Stalker’s threat to burn his ex-lover with acid
A JILTED stablehand who told his ex-partner she would have acid thrown in her face was warned by a sheriff yesterday that he was facing jail.
Craig Burgoyne, 26, rang Rebecca Laidlaw in a rage after she began seeing an ambulance worker.
He called her mobile and told her he was coming to visit – and ‘somebody’ would throw acid in her face for being so vain.
He bombarded her with phone calls, told her new partner he was ‘a dead man walking’, and hacked into her social media account, making private messages between her and her new boyfriend public so they could be read by all her 481 Facebook friends – including her mother and father.
Then he changed her password so she could not delete the ‘graphic and intimate’ exchanges, and sent a text to a friend which boasted: ‘I nailed her on Facebook.’
Miss Laidlaw, 22, an employment coach with Skills Development Scotland, said Burgoyne’s conduct had left her fearful of leaving the ‘security’ of her parents’ home in Shetland, to which she had moved back after leaving him. She told Stirling Sheriff Court that she received the phone call about the acid at 6.18am on October 14 last year, about two months after the end of her two-and-a-half year relationship with Burgoyne.
She said new boyfriend Jason Henry dashed to her parents’ house to warn her that their private messages had been posted on her public Facebook page.
The court heard that the messages she had exchanged with Mr Henry were ‘intimate and quite sexual in content’.
Miss Laidlaw said: ‘I was embarrassed and upset.’
Then Burgoyne rang. She recalled: ‘Craig said he was coming up to Shetland and somebody would throw acid in my face for being so vain. He was shouting that and sounded loud and angry.’
Mr Henry, who overheard the call, said: ‘There was no reasoning in his voice – it was pure threats and abuse.’
The messages between him and Miss Laidlaw were also made public on Burgoyne’s Facebook page.
After a trial held over two days, in September and yesterday, Burgoyne, of Stirling, a stablehand at the Blue Ridge Equestrian Centre near Falkirk, was found guilty of stalking Miss Laidlaw, causing her fear and alarm.
He had pleaded not guilty and claimed somebody must have used his mobile phone to access Miss Laidlaw’s Facebook account.
He accepted he had made the early-morning phone call, and said: ‘I might have said she was vain, but I said nothing about acid.’
Sheriff Wyllie Robertson discounted Burgoyne’s claims that he had not acted as the prosecution had said.
Deferring sentence until December 9 for social background reports, he told Burgoyne: ‘No sentence, including custody, is ruled out.’
A spokesman at the Blue Ridge Equestrian Centre said: ‘We didn’t know about the court case.’
‘No reasoning in his voice’