Landing a primetime role on CSI: Miami was supposed to be Eva LaRue’s dream come true. What followed was a 12-year stalking nightmare.

“Being stalked really rewires your life,” the actress, 58, tells Yahoo. “I don't think you can ever go back to the innocence of thinking or feeling like you're safe. That innocence is stolen.”

LaRue details the terrifying ordeal in the new Paramount+ documentary, My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story, out now, which she executive-produced. The harassment began in March 2007, two years after she started playing Natalia Boa Vista on the CBS crime show.

Her stalker had become obsessed with her years earlier during LaRue's run as Dr. Maria Santos Grey on the soap opera All My Children in the ’90s and early 2000s. Over time, he sent dozens of letters threatening to torture, rape and murder her, signing them Freddy Krueger, after the horror film killer in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

LaRue’s daughter, Kaya Callahan, became a target too, starting at just 5 years old. The stalker made similar threats against the child, tracked down her school and even called pretending to be her father, the All My Children actor John Callahan, claiming he was outside and needed to pick her up.

LaRue and her daughter moved three times after the stalker found their addresses. The constant fear took a toll on every part of their lives.

“You don’t know where the threat is coming from,” LaRue says. “You don’t know if he’s hiding in the back seat, under the car or outside the studio gates waiting to follow you home.”

The stress manifested physically. “I don't know how to describe the level of terror,” she says. “It's a full-body takeover. My eyelashes were falling out. I had a huge rash on my face and neck. My body was terrified.”

The letters would subside for a few months, and she’d think, “‘Maybe he just went away.’ Then they’d pour in again. Even when he wasn't writing, we didn’t feel safe.”

The irony wasn’t lost on LaRue how, on CSI: Miami, she played a DNA specialist who helped solve cases in under an hour each week. Yet, “in real life, the FBI did not have the technology we were pretending to have on the show,” she says.

That finally changed in 2018 when the same FBI agents who cracked the Golden State Killer case — Steve Kramer and Steve Busch — were assigned LaRue’s case. Using forensic genealogy — a mix of traditional detective work and consumer DNA databases like 23andMe, Ancestry and GEDmatch — they tracked down her stalker using DNA left on one of his letters.

In November 2019, James David Rogers from Ohio was arrested. He pleaded guilty to federal stalking charges in April 2022 and was sentenced to 40 months in prison. LaRue was disappointed that the sentence wasn’t longer, especially when Rogers was released early.

“After stealing our peace and sanity for 12 years, he gets three and a half years,” she says. “And we get life. We get a lifetime sentence of fear.”

Initially, LaRue wasn’t sure she wanted to make this documentary. She was worried about poking the bear or inciting a copycat. Still, she moved forward, though she says parts of the process were excruciating.

When she first watched the documentary’s sizzle reel, “I heard his voice detailing all the depraved and sickening things that he had said in the letters [for the first time]. I had to turn it off. I wasn’t prepared to hear his voice making those actual threats.”

During production, LaRue and her daughter kept their therapist on speed dial. Ultimately, LaRue says doing the documentary helped them “heal a certain part of us that had not been healed.” The process also strengthened their bond: “Getting through the anxiety and the terror made us an incredibly strong pair.”

Their connection deepened again after the sudden death of LaRue’s ex and Kaya’s father, John Callahan, in March 2020 — just as the stalker was being brought to justice.

“That was devastating,” LaRue says of the death of her long-time All My Children love interest, with whom she remained close even after they divorced in 2005. “It was Kaya's senior year, and so many things were happening. The stalker got caught, her dad passed four months later — during the first week of the COVID shutdown. It was a really bad time.”

LaRue describes that period as a blur of grief, fear and survival. She adds, “We couldn't even have a funeral for John. We had a Zoom funeral. It was a difficult time for us, our relationship, her. I was barely hanging on to sanity.”

Still, LaRue holds deep affection for the years she and John shared on All My Children, which was a golden age on the show.

“They are my fondest memories,” she says. “Me, John, Kelly [Ripa] and Mark [Consuelos], Sarah [Michelle] Geller, sweet Sydney Penny, Michael [E.] Knight and Catherine [Hickland] — that whole crew of friends. We all started together. We were in our early 20s, and it was our college. We were together all day. It was definitely our family. We’re all still great friends.”

Along with Josh Duhamel, many of them crossed over to primetime TV and film.

“We really got lucky,” LaRue says. “Before that, it was almost this weird taboo that primetime would not hire daytime actors. Then all of a sudden, within a few years, we were all getting picked up on primetime” — Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ripa and Consuelos in Hope & Faith and Duhamel in Las Vegas. “We just lucked out being in that sweet spot when we all got jobs out of daytime.”

Now, with the documentary out in the world, LaRue is focused on her next act: developing a scripted drama based on how the FBI agents Kramer and Busch pioneered the forensics genealogy technology that solved the Golden State Killer case — and hers.

“I want to tell all the stories as they crisscross,” she says. “The way they did it, all the trials and errors, all of the wild goose chases. I already have a [show] treatment.”

For LaRue, it’s a “beautiful full circle. It’s taking back the narrative,” she says. “It’s been such a healing journey. I never thought I’d be sitting here.”