and laid it on the pillow next to my head and was very disturbed. keith morrison: and another time, she said, when she looked out her bathroom window i see mark on a hillside behind my house. he s looking through the scope, pointing the rifle at me. keith morrison: and once, said linda, long after she left him, after mark agreed to plead guilty to the stalking charge, she visited their abandoned paradise, kiket island, to retrieve some personal things. and she said she found in a cubbyhole in the master bedroom a wedding candle that she d thrown away during the divorce. i found the wedding candle in there with a .22 bullet casing and a picture of me along with that in the cubbyhole. keith morrison: was it a message, a threat? in her cross-examination, it was pretty clear that prosecutor rosemary kaholokula was deeply skeptical about linda s fears and allegations. no proof at all from michiel s claims.
back from linda, just one of many transcripts of these calls the attorney read from. send those dang pictures of the wedding. i know you re into the wedding. you don t give a damn about me. i don t want anything showing that we were married or anything else. keith morrison: the defense told the jury that linda s attorney told mark to stop contacting her directly, only go through his office. but of course, he keeps contacting her and contacting her and contacting her, because mark stover is dogged in the pursuit of his prey. keith morrison: prey? an interesting word, very deliberately picked by the defense, because now they would argue that michiel oakes also became prey for mark stover, would claim that a terrified oakes believed something unspeakable would happen if he didn t try to appease linda s ex. i mean, the fact of the matter is, you talk about domestic violence terrorist, the person who s dead here is mark stover.
he just thought she was beautiful, wonderful, smart. never, never ever said anything bad about her, never. keith morrison: seemed to be in love. he was, he was totally, totally crazy about her. keith morrison: it wasn t his father, wally opdycke, who owned kiket island. mark and linda lived there on wally s island, and grew their very successful business together. and then in 2002, they made their union permanent, an intimate wedding ceremony in the presidential suite of the las vegas four seasons. wally opdycke: mark, welcome to the opdycke family. keith morrison: but maybe nothing is forever. it was just three years later when linda told the employees she was taking an extended vacation, alone. and that vacation kept extending and extending. and she just never came back. keith morrison: so separation. there was a brief affair.
the one on the heavenly island. in fact, there was a record the detective discovered. and it was more hell than heaven. well, mark had issues with linda and linda had issues with mark. keith morrison: to put it mildly. here s the story mark s fiance, teresa, told the detective. the story she said mark told her. that linda seemed to be doing her level best to destroy mark s dog training business. she had been calling key clients and saying really horrible things about him to damaging the business. she called and tried to shut the website down, tried to shut his phones down. keith morrison: which is why, again, this is the story teresa said mark told her, why he snooped in her garbage one march morning in 2008. this was a three-hour drive from his own house. he went there, said teresa, to look for a paper trail to prove linda wanted to destroy his business. you know, divorce is never, never pleasant,
things to say about him. but now it was clear oakes attorneys would use whatever evidence they could to paint the dog trainer as a threatening, gun-loving predator, someone michiel oakes would have feared. and here, the real work of the defense began. they focused to a large degree on stover s behavior with his ex-wife. linda opdycke, said browne, was stalked and harassed for years after leaving stover. it wasn t just the incident in which her ex-husband was caught rummaging through her garbage. he made a habit of showing up at her house uninvited, said browne, exposing himself, appearing in her bathroom as she got out of the shower, pointing a rifle at her through a window, leaving handwritten notes, threatening voicemails. the fact that he goes into linda s house with a .45 and puts it on a pillow and threatens to kill himself or her, the fact that he breaks into her house, the fact that he steals her journal, the fact that he steals her garbage, the fact you know, all those things