SEATTLE -- One day in 1994, Tracy Lundeen opened her heart to a socially awkward loner while attending middle school in Renton, Wash. Little did she know her act of kindness would set in motion a nearly two-decade-long campaign of fear and harassment that has changed her life forever.
Lundeen was just 13 when she offered to help schoolmate Shawn Moul after seeing him struggle with his class work in the McKnight Middle School library.
Moul began following Lundeen around as they moved onto high school - a problem that became so pronounced he was expelled for stalking her.
But that was only the beginning. Over the years, Moul harassed Lundeen and her family members through repeated phone calls and more than 100 letters.
In some, he threatened the family; in others he talked of killing himself. "My blood will stain your hands forever," he wrote.
Even an eight-year prison sentence beginning in 2001 failed to end Moul's obsession with Lundeen - he found ways to get letters to her from his cell, and six months after his 2009 release, he was at it again, asking to move in with the family and badgering Lundeen's sister Jennifer.
Today Moul is locked away again; on Jan. 24, he was sentenced to a 26 1/2-year prison term that prosecutors called the longest stalking sentence in memory. But is still does little to give Lundeen piece of mind.
"Unfortunately, I don't think it's over," Lundeen, now 32, told Matt Lauer live on TODAY Tuesday. "He won't stop."
Lundeen's case has shined a new light on the U.S. stalking laws, which permit a near-stranger to continue a course of harassment and threats despite a family taking every step the law allows to thwart it.
Even now, with Moul serving a long prison sentence, Lundeen's mother told NBC News: "It's not realistically going to be over until one of them passes away."
Over the years, Lundeen has consistently tried to keep Moul from contacting her: She keeps her home address secret, has her mail delivered to a post office box, and has tight privacy controls on her Internet presence.
But Moul focused on Lundeen's mother and sister in his desperate attempts to reach her while he served his first prison sentence:
He would have other inmates send letters for him, or address the letters to his lawyer, but at Lundeen's family's addresses.
Lundeen's mother, Holly Knowles, told NBC's Aditi Roy of one particularly chilling letter she received just as Moul was nearing release from his first prison term, in 2009.
"He wrote me a letter saying that when he got out he had nowhere else to go and he wanted to live with us and he said it'd be better if Tracy didn't have a boyfriend," Knowles said. "That just scared the heck out of me."
Still, during the course of Moul's long, relentless pursuit of Lundeen, he never physically harmed her or her family.
But Lundeen told Lauer on TODAY there have been some very unnerving moments.
"There were two instances; one where he let my sister know that he was on his way to her employer, and then there was another instance where he said he was on the way to her house," Lundeen said. She added it's "very frustrating" to ponder what is around the corner when it comes to her stalker.
"I never know and I still don't know," she said.
Paradoxically, laws would have made it easier to keep Moul at bay if Lundeen had actually gone on a date with him. While Moul has chalked up more than 20 violations of Lundeen's restraining orders against him, if she had been granted a "domestic violence no contact" order, Moul would have received a felony conviction after just the third violation.
"(I could have had) a much stronger, tougher protection if I would have gone out with him at least one time," Lundeen told Lauer.
Lundeen has had no face-to-face contact with Moul outside a courtroom since the pair were in high school. But at Moul's sentencing last week, she finally was able to address him directly and tell him how she feels.
"Mr. Moul, please listen to me," she told him. "I don't love you. I don't like you. I don't intend to ever be with you. Please quit trying to contact me or my other family members."
TODAY