Ray’s daughter, Anna-Lisa Johanson, said that “the attention given to her, and the actions of the authorities, made her situation that much worse.”
According to reports at the time, Anna-Lisa was forced to take a restraining order against her own mother – and she told her university to call the police if they ever saw Ray. “I’ve always loved my mother,” Anna-Lisa said, “but I hated the woman who broke into David Letterman’s house.”
Ray spent various stints in prison and mental institutions for trespassing – a reported 24 months in total. After serving seven months of her original nine-month sentence, she was released on a Friday – and was back at Letterman’s home by Sunday.
While incarcerated, Ray’s mental state would improve with medication. But she would deteriorate once she was released and stopped taking her meds.
After five years of stalking Letterman, Ray’s attention turned to the astronaut, Franklin Story Musgrave. Ray wrote him letters and sent packages. She also broke into his house and turned all the taps on. In another incident she posed as a reporter and interviewed Musgrave at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Musgrave suspected something was odd when she didn’t take any notes. When she wrote to Musgrave as the reporter, he recognised her handwriting. Ray was sentenced to time in a Florida jail for stalking Musgrave. When she was released, even the judge criticised a lack of legal support to ensure that Ray got the medical help that she needed.
A month before she died, Ray was featured in the TV magazine, Extra, where she talked about her mental health struggles and said that she thought David Letterman understood her.
Margaret Mary Ray took her own life on October 5 1998 – at a remote spot near Hotchkiss, Colorado. She was 46 years old. She had written a last letter to her mother, writing “I’m all travelled out” and “I chose a painless and instantaneous way to end my life in the valley I loved.”
At the scene of her death, she placed her purse on the ground, with a quick note with the phone number of a friend who could contact her family. David Letterman responded to the news through a spokesman. “This is a sad ending to a confused life,” he said.
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