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Taking you beyond the headlines and into the disturbing world of stalking. Through in-depth conversations, real cases, expert insights and psychological analysis, Charlie & Jack explore what drives obsessive behaviour, how it escalates, and the devastating impact it has on victims.
NOTE: This is an experimental podcast series, created by AI and produced by a human!
Imagine, like, receiving a package in the mail.
It's wrapped really carefully, it's addressed right to
your home.
You bring it inside, and as you hold
it, you notice it emits this very distinct,
actually rather pleasant scent.
Right, like a high-end perfume.
Yeah, exactly, like a floral perfume.
But then, right beneath those bright floral notes,
there's this second underlying order, the unmistakable, totally
stomach-turning scent of, well, wet fur and
decay.
Oh my god.
So you pull back the wrapping, you open
this oddly shaped box, and sitting right inside
is a dead, meticulously perfumed rat.
I mean, it is an image that just
feels entirely lifted from a psychological horror film,
honestly, but it's not.
No, not at all.
It is a very real physical piece of
evidence from one of the most bizarre, unsettling,
and like, psychologically dense stalking cases in British
history.
Hi, I'm Charlie West.
And I'm Jack Mercer.
Welcome to Stalkers.
This is the podcast where we delve into
the truth behind the obsession.
We'll take you beyond the headlines and into
the disturbing world of stalking through in-depth
conversations, real cases, expert insights, and psychological analysis.
And we'll hopefully have a bit of a
laugh at the same time.
But that's not a guarantee because of that
thing called common decency.
It's worth noting that this podcast series has
been created completely by AI and a bit
of human tweaking.
You can find out more at carrotcruncher.com
forward slash stalkers.
That's carrotcruncher.com forward slash stalkers.
Today we are unpacking the total psychological collapse
of a woman named Ruth Tag and her
relentless campaign of terror against the legendary British
comedian Ken Dodd and his partner Anne Jones.
And our mission today for you isn't just
to gawk at a crazy story.
We are diving deep into the absolute darkest,
muddiest waters of the human psyche here.
We are going to decode the why.
Exactly.
Because we aren't just looking at a fan
who sent a few too many glowing letters.
No, we are dissecting the behavioral triggers of
a woman who weaponized her own obsession, right?
A woman who viewed a comedian's long-term
partner as a literal romantic rival and who
just completely crossed the line from superfan into
arson and bespoke biological warfare.
It's intense.
We are going to explore how a mind
fundamentally breaks, how a delusion is constructed piece
by piece, how it defends itself against the
intrusion of reality, and how a polite interaction
can actually serve as the catalyst for a
lethal psychological displacement.
I have to admit, I have a completely
inappropriate fascination with the morbid details of this
case.
It is just so wildly beyond the pale
of normal human behavior.
But before we get to the burning houses
and the fragrant rodents, we have to establish
the playing field.
We need some context, yeah.
Right.
We have to talk about the object of
this intense, destructive desire.
Because the fact that this specific man became
the center of an erotic, violent obsession is,
frankly, the first major psychological hurdle we have
to clear.
You're talking about the immense disconnect between Ken
Dodd's public persona and the romanticized, idealized version
of him that existed in Ruth Tag's mind.
I'm talking about the fact that the man
looked like a cartoon character that had been
electrocuted.
That's one way to put it, yes.
Look, you know who Ken Dodd is?
Our listeners probably know who he is, but
we have to really look at him through
the lens of sexual obsession.
Ken Dodd was a surreal, hyper-energetic, family
-friendly stand-up comedian and ventriloquist from Liverpool.
Specifically, an area called Naughty Ash, which he
built this entire mythological universe around.
Yeah, the Diddy Men and all that.
He started in the 50s, ruled the 60s
and 70s, and his aesthetic was, well, chaotic,
is putting it nicely.
It was anti-romantic by design.
His appearance was notoriously and intentionally eccentric.
He had this massive untameable head of fluffy,
wild hair.
Like a static shock victim.
Right, and he always carried his trademark prop
on stage, a red, white, and blue feather
dustery called his tickle stick, and of course,
the teeth.
Oh man, the teeth.
Famously protruding upper teeth.
Our sources mentioned this was the result of
a childhood accident, actually.
When he was seven, he dared his friends,
he could ride his bicycle with his eyes
shut, promptly hit a curb, and just permanently
altered his face.
Which became his trademark.
Exactly.
And in later years, rumor had it, those
teeth were insured for four million pounds.
But, you know, it wasn't just the stage
persona.
The man's actual day-to-day life was
totally shambolic.
Shambolic is the exact word his own legal
counsel used, actually.
Right.
Look at his 1989 tax evasion trial.
He was charged with 11 counts of tax
evasion, and why?
Because the man literally didn't trust banks.
So what did he do?
He hid 700,000 pounds in cash in
offshore accounts, but mostly in shoe boxes and
suitcases, stuck under his bed in his house.
During this five-week trial, his defense barrister,
George Carmen, literally told the jury, my client
is a shambolic oddball with a poor grasp
of accounting.
It's a bold defense strategy.
It worked.
They played a video of his house in
naughty ash to the court to prove how
disorganized he was.
The video showed absolute hoarding level clutter, and
I am not making this up, a literal
pantomime horse permanently resting in the hallway.
It really painted a picture of a man
who lived entirely in his own eccentric vaudevillian
reality.
Okay, so here's where I have to take
a stand.
I am going to be highly controversial right
out of the gate here.
I am bracing myself.
I am pushing back on this whole stalking
tragedy and narrative for just a second.
You have a guy in his 70s with
wild clown hair, huge protruding teeth waving a
feather duster who lives in a hoarder house
with a pantomime horse and stuffs hundreds of
thousands of pounds in shoe boxes.
I see where this is going.
And some woman in her mid 30s decides
he is the absolute peak of human sexuality.
I'm sorry, but if you look like that
and act like that and you get a
stalker, you don't call the police.
You say, thank you very much.
I appreciate the attention.
You should be deeply, deeply grateful someone is
looking at you with romantic intent.
Okay, I know you're playing devil's advocate for
the sake of humor, but I am going
to pull you right back to the center
here because what you are pointing out, that
massive absurd canyon between the reality of who
Ken Dodd was and the intense romantic obsession
of Ruth's tag that is actually the key
to unlocking the entire pathology.
Wait, really?
The disconnect is the point.
Yes, that disconnect isn't a joke.
It is the defining feature of a very
specific, very dangerous psychological condition called erotomania.
Erotomania.
That's also known as declarable syndrome, right?
Like the absolute delusion that a person of
higher status is secretly in love with you.
Precisely.
And in the psychology of severe stalking, particularly
in these delusional romantic cases, the target is
almost always an idealized blank slate.
Mm.
We assume that stalkers are obsessed with the
real person.
They aren't.
So they just project whatever they want onto
them.
Exactly.
The real person is largely irrelevant.
The stalker is isolating highly specific, fragmented traits
to build a fantasy avatar that fits their
own internal psychological deficit.
So the fact that he has a literal
pantomime horse in his hallway doesn't even register
in her brain.
It is actively filtered out.
The brain of an erotomaniac is incredibly efficient
at discarding any information that contradicts the delusion.
They completely ignore the reality of the shambolic
oddball you just described.
That's wild.
Let's look at the sources to see how
this mechanism actually functioned in Ruth Tag's brain.
During her eventual sentencing, she explained to the
court exactly what triggered this obsession.
And it wasn't his five-hour stand-up
routine about Naughty Ash.
Thank God, because those were exhausting.
She stated that she watched a videotaped performance
where Dodd jokingly imitated a French kiss.
Wait, a joke on a VHS tape?
Yes.
Her exact quote to the court was, I
watched this scene over and over, and I
have never been so aroused in all my
life.
I thought Dodd was incredibly sexy, and it
was then that I realized how much I
wanted him as a lover.
I just, I mean, the mind boggles.
A 70-year-old comedian doing a goofy
bit about a French kiss, and her brain
interprets this as pure uncut eroticism.
It's bizarre, but she followed that up with
a real-world visual that completely cemented the
fantasy avatar.
After seeing him perform, she waited around backstage.
And what did she see?
She saw him backstage, out of costume.
He has wild hair slick back, and he
was wearing a smart tweed suit.
She specifically noted to the court that he
looked so different to the wild-haired comic
on stage.
She thought he looked handsome and distinguished.
Ah.
Okay, so she caught him at a character.
Right.
And her brain seized on those two fragments
a man in a distinguished tweed suit and
a video of a simulated kiss.
She took those two tiny fragments of data
and used them to construct an entire bulletproof
fictional persona of a suave, sexy, romantic lead.
Wow.
The feather duster, the tax evasion, the cartoonish
teeth.
All of that was blocked out by her
psychological disorder because it threatened the fantasy she
desperately needed, likely to survive whatever internal trauma
she was masking.
That makes total sense, honestly.
She's built this imaginary boyfriend out of a
tweed suit and a single joke.
But, I mean, an idealized fantasy in a
vacuum is harmless, right?
People have imaginary relationships with the celebrities all
the time.
Sure, parasocial relationships are common.
Yeah, so for a fantasy in someone's head
to turn into a dangerous, real-world obsession,
it requires a collision with reality, right?
It requires a very specific sequence of psychological
events, yes.
Massive emotional investment, followed by a perceived rejection,
followed immediately by what the stalker interprets as
undeniable reciprocation.
Which creates, like, a rubber band snapping.
It creates an unbearable tension in the mind,
exactly.
Let's look at how that tension built up,
because the sequence of events here is basically
a masterclass in escalation.
So Ruth Tag is in her mid-30s
living in Bristol, and she decides to make
Ken Dodd a gift.
A very elaborate gift.
Right.
She doesn't just buy him a card or
send a box of chocolates.
She spends hundreds of hours and let that
sink in for a second.
Hundreds of hours intricately sewing a massive tapestry
of the two of them.
We really need to pause on the psychology
of that tapestry.
This isn't just a casual craft project.
No, it's a huge undertaking.
It is a tremendous physical investment of emotional
energy.
Think about the repetitive, meditative nature of cross
-stitching or sewing a tapestry.
With every single stitch over hundreds of hours,
she is reinforcing the neural pathways of her
delusion.
Like chanting a mantra.
Yes.
She is weaving her fantasy of their relationship
into physical reality.
It's an artifact of her obsession.
So she puts this masterpiece in the mail
in January 2001, but it's fragile.
The glass frame breaks in transit.
Now, the sources aren't totally clear on the
exact logistics here, whether Dodd's team received it,
saw the broken glass and sent it back,
or if the postal service just returned it
to sender because it was a hazard.
The logistics don't really matter to her psychology,
though.
What matters is that this labor of love
representing hundreds of hours of her life ends
up back on Tag's doorstep, completely broken.
And how does she process that event?
She later stated in court that she felt
insulted and rejected.
Which is a massive, catastrophic, narcissistic injury for
someone suffering from a borderline or psychopathic disorder.
She poured her entire idealized concept of love
into this physical object, and the universe, which
in her mind is controlled by Ken Dodd,
handed it back to her, shattered.
Most people would take that as a sign
to give up, right?
But she doesn't stop.
Despite feeling completely rejected, she relentlessly attends his
live shows.
And keep in mind, you know this, if
you follow UK comedy, Ken Dodd was legendary
for his marathon sets.
Oh, absolutely grueling sets.
We're talking shows that routinely lasted five, sometimes
six hours.
He would go on stage at 7 p
.m. and literally perform until 1 a.m.
And Ruth Tag would sit in the very
front row, staring intently at him, basically unblinking,
for five straight hours.
The sensory overload of a five-hour show
is profound.
The sheer exhaustion of it puts the brain
in a highly suggestible, almost hypnotic state, which
further cements her fixation.
It's like brainwashing yourself.
Right.
Which brings us to the inciting interaction.
The moment the fantasy violently collapsed into reality.
Right.
So she's been staring a hole through him
for hours.
After the show, she goes backstage.
She manages to get face to face with
Dodd.
She tells him that she traveled all the
way from Bristol just to see him.
And Dodd was notoriously friendly with his fans.
He was.
Down to earth.
Lovely guy.
So to show his appreciation, he does something
that completely changes the trajectory of both of
their lives.
He asks her for a kiss and he
presses his cheek against hers.
And the interpretation of that touch is everything.
Oh, she took it straight to the altar.
In court, she described that exact moment saying,
I was over the moon with excitement as
he drew me near and pressed his cheek
against mine.
I felt tremendously happy.
I was walking on air and felt as
if I had fallen in love for the
first time.
There is the catalyst.
Okay, here's where I have to be the
bad guy again.
I am going to use an analogy and
I am going to blame Ken Dodd for
this specific escalation.
I'm sorry, but I am.
I have a feeling I'm going to disagree,
but go ahead.
If you are a massive public figure and
you have a super fan who is sitting
in the front row of your five-hour
shows, just staring at you like a predator
watching prey, and you already know she sent
you a bizarre, obsessive, massive tapestry in the
mail, you do not ask her for a
kiss.
You just being a performer.
It's like feeding a raccoon on your back
porch.
If you leave a bowl of milk out
every night, you don't get to act surprised
when the raccoon moves into your attic and
starts chewing on the wiring.
He blurred the lines of professional distance.
He invited the raccoon into the house.
I am going to stop you right there
and I am going to push back incredibly
hard on that analogy.
That is textbook victim blaming.
It fundamentally misunderstands how the neurobiology of severe
mental illness actually operates.
But he asked for the kiss.
He initiated the physical contact.
He asked for a polite, highly theatrical, utterly
chased cheek-culse, which was entirely standard behavior
for a Vaudevillian performer of his generation, greeting
a fan who traveled a long distance.
No, we cannot hold a victim responsible for
the actions of someone suffering from a psychopathic
disorder simply because the victim adhered to baseline
social norms of politeness.
What you have to understand here, and what
explains why your raccoon analogy fails, is the
immense, dangerous power of cognitive dissonance in a
fractured mind.
Okay, fine.
So if it's not a raccoon moving into
an attic, explain the mechanism to me.
What is actually happening in her brain in
that exact second?
Think about the timeline we just laid out.
Tag had just experienced massive psychological trauma with
the return tapestry.
She is vulnerable, feeling insulted, feeling the raw
pain of rejection.
Her brain is under extreme stress.
Then she gets this backstage interaction.
Now, a healthy mind processes a polite cheek
kiss from a 70-something-year-old comedian
as exactly what it is, which is a
fleeting, friendly thank you for buying a ticket.
Right.
You get your cheek kissed, you wash your
face, you go get a point, and you
go home.
Exactly.
But a mind suffering from erotomania cannot process
objective reality.
To tag, that cheek press wasn't a polite
greeting.
It was overwhelming, undeniable reciprocation.
It was a binding declaration of mutual love.
From a cheek press?
Her mind took the devastating rejection of the
tapestry and violently overrode it with this single
physical touch.
The cognitive dissonance, that agonizing gap between her
internal fantasy of being his lover and the
external reality of being a stranger whose gift
was rejected, it collapsed entirely in that moment.
So it's almost like a psychological immune system
response.
In a way, yes.
Like her brain is faced with the truth
that will destroy her identity, the truth that
she is just a random fan, so her
subconscious immediately generates like a white blood cell
of pure delusion to neutralize the threat.
It converts a polite cheek kiss into a
marriage proposal just so she can survive the
rejection of the tapestry.
That is a brilliant announcement, yes, absolutely.
The delusion is a protective mechanism.
It is a white blood cell attacking reality.
In that moment backstage, she truly believed the
contract of love had been signed, sealed, and
delivered.
Wow.
Okay, so in her mind, they are now
officially a couple.
The problem is solved.
Temporarily, because once she believes they are truly
mutually in love, she has to reconcile a
massive, glaring obstacle that exists in the real
world because Ken Dodd was not a single
man.
Oh, not even close.
And this is where the story shifts from
a slightly creepy backstage encounter into active, hostile
psychological warfare because Ken Dodd had a long
-term partner enter Ann Jones.
Ann Jones was an incredibly significant figure in
his life.
At the time this harassment began, she had
been his partner for over 13 years.
They were together forever.
They were together for a total of 40
years, eventually marrying just two days before his
death in 2018.
But she wasn't just his romantic partner sitting
quietly at home.
She was heavily integrated into his entire existence.
She was his business manager.
She even sang in his live shows under
the stage name, Cibby Jones.
She was a constant, undeniable presence.
So Tag decides to test the waters of
her new imaginary relationship with Dodd.
She starts sending him intense love letters over
a 10-month period.
But interestingly, she doesn't use her real name.
She uses a pseudonym.
She signs them all as Rose Price.
Which is a classic stalking behavior.
By using a pseudonym, she is attempting to
create a secret, exclusive, highly intimate bond that
bypasses the real world.
It's a secret code just for the two
of them.
Naturally, Dodd and Anne ignore these letters.
Because, you know, they're seeing people dealing with
a stalker and you don't engage with the
crazy.
But when the letters are ignored, the tone
of Tag's campaign shifts dramatically.
She escalates.
She sends six highly indecent, explicit photographs of
herself to Dodd's home in Naughty Ash.
And guess who intercepts the male at the
front door?
Anne Jones.
The partner.
The obstacle.
Exactly.
And this is the major pivot point of
the whole case.
Tag realizes Anne isn't just going to quietly
step aside and let her have her tweet
suited prints.
So Tag stops targeting Dodd with love and
starts directly targeting Anne with pure, unadulterated hatred.
The focus completely shifts.
She sees Anne as a direct, literal rival
for Dodd's affection.
Tag sends 12 threatening letters directly to Anne.
And then she sends three intricately embroidered t
-shirts bearing crude, highly offensive slogans about Anne.
The sheer effort involved in that specific form
of harassment is staggering when you stop to
think about it.
I mean, I have to make a very
dark confession here.
I almost admire the craftsmanship.
Oh, no.
No, think about it.
Most haters today, what do they do?
They send a nasty tweet.
They leave a mean comment on a YouTube
video.
It takes two seconds.
It requires zero effort.
Ruth Tag took the time to go to
a store, buy t-shirts, buy embroidery thread,
thread a needle, map out a crude slogan,
and hand embroider her hate mail onto a
textile.
It's incredibly deliberate.
That is bespoke harassment.
That is artisanal hatred.
And honestly, if you force yourself to look
at it from Tag's deeply delusional perspective, you
can kind of see the twisted logic, right?
She's the one who shared the magical, intimate
cheek kiss to her.
Anne is just the other woman stubbornly standing
in the way of true romance.
Well, we can appreciate the dark humor of
artisanal hate mail, but we really have to
cut through the absurdity of embroidered shirts to
analyze what is actually happening clinically here.
Because this isn't just someone being mean.
This is a perfect, terrifying example of a
psychological defense mechanism called displacement.
Displacement, like moving a heavy object from one
room to another, but with your emotions.
Exactly like that.
Let me explain the mechanism.
Remember the foundation of Tag's delusion.
Ken Dodd is a flawless, incredibly sexy man
who is deeply passionately in love with her.
That belief is the core pillar holding her
entire shattered psyche together.
Okay, the pillar is intact.
So when her rose priced love letters go
unanswered for 10 months and her explicit photos
generate absolutely zero response, how does her brain
handle that?
It should just give up.
Right?
A healthy person would realize, oh, he doesn't
want me.
I should move on.
But Tag's delusion cannot accept that Ken Dodd
is rejecting her.
If she accepts that the man she loves
is ignoring her, the core pillar cracks.
Her entire fantasy world collapses, and she would
suffer a catastrophic psychological breakdown.
So she literally cannot blame him.
It's neurologically impossible for her to view him
as the source of the rejection.
She absolutely cannot blame him.
Therefore, all of those horrific feelings of rejection,
inadequacy, and rage, they have to go somewhere.
They can't just evaporate.
Where do they go?
Think of it like a massive steam engine.
The boiler is filling with high pressure steam
that her rage at being ignored.
The main pressure release valve would be accepting
the rejection and being angry at Ken Dodd.
But erotomania has welded that main valve completely
shut.
If the steam doesn't escape somewhere else, the
entire boiler explodes.
So the steam has to blow out a
side pipe.
Precisely.
And that side pipe is Anne Jones.
The rage is violently projected or displaced onto
the partner.
In Tag's mind, Ken isn't ignoring the letters.
The evil Anne is hiding them from him.
Ken isn't rejecting the explicit photos.
The jealous rival is intercepting them at the
door.
You know, you, the listener, you actually do
a mild version of this all the time,
right?
Very common human trait.
Yeah, like, have you ever had a terrible
day at work because your boss completely humiliated
you in a meeting?
But you can't yell at your boss because
you need your job.
So instead, you go home, you walk in
the door, and you completely snap at your
partner because they left a single coffee mug
in the sink.
Right.
That's displacement.
Your brain redirects the anger from a dangerous
target to a safer target.
You aren't mad about the mug, you're mad
at your boss.
That is the perfect everyday example.
Your brain finds a secondary target to absorb
the emotional overflow.
Ruth Tag's brain just executed that exact same
standard human mechanism but on a catastrophic criminal
psychopathic scale.
Wow.
So Anne becomes the ultimate villain of the
story purely out of psychological necessity.
If Anne is the villain, then Ken is
still the perfect lover.
And Tag is still the righteous heroine fighting
for her man.
This is exactly why stalking so often pivots
away from the object of desire and onto
the perceived obstacles, usually spouses, children, or security
personnel.
It turns a tragic, sad, internal delusion into
a highly dangerous, externalized rivalry.
Tag doesn't have to face the agonizing pain
of rejection.
She just has to defeat the rival to
claim her prize.
And as we know from history, that displacement
of rage couldn't stay confined to bespoke embroidered
t-shirts forever?
No, unfortunately not.
The pressure in that boiler was building to
critical mass and it was about to manifest
physically and violently at the couple's home.
Which brings us to the climax of the
terror.
The point where harassment crosses the threshold into
actual criminal violence.
Let's talk about October 11th, 2001.
Ken Dodd and Anne are out for the
day.
Tag travels to a second property the couple
owned in Naughty Ash.
She goes right up to the front door,
shoves burning rags through the letterbox, and starts
a fire.
That is a massive leap.
The blaze takes hold and causes 11,000
pounds worth of damage to the ground floor.
She was later charged with arson, specifically being
reckless as to whether life was endangered.
It's a huge behavioral escalation.
She has moved from invading their psychological space
with letters to literally destroying their physical space
with fire.
But the arson, as insane as it is,
isn't even the most disturbing part of this
climax.
The absolute psychological masterpiece of her harassment campaign
arrives in the mail shortly after the fire.
The parcel.
Yeah.
Tag sends a bizarre, oddly shaped parcel to
their main cottage.
Ken and Anne, understandably terrified at this point,
cautiously unwrap it.
The Guardian sources describe it perfectly.
As they opened it, it emitted a highly
pleasant floral scent mixed with the smell of
wet fur.
Inside the box was a dead rat that
had been heavily sprayed with perfume.
It's just staggering.
I am sorry.
I am completely losing my mind over the
perfumed rat.
It is the most deranged, confusing thing I
have ever heard.
It's like a completely confused Valentine's Day gift.
It certainly is a mixed message.
I genuinely want to know what was going
through her head when she made it.
Isn't this just a terrible attempt at a
romantic gesture gone wrong?
Like she wanted to send him a lovely,
expensive bottle of perfume, but she was out
of gift baskets.
So she just went out to the alley,
grabbed a dead rodent, gave it a spritz
of Chanel number five and thought, that'll do
it.
That's romance.
It is the ultimate mixed signal.
I know the imagery is so absurd that
you have to laugh at it, but your
joke actually highlights exactly why this specific object
is so terrifying to a clench of psychologists.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
That mixed signal you're laughing at.
That is the chilling reality of a complex
personality disorder made physical.
The perfume dead rat is the perfect physical
manifestation of Ruth Tag's completely fractured psyche.
Wait, you're saying there's actual intentional symbolism in
the rat.
She didn't just grab whatever was lying around.
It is profound symbolism.
Whether she consciously designed it that way or
her subconscious dictated it.
Think about the juxtaposition of those two conflicting
sensory elements.
The perfume represents her romantic, erotic delusion.
It's the fantasy.
The love she believes she shares with Dodd.
The desire to be close and intimate.
Okay, that makes sense.
But the dead rat represents the underlying decay.
The hostility, the disease, and the violent threats
directed toward Anne Jones.
Oh my God.
The perfume is the love.
The rat is the hate.
Yes.
When a human mind goes to the trouble
of sending a perfumed corpse through the postal
service, you are looking at a psyche that
has completely collapsed the boundary between love and
lethal violence.
In psychoanalysis, we talk about Eros, which is
the life drive, love, and creation, and Thanatos,
which is the death drive, destruction, and aggression.
And usually those don't mix.
In a healthy mind, these are separated.
But in Ruth Tag's brain at that moment,
Eros and Thanatos are no longer separated.
They're inextricably intertwined at the exact same package.
That is deeply, deeply unsettling.
So it wasn't just a random crazy act.
It was a literal physical map of her
brain at that exact moment.
The love and the violence were the exact
same thing to her.
And if we connect this to the bigger
picture, look at the arson.
Why target the house?
Because the house is the ultimate physical representation
of the domestic life canon Anne share.
It is their safe haven, their nest.
Tag setting fire to the house is a
literal attempt to destroy the domestic reality that
contradicts her fantasy.
She's trying to burn down the evidence that
he is with someone else.
If the house is gone, the relationship is
gone.
Precisely.
She is trying to purge the rival and
the rival's space with fire, leaving only the
perfumed fantasy behind.
Well, fortunately, setting fire to a house and
mailing bespoke biological waste finally caught the full
attention of the police.
Which leads us to the conclusion of this
incredible saga, The Arrest, and a startling look
into the family dynamics that often surround and
enable a stalker.
This is a crucial element.
We have to look at the reality of
how these individuals are perceived by the people
closest to them, and how delusion can be
contagious within a family unit.
Right.
So the police finally track down Ruth Tag
and arrest her in May 2002.
And where did they find her?
At a seaside resort in New Brighton, sitting
prominently in the front rows of a Ken
Dodge show.
Because of course she is.
She hadn't broken the pattern.
The compulsion was just too strong.
No, not at all.
But here is the part that completely blows
my mind, and I know I'm going to
get heated about this again.
The press naturally goes to her elderly parents
in Bristol for a comment.
They want to know how the parents of
an arsonist feel, and her parents publicly defend
her.
It's hard to read, yeah.
Her mother tells the Liverpool Echo, she was
a great fan of Ken Dodge.
She used to go to all his shows.
Not anymore though.
And her father adds, she's enthusiastic about everything
she does.
She just got a bit carried away.
She's a good kid really.
It is a stunning bit of denial.
I am sorry, I have to mercilessly mock
this.
Got a bit carried away.
Getting carried away is eating a whole sleeve
of chocolate biscuits while watching television.
Getting carried away is buying three pairs of
shoes when you only needed one.
It is not committing 11,000 pounds of
arson and mailing perfumed dead rodents to a
70-year-old comedian's wife.
I hear you.
These parents are as delusional as she is.
Honestly, they need to be institutionalized in the
room right next door to her.
She's a good kid really.
She'd bring down a house.
I completely understand the instinct to mock that
because the disconnect between the parents' statements to
the press and the reality of the violent
crimes she committed is intensely jarring.
It sounds utterly absurd.
But if we redirect our focus from mocking
them to looking at the tragic reality of
severe mental illness, this is actually very common,
very well-documented and incredibly sad phenomenon.
Family denial.
Like just ignoring that your kid is a
monster.
It's deeper than just ignoring it.
It is systemic psychological family denial.
You have to understand the immense psychological cost
of admitting that your own child is dangerously,
criminally unwell.
Families often slowly normalize escalating bizarre behavior to
protect their own sanity.
When a loved one slowly descends into a
severe psychopathic disorder, it doesn't happen overnight.
It's a boil the frog situation.
Okay, explain how the parents get boiled in
this scenario.
The parents probably saw her sitting in the
living room making that massive tapestry.
They likely thought, oh, she's enthusiastic about a
hobby.
Then they saw her traveling to the five
-hour shows and thought she's a highly dedicated
fan.
It gets her out of the house.
Right, justifiable steps.
Then she starts writing letters and they think
she's just a bit eccentric.
By the time she crosses the line into
committing arson and mailing dead rats, the parents'
psychological defense mechanisms are so deeply entrenched that
they have to minimize it as getting carried
away.
Because the alternative, looking in the mirror and
admitting that their daughter is a violent, unhinged,
threat society who needs to be locked away,
that would completely destroy their own reality.
So they just minimize it to survive.
They use their own form of cognitive dissonance.
Yes, they rewrite the narrative to protect their
own hearts.
But while the parents minimized it, the UK
legal system certainly did not.
In March 2003, tags leading guilty to arson
and harassment.
The prosecution dropped a more serious charge of
arson with intent to endanger life, accepting her
plea to the lesser charge of arson being
reckless as to whether life was endangered.
And she didn't just go to a standard
prison, did she?
This wasn't a standard criminal sentencing.
No, it wasn't.
Because of the clear psychological pathology at play,
she was remanded to a psychiatric hospital indefinitely
under the Mental Health Act.
The court heard a detailed psychiatric report from
Dr. Jacqueline Short, which concluded that Tag was
suffering from major psychiatric mental illness amounting to
a psychopathic disorder.
So the judge recognized the danger.
The judge, Mr. Justice Moreland, explicitly noted in
his sentencing that she was a dangerous and
frequent menace, not just to Ken Dodd and
Ann Jones, but potentially to the public at
large if her fixations ever shifted.
But the very final detail of this court
case, the absolute last thing that happens before
she is taken away by security, is what
has been haunting me since I read the
sources for this deep dive.
I want you to tell the listener exactly
what she did right after the judge sentenced
her to an indefinite psychiatric stay.
Following her sentencing, as the reality of being
locked away indefinitely was handed down, and as
she was being physically led out of the
courtroom, Ruth Tag shouted out to the judge.
But she didn't use her normal speaking voice.
No, she didn't.
She used a high-pitched, incredibly specific foe
voice meant to sound exactly like one of
Ken Dodd's Diddy Men puppets.
And in that cartoonish puppet voice, she said
to the judge, thank you, my lord, I'm
very grateful.
The Diddy Men.
For those who don't know, the Diddy Men
were the little marionette puppets from the fictional
town of Naughty Ash that Dodd used on
his television shows and stage acts in the
60s and 70s.
They were a core part of his surreal
comedy universe, and she spoke to a high
court judge as she was losing her freedom
using the voice of one of his puppets.
This raises an incredibly important question, and it
provides our final, arguably most profound, psychological analysis
of her state of mind.
Think about what that moment actually means.
Yeah.
Even as she is standing in a court
of law facing the severe, undeniable reality of
being locked away in a psychiatric facility indefinitely.
Her identity was completely irrevocably submerged in Ken
Dodd's fictional world.
She wasn't even Ruth Tag in that moment.
Her ego was completely gone.
Exactly.
She wasn't speaking as Ruth Tag, the woman
from Bristol.
She wasn't speaking as an arsonist.
She was speaking as a character in Ken
Dodd's universe.
It is a psychological death.
It proves the absolute terrifying depth of her
disorder.
The fantasy had entirely consumed her reality.
There was no Ruth left to speak to
the judge.
There was only the delusion.
That is profoundly sad and utterly terrifying.
To lose yourself so completely to an obsession
that your own voice is replaced by a
puppet's voice.
Which brings us to the end of this
incredible psychological journey.
It's quite a ride.
We've seen how the brain can take a
polite, fleeting cheek kiss, combine it with the
painful rejection of a returned cross-stitch tapestry,
and spin it into a lethal case of
erotomania.
We've seen how a fractured mind acting like
a pressurized steam engine will displace its rage
onto an innocent partner, protecting a delusion through
arson and the absolute symbolic warfare of a
perfumed dead rat.
It is a stark, unforgettable reminder of how
fragile the human mind can be when dealing
with perceived rejection, how violently it will defend
its own delusions, and how powerful the draw
of celebrity obsession truly is when it interacts
with underlying trauma.
But here's a final provocative thought.
I want you, the listener, to mull over
on your own as you go about your
day.
This entire nightmare we just described.
It happened in 2001.
It was fueled by physical handwritten letters, returned
cross-stitch tapestries sent through the postal service,
and waiting hours outside physical stage doors in
the rain.
Think about how we interact with public figures
today.
The landscape of fame and access has fundamentally
permanently changed.
Completely.
We live in an era of social media
direct messages 24-7 live streaming access and
algorithmic feeds that are literally designed by tech
companies to create intense parasocial relationships between fans
and creators.
We are encouraged to feel like we really
know these people.
The ingredients for erotomania are far more accessible
now than they have ever been in human
history.
Exactly.
If Ruth Tag could build a dangerous life
-destroying fantasy out of a blurry VHS tape
and a brief cheek kiss in 2001, how
much easier is it today for a vulnerable
mind to find a blank slate on their
smartphone screen, imagine a deeply intimate two-way
relationship through the illusion of the internet, and
turn a virtual perceived rejection into a real
-world physical nightmare.
It's a sobering thought.
The mechanisms of the mind haven't changed, only
the technology that feeds them.
Stay curious, protect your peace, and maybe keep
a safe healthy distance from your favorite celebrities
online.
We'll catch you on the next Deep Dive.
That just about wraps up this episode.
Don't forget to tell them about our release
schedule.
We release fresh new content every Friday.
For more information about this AI-created podcast
series, please visit carrotcruncher.com forward slash stalkers.