Convicted stalker John Hall has been to prison on three separate occasions for relentlessly pursuing his ex, Katherine. She bravely speaks out about the hell he’s put her through and her fears he won’t stop until she’s dead
As the figure in the mist slowly loomed into focus, Katherine’s breath caught in her throat.
She was miles from home, halfway up a mountain with her walking group, and just a few hundred metres behind her was the man who had already been arrested on multiple occasions for stalking her.
John Hall, who she’d been in a brief relationship with when they worked together at a bus company in 2021, had spent the months since they’d split relentlessly harassing her. He bombarded her with messages, calls and would turn up at the flat she shared with her nine-year-old daughter, even buzzing her neighbours’ doors in the early hours of the morning to gain entry.
Despite his bail conditions forbidding him from coming near her, Hall tracked her down to her ‘happy place’ – Helvellyn in the Lake District – in September 2024.
“My legs turned to jelly,” Katherine, a 39-year-old mum-of-one from the North East, bravely recalls in her first interview on the record. “I was absolutely terrified. He kept staring at me. He followed me for seven hours as we hiked the trail, then sat in the boot of his car and waited while me and my friends went into the pub to get away from him.”
Hours later, Katherine skirted the car park to avoid him, escorted by her friends.
But as soon as she pulled out of the car park, there he was in her rear-view mirror. “My friend rang me to warn that he’d jumped into his car as soon as he saw me drive away,” she says. “He told me, ‘put your foot down, get home and call the police.’”
Katherine was forced to pull into a petrol station to dodge Hall, 50. “I flew into the forecourt at 60mph in a panic, because I didn’t want to warn him I was going to pull in,” she remembers. She waited for 15 minutes to give him enough time to believe he’d lost her, before setting off again.
Chillingly though, Hall was holding up traffic by crawling along at 30mph on the carriageway. He pulled into a layby then spotted her overtaking him. “The second he saw me he swerved out behind me,” she says. “He’d been lying in wait. I hit 999 and was told to drive straight to the police station.”
Hall was remanded into custody for four weeks before pleading guilty to stalking. He was handed a restraining order and community order at Newcastle Magistrates’ Court, but even that didn’t deter him.
He broke the electronic tag he was ordered to wear and sent a picture of the broken shards to Katherine to taunt her.
Katherine and her daughter were forced to quit their flat and later moved in with her mum for their safety. But Hall quickly tracked her to her new home and would sit in his car watching her every move, staying just outside of the boundaries put in place by his bail restrictions.
“He knew which days I would drop my daughter off at her dad’s,” she says. “He would be sat at the end of Mum’s street waiting for us to drive past, which obviously scared my little girl. Every time I pulled off Mum’s driveway my phone would start ringing from a private number. I would call the police every time and they would just say to log it.”
One day, Katherine left for work after her mum had checked the road to make sure Hall wasn’t nearby. “I got to the bottom of the street and saw his car parked up,” she recalls. “He was flashing his lights, and I just ignored him. As I drove past I saw his car spin round and he came racing up behind me.”
What followed was the most horrifying experience of Katherine’s life – one that she tears up about just thinking about.
“I picked my phone up and rang 999. I was just crying my eyes out and the police were telling me to pull over. I said, ‘I can’t pull over because I don’t know what he’s going to do, he’s absolutely desperate and I’m scared.’”
Hall chased Katherine onto the A69, a dual carriageway, and, terrified out of her wits, she accelerated up to speeds of 95mph to dodge him.
“He was coming up alongside me, he was leaning out of his car trying to bang on my car with his fist,” she says. “He got in front of me and slammed his brakes on, and my car was swerving all over the road. I literally thought my car was going to flip over.
“I was screaming at the police on the phone, ‘Please, please help.’ They could hear him beeping his horn constantly and shouting stuff.”
After 25 miles of their high-speed chase, Katherine eventually spotted help – but the police car was on the other side of the dual carriageway.
“I’m shouting at them on the phone, begging them, saying they’re going the wrong way. The operator says, ‘don’t worry, they’ve got you now, they’re coming.’ And finally they stop him a bit further up the road.
“I’m still driving, the 999 man says it’s safe to stop, they’ve got Hall in handcuffs. I pull over, open my car door and just vomit into the road. I couldn’t breathe.”
Katherine was asked to follow the police back to their station so she could give a statement. “The next day I got a phone call saying he’d been released,” she says flatly.
During her two years of hell, Katherine was forced to quit her beloved job and flat to move into a women’s refuge 25 miles from her support network to throw Hall off her trail. She has since moved counties after her police force wrote to the local authority warning she was at risk of homicide.
In April this year, he even followed her to her late father’s resting place, creeping up on her as she lay flowers at the crematorium.
“I was at the entrance to the remembrance garden taking the plastic off the flowers and got this horrible feeling of dread. I turned around and looked over my left shoulder, and there he was,” she recalls.
“He was almost tiptoeing up behind me so as not to make a noise. I dropped the flowers and tried to run, but it felt like wading through water.
“I rang 999 as I was running back to my car and was trying to speak, but I couldn’t even get the words out.”
Hall was once again arrested after police found CCTV footage of him lurking in the bushes of the crematorium car park for two hours, waiting for Katherine to arrive.
He is currently banned from entering the city where she lives until mid-September under the terms of his probation.
But Katherine is certain he won’t stop pursuing her as soon as he learns of her current whereabouts, which the Sunday Mirror is not identifying for her safety.
In the four years since their first meeting, Hall has been arrested 24 times for stalking Katherine. He has breached his 10-year restraining order several times and she has called 999 on more than 40 occasions to report him following and harassing her.
He has been jailed on three separate occasions for stalking Katherine and for breaching his bail conditions, but she fears he will never stop.
Hall may have served time, but Katherine feels like the real prisoner inside her own home.
“I randomly burst into tears for no reason. I’ll be watching TV, or driving, and all of a sudden I get flashbacks,” she says.
“Something will pop into my head and I’m literally having a meltdown. I think, ‘I don’t want to let him do that to me’ and I get frustrated at myself because I still get freaked out about it. It’s just really hard.
“I really think he’s going to kill me,” she adds. “Nothing bothers him, no punishment, no amount of prison. He needs either a much longer term behind bars or be sectioned in a mental health institution where he can get help, because there is something seriously wrong with him.
“It scares me how he would always say to me, ‘I love you to death’ and ‘you will always be with me’. It sends chills down my spine what else he’s capable of.”
Having had her career, her home and her peace of mind destroyed, Katherine wants the police and the CPS to take stalking far more seriously.
“How many times has this man got to be arrested before he stops?” she says. “I’m miles away from my friends and family. He’s tainted my dad’s final resting place, he ruined the Lakes, which I love.
“I’m constantly looking over my shoulder waiting for him to come for me. He’s taken away my freedom and I live in fear every single day.”
