Disturbing video footage has emerged showing a man violently choking a woman in a public setting, prompting onlookers to intervene twice to pull him away after he had spent months obsessively stalking her.
On Wednesday, a Western Australia Supreme Court jury swiftly found 29-year-old Mihael Vrhovsek guilty of attempted murder.
According to prosecutors, Vrhovsek relentlessly harassed the woman over a five-month period, going so far as to change his phone number 18 times to bypass her attempts to block him. This allowed him to continue a campaign of threatening calls and messages.
In the days leading up to the attack, Vrhovsek’s harassment intensified, with the court hearing that he attempted to contact the woman 234 times over just three days. This relentless stream of texts and calls foreshadowed the violence that was to come.
The jury learned that Vrhovsek’s fixation reached its peak when he waited outside her Perth apartment for eight hours, hidden in his car, before launching his attack.
The court has released video evidence showing the assault, including the crucial moment when a bystander intervened to halt the attack.
Vrhovsek grabbed the woman by the throat, lifted her off her feet and carried her, before dropping her limp body to the ground.
A man then intervened, confronting Vrhovsek, which allowed the woman who was walking her dogs an opportunity to drag the victim away.
A Supreme Court jury took less than a day to convict 29‑year‑old Mihael Vrhovsek (pictured) after weeks of chilling evidence detailing his obsessive, abusive campaign against the woman
She was able to walk on her own, but Vrhovsek having broken free of the man who had confronted him, ran after her and again began to choke her.
The good Samaritan returned, punching and kicking Vrhovsek in a bid to get him to let go, before the woman walking her dogs was again able to drag the victim away.
The man who came to help managed to hold Vrhovsek down, preventing him from attacking the woman yet again.
The court heard he had said ‘I want to kill her’ and ‘I want to finish the job’.
Among the flood of threatening messages were lines like ‘Kill yourself already?’, ‘This is your last warning’, ‘You’re a spectacular piece of s***’ and ‘I would have killed myself already but the hatred towards you is keeping me alive’.
The woman told the court she had finally walked out of Vrhovsek’s apartment in September 2023 and tried to cut all contact, but he simply wouldn’t stop.
She said he relentlessly called, texted and emailed her, even though she never once replied.
By January 2024, she said his messages ‘got darker’, turning from harassment to outright menace.
The jury was told the campaign culminated with Vrhovsek (pictured) lying in wait outside her apartment block for eight hours, hiding in his car until the moment he allegedly pounced
A bystander pins down Vrhovesk while another woman drags the victim’s lifeless body away
One chilling email read: ‘Thanks for another sleepless night, I much prefer pretending you are dead in that apartment.’
He followed it with texts including ‘Good night attention‑seeking s**t’ and later, ‘You’re dead to me.’
After spending a weekend away from her apartment because she was scared he would find her, the woman told the court she returned briefly to grab clothes with a friend, but when she ran into Vrhovsek she immediately called triple-zero.
‘I saw him walk out of the doors at me – he was looking down, targeted, coming at me,’ she told the jury.
That call was played to the jury during the trial where she could be heard yelling ‘get the f–k away from me, get the f–k away from me’ before the call goes quiet.
It’s in those moments that she said Vrhovsek put his hands around her throat and lifted her off the ground, choking her into unconsciousness.
The incident was all caught on CCTV cameras and played to the jury, but Vrhovsek denied he was trying to kill her and gave evidence that he did not remember the assault.
The court also released the woman’s triple-zero phone call where she can be heard screaming and repeatedly shouting ‘get away from me’.
The incident was all caught on CCTV cameras and played to the jury, but Vrhovsek denied he was trying to kill her and gave evidence that he did not remember the assault
At one point during the call, which lasts for more than eight minutes, the operator asks if the man has any weapons.
‘Does he need to have weapons to be f***ing threatening?’ the woman replied.
‘The longer you take to answer my questions, the longer its going to take for me to put the job on,’ the operator said as the woman continues to tell the man to get away from her.
‘He’s here … send the goddamn police right now!’ the woman pleads.
‘Stop screaming,’ the operator said before confirming police were on their way.
He will be sentenced on July 23.
The verdict comes just days after new Australian Bureau of Statistics data revealed an 8 per cent rise, or 7,103 additional cases, in domestic violence offenders proceeded against by police in the 2024-25 financial year.
More than three‑quarters of FDV offenders were male (78 per cent), with a median age of 35.
It was the largest annual increase in FDV offenders since national reporting began in 2019.
