Punctured tyres, nasty notes and malicious rumours: One woman's terrifying experience at the hands of a stalker

Julie was a successful Irish professional enjoying life in the UK until her 79-year-old neighbour began a campaign of harassment against her, writes Sorcha Crowley

'When you’re being stalked you can’t get out of it. You normalise what isn't normal. You go into survival mode and so you do what you have to do to cope.'

As part of her new normal, Julie* doesn’t open her blinds in the mornings. She times precisely when to leave for work, regularly changing her pattern of coming and going. She checks the ground in front of her car tyres for screws before getting in, ready to photograph and bag any evidence. 

Expensive CCTV cameras stud her every wall and window. Mirror film lines her rear conservatory windows. She has stopped sitting outside in her back garden. Sometimes she’ll ring a neighbour to ensure she gets into her home safely in the evenings. 

Julie is a woman under siege. How did it come to this?

The answer is a 6ft, agile and strong 79-year-old man who lives with his wife and adult son next door to Julie. When Julie bought her home in England 10 years ago, she found the man “a little bit nosey” but harmless. They exchanged pleasantries about the weather, nothing more. 

Julie is one of many Irish successful professionals living in the UK. Life was good until her ex-partner moved out over a year ago and suddenly everything changed.

It all started with a bamboo tree. Quoted thousands of pounds from landscapers to remove it from her back garden, Julie gratefully accepted her neighbour’s offer to dig it up for her. As a thank-you, she gave him a card, a bottle of whiskey and £100, a transactional gesture she “would have done with anyone”.

Not long after, however, he started mentioning outfits she had been wearing in the garden. She realised he was watching her. He then started to appear outside whenever she came home from work. He spoke about her to another neighbour a little too adoringly. 

“I felt uncomfortable,” she tells the Irish Examiner. 

He then began asking other neighbours questions about her personal life. Julie started avoiding him. The first unsettling experience happened when she returned home one day to find he had taken it upon himself to paint her house number on her bin. 

Riled at this small but unwelcome interference with her property, she immediately went out and scrubbed it off. “At this stage, I felt like I'm being stalked when I come home. He's coming out asking me things, he's saying ‘I'll help you with this…’ like I was a damsel in distress,” she says.

'My skin was crawling'

He continued to make unsolicited offers of ‘help’ with her garden and appearing in the car park. “I knew I was being watched. My skin was crawling,” she says. 

She began to park in another car park nearby so he wouldn’t see her coming or going. He then started knocking on her door and warning her her car would get damaged there.

'One of the biggest challenges is worrying that people are going to think you're a drama queen, that you're making it up''

The knocking stopped after a few days and while Julie was relieved, she was still “on edge”. His warning soon took on a new significance. A few days later, she found her windscreen wipers completely broken off. She reported it to the police and installed a doorbell camera. 

He approached her again in the car park, pleading to be her “friend”. 

“I was walking around the car park and he's walking after me and I'm just like, ‘go away. I don't want to talk to you’,” she says with a shudder.

It rapidly escalated. A few days later, her tyre was punctured with a nail. The following morning, a nasty note was left on her windscreen. 

“I just went well, that's him. I had his handwriting from a number he gave me and they matched.” She reported it to the police, who urged her to take action but like many victims of harassment or stalking, she was initially reluctant. “The police officer said to me ‘So then this doesn't go away. These things get worse.’” 

He was right. 

A short time later, Julie was at a work event when a doorbell camera notification pinged on her phone. She opened the app and was met with a terrifying sight: a man wearing a balaclava ripping her doorbell camera off her front wall with a crowbar. “I just started shaking. I rang the police and that was the first time he was arrested,” says Julie.

He denied everything. By the time he was released from custody the next day, Julie had thousands of pounds worth of CCTV cameras installed. As he is a council tenant, the local council gave him a tenancy warning which put him and his family at risk of eviction. That quelled his behaviour for a month or so but then he began verbally abusing her, spreading malicious rumours about her to anyone within earshot.

He soon realised Julie’s cameras had a blind spot in the car park. She found a screw carefully placed in front of her tyre one evening. She photographed it, bagged it and went off to the gym. Within 10 minutes of her return that night, she caught him outside shining a torch at her back wheel, checking if it had been punctured. 

“I have video on my phone of him. I now had proof,” she says. “Then I knew that it was all him. [I thought] ‘I'm not going mad’ because you do start to question yourself.” 

This is common for victims of stalking, according to criminologist and true crime podcast host Trina O’Connor. “One of the biggest challenges is worrying that people are going to think you're a drama queen, that you're making it up,” she said. “It's extra hard though, when it's your neighbour. They're harassing you within your four walls.” 

Older men stalking younger women

O’Connor points to the growing prevalence of older men stalking younger women both in Ireland and the UK. 

“What we have emerging in society now, particularly in Western society, is very put-together women who are very independent in so many ways. And some of the older-generation males may find this intimidating and humiliating, and they can at times feel emasculated by women like this. If you can make a woman feel unsafe in their home by stalking her, that gives you a one upmanship,” she says.

The phenomenon is “very common” in this country, according to Cork-based solicitor Dylan Green of Green & Associates. 

“People do that for quite a long time and they feel that they are untouchable. It's quite covert, quite hard to prove,” he says.

Stalking vicims and campaigners Una Ring and Eve McDowell: 'We were inundated with calls from mainly women, all ages, all demographics.' Picture: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

Stalking, defined as fixated, obsessive, unwanted and repeated behaviour that causes people to feel unsafe, is now a standalone crime under the new Criminal Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2023, and punishable by up to 10 years.

After calling the Garda Protective Services Unit in the first instance (27 units countrywide), Green advises anyone who feels they’re being stalked that they can apply to their local district court for a civil restraint order against the perpetrator. No prior relationship between both parties need have existed. 

“The beauty about it is that it can be granted ex parte. You don't need the stalker to be present in court,” he adds.

Since it came into force in September 2024 up to September 30, 2025, 1,545 applications were made, 506 of which were granted, said the Courts Service. Of those, 392 were ex parte orders granted. 

Between 2020 and 2024, 463 people were charged with harassment/stalking offences under the older laws. Of those, 259 charges were sent forward for trial to a circuit court. A year on from its commencement in November 2024, there are no figures yet for charges under the new stalking law.

No dedicated support service in Ireland

Unlike the UK, Ireland still has no dedicated support service for victims of stalking. The Sexual Violence Centre in Cork offers its services until such time as one is established, but O’Connor believes a dedicated statutory agency is a must. 

“The problem that we have in Ireland is there isn't a statutory agency to provide support for victims, because if you have a neighbour who's doing this to you and you move somewhere else, the impacts of being stalked by your neighbour will have an impact on you when you move. 

"It will inform how you embed yourself into your new community — that can be very damaging for community cohesion,” she says.

Co-founder of the Stalking in Ireland information website and stalking victim herself Una Ring agrees: “It’s badly needed. We were inundated with calls from mainly women, all ages, all demographics. I think the fact it’s being highlighted people are more comfortable coming forward.” 

Former Cork City councillor Joseph O’Donovan, 49, formerly known as Gary O’Flynn, of Blarney, Co Cork, is due for sentencing on December 4 after pleading guilty to harassing a woman in Cork City three years ago.  Picture: Dan Linehan

A man in his 50s in currently before the courts in the south of the country, charged with the alleged harassment of a neighbouring couple. Former Cork City councillor Joseph O’Donovan, 49, formerly known as Gary O’Flynn, of Blarney, Co Cork, is due for sentencing on December 4 after pleading guilty to harassing a woman in Cork City three years ago. 

In the most recent hearing on that case on November 7, Judge Mary Dorgan quoted from the victim impact statement that the young woman was very upset by O'Donovan's harassment and that the accused said to her at one stage: “I’m a kind of a stalker.”

In the past year alone, three older men in Sligo and Leitrim have been sentenced for up to four years in prison for harassing younger female neighbours.

Enormous psychological toll

Being stalked has taken an enormous psychological toll on Julie. 

She went home for Christmas last year “a nervous wreck” and had to take two months off work. “It got too much. My whole system just went. I couldn't concentrate at work,” she says. 

She’s had support therapy, has cancelled important work projects, shrinking her life bit by bit, all while the abuse continued, including comments he hoped she’d get killed. He threw stones onto her conservatory roof and would shine lights up at her bedroom window at night. He received an Asbo and then a community protection warning from the police, which he often breached. Julie has a “forensic log” kept and hundreds of videos.

“The sinister thing about any of this is that you start to do things to adapt within the situation and then that becomes your new normal. It’s affected me on so many levels. I remember going to the supermarket at one stage and just sitting in the car thinking, ‘the world is no longer safe for me’.” 

Julie compares it to being like a frog in cold water, slowly warmed up for the boil, but staying put. “That’s what it’s like when you’re being stalked. You can’t get out of it. You normalise what isn't normal. You go into survival mode and so you do what you have to do to cope.” 

Last September, a breakthrough came. Two men from an estate nearby had heard what was happening to Julie and showed her video footage of an older man puncturing up to seven cars in their car park. Julie was able to identify him, which has led to a separate police investigation. 

And just last week, she heard him speaking on his phone, telling someone to ambush her car. He was immediately arrested and a harassment case was finally opened against him. The UK police have now completed their investigation and the man is going to be formally charged with harassment.

As she speaks to the Irish Examiner, the man is next door, released on station bail. One of his bail conditions is not to interfere with her.

She finally feels “validated.” “For me, it was this sense of well, now they'll realise exactly what's going on. I'd love to know has he explained why? That's the question. Why?” 

Clinical and forensic psychologist Dr Kevin Lambe, who has carried out pre-sentencing psychological evaluations on people convicted of harassment in the past, says: “The need to be in control and powerful lies at the root of this behaviour.” 

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“The men I meet are usually highly defensive. Aware they have made mistakes, they tend to shift the blame to the female, who is cast as the one who is hysterical. It does keep escalating as he becomes more fixated on interfering with her. The torment of the whole thing could last 10 years — that's a lot of time in a young person's life,” he says.

For now, both Julie and her neighbour await a charging decision from the police. Despite the uncertainty, she is hopeful. “It’s not what it was this time last year. It has changed. He's no longer in control and he will hate that.” 

- If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please click here for a list of support services.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy