As PEOPLE detailed, shortly after he entered the race, he hired a pilot named Thomas Michael Humphrey to fly the family to campaign appearances.

“Humphrey had a single-engine plane, and I remember thinking he seemed like a real nice, quiet person,” Kathleen recounted to PEOPLE in 1993. “He was a reliable employee, someone the whole campaign staff thought well of.”

When Bob lost the Democratic primary in May 1984 by less than one-tenth of 1%, “Tom Humphrey was devastated,” she said.

“His grief and despair seemed beyond normal,” she said. “When a campaign ends, the staff disperses and people go on to other jobs. Tom didn’t seem to be able to accept that notion.”

After Tom and a few other volunteers helped the couple wrap up the campaign, he began dropping by our their house.

“At first, we viewed him as a troubled friend; Bob would sit and talk with him,” she recounted. “He’d say, ‘Tom, you need to get on with your life. We’re getting on with ours and we need you to respect our privacy the same way we’ll respect yours.’ That’s when Tom snapped.”

Tom began calling the couple about a dozen times per day initially and, eventually “as many as 120 times a day.”

“He would leave rambling, threatening, bizarre notes on our door and in our mailbox,” she told PEOPLE. “He’d telephone at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. But the real harassment began six months later, in the late spring and summer of 1985. It was as if he were a drug addict and we were the drug. He became obsessed.”

One day, Kathleen was home alone when Tom rang the doorbell.

When she opened the door, he stepped inside and “reached forward to give me a hug.”

“His grip tightened and I realized he might not let go. It wasn’t sexual, but it was eerie. I knew something wasn’t right. I thought, ‘What can I do to get out of this situation?’ So I said, ‘Tom, would you go out with me to check the mail?’ We went outside. I knew it was too early for the mail but I was able to say goodbye to him on the street. That was the last timeI ever opened my door to him,” she said.

The family began keeping the blinds drawn, and Kathleen would hide any time the door rang, often to see Tom standing there for as long as 20 minutes.

One day, when he called, she told him, “I think you enjoy this,” to which he replied, “You’re right. I do.”

“I knew then that we were in real trouble,” she said, going on to recall how Tom at one point rented the home across the street from them — peering out of the window frequently. Then, they learned he had moved to California, and they assumed he’d move on — but he didn’t.

By year two, the couple stopped responding to his phone calls.

In 1987, when Kathleen got pregnant with their first child, they made their phone number unlisted — and Tom began calling Bob’s New Braunfels office.

“The tapes in the answering machine are an hour long,” Kathleen told PEOPLE. “Callers are cut off after 30 seconds. He would regularly fill up the whole hour-long tape during the night, which meant that he had dialed 12 times in a row.”

It was around Christmas 1987 when Tom made his most specific threat in a message to Bob: “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. I’ve hired a killer to put a .22-caliber to your head while you lie sleeping next to your wife. You won’t be much of an ambassador with a hole in your head.”

At that point, the FBI intervened, traveling to Tom’s California home, which they found empty. Kathleen and Bob, meanwhile, left their home fearing he was on their way to them. Through the use of a recording device that re-routed calls made to Bob’s office to his parents’ address, the FBI was able to determine that Tom was staying in a California hotel, where they arrested him and charged him with extortion and death threats.

Tom pleaded guilty to the charges in May 1989, and on July 19, he was sentenced to a term of 12 months in prison, to be followed by a supervised release term of three years.

But shortly after being released from the Federal Correctional Institute at La Tuna, Tex., on Dec. 28, 1989, he began again making threats and was put back in prison for six months.

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Kathleen and Bob were married for 39 years and had three children — daughters Mariana and Sarah and son, Christian. Kathleen served two terms as a City Council Member in New Braunfels, Texas, and as Mayor Pro-tem. Bob served as both a Senator and U.S. Ambassador and died in April 2022.

The Cinemaholic reported that, after Bob became the U.S. Ambassador to Botswana, the couple moved to Africa and when they returned to New Braunfels, Texas, their stalker had disappeared from their lives for good.