SELF-ABUSE
Man suffered years of torment at his own hands
ALEEDS man who has confessed to stalking himself for 4 years has been warned by a judge to expect a custodial sentence.
52-year-old council roadsweeper Mick Pebbles was enjoying a quiet life when he began to receive threatening letters from himself through the post.
“I came home from the pub one afternoon and there were all these letters addressed to me lying on the doormat,” he told the Kippax Rectal Examiner. “They were vile and threatening, saying they knew where I lived, and what time I went to bed.”
“And the fact they were written in my own handwriting left me terrified.”
OFFICER
Pebbles contacted police with his concerns, but the officer he spoke to was unsympathetic and laughed him out of the station.
He now believes that the police’s lack of action only served to embolden himself to carry on. The next day, Pebbles awoke after a heavy drinking session to find an envelope on his bedside table. When he opened it, he was shocked to the core at what he saw.
“There were photos of me in various states of undress,” he told the paper. “I felt sickened when I saw the pictures as I knew they could only have been taken inside my bathroom by me.”
Things escalated further in the following months, with a series of late night phone calls to Pebbles’s landline. “I recognised the number straight away as it was my own mobile. I ran upstairs to get my phone but it was too late. I’d already hung up,” he said.
And Pebbles’s behaviour wasn’t confined to menacing letters and telephone calls. He also said that he spotted himself following him home after a particularly long drinking session at the pub.
“I was walking home one night from my local flat-roofer when I spotted myself following me in a bus shelter window,” he said. “I quickened my pace, but when I looked in the butcher’s shop window up the road, I was still there.”
Pebbles ran into a local police station, but was once again given short shrift by the officers on duty. “They told me to fuck off,” he explained.
STATION
With the police showing no interest in his plight, Pebbles’ was stalked by himself for the next 4 years – a period he describes as a nightmare. And he believes it was the pressure and distress caused by stalking himself which resulted in him turning to drink and occasionally breaking into his neighbour’s bedroom.
Eventually Pebbles decided it was time to take matters into his own hands and confront his tormentor. “I waited outside my house after I’d had a few drinks and followed myself when I left,” he said. “And I couldn’t believe it when I saw myself nipping through the downstairs window of my neighbour’s ground floor flat. I followed myself in but I somehow gave myself the slip.”
CAMERA ACTION
At that point, Pebbles believes that he must have tumbled into his neighbour’s laundry basket and fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew he was being woken by his furious neighbour and two police officers.
“I had a pair of her knickers on my head and there were police sirens outside,” he said. “I tried telling the coppers that they’d got the wrong me, but they didn’t want to know.”
Pebbles was charged with breaking and entering and was taken to the local police station. He was also charged with breaching a previous restraining order, an offence carrying a custodial sentence.
“In 2018, I performed a citizen’s arrest on myself after I caught me fitting a hidden camera in my neighbour’s bathroom,” he said. “I thought I would get a medal for being a good citizen, but that’s not how the law works, apparently.”
“Once again it’s me getting into trouble while I get away Scot free,” he added.