Joshua Hunt: Man who terrified Somerset drivers while ‘writhing around’ in gimp suit found guilty of public order offences

Published

2 years ago

October 27, 2023

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A gardener who terrified female drivers heading home late at night in Somerset while wearing a gimp suit has been found guilty of public order offences.

Joshua Hunt was seen by one woman writhing around on the ground, while another was left shaking and crying.

The 32-year-old was fined £100 and ordered to pay £200 compensation to each of his three victims and £620 prosecution costs after being convicted Bristol Magistrates’ Court on Friday of two counts of intentionally causing harassment, alarm or distress.

The incidents took place in the evening of May 7 and just after May 9 in Bleadon, near Weston-super-Mare.

After his arrest Hunt told police: “I am not a gimp, I do not own a gimp suit. I am not in a gimp suit.”

‘Writhing and crawling’

Motorist Lucy Lodge, in a written statement, said she was on her own when she drove home through Bleadon and saw a figure moving on the ground.

She said: “He was writhing and crawling as if in a military fashion. I could see the person was wearing very tight, dark clothing and had a mask on their face.

“The mask was dark and very tight and two white crosses where the eyes should be. My first thought was it could be a possible abduction and the person was trying to get me out of my car.

“It was terrifying although I had only seen them for a few seconds.”

The witness told the court she thought she was witnessing an abduction when she saw the man on the ground.

She added: “I had never seen anything like this before. I feel scared and I never want to see this thing again due to the fright it gave me. I didn’t sleep more than three hours that night.”

Shortly after midnight on May 9, Samantha Brown was driving from work with her sister-in-law and another colleague when she saw a man dressed all in black with a face mask, the court heard.

Following reports of the second incident, the court heard police went to Bleadon and spotted a white Berlingo van in a field which was reversing and decided to stop it.

PC Declan Coppock spoke to the defendant, who was wearing grey trousers and a black hooded top, and arrested him.

“I noticed his skin was extremely wet and damp – suggesting he had been lying on the side of the road,” the officer said.

Hunt told him: “I am not dangerous, I am a normal person, I have got a few problems.”

A search of the van found Hunt was not wearing a T-shirt or any underwear and inside his van was a collection of wet black clothing, women’s tights, face masks and gloves. There was also neon white paint used for drawing on a mask, the court heard.

Hunt told police during an interview that his mental health had been in “crisis” over problems with his medication and wanted to take his own life, the court heard.

“I stood in the road because I wanted to kill myself and I never intended to scare anybody,” he told officers. “I am crying out for help and need help with my mental health.”

A search of Hunt’s home in Claverham uncovered a journal in which he had written a story about someone called Jack who purchases a black rubber suit and mask with white paint on the mask.

He had also done internet searches in 2022 and 2023 about the “Somerset Gimp” and the “Gimp of Cleeve”, the court heard.

‘I hated myself with the way I looked’

Hunt, a self-employed gardener, claimed he would go out at night and change into black clothing to go “mudding”.

“Which a lot of people wouldn’t understand, which is something I do to get covered in mud which is another reason I was there as it is close to the estuary where there is mud,” he added.

Hunt also told the court on the two nights he had been seen on the side of the road he had wanted to kill himself by being hit by a car.

“It never entered my head that what I was doing was frightening people,” he said.

“I apologise to those people – I agree what I was doing was frightening but hand on my heart I never intended to cause them harassment, alarm or distress.”

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

2 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

3 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.

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Miguell Rocha played with Jota for around ten years with Gondomar Sport Clube in Portugal.

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The former captain was seen wiping away tears as he read messages and laid his tribute down.

UK

How Britain’s most notorious gangster turned up at a charity lunch to fact-check a retired detective’s talk

Published

8 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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How Britain's most notorious gangster turned up at a charity lunch to fact-check a retired detective's talk

Britain’s most notorious gangster and the detective who pursued him have been involved in a bizarre confrontation…at a charity lunch.

Former Detective Superintendent Ian Brown was at a Kent golf club and about to give a talk on the infamous £26m Brink’s-Mat gold robbery when he was summoned from the stage by officials.

Mr Brown, who appeared on the award-winning Sky News StoryCast podcast The Hunt For The Brink’s-Mat Gold in 2019, said: “I go outside and they say ‘he’s here’ and I say ‘who’s here’ and they say that table over there in the corner, that’s Kenny Noye with a baseball cap pulled down over his head.”

Noye stabbed to death an undercover policeman during the Brink’s-Mat investigation, but was acquitted of murder, though he was jailed for handling the stolen gold.

After his release, he used a knife again in the M25 road-rage murder of motorist Stephen Cameron.

“They said what are we going to do?” said Mr Brown.

“I said are you serving food? Well, just use plastic knives.”

Although Mr Brown had not personally arrested Noye over Brink’s-Mat he had identified him as a suspect months after the robbery.

Years later he met him during an ill-fated TV interview in which he quizzed him about his role in the robbery.

He said: “He told me everything I wanted to know except the truth. He still insists he had nothing to do with it.”

The interview was never broadcast after the prison authorities threatened to send Noye back to jail for a breach of his parole.

Mr Brown, 86, said: “I went over to him and said ‘thanks for coming, nice of you to pop in’, but I don’t believe you’ve turned up with your sons and grandkids to listen to me telling how you killed a police officer.

“And he said ‘I want to make sure you don’t say I’ve been dealing drugs’ and I said ‘I’ve never said that Kenny’.”

The retired detective told Noye he wasn’t going to change his presentation just because he was there.

“He said ‘mate, I wouldn’t expect you to and I’ll come up [on stage] if you want me to’.

“Can you think how he’s turned up with his family to listen to somebody talking about you killing the police? Now, you put logic on that.”

The bizarre story emerged when I rang Mr Brown after I’d been told about the meeting.

I also wanted to ask him about the recent BBC hit drama series The Gold which retold the story of the Brink’s-Mat heist at Heathrow Airport in 1983.

“It was an absolute shambles, far too much dramatic licence and the real story was so much better,” said the ex-detective, whose job had been to follow the trail of the 6,800 gold bars to the US and the Caribbean.

He said he chatted to one of the show’s writers for a long time in a phone call but then heard no more.

“They invented people, changed a bit here and there and made it politically correct in so many ways. I’m just very sad that that is what people will believe.

“And I couldn’t work out who my character was supposed to be. I could have been one of the female cops.”

He also criticised the portrayal of Noye, now 78, as a likeable jack-the-lad character when the truth about the double killer with a volatile temper was quite different.