Stalking victim tells court of her ‘sheer terror’ after learning her ex-boyfriend was tracking her car

A service manager in a car dealership used an app to track the location of his estranged girlfriend’s car, a court has heard.

A STALKING victim has described her horror at discovering her estranged boyfriend had been using an app to track her vehicle and conduct elaborate surveillance on her.

The Hobart woman, 43, said she felt “fear, anger, shame, disbelief and sheer terror” at the situation, which she said had “sent a wrecking ball through my life”.

The woman delivered an emotional victim impact statement in Hobart Magistrates' Court, saying she no longer felt safe, suffered regular nightmares and was still coming to terms with the trauma she had experienced.

Harry Johannes Boonstra, 38, has pleaded guilty to one count of stalking.

Prosecutor Liz Avery told the court the woman had bought a new car — a Land Rover — and that Boonstra, who was working as a service manager in a car dealership, registered the tracking app without the woman’s knowledge.

The prosecutor said all that was required to register the app was a valid email address, the vehicle identification number, and being in the vicinity of the vehicle.

“This allowed the defendant to check on the complainant’s vehicle on a smartphone from anywhere in the world,” she said.

The court heard the app enabled Boonstra in May and June last year to track the woman’s movements to and from work, get live locations of the vehicle and to even control the vehicle.

But the court heard the digital surveillance was not the only form of stalking, with Boonstra breaking into the woman’s house on one occasion as she slept.

“Waking up to the silhouette of a man at the foot of your bed is something I will never get over,” the woman said. “I have suffered from nightmares ever since that night, and can’t remember the last time I slept peacefully.”

The woman said she had been forced to change the locks on her house.

On another occasion, Boonstra confronted the woman at a horse riding event, and sent repeated text and Facebook messages which went unanswered.

The court heard Boonstra and the woman had been friends since 2016, and had become romantically involved in January last year.

But in April, the woman began “pulling back” because Boonstra was displaying “obsessive tendencies”.

The woman only discovered the digital stalking when she misplaced her phone and tried to log in to her email account in an attempt to find it.

It was then she came across Boonstra's email account — which he had previously used her computer to access — which started to unravel the elaborate surveillance scheme.

The woman then reported the matter to police.

“I was in shock and in fear for my life when I realised he was stalking me,” she said.

Boonstra’s lawyer Claire Flockhart is yet to detail her submissions to the court but asked Magistrate Reg Marron to assess Boonstra for a community corrections order.

The matter was adjourned until December 20.