"WE would go into the hills and camp out for a few days while the nation searched. I had brought the necessary supplies."

These are just some of the twisted words penned by Bedford man Richard Brittain as he planned how to 'kidnap' the woman he'd grown obsessed with – and reading them, Eileen Ormsby felt a chill run down her spine.

The delusional former Countdown champion had spent years stalking university student Ella Tundra, before eventually pursuing her more than 400 miles across the country in 2014 – truly believing they were meant to be together.

His plan to 'fake her kidnapping' in order to make them both famous was eventually thwarted when the terrified woman called the police, but it sadly didn't prove enough to stop his reign of terror.

Brittain, 32, went on to smash a bottle over another woman's head in the middle of an Asda store in October that year, and was eventually jailed for 30 months for the vicious attack – as well as his stalking campaign.

Rather than hiding in the shadows, Brittain openly wrote about his growing obsession with Ella in an online blog named 'The Benevolent Stalker' at the time.

Now Aussie author Eileen, 50, has dug out the deleted post, giving her an unparalleled insight into how his mind was working.

She tells Sun Online: "It provided a unique insight into a stalker's mind. It was chilling to see that he was aware of what he was doing and of the effect it was having on his prey, but felt compelled to do it nonetheless.

"There was no doubt he was intelligent, but he had the lack of social skills and awareness typical of what has been defined as 'the incompetent suitor'.

"He took the over-the-top courting of rejected heroes in romcoms at face value, believing if he just persisted long enough, his victims would come around to returning his feelings. It was also astonishing how narcissistic he could be."

Eileen's new book Stalkers: True Stories Of deadly Obsessions unpicks the sordid tale from the start, while also delving into two other harrowing stalker cases – including that of a 14-year-old boy who tricked his best friend into stabbing him in an online chat room hoax.

Here we revisit the true stories behind each of them…

'The attacker travelled nearly 500 miles to smash in her skull'

Eileen tells the horrific story of how a former Countdown contestant not only stalked a girl he became obsessed with – but later smashed a bottle over the head of another woman, all because she gave his book a bad review.

Brittain, who won TV show Countdown in 2006, began stalking fellow university student Ella Durant after they met in 2012, when Ella was working in a bar around her studies at Greenwich University.

"He seemed a bit odd, but harmless. Little did I know," she previously told the Daily Mail.

After they met, Ella began noticing that Brittain was commenting on a lot of her Facebook posts – and regularly turning up at the bar.

It grew steadily worse, to the point Brittain would call her and leave voicemails expressing his love – something he later openly admitted to in his blog.

"When it became clear that I had no chance with her, my behaviour became increasingly erratic," he openly admitted in the blog, which has since been deleted.

He added: "I sent a few love letters through the post, rose-themed cards containing poetry and drawings. I also left messages on her phone."

After Ella told the university, Brittain was banned from contacting her – but when it failed to stop him, Ella reported him to the police.

The stalking went on for several more months all the same, until Ella eventually moved from London to Glasgow – at which point, Brittain appeared to have gone quiet.

However, months later she received a social media message from him, asking her to read his self-published novel, The World Rose, a fairytale in which Ella was portrayed as a princess.

Not long after that, she spotted him across the street from her. He'd tracked her down across the country.

"I froze and couldn’t speak," she told the Mail.

Brittain himself detailed the encounter in his blog, revealing how he had hoped to persuade her to go away with him – and for them to pretend he had kidnapped her, all to make them both famous.

"I saw her on the street and approached her, and called her name, but she freaked out," he wrote.

"'How?' she said. 'How are you here?' She turned and snapped me on her phone before hurrying away.

"I didn’t even get to tell her about my plan. I didn’t want to make a scene because people were staring. I also realised that I didn’t have the heart to ask her if she would like to be kidnapped."

Finally accepting defeat, Brittain returned to London.

However, it was shortly after this that he spotted a review from another woman, Paige Rolland – who was 18 at the time – criticising his book.

Filled with rage, he tracked her down on Facebook and travelled back up the country, before finding her at the Asda store she was working at in Fife.

"He selected a bottle of white wine from the alcohol section, went to the cereal aisle, walked up behind Paige Rolland and slammed the bottle as hard as he could against the petite teenager’s skull," Eileen writes in her book.

Paige luckily survived the attack, but needed several stitches.

Police tracked Brittain down and charged him with the attack as well as, finally, stalking Ella.

He eventually pleaded guilty to both charges in November 2015 and was sentenced to 30 months in jail. He was released in March 2017 and placed on an indefinite non-harassment order.

Paige has since moved into a secret address to escape him.

"I live in fear every day he’s going to track me down again," she has since told the Daily Record.

Eileen says now: “He knew he was stalking, and he knew she didn’t want him to, but he just kept on going anyway. He had this compulsion to keep going.”

'The plot was far more bizarre than they could ever have imagined'

Another truly harrowing case that Eileen revisits is that of two teenage boys in Altrincham whose 'friendship' ended with one secretly organising his own stabbing – at the hands of the other.

When John, 14, began talking to Mark (both pseudonyms to protect their identities) online in 2003, it marked the start of a "matrix of deceit" that left authorities gobsmacked.

John used MSN Chat to slowly build up a bond with 16-year-old Mark, by pretending to be a series of different people – including a spy and two women, both of whom he later claimed had been killed.

They first began chatting online when John lied and introduced himself as a girl called Rachel.

Just days later, 'Rachel' then introduced him to her 'little brother' John.

The web of lies snowballed from there – with John even managing to convince Mark at one point that he was being blackmailed by a sick stalker called 'Kevin'.

'Kevin' even blackmailed Mark into performing sex acts for him on webcam – before tormenting him by saying he'd murdered 'Rachel'.

According to Eileen, he told Mark at one point: “She stained my sheets when she was bleeding! U weren’t there for her. However much she screamed for u.”

The lies only continued, and John later posed as a supposed British Intelligence Service agent named Lyndsey – who was also eventually 'killed' too.

Tragically, Mark continued to believe he was speaking to multiple people the whole time – while slowly falling into depression.

The final character in John's shocking plot was an 'older woman called Janet', who claimed to be a more senior member of secret intelligence.

"She told Mark that MI6 had been testing him and now they wanted to recruit him," Eileen writes.

Mark's initial mission was to act as bodyguard to the real-life John – presenting the twisted teen with the perfect opportunity to finally meet his victim face to face.

"The two met up after school and started spending all their spare time together," Eileen writes.

It all then reached a head when 'Janet' finally managed to convince Mark that John had an inoperable brain tumour, and he would need to kill him – as a mercy killing.

"In return, Mark would be given a contract for his position in the Secret Service, and be paid £80 million for the job," Eileen writes.

Slowly, Mark was convinced by the story and agreed to go through with it.

The following day, after going shopping together, Mark led John to an alleyway in Altrincham and calmly stabbed him twice.

"'I love you, bro', Mark said, and then he thrust the knife with all his might into the younger boy’s chest," Eileen writes. "He felt the knife pierce John’s rib cage. John crumpled to the ground as his legs buckled under him."

When Janet failed to turn up, Mark eventually rang 999 and pretended John had been attacked by a random man.

John was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, but miraculously survived.

Having realised things didn't add up, police then charged Mark with attempted murder.

When they looked at his computer records, they slowly put two and two together and realised John had orchestrated the entire thing, to trick Mark into killing him.

"He was a lonely and bullied child and he found solace in taking on different personas in the chat room," Eileen writes.

Mark eventually pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was given a two-year supervision order. Meanwhile John pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice and incitement to murder, and was handed a three-year supervision order.

While it's unclear what motivated John, it's been widely reported he became infatuated with Mark and according to Vanity Fair, his lawyer John Goldberg later said: "Bear in mind this is a love story – that's why he wanted to commit suicide… An unrequited-love story."

Eileen says: "The chat logs from the Mark & John case showed an incredible amount of work the stalker was willing to put in to create the fantasy world for his prey."

'His finger was already squeezing the trigger as she screamed, 'Why?''

However, perhaps the most tragic stalking case covered in the book is that of former American actress Rebecca Schaeffer, 21, who was shot and killed by a fan on her own doorstep in 1989.

Robert John Bardo had slowly grown obsessed with the actress after watching her rise to fame and starring role on US sitcom My Sister Sam.

Bardo is claimed to have spent years following the actress, even previously trying to gain access to the set of her sitcom. However, according to Eileen, she never appeared to realise how serious it was.

This obsession grew deadly though when he saw her act out a love scene in the movie Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

"All those rageful feelings… 'How dare she? She's mine. … She's supposed to stay innocent for me.' That gets… converted into a plan of cold-blooded revenge," Dr. Kris Mohandie, a clinical police and forensic psychologist, later told ABC News.

"I’m going to punish you and permanently possess you by taking your life."

He hired a private investigator to track down where she lived and on July 18, 1989, Bardo turned up on Rebecca's doorstep in West Hollywood.

The news outlet reports he was carrying a card she had sent him and her photo – and Rebecca initially smiled when she realised he was a fan, greeted him, but told him not to return.

Just an hour later, however, he did just that, and shot her dead on her doorstep when she once again answered her door.

Most read in News

He fled the scene but was arrested a day later. While his lawyer later told the court he had a mental illness, Bardo was eventually found guilty of first degree murder and jailed for life without the possibility of parole.

Rebecca's awful murder went on to inspire change, and in 1990 California passed the US’s first anti-stalking law, which "makes it a felony to cause another, or their family, to be in reasonable fear for their safety and carries a state prison sentence".

Eileen's book Stalkers: True Stories Of Deadly Obsessions is out now.

Source: Read Full Article