Grace Hallam will never forget the excitement of having afternoon tea with colleagues in the opulent surroundings of The Ritz’s Palm Court.

She had never visited before, so she was delighted to be treated to champagne and pastries for winning a significant contract at the facilities management company she represented.

Later she and her co-workers would go to a rooftop bar, then to a West End show.

And yet that day – October 10, 2023 – also marked the beginning of a nightmare that would leave Grace, 32, frightened for her life.

However, this experience would conclude in a courtroom, with the man who had shared tea and cake with her at The Ritz receiving a prison sentence of over eight years for a harassment campaign that jeopardized her career, health, and peace of mind.

Even though Grace frequently called the police, Karl Chads, another bid writer, was only apprehended when her Ring doorbell recorded him breaking into her house.

In October of last year at Wood Green Crown Court, located in North London, Chads, aged 43, was found guilty of stalking with an intention to cause fear of violence, along with charges of burglary, criminal damage, and trespassing for the purpose of committing a sexual offence.

The police labeled him ‘a very dangerous man’ and praised the severe prison sentence, stating: ‘His obsessive conduct was both unsolicited and baseless. He demonstrated that he would stop at nothing to reach his target, despite having minimal acquaintance with her.’

But, by then, Grace had changed forever. ‘Karl Chads has done nothing short of ruining my entire life,’ she said in her victim impact statement.

‘He defiled possessions that capture my most significant memories and he destroyed the last bit of hope my soul had for this life. Where my life was once broken into phases of childhood and adulthood, I now see my existence as Before Karl and Enduring Karl.’

According to the Office for National Statistics, one in five women experience stalking.

Many high-profile celebrities have opened up about the abuse and fear they have suffered at the hands of stalkers, including singer Cheryl Tweedy, presenter Laura Whitmore and radio host Myleene Klass, whose stalker has just been found guilty and will be sentenced next month. Yet fewer than two per cent of stalking cases get a conviction in the UK. Now the

subject of a new Channel 4 documentary, Catching My Stalker, Grace’s case was one of them.

When Chads joined the firm where she worked in October 2022, Grace’s life was very much on track. She had a job she loved, had bought her first home – a £250,000 maisonette in Watford, Hertfordshire – and was planning a future with boyfriend Daryl Richards, 36, who worked in tech.

At first Chads, who lived in Pimlico, West London, merely popped up on Teams meetings and Grace paid little attention to him. He was in the London office and she worked from home.

But on May 16, 2023, she met him for the first time when they caught a train back from a meeting in Birmingham together.

‘On Teams calls he was just odd,’ she recalls. ‘My colleagues and I had a running joke that he was either a serial killer or a virgin, which is a line from the film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, just to express that somebody’s a bit weird.’

She adds: ‘But on the train journey he was quite friendly to me and came across as fairly normal, so I felt bad for thinking he was such a weirdo.

With hindsight, I see that he was mirroring my conversation. I’m a black belt in martial arts and he was telling me he was a boxer, for example.

‘I now realise he was a fantasist. One minute he was talking about his aristocratic background when in reality [as Grace now knows], he slept in a sleeping bag on a pile of newspapers in social housing. Everyone at work thought he shopped at Savile Row because that’s what he told us.’

It was during that afternoon tea at The Ritz, followed by the musical Moulin Rouge, that Grace really noticed Chads’ unusual behaviour. At that stage, she wasn’t frightened of him, however – she just thought he was rude.

‘I was thrilled because I hadn’t been to The Ritz before and I love food,’ she recalls. ‘Karl and I were sharing a cake stand but he wasn’t eating anything at all. He said he didn’t eat buffets, though it wasn’t a buffet, it was afternoon tea.

‘I remember when we were looking at the champagne list, he said: “This is the only label I would drink from this list anyway.”

‘I thought he was being very rude and not showing much appreciation. At one point, I was chatting to my colleague on the other side of me and we started talking about how we met our boyfriends on dating apps. Karl interrupted, saying: “I don’t use dating apps. I would only meet someone in person.” He was very dismissive of it and seemed very unhappy.

‘Looking back, I think it was because I was talking a lot about Daryl. It didn’t fit his narrative – that I had a boyfriend.’

Six days after the trip to London, Chads made an elaborate excuse to get her personal mobile number, claiming he could not access Teams as he was on a training course.

Assuming he had sent the same message to her other colleagues, she gave it to him. But the following day, he began to bombard her with messages.

The first few were anodyne but, within hours, they became deeply inappropriate. Describing her as ‘heart-stoppingly beautiful’, he tried to persuade her to dump Daryl for him.

‘Put bluntly, I want to take his place,’ he wrote. ‘A gorgeous woman of your calibre must’ve upgraded her boyfriend before; do so again.’

Knowing he was a colleague, and trying to spare his feelings, she replied: ‘I really do appreciate your extremely kind compliments but work colleague it is. I’m a loyal gf [girlfriend].’

Chads immediately turned abusive, sending a message at 11.05pm, which read: ‘You were very obviously leading me on; next time just make it clear: “Karl opens his wallet, Grace opens her legs.”

Forty minutes later, he added: ‘Memo to self: don’t try to shag some below-stairs type from Watford.’

Grace was horrified and frightened. A fan of true crime, she immediately thought of the tragedy of Gracie Spinks, a 23-year-old from Derbyshire who in 2021 was stabbed to death by her stalker Michael Sellers, a former supervisor at the warehouse where she had a temporary job.

‘As soon as he started threatening me, my mind immediately went to what happened to Gracie,’ she admits. ‘I thought: “He’s going to break in, he’s going to rape me.

‘So, I thought, I need to go to the police. I mustn’t engage with him because he will just see any communication as a positive. From that point onwards, it was a nightmare.’

Grace reported Chads to the police the following day but was told they could not take any action until she had told him not to contact her again, which she did. She also complained to her manager about him and was shocked to find he had been telling colleagues in Teams chats that he was in a sexual relationship with her.

The company began to investigate his behaviour and a fortnight after the London trip, he resigned ‘before he was pushed’. At the time he quit, Grace was in Prague for her cousin’s wedding, but now the messages came thick and fast and ‘were extremely disturbing’, she says.

Over two weeks, Chads sent Grace 27 texts, numerous LinkedIn posts and connect requests, five emails and ten voicemails, as well as phoning her on multiple occasions.

Sometimes he pleaded with her; on other occasions he was horribly threatening.

‘I didn’t know whether to cut my holiday short. I had followed the police’s instructions and messaged him to say: “Do not contact me or I’ll go to the police,” but he kept messaging me anyway.

‘I was emailing the police every day as at that point I knew I was dealing with a crazy stalker who has a sexual obsession with me. I was terrified he was going to find, kidnap and rape me… or worse.’

Then, on November 9, Grace realised that Chads had discovered her home address.

‘He sent a parcel via recorded delivery to my house,’ she explains. ‘The parcel included a £190 Alexander McQueen card holder with a skull emblem, alongside a handwritten letter.

‘I have lots of skull art in my house and so it was clear at that point he had been watching me through my ground floor windows for some time.

‘The “love bombing” style letter was extremely creepy.

‘He said: “My biggest regret in life is the fact that you no longer speak with me.”’

At the time she lived alone, but Daryl then moved in and the couple installed the Ring doorbell.

Undeterred by the lack of response, on December 1, Chads sent Grace a bouquet of red roses with another handwritten letter. ‘Dear Grace,’ he wrote. ‘Please don’t shut me out of your life. I was just so shocked and hurt how cold your messages and response to me seemed.

‘We both know we had chemistry between us. I can satisfy you better than anyone else can.

‘Every night I dream of hearing from you and you’re my first thought when I wake.

‘Contact me to save me from this pain I’m suffering please. Yours always, Karl.’

‘I don’t understand how you can be that obsessed with someone when you’ve only met them a handful of times,’ says Grace.

She now tried to get a restraining order against Chads but was told she couldn’t apply for one because his behaviour towards her wasn’t categorised as a domestic violence incident.

Things came to head on December 17. Chads kept ringing Grace – until Daryl picked up the phone, to be met with a barrage of abuse. ‘Don’t f*** with me Daryl Richards,’ he screamed. ‘I f***ing know you mate. I know where you live. I will blow your f*****g brains out. I will rape your girlfriend in front of you.’

After ringing the police – and still receiving no meaningful action from them, Grace says – the couple went to stay at Daryl’s flat. ‘It just kind of felt like I was waiting for him to attack me before they’d arrest him,’ she recalls.

Indeed at 9.15pm, Chads turned up at Grace’s flat, kicking and hammering the front door, before breaking in by smashing a window.

A neighbour called the police and when Grace and Daryl went back to the flat later that night, they found Chads had smashed up the bathroom, causing £6,000 worth of damage.

He had also stolen her journal, which she’d hidden in the back of a cupboard.

It was then that she realised the must have been watching her through the large bay window of her ground floor bedroom too.

‘At that stage I was incredibly scared,’ she says. ‘I had no idea what he would do next.’

After surveying the mess, the couple went back to Daryl’s, where they tried to get some rest. But around 3am the following day, Chads returned to the flat and smashed the doorbell camera and two glass panels in the front door.

Leaving Grace at his home, Daryl called the police and drove over to the house, arriving just in time to see a dozen police officers in squad cars and a prison van arrest Chads at the scene. He had two glasses and a bottle of wine in his backpack – and seven condoms in his pocket.

Adding insult to injury, Chads pleaded not guilty and Grace was forced to testify against him last summer.

‘I was two days on the stand and was absolutely terrified,’ she says. ‘I was super paranoid that his defence would cherry pick whatever they wanted from my phone and twist it.

‘I wanted to be at the trial every day and sit in the gallery because I wanted to hear what the police testimony was. But, in the end, I had to rely on friends and family to report back to me because I didn’t think it was right for him to see me.

‘The fact is, he’s going to get out one day so the more information I know about what he’s done, the better I can prepare myself for when he is released.’

Hertfordshire Police said: ‘The Constabulary recognises the significant harm that stalking causes and that, in this case, the force’s initial response to the reports did not meet the required standards.

‘Last year the Constabulary initiated a significant piece of work to improve our response to stalking, including training for front line officers and investigators including the use of Stalking Protection Orders.’

What can’t be easily repaired, however, is Grace’s confidence.

‘I don’t want to be obsessing about him, moving forward,’ she says. ‘I want him to become smaller and smaller in my mind until it gets to a point when I don’t have to consider him again.

‘[But at the same time, I know] my life is never really going to be the same.’

Catching My Stalker is available to watch now on Channel 4.