Stranger danger

Ellis Gunn had survived a lot, including a violent past, and come out the other side tough and positive. But when she started being stalked by a stranger, her world unravelled.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

The day started promisingly with egg and bacon rolls, fresh coffee and the upbeat operatic pop-rock of Queen at a bicycle event in Adelaide in the summer of 2014. Ellis Gunn had been invited to read a poem for the gathered cyclists, after which she biked across town to an auction house where she had her eye on a chest of drawers. She felt good. It had been four years since she'd left the cobbled streets of Edinburgh for the sprawling parks and hot summers of Adelaide, and she and her partner had just purchased a house. She had a small business selling up-cycled furniture and she was getting into a groove in her adopted homeland. As she peddled, thoughts of mother-of-pearl drawer handles in her mind, she had no idea she was riding towards an encounter that would plunge her life into terrifying chaos.

It began with a brush with a stranger. A civil exchange. This particular stranger was a tall, lean, middle-aged man wearing a Ralph Lauren V-neck when he approached Ellis at the auction house and struck up a conversation. He seemed harmless and they had a polite back-and-forth about furniture and houses. The Man asked Ellis her occupation. She said she was poet, but when he asked her name so that he could look up her work, something made Ellis' internal warning system light up.

"I was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable, though I couldn't really put my finger on why," she writes in her memoir, Rattled. As he probed deeper, a sense of unease settled over Ellis. The man explained he'd just moved to Adelaide from NSW. Then he said, "Look, I'm not trying to find out where you live or anything, but which suburb?" Ellis was unnerved. "Why would somebody say that?" Caught off guard, she named the suburb and excused herself.