One simple act of kindness sparked a stalking nightmare for Melbourne woman Di McDonald.
In 2014, Di, a divorced mother of three, was working as a supervisor at Craigieburn Big W. During one shift, Di was approached by a male customer who was complaining that he couldn’t find a particular shirt.
“I found out he just had surgery and I felt a bit sorry for him,” says Di, now 60.
What followed was more than three years of stalking that brought Di to the brink of taking her own life. It’s a scenario eerily similar to the plotline of Baby Reindeer.
Netflix’s latest watercooler show is based on the allegedly true account of a British man’s stalking experience.
“It was like Baby Reindeer, where all the victim did was give a woman a cup of tea,” Di tells New Idea from her Melbourne home.
“All I did was to see what my customer wanted.”
Following that initial interaction, the customer returned to the store to thank Di with a letter and a rose. His name was Max Gardiner, a “charming” twice-married dad.
Not long after Di began dating Max, then 62, for a few months.
“He came across as a nice guy,” she says. “He would give my elderly mum lifts to the hospital, and he’d take me out to dinner.”
But cracks soon appeared in Gardiner’s good-guy facade. He became disturbingly possessive of Di.
At her birthday party, he was angry over the attention she was receiving from male friends. Another time, he was jealous of the attention Di was showing her son.
“I’d had enough,” says Di. “I said, ‘I’m done with you.’”
But Gardiner wasn’t done with Di. He repeatedly drove by or visited her house, before posting slanderous and malicious flyers about Di at the nightspots she frequented with friends.
“It was horrible,” she says.
It got worse. Di had her tyres slashed, found used condoms on her door mat and her home-security cameras caught Gardiner hiding behind a hedge one night.
“He had on a black balaclava, but you could see his eyes, they were glowing,” says Di. “I was in fear for my life.”
At her most desperate hour, Di overdosed on anti-depressant medication.
“When I survived, I thought, ‘I’m obviously here for a reason,’” she says. “And that was to get him.”
Despite taking out an intervention order and making 26 complaints to police, Di was told they could not prove Gardiner was responsible. Then her case fell into the lap of Victoria Police’s Detective Senior Constable Beck Norris, who Di calls her “saviour”.
Detective Norris enlisted an FBI linguistic profiler who found similarities in the language used in the flyers and in Gardiner’s love letters to Di. In August 2018, Norris conducted a search warrant at Gardiner’s home.
“She found a bag that held his latest flyer about me, the balaclava, gloves, everything,” says Di.
Gardiner was convicted of stalking in 2020 and sentenced to eight months in prison. After his release on January 10, 2021, he served a two-year community corrections order.
Di says he has not made contact with her since. “It was a really long road,” says Di, who remains “hypervigilant” and suffers from depression and anxiety.
“Obviously, I’m still concerned he will come after me.”
Last week, on May 24, Di launched the first Stalking Awareness Day Australia (SADA), which also has a support group to help other victims.
“Having a stalker is like having your own private terrorist,” Di says. “You know they’re going to attack you – you just don’t know where or when.”
For more about Di’s cause, visit sada.au
If you or someone you know has been affected by any of the issues in this article, help is always available. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
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