In 2008, Alissa got a summer gig waiting tables at a local restaurant in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Fifty-nine-year-old Roger Troy had taken to sitting in her section. To Alissa, then 21, he seemed harmless enough—a lonely guy, bald and paunchy, who just wanted some attention—but when he asked for her number, she refused. He kept asking, though, so eventually she gave him an email address to an account she rarely used. "She didn't want Troy calling but thought if he had her email he'd stop bugging her," recalls Brent Blanton, Alissa's boyfriend at the time.

Troy would email to ask Alissa to let him know what shifts she was working, which she did. Then one day, as she was leaving work, Troy tried to hug her. Alissa's manager intervened before Troy got close enough, but the incident spooked her; she began ignoring his emails. Two weeks later, she quit to start her job at a local school. Angry, Troy took to his computer. "Too bad you let John [the manager] ruin a good friendship," he wrote in an email. "I really did 'love you to bits' in a fatherly way...."

Alissa mentioned to Brent that Troy was sending creepy emails but left it at that. "She hated talking about him," Brent says. "She didn't want me to worry about her." Alissa stopped checking the account, figuring Troy would get bored and leave her alone, and instead focused on her upcoming wedding—Brent had proposed that winter and the couple was happily planning a late-summer ceremony on the beach. "Right after we got married, she happened to log in to her old account," Brent says. "There were hundreds of new emails from Troy. That's when I realized how serious this was. He was obsessed."

The couple immediately went to the police. "We showed the officer the emails—some of which contained details about Alissa's hair and weight, things that Troy could know only because he'd been following her," Brent says. "His only advice was to file for a restraining order, but he made it seem like we wouldn't get one, since it wasn't a crime to email someone."

Believing there was nothing the police could do, Alissa and Brent tried to move on with their lives. In October 2009, they signed the papers on a little three-bedroom fixer-upper on a side street in Cocoa. "Alissa was so excited about owning our first home and tackling some DIY projects," Brent recalls. That January, the two were doing yard work when they found an envelope in the grass addressed to Brent. It wasn't postmarked. Inside was a three-page letter from Troy detailing a series of fictional affairs involving Alissa: "If you knew what I know, you would run [away] and not leave [her] a forwarding address.... You should have kicked her cheating, lying ass...to the curb. What the HELL is wrong with [you]?"

Freaked out that Troy had apparently been to their home, Alissa filed for a restraining order. A hearing followed, but the judge wasn't convinced that Troy posed an imminent threat. He scheduled another hearing for a few weeks later and declined to issue a temporary restraining order in the interim. "We were really upset by the decision," Brent says. "Alissa was such a happy person, but after the hearing she was anxious."

On February 8, 2010, Alissa and Brent drove to the AT&T call center where they both worked. Her shift started at 1:15 p.m., his an hour later. Brent parked the car in their usual spot. Alissa jumped out and made her way toward the building; Brent stayed behind. Neither noticed Troy sitting in his pickup several hundred feet away.