My daughter was hounded over WhatsApp then murdered

Stephanie Hansen was stabbed to death by her housemate after he obsessively spied on her in their home. Her mother Glenda, who knew nothing of her daughter's cyber-stalking ordeal, today bravely shares her story to help others be alert to dangerous behaviour

- By Claire Donnelly

T’S THE devastating phone call every parent dreads. And when police telephoned Glenda Hansen to say her beautiful daughter Stephanie (also known as Steph) had been found dead, her first thought was she’d had an accident or perhaps been attacked by a burglar.

Her second thought was to wonder if Steph’s flatmate Sheldon Rodrigues was OK. But as Glenda tried to make sense of what had happened, Rodrigues, Steph’s apparently mild-mannered friend and colleague, was actually being investigated by police.

Within days it became clear that the 30-year-old had actually murdered Steph - stabbing her more than 60 times before battering her lifeless body with a hairdryer and a tower fan.

He’d become obsessed with the friendly, animal-loving young women he’d met at work, stalking her on social media and via secret cameras he’d installed in the house they shared bombarding her with thousands of pleading and abusive WhatsApp messages, begging her to love him and threatening her and her boyfriend.

Tragically, Steph, 39, hadn’t told anyone about his increasingly deranged behaviour believing she could deal with it herself. Now her mum, speaking for the first time about the tragedy, is warning others to learn from her family's pain and be alert to cyber-stalking and dangerous behaviour.

“He would have been the last person I would have thought capable of doing what he did,” says Glenda, 67. “But when you look at the messages he sent her that all changes. The last three months of her life must have been absolute hell - but she kept it to herself, she thought she could handle it.

“When you read the messages, he was becoming increasingly obsessed. He was googling, ‘What can I do to make someone love me?’ ‘How can I have plastic surgery to make someone love me?’ He actually said, ‘I’ll go to prison for you’.

“She was getting 80 WhatsApp messages a day from him, demanding she answer him.