As we discussed last week, shockingly, stalking is currently not a crime in New Zealand. But, it does appear to be common – and, incredibly disturbing. It most often is a woman who is stalked – and, in most cases her stalker is someone she knows, likely an ex. But, as we learned from Capsule reader Kylie, this isn’t always the case…
The first phone call came two weeks after Kylie and Shane’s wedding.
“My parents are of that generation who don’t really ‘trust’ mobile phones for an emergency,” says Kylie. “We had a landline that really only they would call, or scammers.”
So, the phone – that was right next to Kylie’s side of the bed – ringing at 3am, was an entirely unprecedented experience.
Startled awake, Kylie picked up the phone only to hear silence on the other end. She hung up after asking ‘is anyone there?!’ a few times and then tried to go back to sleep. Another 20 mins later though, the phone rung again. This time Shane answered, and again was met by silence.
“We checked our mobiles and had no missed calls,” says Kylie. “It was a Friday night, so we decided it must be kids doing a prank call.”
So, they pulled the phone out of the wall and both turned on the volume on their cell phones, just in case it really was someone trying to get through to them in an emergency.
But then, after plugging the phone back in, the next night at 4am the same thing happened – two phone calls, 20 mins apart, both with absolutely no noise from the other end.
From there, they kept the phone unplugged – except for when Shane forgot why it was unplugged and accidentally put the phone back on. That night – a Wednesday night, the phone rang again at 2am. They unplugged it before it could ring again.
Nothing out of the usual happened until the Saturday morning. Then, Shane woke up and got a fright when he looked at his mobile phone and saw he has 67 missed calls.
“They were all from a blocked number, and were all through the night, from midnight to 6am,” says Kylie.
The same thing happened on the Sunday morning – Shane had a call log of nearly a hundred missed calls.
“It was starting to get a bit scary,” says Kylie. “But we couldn’t think of anyone who would do this, or had a reason to. I’d been married before, but my ex-husband and I were on good terms. I’d met the woman he remarried and she was lovely.”
Shane went to work on the Monday and told a few people what had happened – they suggested he get some security, maybe one of those ring cameras at the front door, just to be safe.
From there, for two weeks, Shane was getting phone calls from a blocked number at all hours. He picked up a few times – there was no one there.
“Once he yelled that he was going to find them so they needed to stop calling, or else,” says Kylie. “But there was never any sound on the other end.”
The next week, Shane had a work conference on so was going to be away for two nights.
“To be honest, I didn’t think much of it beforehand,” says Kylie. “I was worried about what was happening, but it seemed to very much be Shane who was the target of it all, so I didn’t feel scared about him being away. And we had the camera at the door now and an alarm.”
Kylie kept her phone on when she went to bed, just in case something happened – or her parents needed her (now that she didn’t have the phone plugged in).
She woke up at 11am to a knock on the door. Terrified, she looked at the camera. It was a man holding an Uber Eats bag.
“Because of the phone calls, I was immediately on edge. I said through the speaker that I was calling the police,” says Kylie. “But he said ‘sorry, sorry, I am just delivering the Uber eats you ordered.’”
Kylie asked who the name was he was delivering it to, and he gave her name.
“I wondered if I had accidentally scheduled it, or if Shane had sent it or something,” she says.
She asked him to leave it there and she would get it a bit later. Once he’d left, she opened the door and picked up the package. It was McDonalds. She didn’t really eat McDonalds, but if she ever did, this wasn’t even close to what she would order.
She sent Shane a text message. Her phone beeped and she picked it up to read her husband’s message, but instead saw it was from a 0274 number that she didn’t recognise.
‘Hope I didn’t scare you. Thought you might be hungry with Shane away x’
Kylie instantly felt sick.
“I went through all my numbers to make sure it wasn’t someone I knew that just wasn’t in the phone,” she says.
Then she called Shane, to see if he knew the number. Neither of them did. As they were wondering whether to text back to ask who it was, another text came through.
‘Least you could do is say thank you.’
And then another one.
‘Especially when I’m trying to do something nice for a woman who is all on her own’.
Then the doorbell rang again. There was another Uber Eats delivery man at the door.
She again asked the delivery person to leave it on the doorstep.
Her phone pinged. ‘Thought you might like something sweet, sweetheart’
Still on the phone to her husband, Kylie got her keys, went to their internal garage, got in the car and drove round in circles a few times and, when she was convinced no one was following her, drove to a hotel in town and checked in for the night.
Shane tried to get out of the second night of his Australia work trip, but Kylie insisted he stay and she would stay with her parents until he was home.
“I barely slept that night in the hotel,” she says. “I got text messages all night.”
The next day she reported it to the police, but, there wasn’t much they were able to do.
That night the messages began again.
‘Why aren’t you at home?’
‘Did I scare you last night, sweetheart?’
‘It’s not me you should be scared of.’
Kylie turned off her phone and she and Shane continued to wrack their brains as to who this could possibly be.
“The timing was starting to make me really suspicious,” says Kylie. “I was sure it must be someone from Shane’s past who was jealous or angry about us getting married. Shane couldn’t think of anyone it could be. I believed him.”
The phone calls continued. To both Kylie and Shane. Every few days the number they would be coming from would change. They’d block the numbers, only for a new one to pop up. They’d wake up to dozens of strange text messages and missed calls every night.
“The phone company wasn’t a lot of help, but they did offer to change our numbers for free,” she says. “And we weren’t getting anywhere with the police.”
Packages started turning up. Weird, random items from Shein or Temu.
“We got vases, baby clothes – a bunch of stuff,” says Kylie. “We’d get messages saying stuff like ‘I got you a wedding gift’. It was horrible. We got lots of messages about whether we were going on a honeymoon. One said, ‘I’ll come too. Can’t wait sweethearts’.”
There was another late night Uber Eats order. The next day, there was an Amazon order. And then a Peter Alexander order – a slip nightgown, with a message saying, ‘this one is for the honeymoon’.
Then, that afternoon a bunch of flowers turned up. The card just said, ‘For my sweetheart’.
But Kylie, was suddenly thrilled. No, they weren’t from her husband, but she was excited when she saw where the flowers were from.
“My sister works for that florist,” says Kylie. “It was totally unethical, and she risked her job to do it, but when I called her, she said she was going to find out who sent them.”
Two hours later, Kylie’s sister called to say she had two names: one was the name of the person who ordered them and the second was the name on the credit card they used to buy them. She didn’t recognise either of the names, but obviously hoped Kylie and Shane did.
“I put her on speakerphone,” says Kylie. “Shane and I were holding hands. She said the first name – a woman’s name and we both just looked at each other, it was so disappointing, we didn’t know the name.”
Then, Kylie’s sister said the second name.
They stopped holding hands, because they both instinctively covered their mouths in shock.
“We couldn’t believe it. It was Shane’s colleague,” says Kylie. “He was one of the people Shane had been confiding in, telling about everything that had happened.”
Kylie said that Shane thought he and this guy – let’s call him Steven – got on fairly well. It’d been a pretty good year for Shane in his job though – he’d been the top performer in his team and got a commission bonus.
“Steven was number two,” says Kylie. “He’d been number one until my husband joined his team. He was always so nice to Shane! I felt sick though when Shane said that HE was the one who suggested getting the camera and the security etc. But it all made sense that Steve would know where Shane was all the time and when I would be alone.”
Because they couldn’t quite use the credit card information, they worked on some ways to try to out Steven themselves.
“Shane was going to tell Steven – and only Steven – that he was surprising me with a trip away to Fiji for the weekend, and then wait for the messages to come in about it,” says Kylie. “But we didn’t really know how to get the proof we needed. And all Shane wanted to do was beat the shit out of Steven so we didn’t know what we were going to do.”
Kylie’s sister called back a little while later.
“She said she’d told the store owner what had happened and the store owner wasn’t angry at her – she’d told them already before what was happening to us,” says Kylie. “The store owner had said we should give them a call and they’d be happy to turn over the credit card and delivery information to the police.”
Kylie says she and Shane spent the rest of the weekend going back and forth over what to do.
“We didn’t know whether to go to the police, or tell Shane’s boss, or confront Steven, or all three,” she says.
In the end, they decided that as a first step, Shane would confront Steven.
“He sent him a screenshot of the flower delivery info with his name on the credit card,” says Kylie. “Then he called him and without giving him a chance to talk, said that he knew everything – had a log of everything and could connect him through several pieces of evidence now and that he would hand it to their boss and to the police, unless he resigned himself immediately. Then he hung up.”
The next day, Shane went to work, and discovered that Steven was off sick. And the next day, Shane’s boss told him that Steven had resigned and was not going to be working out his notice period.
“Shane asked to have a private chat with his boss,” says Kylie. “He showed him the folder of stuff we collected – print outs of all the text messages, delivery slips, call logs etc, and the flower delivery info. His boss couldn’t believe it. I mean, he believed Shane, but neither of them could quite believe that Steven was capable.”
It’s now nine months since the stalking incident happened, and Kylie and Shane haven’t heard a thing from Steven since.
“It’s only recently that we started even calling it stalking,” says Kylie. “It felt too weird to call it that, but it’s what it was. He was constantly following and monitoring us, and bombarding us – but all anonymously.”
Kylie says they know he has a job at another company – but they’ve never crossed paths again.
“We’d both like some closure, Shane and I, but we also don’t want to initiate any sort of contact,” she says. ‘We’re assuming it was all inspired by jealousy, but I guess we’ll never really know.”
Have you been the victim of stalking before? Email alice@capsulenz.com with your thoughts, opinions and anything you’d like to add to this conversation.
