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.
Read more:
Singer Billie Eilish asks for restraining order
Stalker terrorised 121 victims after making ‘rape list’
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
Budget 2025: Three things Rachel Reeves’s speech boils down to – and two tricks the chancellor will fall back on
This is going to be a big budget – not to mention a complex budget.
It could, depending on how it lands, determine the fate of this government. And it’s hard to think of many other budgets that have been preceded by quite so much speculation, briefing, and rumour.
All of which is to say, you could be forgiven for feeling rather overwhelmed.
But in practice, what’s happening this week can really be boiled down to three things.
1. Not enough growth
The first is that the economy is not growing as fast as many people had hoped. Or, to put it another way, Britain’s productivity growth is much weaker than it once used to be.
The upshot of that is that there’s less money flowing into the exchequer in the form of tax revenues.
2. Not enough cuts
The second factor is that last year and this, the chancellor promised to make certain cuts to welfare – cuts that would have saved the government billions of pounds of spending a year.
But it has failed to implement those cuts. Put those extra billions together with the shortfall from that weaker productivity, and it’s pretty clear there is a looming hole in the public finances.
3. Not enough levers
The third thing to bear in mind is that Rachel Reeves has pledged to tie her hands in the way she responds to this fiscal hole.
She has fiscal rules that mean she can’t ignore it. She has a manifesto pledge which means she is somewhat limited in the levers she can pull to fill it.
Put it all together, and it adds up to a momentous headache for the chancellor. She needs to raise quite a lot of money and all the “easy” ways of doing it (like raising income tax rates or VAT) seem to be off the table.
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The Budget Explained – in 60 seconds
So… what will she do?
Quite how she responds remains to be seen – as does the precise size of the fiscal hole. But if the rumours in Westminster are to be believed, she will fall back upon two tricks most of her predecessors have tried at various points.
First, she will deploy “fiscal drag” to squeeze extra income tax and national insurance payments out of families for the coming five years.
What this means in practice is that even though the headline rate of income tax might not go up, the amount of income we end up being taxed on will grow ever higher in the coming years.
Second, the chancellor is expected to squeeze government spending in the distant years for which she doesn’t yet need to provide detailed plans.
Together, these measures may raise somewhere in the region of £10bn. But Reeves’s big problem is that in practice she needs to raise two or three times this amount. So, how will she do that?
Most likely is that she implements a grab-bag of other tax measures: more expensive council tax for high value properties; new CGT rules; new gambling taxes and more.
No return to austerity, but an Osborne-like predicament…
If this summons up a particular memory from history, it’s precisely the same problem George Osborne faced back in 2012. He wanted to raise quite a lot of money but due to agreements with his coalition partners, he was limited in how many big taxes he could raise.
The resulting budget was, at the time at least, the single most complex budget in history. Consider: in the years between 1970 and 2010 the average UK budget contained 14 tax measures. Osborne’s 2012 budget contained a whopping 61 of them.
And not long after he delivered it, the budget started to unravel. You probably recall the pasty tax, and maybe the granny tax and the charity tax. Essentially, he was forced into a series of embarrassing U-turns. If there was a lesson, it was that trying to wodge so many money-raising measures into a single fiscal event was an accident waiting to happen.
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Can the budget fix economic woes?
Except that… here’s the interesting thing. In the following years, the complexity of budgets didn’t fall – it rose. Osborne broke his own complexity record the next year with the 2013 budget (73 tax measures), and then again in 2016 (86 measures). By 2020 the budget contained a staggering 103 measures. And Reeves’s own first budget, last autumn, very nearly broke this record with 94 measures.
In short, budgets have become more and more complex, chock-full of even more (often microscopic) tax measures.
Read more from Sky News:
What tax measures are expected in budget?
The political jeopardy facing Rachel Reeves in budget
In part, this is a consequence of the fact that, long ago, chancellors seem to have agreed that it would be political suicide to raise the basic rate of income tax or VAT. The consequence is that they have been forced to resort to ever smaller and fiddlier measures to make their numbers add up.
The question is whether this pattern continues this week. Do we end up with yet another astoundingly complex budget? Will that slew of measures backfire as they did for Osborne in 2012? And, more to the point, will they actually benefit the UK economy?
Reports of a “board-level orchestrated coup” at the BBC are “complete nonsense”, non-executive director Sir Robbie Gibb has told MPs.
Sir Robbie, whose position on the BBC board has been challenged by critics in recent weeks, was among senior leaders, including the broadcaster’s chair, Samir Shah, to face questions from the Culture, Media and Sport committee about the current crisis.
The hearing took place in the wake of the fallout over the edit of a speech by US President Donald Trump, which prompted the resignation of the corporation’s director-general and the chief executive of BBC News, and the threat of a lawsuit from the US president.
Former BBC editorial adviser Michael Prescott wrote the memo that was leaked. Pic: PA
Former editorial adviser Michael Prescott, whose leaked memo sparked the recent chain of events, also answered questions from MPs – telling the hearing he felt he kept seeing “incipient problems” that were not being tackled.
He also said Mr Trump’s reputation had “probably not” been tarnished by the Panorama edit.
During his own questioning, Sir Robbie addressed concerns of potential political bias – he left BBC News in 2017 to become then prime minister Theresa May’s director of communications, a post he held until 2019, and was appointed to the BBC board in 2021 by Boris Johnson.
BBC board member Sir Robbie Gibb appearing before the Culture, Media and Sport committee. Pic: PA
“I know it’s hard to marry the fact that I spent two years as director of communications for the government… and my genuine passion for impartiality,” he said.
“I want to hear the full range of views… I don’t want the BBC to be partisan or favour any particular way.”
Asked about reports and speculation that there has been a “board-level orchestrated coup”, Sir Robbie responded: “It’s up there as one of the most ridiculous charges… People had to find some angle.
“It’s complete nonsense. It’s also deeply offensive to fellow board members… people of great standing in different fields.”
He said his political work has been “weaponised” – and that it was hard as a non-executive member of the BBC to respond to criticism.
‘We should have made the decision earlier’
BBC chair Samir Shah also answered questions. Pic: PA
Mr Shah admitted the BBC was too slow in responding to the issue of the Panorama edit of Mr Trump, which had been flagged long before the leaked memo.
“Looking back, I think we should have made the decision earlier,” he said. “I think in May, as it happens.
“I think there is an issue about how quickly we respond, the speed of our response. Why do we not do it quickly enough? Why do we take so much time? And this was another illustration of that.”
Following reports of the leaked memo, it took nearly a week for the BBC to issue an apology.
Mr Shah told the committee he did not think Mr Davie needed to resign over the issue and that he “spent a great deal of time” trying to stop him from doing so.
Is director-general role too big for one person?
Tim Davie is stepping down as BBC director-general
Asked about his own position, Mr Shah said his job now is to “steady the ship”, and that he is not someone “who walks away from a problem”.
A job advert for the BBC director-general role has since gone live on the corporation’s careers website.
Mr Shah told the hearing his view is that the role is “too big” for one person and that he is “inclined” to restructure roles at the top.
He says he believes there should also be a deputy director-general who is “laser-focused on journalism”, which is “the most important thing and our greatest vulnerability”.
Earlier in the hearing, Mr Prescott gave evidence alongside another former BBC editorial adviser, Caroline Daniel.
He told the CMS committee that there are “issues of denial” at the BBC and said “the management did not accept there was a problem” with the Panorama episode.
Mr Prescott’s memo highlighted concerns about the way clips of Mr Trump’s speech on January 6 2021 were spliced together so it appeared he had told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell”.
‘I can’t think of anything I agree with Trump on’
Mr Trump has said he is going to pursue a lawsuit of between $1bn and $5bn against the broadcaster, despite receiving an official public apology.
Asked if the documentary had harmed Mr Trump’s image, Mr Prescott responded: “I should probably restrain myself a little bit, given that there is a potential legal action.
“All I could say is, I can’t think of anything I agree with Donald Trump on.”
He was later pushed on the subject, and asked again if he agreed that the programme tarnished the president’s reputation, to which he then replied: “Probably not.”
Read more:
Experts on why Trump might struggle to win lawsuit
Why are people calling for Sir Robbie Gibb to go?
Mr Prescott, a former journalist, also told the committee he did not know how his memo was leaked to the Daily Telegraph.
“At the most fundamental level, I wrote that memo, let me be clear, because I am a strong supporter of the BBC.
“The BBC employs talented professionals across all of its factual and non-factual programmes, and most people in this country, certainly myself included, might go as far as to say that they love the BBC.
He said he “never envisaged” the fallout that would occur. “I was hoping the concerns I had could, and would, be addressed privately in the first instance.”
Asked if he thinks the BBC is institutionally biased, he said: “No, I don’t.”
He said that “tonnes” of the BBC’s work is “world class” – but added that there is “real work that needs to be done” to deal with problems.
Mr Davie, he said, did a “first-rate job” as director-general but had a “blind spot” toward editorial failings.
A teenage boy is in a life-threatening condition after being shot in Sheffield.
Police said the 16-year-old was taken to hospital after suffering a gunshot wound on Monday evening.
The incident happened shortly before 5.20pm in London Road.
Officers will remain in the area overnight as they carry out “extensive enquiries to identify those responsible”, with increased patrols in the coming days, said a statement from South Yorkshire Police.
London Road is partly closed, and traffic disruption is expected to continue today.
Meanwhile, the boy’s family are with him in hospital.
London Road is closed from the junction at Sitwell Place to the junction at Crowther Place
‘Terrible incident’
Detective Chief Inspector Emma Knight, the senior investigating officer, said it was a “terrible incident”.
“I want to assure residents that a dedicated team of officers and staff are working tirelessly to understand the circumstances that led to this attack and to trace those responsible,” she added.
Read more from Sky News:
Farage dismisses school racism claims
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“We need you to work with us and provide any information you have,” the officer told the public.
“This is not acceptable on our streets, so we must work together to stop it.
“If you see officers in the area and have information or concerns, please do speak to them.”
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