Man unlocked lover’s iPhone with her thumb as she slept
A POSSESSIVE boyfriend pressed his sleeping fiancée’s thumb to her iPhone to unlock it and check if she was dating other men, a court heard.
Alexander Heavens waited until Stacey Booth nodded off before gaining access to texts and emails.
He would put Miss Booth’s thumb on the iPhone’s home button, which uses fingerprint recognition technology as a security measure.
After checking the phone, he would wake her up to interrogate her throughout the night as to who everyone was, a judge was told.
The 24-year-old also demanded the pin code to view her messages at other times, and during rows he bit her on the arm, bent her fingers back and punched her.
Manchester Crown Court heard the couple were together for six years but drug-addled Heavens, of Failsworth, near Oldham, subjected her to increasing abuse.
Miss Booth, 24, who works for a funeral company, said she had feared she would be killed.
She said she lost weight due to her ordeal and would lie waiting for birdsong at the end of each night to let her know she could escape and go to work.
She became so convinced she would end up dead that she made secret recordings of her fiancé’s nightly activity. She said: ‘I used to record him towards the end because I felt like no one would believe me. That’s what helped me get him into the courtroom.’
Too terrified to tell even her family, she made excuses to avoid showing them her scars and bruises. She even kept her coat on as she ate Christmas dinner with her mother.
The court was told the relationship soured at Christmas 2016 after Heavens developed bouts of paranoia because of his cocaine use.
He admitted engaging in controlling and coercive behaviour.
Prosecutor Rob Smith said: ‘He started taking his anger out on [Miss Booth] and was paranoid about her actions.
‘The first incident in 2016, the defendant became angry because she was spending time with her family rather than him. He kept arguing with her about it until he bit her and bruised her upper arm.
‘His behaviour worsened, particularly when he alleged that she had been with other men. During arguments he began bending her fingers back so far that she thought they were going to break.’
Mr Smith added: ‘When she was asleep he would grab her finger and use it to unlock her phone.
‘He would wake her up and ask who everyone was and keep her up all night. Her work became affected and she became sleep-deprived. On one occasion, she was going to sleep when he asked her a question, and when he did not get a reply he punched her in the face.
‘She remembers being pushed to the kitchen floor, stood on and trampled on.’
Despite Heavens’s accusations, in March last year Miss Booth found messages suggesting it was him who was cheating, Mr Smith said.
When she told him ‘he began screeching at her, ran to the kitchen and he got hold of a knife and held it to his stomach’.
His behaviour then ‘worsened to the point that whenever she said something he didn’t like, he punched her twice to the face’. Mr Smith said Miss Booth ended the relationship in October last year, adding: ‘When [Heavens] was arrested, he said he had never laid a finger on her.’
Miss Booth told the court: ‘I always tried to help him but he responded with abuse.’
Sentencing on Heavens was deferred for six months.
‘He got hold of a knife’