In 1993, Soap Opera Actress Andrea Evans Quit Her Job to Escape a Stalker

Andrea Evans was just 20 years old when she landed her breakout role as Tina Clayton on ABC’s One Life to Live. But her acting dreams were put on hold when a stalker began to threaten her life.

Evans — who died in 2023 at age 66 — described her ordeal to PEOPLE correspondent Maria Eftimiades for a 1993 cover story.

Thirty-four years old at the time of the story, Evans spoke about how the situation began in July 1987, when she took her parents to a taping of Regis Philbin’s The Morning Show.

“I had appeared on the show many times. Afterward, Regis told me, ”I got your letter about the dog.” He showed me a letter that someone wrote to him pretending to be me. I didn’t think anything of it. But shortly after that I started getting fake legal documents in the mail about suing Regis,” she told PEOPLE.

She disregarded those letters, too.

“But one day in the fall of 1987, I was standing in the lobby of the ABC studios in New York City, saying goodbye to my boyfriend at the time. Just after he walked out of the building, this little, well-dressed man came up, grabbed me, turned me around and started screaming at me about a dog and throwing phony legal documents at me,” she said. “It was only a matter of seconds until he was thrown out of the building.”

After connecting the man’s comments about the dog and the phony legal documents to what had been in the letters, she called the police, who told her not to worry.

“A week or two later, I had a day off,” she told PEOPLE. “I got a call in the afternoon from a production assistant at One Life telling me that the same man had come to the studio. Because I wasn’t there, he had slashed his wrists on the front steps. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital. He used my name as his next of kin. That’s when I began to get freaked out.”

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A week later, in October 1987, she began getting death threats from the man while she was at work.

“He would write things like, ”Death to the blond wh—‘ and ‘Do you want to die at home or at work?’ Some of the letters were written in blood. Some had swastikas on them. Then the FBI got in touch with me, because five years earlier this man had threatened President Reagan. They had a file on him,” she said.

Doctors had previously diagnosed the man as a paranoid schizophrenic and put him on medication, though his behavior remained unchanged — as Evans described, “every time he would threaten me, he would be institutionalized for 60 to 90 days. Then the doctors would say he was fine and he would be released to a halfway house.”

“Not just any halfway house,” she added. “They would release him to the closest halfway house to where I lived and worked, and they continued to do that no matter how I tried to get that changed. It was 10 blocks away.”

Time would go by, she would grow less anxious, and then she’d get a call from the FBI advising her not to leave her house.

“It was on and off. They would find him, usually armed with a butcher knife. I was informed by the police and the FBI that until he harmed me there was nothing that could be done,” she wrote, adding that the man would also “send me cards on holidays talking about our wedding, which would be in a cemetery.”

While Evans said she was initially in “denial,” she told PEOPLE: “little by little it started to erode my life.”

“I stopped going out as much, and I never went any place by myself. I had somebody do all my shopping for me and started having to take cars to and from work. Once he disappeared for three weeks, and the cops lost track of him. I hired 24-hour-a-day armed security guards. The stalker was found trying to get into the Secretary of State’s office in Washington, and an FBI agent told me he had a meat cleaver with him — and my picture.”

The situation got so out of hand, she added, that she quit One Life to Live in the winter of 1990 and moved away from New York.

More than a year later, she went back to New York to participate in a celebrity tennis tournament and appear on Regis’ show again.

“It was my first trip back,” she told PEOPLE. “I flew in and checked into a hotel. I got up that morning and an ABC limo came to drive me to the show. I got out and the limo driver was walking me in. In the crowd was the stalker. I saw him. I saw his face. He chased me into the building. I ran, screaming for the guards to stop him,” she said, adding that security had scared him away.

While some people suggested to Evans that stalking is the price of fame, she told PEOPLE: “nobody should have to pay that high a price for what they do for a living.”

“Over the years I’ve thought of all the possibilities — maybe it’s my hair. Fine. I can cut it off and dye it. Or dress a different way,” she said. “But I’m at a place now where I think, ”This is me. I’m not going to give up any more parts of me.”

After dropping out of public view for nearly a decade, Evans did eventually return to television, appearing as Tawny on The Bold and the Beautiful from 1999 until 2000, and later stepping in to the role of Rebecca Hotchkiss Crane on the NBC soap opera Passions.

Don Carroll, Evans’ former manager, confirmed to PEOPLE that the daytime star died in 2023 from cancer, saying at the time: “People often think she must be very like the characters she played on television. In reality, her greatest days were spent with no makeup, her hair in pigtails, and a ballcap on her head at Disneyland with her daughter Kylie.”