Ginny Winn, a thirty-nine-year-old bank supervisor from Los Angeles, assumed that the cassette tape left anonymously on her desk just after Christmas in 1991 was a gift from a customer. So when she and her husband drove down to Palm Springs the following weekend, she slipped it into the tape player. The car filled with music from Phantom Of the Opera. The end of the tape, however, shocked them both. "My love for you is undying," a garbled man's voice proclaimed. "I'll wait my whole life for you."

At first the athletic blonde dismissed the message as a previous recording that someone had taped over. But that changed when she received a letter in January, along with a box of garden roses and a fake diamond ring in a plastic jewelry box. "Although the diamond isn't real, the sentiment behind it is," she read. The return address on the envelope revealed that the sender had been a bank patron for several years.

After calling her husband, Ginny notified the police. "I thought that if I didn't show up one night, they might check his house," she said. "If something were to happen, I felt that some information should be on record."