Richard Farley

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Picture of Richard Farley being escorted by two police officers

Richard Wade Farley (b. 1948) is a former employee of Electromagnetic Systems Labs (ESL) in California. He stalked a woman named Laura Black until his violence and frustration escalated into a shooting spree at his former company.

Richard Farley first met Laura Black in April 1984. Farley began stalking Black when she did not accept his advances.

When Laura Black refused to go on dates with Farley, he began to attend Black's aerobics classes whenever she was present, and waited near her house constantly. According to Black, Farley was sending her 1-2 threatening/disturbing letters per week.

Although there were periods of times when the letters would cease, Farley managed to send some 200 letters over four years. Farley, who had been working for ESL for 10 years, was terminated after Black provided copies of the letters to her employer.

Farley would leave "strange gifts on her desk" and would harass her over the phone until she changed her number to an unlisted one. He constantly called her at work, even after he was terminated.

Richard Farley stalked Laura Black (pictured above), with whom he had never had a relationship, for about four years

Laura Black also claims that Farley would wait near her workplace and follow her. Black changed her residence three times during the four years that he was stalking her.

By the autumn of 1985, Laura Black asked the Human Resources Department at ESL for help. ESL responded by telling Farley that he must attend psychological counseling sessions if he wanted to keep his job.

Although he attended these sessions, his harassment did not decline. Rather, it escalated: while attending counseling, Farley found that Black had inadvertently left her house keys in her workplace.

Farley made a duplicate copy of the keys, and left a copy of the key on her dashboard with a handwritten note, presumably to let her know that he had access to her house.

In 1986, Richard Farley began publicly threatening to kill Black if she wouldn't date him. Farley also threatened other employees of the company, which ultimately resulted in his termination in May 1986 after ten years of employment.

In one of Farley's letters to Black, he ominously warned: "You'd better tell him, I'd better never see any police around me." Nonetheless, Black filed for a temporary restraining order against Richard Farley 6 days after receiving that letter, on January 29, 1988.

Farley owned many weapons, including a .38 automatic, a .357 Magnum, a .22 rifle, and two shotguns. He returned to ESL on February 16, 1988, with guns and explosives. There, he killed seven people and injured four others, including Laura Black herself, before surrendering to a police SWAT team after a five-hour siege.[1] Farley's first shot at Black missed, but the second hit her shoulder, critically wounding her.

Laura Black survived, and Richard Farley was given the death penalty (by gas chamber). Farley had no previous criminal record. In wake of Farley's murders, the State of California passed its first "anti-stalking" law.

A movie, I Can Make You Love Me (also known as Stalking Laura in the United Kingdom) was made in 1993 about these events. Brooke Shields played Laura Black and Richard Thomas played Richard Farley.

The shooting incident is also the subject of a chapter of the book Chinese Playground: A Memoir by Bill Lee.