The Peaky Blinders actor who battered 3 women
... but thug who changed his identity avoids prison
AN extra from the TV series Peaky Blinders who attacked a series of girlfriends hid behind multiple identities and failed to show up in police domestic abuse checks.
Oliver Cox’s latest victim was hairdresser Lyndsey Yarwood, who believed he was a perfect partner when he wooed her with romantic gestures including baths filled with rose petals and proposing after a month.
In reality he had a number of previous convictions for assaulting women.
But when single mother Miss Yarwood, 35, asked police to conduct checks under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme, also known as Clare’s Law, he was given the all clear.
It emerged that Cox, 33 – a fitness fanatic who used steroids – had changed his name by deed poll to Bart Milben in an apparent attempt to hide his past.
After he again walked free from court, Miss Yarwood and Cox’s other exes warned women to stay away from him.
Police have launched an inquiry to establish how he apparently slipped through the net but campaigners say it is all too easy to hide a violent past.
Miss Yarwood, from Melksham, Wiltshire, met Cox on the Plenty of Fish dating website early last year. She was too nervous to meet him but in August he surprised her by turning up at Bristol airport on her return from a holiday in Gran Canaria.
‘The next day at work he sent me a big bunch of flowers and he came to meet me at mine,’ she said. ‘He never left.’
Having had a bad experience
‘Caught up in the moment’
in the past, she said she contacted police about his background, under his original name Oliver Cox, only to be told there was nothing of concern.
‘He was everything you see in rom- coms – rose-petal baths, cooking dinner, brilliant with the kids,’ Miss Yarwood said.
Just over a month later, he proposed and, ‘caught up in the moment’, she said yes because ‘everything was great’.
But last December she was contacted by his ex-girlfriend Rosie Benson, who warned her Cox had attacked her and been given a restraining order. She urged Miss Yarwood to ask police for a disclosure check under his new name Bart Milben, but there were no results.
Shortly afterwards, the couple began arguing during a night out and he attacked her, leaving her with two black eyes and bruises to her body.
Last month Cox pleaded guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm and was given an 18-week suspended sentence by Taunton magistrates.
He was also ordered to pay Miss Yarwood £725 in compensation. She said yesterday she feared ‘it’s going to take for him to actually kill someone for the courts to punish him properly’.
Less than a year before, Cox received a community order for assaulting Miss Benson, 31, in Bolton. Weeks before attacking Miss Yarwood, he had been warned by police to cease contact with another ex, Jen Atherton, after harassing her.
Last year Cox was also fined £600 after admitting attacking another woman in Newcastle.
Cox, who has also appeared in an episode of Coronation Street, admitted yesterday his behaviour had been ‘disgusting’ but blamed his steroid use. He admitted having ‘a number’ of Facebook profiles under various identities but said he changed his name ‘for a fresh start’.
The anti-stalking charity Paladin said: ‘We hear of too many cases like this where serial offenders can hide their past, often because they have changed their name or moved.’