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Their first and only date was an innocent stroll through Central Park.
But when an Upper East Side woman rejected her running-club pal’s bid for an encore, the creep lost his mind and embarked on an 18-year reign of terror — stalking her through six states as she desperately tried to escape his reach.
“I was terrified of him,” Linda Arnaud, 45, told The Post of twisted Queens native Moses Shepard, who last week was finally found guilty of federal stalking charges.
“He showed up at my place of work. He showed up at my school, at my apartment — he showed up on the subway platform. He stalked me all over New York City.”
The frightened elementary-school teacher-turned-yoga instructor spent two decades moving to New Mexico, Arizona, California and Connecticut — praying that each stop would be her last.
He always found her — bombarding Arnaud with phone calls, e-mails, letters, CDs and porn, according to prosecutors.
When Arnaud got restraining orders, Shepard would wait until they expired and then renew his sick fantasy of reuniting with her.
Finally, in 2010 — with Arnaud living in Connecticut — Shepard sent her “a death threat” that shook her to the core.
“He said he’s ‘coming for me.’ And that’s when I feared for my life,” Arnaud said.
“He came here; he scoped out my house; he scoped out my work,” she said. “He’s never taken no for an answer.”
Cops got an arrest warrant and alerted the FBI — and Shepard was finally arrested at his Arizona home in May 2010.
Last week, he was convicted by a federal jury, but faces only a maximum of five years in prison.
“I hope that justice is served and that there’s more awareness that stalking is a serious crime,” Arnaud said.
She was just 27 when she agreed to a date with Shepard. “It was fine. We just walked around Central Park, got to know each other,” she said.
“I just decided on that date that he didn’t interest me at all.”
But Shepard, who claims to be a graduate of Stuyvesant HS with “an Ivy League education,” didn’t get the message.
He tormented Arnaud for six months here before tracking her to Santa Fe, San Diego and Hartford.
At one point, she pretended on paper to live with her parents in Tucson, Ariz.
“I was trying to get him to stop, and he won’t,” she said. “But I’m also just a really positive, strong person, and I try to live my life as normally as I can.”