The threats arrived with terrifying precision.
Between December 2015 and June 2017, Amanda Playle, a resident of Sussex, England, began receiving messages from someone who seemed to know exactly where she was and what she was wearing. The sender even sent her photographs of herself in public, taken without her noticing. One of them, at Gatwick Airport. When she went to the authorities, the police traced the emails to their source and found something no one expected: some had been sent from her own home’s router.
The stalker was Paul, her husband. He had pretended to be an ex-boyfriend from school to torment her and, at the same time, comforted her as if he too were a victim. He even hid her passport to stop her from going on holiday with friends. A security camera at Gatwick gave him away and, after the trial, a jury at Lewes Crown Court found him guilty of stalking and coercive and controlling behaviour in less than 30 minutes.
On 24 January 2018, Paul Playle was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. First, Amanda lost trust in the person sleeping beside her. Then she had to support her children as everything came to light. But the sentence did not erase what had happened: the man she had believed she knew for years had in fact been the one who turned her own home into the place where she should have felt safe.