Forensic psychologist tells of ‘terrifying’ stalking ordeal – and reveals why some celebrities are targeted
When Kerry Daynes discovered the words “Jill Dando” scrawled on her fence, shortly after her cat was found dead in her garden with its neck apparently broken, she believed her life was in danger.
The forensic psychologist has come face-to-face with some of the UK’s most notorious criminals, including Moors murderer Ian Brady and violent inmate Charles Bronson, through her work in maximum security prisons.
But it was after her appearances on television that she says made her the target of a stalker.
After taking part in several crime documentaries, Daynes was contacted online by a stranger offering her the chance to buy domains for websites set up in her name.
She declined the offer but he “immediately turned” and responded with “anger and vitriol”, she says.
He “bombarded” her with messages and comments were posted online accusing her of being a liar and remarking on her appearance in different outfits, she says.
“I knew he had my address, he knew what clothes I was wearing, he knew I lived alone,” Daynes tells Sky News.
“It was a really terrifying time.
“I didn’t have any knowledge of him. I didn’t know who he was.
“He could have been any man who walked past my house or who was behind me in a queue in Tesco’s.
“Every time a man looked at me, I thought: ‘Is that him?’
“I was rushing into my house at night, trying to get my key in the door quickly… and then living with the curtains closed.”
Kerry Daynes would lie awake at night fearing for her life
‘Fixated, unwanted, persistent’
Daynes, from Greater Manchester, says she would lie awake at night thinking was this “somebody who was likely to kill me”.
“What was disconcerting about it was the level of obsession this man had about me,” she adds.
“I’d never spoken to him. As far as I was aware, I’d never set eyes on him.
“Fixated, unwanted, persistent – he was clearly a stalker.”
Daynes says the man’s behaviour meant she stopped appearing on TV or at public speaking events and stayed off social media.
She finally came face-to-face with him in a civil court case, which resulted in the websites in her name being taken down.
But years later, while out walking her dog, she says a parked car suddenly sped up and nearly hit her.
A week later, she received a letter from the man with a demand for more than £26,000. Shortly after that, her cat was found dead.
The name ‘Jill Dando’ was scrawled on Daynes’s fence. Dando was shot dead on her doorstep in 1999
‘Death threat’
“My cat – who had been absolutely fine 10 minutes previously – I found dead, seemingly having had its neck broken, and looking like he’d been thrown over my fence,” Daynes says.
“When I went round to the other side of the fence, somebody had written the words: ‘Jill Dando’.”
Daynes believes the mention of Dando – the TV presenter who was shot dead outside her London home in 1999, in a murder that remains unsolved – was meant as “a death threat”.
“I walked into the police station and said I want to speak to your specialist officer in stalking,” she says.
Daynes says the man later received a harassment warning from police.
The celebrities targeted by stalkers
Emma Raducanu, Claire Foy and David Beckham have been victims of stalking
On Friday, a stalker will be sentenced for targeting the actress Claire Foy, who played Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix series The Crown.
Foy described the actions of Jason Penrose as “deeply frightening” after he sent more than 1,000 emails in just over a month, knocked on the door of her home and contacted her sister.
It follows a string of high-profile victims of stalking in recent months.
David Beckham said he was “frightened” for his family’s safety after Sharon Bell sent him “threatening” letters and turned up at his daughter’s school.
She was charged with stalking and detained under the Mental Health Act in July last year.
And in February 2022, a stalker who trekked 23 miles to the home of tennis star Emma Raducanu and stole her father’s shoe as a souvenir was handed a five-year restraining order.
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which supports victims of stalking, says cases involving celebrities are “by no means the majority”.
About 45% of people who contact the charity’s helpline are being stalked by ex-partners, and a further third have had prior contact with their stalker.
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Official figures show there were more than 718,000 stalking and harassment offences in England and Wales in the year to June 2022 – a 45% rise compared with the year ending March 2020.
However only 5% of stalking cases in England and Wales result in a charge, according to the National Stalking Consortium.
In November, anti-stalking campaigners submitted a super-complaint – which is designed to consider complaints about systemic issues in policing – after arguing that forces are failing to launch effective probes into stalking crimes.
Why are celebrities targeted?
Daynes says the most common type of stalker is “the rejected stalker” and most people will know those targeting them.
“Stalking is a pretty gendered crime – more often than not, it is men who stalk their female ex-partners, although that’s not to say you don’t have female stalkers,” she says.
“What we find is that those who stalk people in the public eye, they tend to have low-level mental health problems, they tend to be unemployed, or under-employed, and they’re struggling with various difficulties in their lives.
“I think it’s easy for them to become obsessed with someone they don’t know, because they turn to fantasy to deal with that.
“For people who are inclined to fantasise a relationship with somebody they’ve never met, the fact they’re able to view lots of photographs of them on Instagram or they’re able to look into their home on TikTok videos, it all adds to that faux intimacy.”
Ex-newsreader tells of ‘psychological rape’
Alexis Bowater was stalked while working as a newsreader. PIc: ITV Westcountry/Home Office
Former newsreader Alexis Bowater, who was the victim of stalking, described the crime as “psychological rape”.
She was working as a presenter on ITV Westcountry when she was bombarded with emails from stalker Alexander Reeve, who made threats against her and her then-unborn child and falsely claimed a bomb had been placed in the studios.
“It’s barbaric, isn’t it, for a human being to want to torture a pregnant woman,” Bowater tells Sky News.
“I had a Home Office-approved alarm installed in my home and we were linked up to the local police station.
“It was a race against time at that point between them getting him and him getting us.”
Bowater was awarded an OBE for her campaign work
Reeves was jailed in 2009 for four years but Bowater, who received an OBE for her work to combat violence against women and girls, believes stalking is still “not taken seriously”.
“The sentences are not long enough and not enough people are prosecuted for it,” she says.
“This is a horrific psychological crime which destroys lives.
“When I first start campaigning 10 years ago, people were still making jokes about stalkers. Thank heavens that’s not happening now.”
The private investigator hunting stalkers
Laura Lyons set up a private investigation agency after she was the victim of stalking herself.
Her company – Are They Safe – helps victims of online stalking identify the perpetrators and receives “at least 30 calls” every week about this form of crime.
“It’s a huge, huge problem,” Ms Lyons tells Sky News.
“The landscape of stalking has changed significantly since online communications.
“A lot of the time, until (the stalker) is outside their house, victims don’t know who the stalker is online.
“Sadly, online provides stalkers with the weaponry to stalk anonymously who they want, when they want.
“We’re seeing now that 99% of stalking cases start online.”
Read more:
Stalkers ‘have become increasingly obsessive’
The ‘powerful tool’ to protect stalking victims
Social media makes it ‘easy’ for stalkers to hide
Ms Lyons says she works with “a lot of people in the public eye” who are victims of stalking.
“They have to have active social media,” she adds. “You would be hard-pushed to find a presenter with a closed social profile.”
Ms Lyons says stalkers are using virtual private networks (VPNs) to prevent authorities finding them; sending spyware to victims’ emails; hacking into CCTV cameras and using Apple Air Tags to track victims.
She adds that it is also “easy” for stalkers to set up fake profiles on social media sites and hide their information.
“There are so many tools for stalkers to use,” she says.
“It’s so easy for stalkers to remain anonymous and hidden. It’s very difficult for the police.”
UK
Facewatch: The controversial tech that retailers have deployed to tackle shoplifting and violence
The Christmas period is upon us, and goods are flying off the shelves, but for some reason, the tills are not ringing as loudly as they should be.
Across the country, the five-finger discount is being used with such frequency that retailers are taking action into their own hands.
With concerns about the police response to shoplifting, many are now resorting to controversial facial recognition technology to catch culprits before they strike.
Sainsbury’s, Asda, Budgens and Sports Direct are among the high-street businesses that have signed up to Facewatch, a cloud-based facial recognition security system that scans faces as they enter a store. Those images are then compared to a database of known offenders and, if a match is found, an alert is set off to warn the business that a shoplifter has entered the premises.
It comes as official figures show shoplifting offences rose by 13% in the year to June, reaching almost 530,000 incidents. Figures reported in August showed more than 80% result in no charge.
At the same time, retailers are reporting more than 2,000 cases of violence or abuse against their staff every day. Faced with mounting losses and safety concerns, businesses say they are being forced to take security into their own hands because stretched police forces are only able to respond to a fraction of incidents.
A Facewatch camera
At Ruxley Manor Garden Centre in south London, managing director James Evans said theft had become increasingly brazen and organised, with losses from shoplifting now accounting for around 1.5% of turnover. “That may sound small, but it represents a significant hit to the bottom line,” he said, pointing out that thousands of pounds’ worth of goods can be stolen in a single visit.
“We have had instances where the children get sent in to do it. They know that the parents will be waiting in the car park and they’ll know that there’s nothing that we can do to stop them.”
Gurpreet Narwan is seen at the garden centre while being shown how Facewatch works
Staff members here have also had their fair share of run-ins with shoplifters. In one case, employees trying to stop a suspected shoplifter were nearly struck by an accomplice in a car. “This is no longer just about stock loss,” said James, “It is about the safety of our staff.”
However, the technology is not without its critics. Civil liberties groups have warned that the expansion of this type of technology is eroding our privacy.
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, called it “a very dangerous kind of privatised policing industry”.
Facewatch is seen in operation as retailers look to crack down on crime.
“[It] really threatens fairness and justice for us all, because now it’s the case that just going to do your supermarket shopping, a company is quietly taking your very sensitive biometric data. That’s data that’s as sensitive as your passport, and [it’s] making a judgement about whether you’re a criminal or not.”
Silkie said the organisation was routinely receiving messages from people who said they had been mistakenly targeted. They include Rennea Nelson, who was wrongly flagged as a shoplifter at a B&M store after being mistakenly added to the facial recognition database. Nelson said she was threatened with police action and warned that her immigration status could be at risk.
Gurpreet’s profile can be seen on the Facewatch database
“He said to me, if you don’t get out, I’m going to call the police. So at that point I turned around and I was like, are you speaking to me? Then he was like yes, yes, your face set off the alarm because you’re a thief… At that point, I was around six to seven months pregnant and I was having a high-risk pregnancy. I was already going through a lot of anxiety and, so him coming over and shouting at me, it was like really triggering me.”
The retailer later acknowledged the error and apologised, describing it as a rare case of human mistake.
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A spokesperson for B&M said: ‘This was a simple case of human error, and we sincerely apologise to Ms Nelson for any upset caused. Reported incidents like this are rare. Facewatch services are designed to operate strictly in compliance with UK GDPR and to help protect store colleagues from incidents of aggressive shoplifting.”
The cloud-based technology has critics who argue that it amounts to a misuse of personal data and privacy
Nick Fisher, chief executive of Facewatch, said the backlash was disproportionate.
“Well, I think it’s designed to be quite alarmist, using language like ‘dystopian’, ‘orwellian’, ‘turning people into barcodes’,” he said.
“The inference of that is that we will identify people using biometric technology, hold and store their own, store their data. And that’s just, quite frankly, misleading. We only store and retain data of known repeat offenders, of which it’s been deemed to be proportionate and responsible to do so… I think in the world that we are currently operating in, as long as the technology is used and managed in a responsible, proportionate way, I can only see it being a force for good.”
Yet, there is obviously widespread unease, if not anger, at the proliferation of this technology. Businesses are obviously alert to it, but the bottom line is calling.
Jeffrey Epstein led two different lives – sex offender and celebrity networker – and he did that in the UK as well as the US.
The newly released Epstein documents reveal, in particular, how the paedophile financier ascended into the highest levels of British society.
This photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor sprawled across the lap of several women, whose identities have been protected, speaks to his close relationship with Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was jailed for child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with Epstein. But the furnishings are even more revealing.
Epstein files – latest updates
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor pictured with Ghislaine Maxwell. Note: inclusion in Epstein files does not infer wrongdoing
Sky News matched the fireplace in this photo with the one in Sandringham, the estate where the royals tend to spend Christmas – (Andrew is not invited this year).
Andrew has vigorously denied any accusations against him.
Prince Charles, now King Charles III, at Sandringham with Prince Edward. Pic: PA
Also included in the latest release are Epstein’s flight records. They provide some useful corroborating evidence.
A flight log from the Epstein files
On 9 March 2001, his plane landed at “EGGW” – Luton Airport – with JE, GM and VR on board – Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Virginia Roberts, better known by her married name of Virginia Giuffre and perhaps Epstein’s most famous accuser.
The next day is when this photo was alleged to have been taken, in London, of Giuffre and Andrew.
Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts, aged 17, and Ghislaine Maxwell at Ghislaine Maxwell’s townhouse in London, in March 2001
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell hunting, date unknown. Pic: US DoJ
Other photos show Maxwell on the steps of Downing Street – and power was as much a draw as celebrity.
Ghislaine Maxwell outside 10 Downing Street, date unknown. Pic: US DoJ
On 15 May 2002, the flight records show Epstein again arriving at Luton.
A flight log from the Epstein files
The next day is when he met Tony Blair, prime minister at the time. This was before Epstein’s first arrest and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing.
Read more:
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The meeting was arranged by Peter Mandelson, who lost his job as ambassador to the US because of his Epstein connections, and who features prominently in the files.
Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein. Pic: US DoJ
The UK was a draw for Epstein’s wider circle too – Maxwell here is pictured touring the Churchill War Rooms with Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey. Neither are accused of wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
(L-R) Ghislaine Maxwell, Kevin Spacey and Bill Clinton, with three other men. Pic: US DoJ
And the other grim life that Epstein led, of sex trafficking, also had British links.
A page from the Epstein files
Another document released in the files, from 2019, shows witness testimony from Maxwell’s trial. In it, a victim is mentioned who is “17 years old” and who grew up “in England”. She would later be taken to Epstein’s private Caribbean island.
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