Bowen man Adam Matthew McClintock guilty of stalking ex-lover and her husband

‘You literally carry a part of me inside you’ was one of dozens of messages a Bowen man sent an ex-lover he obsessively stalked for months after she called off their affair.

Bowen man Adam Matthew McClintock leaves court with a female supporter after pleading guilty to unlawful stalking. Picture: Kirra Grimes

A married couple has been forced to move house twice to escape an obsessive stalker who went to great lengths to stay close to a woman he refused to let go following an intense affair.

Adam Matthew McClintock, 52, was on a suspended sentence for assaulting the husband of another former lover when he embarked on a five-month “campaign of intimidation, almost terror”, against a 32-year-old married woman he had started dating in April 2019 after meeting her at an Airlie Beach market.

Bowen man Adam Matthew McClintock pleaded guilty to unlawful stalking. Picture: Kirra Grimes

Bowen District Court heard the relationship ended in December that year when the woman’s husband discovered she was having an affair, but McClintock repeatedly ignored her attempts to cut all ties with him.

The court heard the woman changed her phone number and email address and moved house after McClintock stalked her at her home, her local supermarket and her child’s school, and bombarded her with calls, texts, and emails professing his undying love for her.

When the woman repeatedly rejected his advances, he told her “You can go to hell”, threatened to kill himself, and turned his attention to sabotaging her relationship with her husband, including printing out sexually explicit images of the affair he had captured without the woman’s consent and leaving them in the married couple’s letterbox.

When the couple moved house for the first time, McClintock enlisted a third party to find out their new address by pretending to be interested in a trailer the husband had put up for sale on Gumtree.

He persisted even after police granted the woman a protection notice, and was finally arrested in May 2020.

In total, he sent 46 texts and 13 emails and made 32 unanswered calls in the five month period in what Judge Gregory Lynham described as “completely irrational” and “highly obsessive” behaviour.

The messages detailed what he missed about the woman, including their long “intellectual” chats, but over time degenerated into calling her a “monster” and an “idiot” who had “broken and devastated” him by going back to her husband.

“You wrote that she ‘made’ you, that you had ‘found her for a reason’, and that she ‘literally carried part of you inside her’,” Judge Lynham said in court.

“She responded three times via email making it unequivocally clear she did not want any more to do with you and to leave her alone.”

The court heard one of the physical stalking incidents involved McClintock sitting in his car watching his ex-lover as she picked her daughter up from school. Picture: Kirra Grimes

The court heard McClintock’s previous suspended sentence was for running another former lover’s husband down with his car and kicking him to the head as he lay on the ground.

He was convicted of assault occasioning bodily harm and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle for the 2018 offences.

Judge Lynham activated the 13 months remaining in that sentence, and impose an additional 18 month jail sentence, to be served concurrently, with immediate parole.

Bowen man Adam Matthew McClintock pleaded guilty to unlawful stalking. Picture: Kirra Grimes

He took into account a letter from McClintock’s psychologist stating that he had made attempts to change his behaviour in the time since the offending, which occurred when he was not receiving any treatment for a major depressive disorder developed during a previous stint in jail.

He also took into account victim impact statements from the couple that made it clear they remained fearful he would continue to harass them, even as they planned to move house for a second time, “directly as a result of [his] stalking of them”.

Judge Lynham warned McClintock, a father of one, not to let his “obsessive personality trait” dictate his actions any longer.

“If you’re tempted in the slightest way, look down at your hand and imagine you’ve got the keys to the jail door, because that’s where you’ll be going if you go down this path again,” he said.