Jan from Fear: What happened to the real life stalker and where is he now?

If you've been tuning in to Fear on Prime Video, you might be terrified to hear the stalker from the series is based on a real person.

Prime Videos' Fear begins with a family excitedly moving into their new home in the West End of Glasgow. Architect Martyn (Martin Compston), his research scientist wife, Rebecca (Anjli Mohindra) and their two children are happy to begin some new adventures, and the man named Jan (Solly McLeod) who lives in the basement flat below them has even left a welcome note.

Except Jan is not welcoming at all, and puts the family through a horrifying period of stalking and mental torture. Likely to draw similarities with Netflix's Baby Reindeer and stalker Martha, the series is actually based on Dirk Kurbjuweit’s 2017 novel of the same name, taking inspiration from his own family's experience of being stalked by the neighbour from the basement flat. We look at who the real stalker was, and where he is now.

Jan from Fear: Where is the real stalker now?

The novel Fear is a fictionalised account of Dirk Kurbjuweit’s experiences of being stalked. Journalist and editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegeland, Kurbjuweit has not named the real stalker - in the book he's called Dieter Tiberius. The real stalker has now passed away.

Towards the end of his stalking ordeal, Kurbjuweit was speaking to a psychiatrist about his neighbour’s mental health issues. He later found out the neighbour was well aware of his issues. Shortly after the conversation took place, the psychiatrist agreed to assess him.

A few days later the stalker packed a bag and left - Kurbjuweit found out he'd gone to live in a facility with other men struggling to integrate into society. Shortly afterwards, he died from a heart attack.

When asked by The Guardian if he felt sympathy for his stalker, Kurbjuweit was conflicted. "Not exactly, because what he did was terrible," he said. He added, But he had an awful life. He was an orphan who had grown up in care homes. I later found out some terrible things had happened to him. He was a very sad person but what he did was still very wrong."

What did the real stalker from Fear do?

As both the Fear novel and TV adaptations are based on Dirk Kurbjuweit's experiences and don't reflect them entirely, viewers might be wondering what is the truth in the TV show.

As per The Guardian, the real stalker waged an eight-month campaign against the family until he moved into a mental health facility. He would lay in wait in the hallway for Kurbjuweit’s wife, Bettina, to arrive home and jump out and shout at her.

He also made attempts to get into the family's flat through the garden and papered walls in shared hallways with messages accusing the couple of sexually abusing their children.

The unnamed stalker also wrote the family poems and letters that were filled with fantasies of murder. Remarkably, because there was no actual violence, the police said there was nothing they could do - the lawyer the family employed said the same.

This is where the TV series and reality differ. In the book and the series, the family are pushed to the limits by the stalker and he ends up murdered. In reality, we know this didn't happen and a psychiatrist eventually sought help for the troubled man.

Kurbjuweit was particularly interested to explore this different outcome within his novel. "One of the things I was most interested in was how thin the line is between being civilised and acting on the side of the law and being uncivilised and ignoring the law," he says.

He concludes, "It’s a subject people have very strong views about. Many feel that if you are under threat then it is justified to take the law into your own hands, and sometimes I think when they realise that is not what I think it becomes disappointing for them.

"Myself, I don’t like guns, I don’t like violence – even in my darkest moments I believed that the state would help us in the end."