Landing a primetime role on CSI: Miami should have been the peak of Eva LaRue’s career. For American viewers in the 2000s, she wasn’t just another TV face — she was a recognizable part of a cultural moment, a decade when crime dramas ruled U.S. living rooms. But while her character, DNA expert Natalia Boa Vista, spent every week solving fictional mysteries, LaRue was quietly facing a threat that haunted her long after the cameras stopped rolling.
Her new documentary, My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story, streaming now on Paramount+, finally brings her harrowing experience into the light. And for U.S. audiences who grew up watching her on screen, the story hits even harder: the dangers celebrities face aren’t always glamorous headlines — sometimes they’re years of fear that unfold far away from the public eye.
A Stalker Who Targeted Her Fame — and Her Family — Long Before CSI: Miami
The nightmare began long before CSI: Miami. In the 1990s and early 2000s, LaRue starred as Dr. Maria Santos Grey on the iconic soap All My Children, a show that shaped a generation of American daytime television fans. Somewhere in that era, a man became obsessed with her — an obsession that escalated into threats to torture, rape and murder her, signed with the name “Freddy Krueger.”
By 2007, two years into her CSI: Miami run, the letters intensified.
The threats then shifted toward her young daughter, Kaya, barely 5 years old. The stalker tracked her school, called pretending to be her father, and tried to pick her up. Every parent reading this can instantly feel the dread in that moment — it’s the kind of fear that pulls the floor out from under your life.
LaRue and Kaya moved three times. The panic didn’t fade. Even when letters paused, safety never returned.
“You don’t know if he’s hiding in the back seat,” she said. “It’s a full-body takeover.”
The Irony of Playing a Crime Solver While Waiting Years for Justice
For American viewers who spent years watching CSI: Miami, the irony is chilling. Each week, her character solved crimes using high-tech tools that didn’t yet exist in real life. The FBI simply didn’t have forensic genealogy at that time.
Everything changed in 2018 when the same team that caught the Golden State Killer — Steve Kramer and Steve Busch — took on LaRue’s case. Using DNA from a single letter and consumer genealogy databases like 23andMe and GEDmatch, they finally identified the stalker: James David Rogers, who later pleaded guilty.
LaRue, however, calls his 40-month sentence “a lifetime of fear for us — and three and a half years for him.”
Healing Through Documentary Filmmaking and Rebuilding Life After Loss
Making the documentary wasn’t easy. Hearing the stalker’s voice for the first time was retraumatizing. Yet, the process — supported by therapy and the unbreakable bond between her and Kaya — helped them heal a part of their lives that had been frozen in fear.
And just as justice arrived, heartbreak hit again: John Callahan, LaRue’s ex-husband and Kaya’s father, died unexpectedly in 2020. A Zoom funeral during the pandemic, grief layered on top of years of anxiety — LaRue calls that period a blur she barely survived.
Still, she holds enormous love for her All My Children family. For U.S. viewers, that group — Kelly Ripa, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mark Consuelos, Josh Duhamel — defined a generation of soap-to-primetime success stories.
The Full-Circle Ending No One Expected — and the Angle That Makes This Story Uniquely American
Now, LaRue is working on a scripted drama about the FBI agents who solved her case — bringing viewers inside the world of forensic genealogy, the very tool that changed her life.
And here’s the unique angle: Eva LaRue is one of the rare American actresses whose real-life trauma directly influenced the future of true-crime storytelling. Her survival didn’t just end in justice — it sparked a new chapter in Hollywood, where the woman once hunted for 12 years is now telling the stories of the people who hunt criminals.
It’s a full-circle moment not written by a scriptwriter, but forged through resilience.
For LaRue, reclaiming the narrative isn’t just healing — it’s victory.