The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  Women are afraid that men will kill them.

  Margaret Atwood

  I have clear-cut evidence that Kerry Daynes is a liar. I know for a fact that she is capable of lying. At worst it brings into question her credentials as an Expert Witness.

  A biography about Kerry Daynes…Have you ever been conned by an expert? Has your life ever been destroyed by a so-called ‘expert’ or have your family and friends been destroyed by such people?

  She is not the sharpest tool in the box but what the hell, she is a redhead, attractive and she has big tits. So what if her bum does look big in certain clothes.

  More to follow…stay tuned.

  I put my mug down and read the words on the screen in front of me again, the feeling that this was something quite ugly creeping through me. Lies written about me by someone I had never met, on a website that appeared to be in my name. What the hell was this?

  A week earlier I’d received a Facebook message request from someone I didn’t recognize. It was 2011 and Facebook was still quite new to me. I got, and still get, a lot of friend and message requests from people I don’t know and normally I pay them little attention. It was a dreary Saturday morning in September, I was still in wake-up mode and my mind was a bit fuzzy around the edges, even though I was on my second cup of Yorkshire tea.

  It said: ‘I am not sure how you will take this but I have started a website for you.’ Right. I usually appreciate a bold elevator pitch but not this one – I was suddenly very much awake. It was true I didn’t have a website of my own, but I hadn’t yet felt I needed one.

  My private practice had been steadily growing for almost ten years by then. It was four years after I had met Gary and there had been many more prison visits. I had a healthy portfolio of consultancy and training work, as well as private clients and my work with the courts as an expert witness. I’d built a strong reputation for myself as a direct and honest psychologist, and as a result had also begun to make appearances on crime documentaries and series as a talking head. This TV work had come along unexpectedly in 2005 when I’d been asked by a news programme to comment on the case of teenager Brian Blackwell, who had been convicted of the manslaughter of his parents. I had then become the series expert on Sky’s Killing Mum and Dad documentaries and there had been a number of other TV appearances since then.

  But these were brief commentaries; I was a forensic psychologist, not a celebrity. And I certainly didn’t have a social media presence apart from my own very private account on Facebook. I still thought that trolls were the hairy things that lived under bridges in fairy tales. Work had always flowed in via word of mouth, so I didn’t need to promote myself with a website. And if I did, I had always thought that I would be the one to decide on its content.

  I wrote back immediately, politely thanking him for his wholly unsolicited offering. I even said I was flattered – I wasn’t remotely, I was creeped out, but such was my female programming to placate and be well-mannered that I said it all the same. I made it clear I was extremely uncomfortable with anybody creating a website for me but that as a gesture of goodwill I would reimburse him for the domain names, which a little bit of research revealed would have cost him around £20.

  His reply pinged back almost immediately, his tone now flipped from vaguely polite to something altogether more terse and sinister:

  ‘I could continue to run it as a fan or tribute site but I’m not sure that I want to be psychoanalysed. I don’t see anything illegal in carrying on but in order to save any embarrassment or legal proceedings etc, I will sell the domain name to you for £3000.’

  Clearly, I wasn’t going to be buying anything from this pushy salesman. I reiterated my request that he remove the website, decided not to engage any further and left it at that. But the following week when I looked online to see if it had been taken down, I instead saw a site that was very much still standing and read the hateful words that I was now staring at in disbelief.

  Online abuse is now a depressingly everyday part of life for women, especially those in the public eye. A 2017 study by Amnesty International clarified what any woman with a Twitter handle already knows. Online abuse of women is widespread, with one in five women suffering some kind of harassment, much of it sexually or physically threatening. The ‘online’ bit is something of a red herring, because the effects of the abuse are experienced offline, with over half of those surveyed reporting increased anxiety, panic attacks and stress as a result of the ‘virtual’ abuse, as well as other psychological consequences like loss of self-esteem and a sense of powerlessness. Amnesty’s ‘troll patrol’ counted over a million abusive tweets alone sent to the women in the study over the course of 2017 — that’s one every 30 seconds. The outlook gets even worse if you are a black or ethnic minority woman, and/or LGBTQ.

  This was still the comparatively early days of the internet and there wasn’t the same awareness around the perils of simply being a woman online. The idea that someone you’d never seen or met before could intimidate you from the anonymous comfort of their living room hadn’t yet been declared an occupational hazard of being female. I watched with a strange vibration inside my chest as each day new ‘content’ went up on his site.

  There were sexually graphic comments that made specific references to my clothing, especially a pair of jeans I wore when off-duty. I didn’t take his sartorial critique too much to heart, but it did occur to me that I never wore jeans on TV and I’m usually filmed from the waist up – a talking head, not a talking bottom (although some may beg to differ). He must have seen me wearing them in real life. I was being stalked.

  Lawmakers are usually more than a few steps behind trends in crime. Upskirting – the act of secretly filming or taking a photo under a woman’s clothes – became illegal in England and Wales in 2019, but only after an 18-month campaign by Gina Martin, who was photographed unawares at a music festival. Back in 2011, the Protection from Harassment Act was in place, but it didn’t specifically name or define stalking as a criminal offence. The government didn’t introduce the crimes of stalking and stalking involving a fear of violence until November 2012. This followed research that found that one in five women and one in ten men will experience stalking in their adult life and a parliamentary inquiry making clear that the law was inadequate, the training of professionals piecemeal and victims’ advocacy non-existent. The factor that differentiates stalking from harassment is the persistent, determined and altogether obsessive nature of the unwanted attention, something the existing laws didn’t address.

  Friends and relatives of targets can also often find themselves drawn into a stalker’s preoccupation. While I was tackling this strange website, my sister, who was on Twitter long before me, received some tweets from an anonymous account. One said: ‘Your sister is a vile disgusting bitch.’ Another declared: ‘Your sister is pathetic. No wonder she is divorced. Who would date a shrink like that? Hideous.’

  I’ve never been married, but I was briefly engaged, in 2009, to a criminal law barrister who kept his wig in a Batman lunchbox. We’d given the appropriate notice at the register office near my home, but rather than live unhappily ever after we cancelled the wedding and went our separate ways. Information about my non-starter nuptials could only have been gleaned by searching public records; this person had discovered that I was not married now, but failed to join the dots correctly and assumed that I must be divorced. He knew I was single and probably that, apart from my cat Bijou, I was living alone.

  He later went on to write outrageous and false allegations about my work online. He said that I was not a bona fide forensic psychologist, and went as far as calling me a criminal. I later discovered this was because he’d found evidence of a £100 fine I’d paid for filing my tax return late – I was hardly in line for an Interpol red notice. Had he gone through my bins (and that is not beyond the realms of possibility) he might have also discovered that I am not as fastidious with my recycling as I should be. That is how despicable I reall
y am.

  He frequently urged his readers to ‘stay tuned’ and promised to reveal the truth about the real me in his forthcoming biography of my life: ‘The Devil You Don’t Know’.

  These rambling slurs on my name were far more galling for me than any of the comments about the shape of my body. To have my hard-won professionalism and integrity called into question by someone I’d never met felt like a sort of virtual poison. Even worse, I realized that if a site visitor contacted ‘me’ via this website they received a reply saying ‘Thank you for contacting Kerry Daynes’. It was not inconceivable then that potential clients, solicitors, police officers, TV producers, even judges – anyone – could have emailed who they believed was ‘me’ via this site and I would not have known anything about it. Not only was I being stalked, but my career was now also under siege.

  Clearly, and for reasons best known to him, this man was incredibly angry with me. Ostensibly, it was because I rejected his website proposal, but if it was a simple matter of business the slew of vicious and defamatory remarks would have served little purpose. And without a purpose, this behaviour could only exist to serve a much broader fury.

  It’s hard to capture how deeply unsettling it feels to realize that you have somehow awoken a random person’s rage. Reading that kind of spite feels every bit as shocking as if it was said to your face, leaves you as winded as you would be by a physical blow.

  Not knowing who this person was meant that anyone and everyone could potentially be him – the person walking behind me in the street or standing in the queue at the Post Office. I started to feel on edge when I went out, but equally didn’t feel safe behind my own front door either, because he had explicitly mentioned on the website that he knew my address, commenting ‘it isn’t a difficult thing to get hold of’.

  I had already tried calling the police.

  They traced him through the details he had used to pay for the site registration and went to see him at his home, which it turned out was uncomfortably close to mine. But I didn’t know they’d been to see him until I read about it on his website.

  BREAKING NEWS – the police call at my home address.

  …Talk about harassment from a female! They came around at Ms Daynes behest.

  As it happened they only sent one officer so they obviously don’t think I am high-risk…He asked if I was stalking Ms Daynes and I laughed out loud and said ‘absolutely not…has she suggested I have?’

  He asked if I would discontinue my websites and I said absolutely not. I welcome litigation by Ms Daynes. I told the officer Ms Daynes should be charged with wasting police time and she thinks all police are psychopaths…I assured him that Ms Daynes has nothing to fear from me of a criminal nature. He said ‘you are absolutely right, the whole case is a civil matter.’

  My stalker had given me a full report of his meeting with the police – rather than, as you would expect, the police themselves.

  When I contacted the police they confirmed that, as far as they were concerned, no offence had been committed. It was, as he had said, a civil matter. It struck me then, as it does now, that the phrase ‘a civil matter’ is the stalking victim’s equivalent of ‘just a domestic’ to a battered spouse.

  I pointed to the fact that he clearly knew what clothes I had been wearing, had searched for my address online, and that he knew I was single and lived alone. He was making me feel threatened. But it was my job to provide evidence of this, they explained. Could I provide a log of his behaviour, even better could I get photographs of him watching me? It seemed like I had to turn stalker myself to catch my stalker. Except I had never seen him and had no idea what he looked like. How was I going to take photographs of him?

  I felt incredibly let down by the police response – with inadequate laws and legislation to guide them, they had failed to see the bigger picture.

  It was a horrible position to be in – and my insight as a forensic psychologist was proving more of a hindrance than a help. Stalking has been nicknamed ‘assault in slow motion’ because the drip-drip of stalking behaviours tends to escalate over time if left unchecked, and too frequently culminates in violence. I was only too aware that a high proportion of murders of women (94 per cent according to research conducted since then by the University of Gloucestershire) are preceded by stalking (surveillance activity, including covert watching, was recorded 63 per cent of the time by the same study). In short, not all stalkers are killers, but most killers of women start out as stalkers.

  But I also knew that the risk is highest where a prior intimate relationship has existed between the stalker and the victim. And – even taking into account his fevered imagination – that clearly did not apply here. I tried to reassure myself with the rational, factual evidence that it was highly unlikely that a physical attack would happen to me. I knew that stalking by a stranger was likely to escalate into violence in roughly one in ten cases, rather than the 50 per cent of cases involving former partners. And I was a professional who had made a career out of working with, and keeping my cool around, high-risk men, after all.

  And yet I also worked precisely where the unlikely existed. And I knew how unexpectedly and irreversibly things could escalate.

  This was something my anxiety liked to remind me of at three in the morning, when it shook me awake and whispered to me: Are you safe? Are you sure you are safe? Are you sure you are sure? And then, the smallest and yet most fear-provoking question we ever ask ourselves: What if?

  My mind returned more than once to a patient I had treated many years before, a young man who was plagued by a delusional belief that Chinese Triad members were trying to kill him. We spent a series of lengthy sessions testing the reality of his beliefs, reflecting sensibly on how the likelihood of him being killed by the gang was very low. I heard just a few weeks after his discharge from hospital that he had been shot dead by drug dealers in Manchester who, unbeknown to me, he owed money to. I was reminded of what Joseph Heller wrote in Catch 22: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you’.

  I set about making my home a fortress, and upped the security with a new alarm system and extra locks. I even moved out for a while and went to stay with a friend, only moving back home when I got myself a giant dog – much to my cat’s disgust, he had been king of the garden for 11 years by then. Humphrey joined Fozzchops a few months later. I’m not sure what my lionesque chow-chows would have done in the event of an intruder, but the size of them and their unrelenting loyalty were, and still are, a reassuring presence.

  This was undoubtedly an unwelcome blurring of the line between work and home life that I had tried so assiduously to maintain over the years. And as used as I was to quashing my own gut reactions – pushing the eyeball to one side – it’s fair to say that, for the first time in a long time, I was truly scared. Scared of a man. Scared of a man who I had never met and had never been involved with, physically or emotionally.

  *

  This all happened just a few weeks before I first met Liam, a man with a history of degrading attacks on women. So a sense of my gender being the touch paper for a dose of misogynist vitriol was at the front of my mind during the weeks I spent with him.

  The first time Liam went to prison he was just 18 years old. His girlfriend, who was 17 and petite, with long blonde hair, had laughed at him for being clumsy during foreplay; the pair were at her parents’ house messing about on the sofa. So he punched her in the face, stripped her naked, tied her arms to a dining chair and beat her repeatedly across her body with the buckle end of his belt. He left her there in the middle of the room, in a state of shock, attaching her legs to the chair before he left so that her genitals were on display to whoever came home and found her.

  After his release for that attack he spent three blemish-free years on the outside but was arrested again, this time after assaulting another slightly built, blonde teenage girl. He had followed her home from the pub she worked at as a glass collector, a route which took in a sh
ortcut across a disused children’s play area in the middle of a residential estate. He came up behind her and ‘blitz’ attacked her: punched her in the back of the head, kicked her feet out from under her so she fell down to the ground and stamped on her. He knelt next to her and masturbated over her, while she was semi-conscious, before running off.

  Unfortunately for him she had been more conscious than he realized and she was able to identify him as a recent regular of the pub. In fact she had noticed him a couple of times while she had been out shopping, but thought nothing of it. When he was arrested, police found detailed notes about her shift patterns, the clothes she wore plus the movements of two other girls – the same age, the same small frame and fair colouring – along with pictures he’d drawn of girls, bound and naked, being kicked or punched. They were cartoon images, quite accomplished, enlarged heads with distressed faces and droplets of sweat spraying outwards from them. Laced-up boots and disembodied fists coming down on them. Liam’s criminal behaviour was an ugly caricature in every sense. It is not that often that a case file includes a fully illustrated guide to the fantasy life and offence rehearsals of a predatory stalker.

  The Stalking Risk Profile, developed over the course of 20 years by leading psychologists and psychiatrists in the field, assigns stalking offenders to five different motivational types. Liam’s behaviour was definitely true to type for the rarest of the bunch: a predatory stalker. These are men who follow and collect information about their victim, typically a female and a stranger to them, as an elaborate precursor to a violent or sexual assault. For this stalker type, the sense of excitement and anticipation that comes from covertly watching an unsuspecting victim is as gratifying as the ultimate attack.

  Far more typical than predatory or other types is the rejected stalker, someone who is either attempting to reconcile with a former intimate partner, or seeking revenge for the rejection they have suffered when the relationship ended or they were rebuffed. Other types include the incompetent suitor who targets strangers or acquaintances, and is driven by a combination of lust and loneliness, going entirely the wrong way about trying to lure their victim into a brief encounter such as a date or a short-term sexual liaison. The intimacy-seeking stalker is fuelled by delusional beliefs that they are already in an intense relationship with the victim. And the resentful stalker blazes with the conviction that they have been mistreated or humiliated by their target, and wants to settle the score. While useful as guideline indicators of behaviour, what drives a stalker’s behaviour is often complex and shifting. He or she won’t necessarily behave within the strict confines of one ‘type’ forever.