Adam Joseph Hanns pleads guilty to stalking

A Lara man terrorised a woman for over a month, bombarding her with messages and sneaking onto her property to turn off her house’s power while she wasn’t home, a court has heard.

Terrifying stalking claims were heard in Geelong Magistrates Court on Monday.

A Lara man terrorised a woman for more than a month, bombarding her with messages and sneaking onto her property to turn off her house’s power while she wasn’t home, a court has heard.

Adam Joseph Hanns, 40, appeared in the Geelong Magistrates Court via videolink on Monday and pleaded guilty to stalking.

The stalking took place between March 8 and April 3 this year, the court heard.

Police prosecutor Senior Constable Andrew Clapham told the court Hanns threatened to kill himself and “get her family involved”, in some of the messages while in others he threatened to release intimate videos.

The woman also received text messages from unknown numbers at one point during the offending, but when she confronted Hanns he denied all knowledge of the messages.

For a period of about two weeks, Hanns texted the woman a total of 250 times, including dozens of messages a day on multiple occasions.

On one day he messaged her 54 times.

The woman repeatedly asked Hanns to stop messaging her, the court heard.

He was also seen by the woman driving past her property, and on one occasion he went to her home while she was away, turning off her power at the powerbox and placing a laminated sheet of paper over a CCTV camera.

The woman was left feeling anxiety and concerned Hann’s behaviour was escalating, Constable Clapham said.

Hann’s lawyer, Adrian Paull, told the court his client’s behaviour was a “very significant blind spot” in an “otherwise functional person”.

The court heard Hann had had three significant relationships, and had continually found himself “falling back into the same pattern of behaviour” following the end of each.

The behaviour included contacting the women and their friends and constant text messages.

“In these moments, periods of time when the relationship is disintegrating he has difficulty accepting that is the situation,” Mr Paull said.

The messages and behaviour were “troubling”, Mr Paull conceded, but he said the offending was not premeditated.

Mr Paull told the court that while Hanns was a functioning member of the community, he had a “fairly limited social group”.

“When a relationship ends, it increases his isolation … he tries to continue the relationship, clearly to his detriment,” Mr Paull said.

Mr Paull told the court Hanns suffers from anxiety, depression and potentially ADHD, having scored highly in that category during a psychological assessment.

He did not consider the consequences of his actions and had difficulty staying focused, the court heard.

Hanns will be sentenced on July 29.

Originally published as Adam Joseph Hanns pleads guilty to stalking