“Utterly riveting.” — Jody Evans

“An amazing memoir, compelling and deeply moving.” — Dr. Ruth Meyer

“I was riveted, haunted, outraged and inspired…A powerful work.” — Clint Talbott

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Kaia Anderson didn’t have to imagine what most people only read about in newspapers or see in stalker movies. Hers is a true living nightmare from which she fought hard to awaken. At first, she had little help. The criminal justice system seemed designed more to protect the rights of criminals than to safeguard innocent people; at times, its rules and the rulings of its judges seemed more insane than the man who hunted Anderson year after year.

For anyone who has a shred of empathy for others, Trial By Fire is hard to read, emotionally. But the author’s clear, simple writing and passion for justice and a life lived sanely and lovingly make it a real page turner. From relentless terror to high courtroom drama to the farce of often inept judges and law enforcement officials to the quest of Anderson to reclaim her life, this book forces readers to ask what they would do if plunged into such a tragedy: collapse in mind, body, and spirit and simply give up?

Anderson, of course, never gave up. What she did do was to fight bitter battles to overcome a little of the world’s craziness, which, among other things, would lead to the strengthening of Colorado’s stalking law. And she set out on a path to somehow find a way to bear the unbearable. Her movement toward wholeness and empowerment forms the living, beating heart of her story.

With the help of a wise and wonderful therapist who pushed her to do the hard work of confronting her own inner demons, she achieved nothing less than the miraculous alchemy of transmuting the basest of life’s elements into pure, spiritual gold: from confusion she gained insight, from terror she took courage, from weakness she found strength, and from despair she apprehended the deepest of joy. Anderson’s struggle to find a way into the very ground of being that we all share has been a true hero’s journey from the belly of darkness into the heart of light – ultimately, a journey of awakening and healing that this book inspires us all to make.

— David Zindell, author of the Requiem books, The Ea Cycle books and The Idiot Gods

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With all the riveting suspense of a true crime thriller, Kaia Anderson tells her story of living in a prison of fear created by a dangerous and deranged stalker. The compelling nature of the narrative and the author’s courage and perseverance in the face of life-threatening adversity would make Trial by Fire great reading in and of itself. But what sets Anderson’s work apart from the usual genre of true crime memoir is her quest to understand the psychological dimensions of her experience.

In Jungian psychology the Shadow is composed of the dark and unknown aspects of the personality. Carl Jung believed that knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness in other people. If you possess the courage and determination to unveil your own shadow, and to break away from your ordinary patterns, then you will unleash great energy from within. Jungians believe that mining that shadow can create gold through the creative insights that result.

Kaia Anderson is living testimony to this process. With the tenacity and strength of a warrior, she delves into her own darkness and emerges with the gift to the world of this memoir. Jung would call this alchemical transformation, since Anderson is able to navigate through the heavy leaden aspects of trauma and move into the gold of compassion and healing. Throughout, Anderson remains true to herself: a powerful Shadow worker and transformer of energy.

          —Dr. Ruth Meyer, Jungian Scholar, Dream Tender and author of Clio’s Circle: Entering the Imaginal World of Historians

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There is an intriguing irony at the heart of Kaia Anderson’s harrowing, maddening new memoir, Trial by Fire.

The Longmont author, formerly known as Peggy Anderson, was — and is — in the vortex of one of Colorado’s most appalling and infamous stalking cases. For more than three decades, a mentally ill man named Robert Vinyard has single-mindedly harassed, threatened and terrorized Anderson and her family. Thanks to the failures of a judicial system that continually elevated the stalker’s rights over hers, even jails and civic institutions failed to stop his obsessive contacts.

Yet from the very beginning of an ordeal that surely would have broken many people, Anderson refused to compromise her core beliefs. She understood why friends counseled her to buy a gun, but refused to abandon her nonviolent ethics. When people advised her to run away and disappear, she wouldn’t let a sick, delusional man determine the course of her life. And when the system showed more concern for healing her stalker than the safety of her family, Anderson never stopped speaking her truth.

Simply put, she refused to surrender. Yet one of the key lessons Anderson learned while working with a single therapist throughout the ordeal was the spiritual importance of … surrender.

The therapist, identified only as Mary, counseled, “When you feel you’re resisting, surrender. When you feel an emotional hook, surrender it. Surrender your fear. Surrender beliefs that don’t serve. Surrender control.”

“(I)t took a lot of faith for Mary to use the word ‘surrender’ with me,” Anderson writes. “In no way was I ready for that. But she wasn’t suggesting I surrender to defeat.”

In clean, evocative and powerfully honest prose, Trial by Fire plunges the reader not only into the depths of Anderson’s horrifying, Kafkaesque ordeal and the mad labyrinth of the modern U.S. justice system, but also on her journey of self-discovery and the evolution of her power.

And thank goodness. Her deeply documented account of her experience — which, tragically, continues, despite Vinyard’s current incarceration in a mental institution — is frankly exhausting and enraging. Alternating segments about her continuing recovery offer the reader much-needed respite from the madness.

One of the most poignant and painful aspects of the story is Anderson’s early self-doubt — had she “done” something to encourage the madman? The two first met while students at the University of Colorado. Conditioned by a society that insists women be perpetually kind and welcoming, Anderson was kind to the awkward Vinyard, going so far as to invite him in for tea the first time he showed up on her doorstep.

“I had no idea at the time,” she writes, “but this one small moment would change the course of my life.”

Soon after she married her longtime partner in 1979, Vinyard appeared on the doorstep of the couple’s Boulder rental home demanding that Anderson “come now and be with me.” When she asked him to leave, he exploded in rage, shouting and pounding the outside of the house. The police officer who took their report asked such misguided, clueless questions as, “What did you do to encourage him?” and “Do you wear lipstick?,” and tossed off the outrageous non-sequitur, “You’re a pretty girl.”

“We had been violently invaded, and now the person we looked to for help, for protection, accused me,” she writes.

That was just the first of countless failures on the part of law enforcement and the judicial system. Judge after judge, hoping to “fix” Vinyard, deferred sentences while confidently issuing “no contact” and restraining orders, every one of which he would violate.

To be sure, individual officers and prosecutors did their best to convince judges that Vinyard’s terrorization had effectively stripped Anderson of her own right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the system repeatedly proved impermeable to such logic, and arrests that seemed to promise long periods of incarceration were soon whittled down to minimal time.

Even when he was confined, Vinyard’s rights allowed him to call Anderson and send increasingly violent letters. It took repeated assaults on officers and guards for the system to take him seriously as a threat. But even then, jail staff facilitated his release because he was so much trouble.

“My God! If the jail staff can’t handle him, the answer is not to put him back on the streets sooner!” Anderson thought.

The Boulder district attorney’s office continually informed Anderson that it had little choice but to offer plea bargains to Vinyard. Prosecutors were stonewalled in their efforts to obtain information about the perpetrator’s mental health, and Anderson was even forced to endure a face-to-face grilling by her own lunatic stalker. And just this spring, three decades on, a judge dismissed her and prosecutors’ concerns and decided to allow the demonstrably powerful, violent Vinyard to leave hospital premises under supervision of staff.

“I’ve come up with a new description of being a crime victim in American courts: Roadkill Beneath the Wheels of Justice,” she writes.

Despite Anderson’s justified frustration and outrage, the book is no pity-fest. She becomes, in Hemingway’s words, “strong at the broken places.”

Trusting that a higher power is in charge, she writes, “This — this amazing love — is the truth of our existence, here for us always just beyond the veil of ugliness and heartache we’ve created in our world. It is so beautiful. How have we drifted so far?”

While no silver lining can ever fully pay for what she’s gone through, Anderson’s case and subsequent advocacy has been critical to passing new, stronger state anti-stalking statutes into law, as recently as the 2017 legislative session.

The author also emerges as a keen social critic. Vinyard, she observes, “was virtually the embodiment of the collective shadow that … permeated our culture. The feminine aspect within rejected, repressed, and distorted, the inevitable projections were aimed directly at women. The result? Hideous, barbaric abuse: both wanting women and dismissing them entirely; objectifying, owning, and violating them.”

Anderson’s Trial by Fire, though self-published, is a highly professional, riveting account of an ordeal few can imagine, but also a moving and thoughtful spiritual memoir.

It’s a remarkably balanced blend that will keep readers turning pages late into the night.

—Clay Evans for the Times-Call: Trial by Fire Review

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Kaia Anderson’s saga is amazing, appalling and, in some measure, affirming.

She and her family have suffered the relentlessly predatory stalking of a truly psychotic man for decades. Anderson has been pursued, harassed, stalked, threatened, hunted and hounded by this man. The justice system has been slow and often ineffective in protecting her.

She met him in 1976 when they were fellow students at the University of Colorado Boulder. He sought her out, seemingly intent on forging a friendship. Thus began a seemingly interminable ordeal—one that remains a source of anxiety if not torment to this day. Anderson vivifies the story in her compelling and haunting memoir Trial by Fire.

Some portions of Anderson’s life story have made headlines and, also, helped to strengthen Colorado’s anti-stalking law. But as Anderson makes clear, the law is no panacea, and its enforcers and practitioners can be clueless and sometimes cruel.

Time and again, the stalker showed up at her door, on her phone, in her mailbox. Time and again, she called the cops, went to court, tutored herself in the law, acted as her own advocate. She did so through years and years during which others’ understanding, let alone advocacy, was scarce.

Trial by Fire is a devastating indictment of the system’s inability to protect an innocent citizen who simply wants to live her life, develop her career and rear a family. When the madman repeatedly defies court orders and tracks her down—with chilling tenacity and with implicit and escalating threats—she stands her ground and fights back.

But even with the courts, the cops, the law and the very concept of rectitude on her side, she is not fully protected. It is a testament to her strength that she is still standing, cognizant of the darkness in the world but still striving toward the light.

          —Clint Talbott, communications director at the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder, former Daily Camera columnist