Katie Bell: Victim of Sheffield stalker and 'troll' speaks out after five year nightmare

Imagine being at your lowest ebb - grieving the sudden, and unexpected, death of your beloved husband - only for the Sheffield stranger who has been stalking you for four years to choose that as the moment to resume her seemingly neverending campaign of abuse, which has previously included threatening the lives of your young grandchildren.

That was the horrific reality Tracey Patterson was forced to cope with, as she was in the midst of the unimaginable trauma of not only losing her husband, Barrington Patterson, following a heart attack; but the pain of being present as paramedics desperately tried for an hour to 'save his life'.

"At that time I can't even think, I don't even know my own name. I've just watched them trying to save my husband’s life for an hour and now I'm getting bombarded with people being upset with Katie Bell," said Tracey.

The reason Tracey's loved ones were upset with Bell is because she had just breached not one, but two, court orders, to write vile and vindictive comments under news articles paying tribute to Barrington.

Barrington, also known as 'One-eyed Baz' was a former MMA fighter and champion kickboxer, who had became just as well known for his community work in the West Midlands, some of which was carried out through the charity, Birmingham Homeless Support Team, that he ran with Tracey. He also appeared on Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men and released an autobiography in 2010, entitled 'One-eyed Baz'.

"Katie said he should have been six foot under ages ago with his mum," Tracey said, and explained Barrington's mother had died just six weeks before his sudden passing in March 2022.

Tracey continued: "She was sending me more coffins. She was commenting under every news article regarding my husband. Same sort of thing, it’s his own fault...Then she started actually tagging me in because she needed me to see it. She wasn't sure whether I was seeing it, so she started actually tagging me in to make sure that I could see it, which was another breach of her restraining order."

"The one that actually finished me off was the day after my husband's funeral. Obviously there was a lot of activity online from people that were at the funeral, and she posted a picture of my husband's grave and said I'll see you in the cemetery…I just thought: 'You're never gonna stop'."

Bell was made the subject of the two court orders - a suspended sentence order and an indefinite restraining order, banning her from contacting Tracey - just seven months earlier during a Sheffield Crown Court hearing held in August 2021, when Bell was sentenced to 18 months in prison, suspended for two years.

“Every day it was something and it's mentally and physically draining and it takes its toll," Tracey told The Star, adding: “On that morning, my husband had passed away by lunchtime. I remember looking at my son and saying: 'Katie Bell’s gunna start'. He said: 'Mum she won't, she won't,' and within hours people were sending stuff to my sister's phone and my son's phone, to my phone [about the comments Bell was making], going 'she needs to be arrested for this'."

“I know they probably meant well at the time. I wasn't thinking, but it really didn't help me because for weeks after whilst we were trying to arrange the funeral and she [Bell] was relentless, relentless."

As someone who believes in the power of 'second chances,' Tracey had hoped that Bell's first time in court might help her to 'turn her life around'; but Tracey believes Bell 'couldn't help herself' and 'wasted' the chance she was given with the suspended sentence imposed by the judge, Recorder Andrew Smith MBE.

Bell was brought back before Recorder Smith at Sheffield Crown Court last week (July 3, 2023), when he jailed her for 15 months for breaching the orders to continue subjecting Tracey to abuse, as well as an additional charge of malicious communications.

Tracey is today speaking out, in the hope of highlighting the very real, and distressing, impact receiving death threats, and online abuse, over a period of time, which in her case now stretches to five years, can have.

Tracey is also keen to emphasise that not only is Bell, of Stradbroke Road, Woodhouse, Sheffield a complete stranger, living over 90 miles away from her home in the West Midlands, but Tracey has never spoken to Bell, or had any form of communication with her.

This is in spite of the hundreds of messages and communcations Bell has sent to her, and her husband, consisting of death threats including: 'Your grandchildren will die, the whole of them'; 'You best have enough for a lot of funerals' and 'You will be joining Caroline Flack,' who took her own life in 2020, along with pictures of bombs, axes, machetes and urns used to hold the ashes of someone who has passed away.

Tracey was already being targeted by another stalker, Natasha Dawn, when Bell embarked upon her criminal campaign; and Tracey believes Dawn recruited Bell, and the pair formed a sort of perverse online 'tag team'.

Tracey explained: “She did recruit her, I watched it happen. I watched it on Twitter. She’d seen Katie being horrible to people, she followed her and then the next thing she sent her message saying DM me, and then within hours my husband's Wikipedia page had been changed to say he was dead and then that Instagram page with the 980 something messages [about us] was set up that day. And then they became like a tag team."

"I thought oh my god not not these two together because that point I was waiting for Natasha to be arrested.”

“Initially, with Katie, it was pictures of coffins and headstones and then a picture of a bomb, I just thought to myself: ‘I've got two of them’. At that time I had two of them together, and it just felt like it's never going to end. So you know we had to put in a complaint to the West Midlands Police to get them to act."

The police did act and Dawn was jailed for three years in November 2021 after admitting to three counts of stalking at Nottingham Crown Court. Dawn, then aged 43, of Nottingham was also slapped with a restraining order, banning her from contacting or referring to a number of people on social media indefinitely.

In addition to targeting Tracey, Dawn also pursued relentless campaigns against ex-EastEnders actress Danniella Westbrook and Richard McRae, a councillor for Broxtowe Borough Council.

Tracey has described how Dawn's campaign of stalking began with online abuse but soon escalated to her watching Tracey and Barrington's home.

“When my husband was at work. I used to have somebody come and pick me up to take me to the supermarket. Everywhere I went, I had somebody with me, because Natasha Dawn didn't miss a trick. I went to the dentist one day and came home and she put: ‘I don’t know why you’ve been to the dentist because I'm gonna kick your teeth down your throat’,” Tracey said.

“I had Natasha Dawn threatening to burn my house down. I had West Midlands Fire around here showing me how to get out, should she put petrol through my letterbox."

“When you're dealing with two people like that [Dawn and Bell] you have to think something like that could happen because if you let your guard down, then it's all over for you. 

“I didn't go anywhere on my own for months and months while I had both of them on me...people don't actually take into account the velocity of having two people that are clearly unstable stalking you."

Tracey hoped that hearing news of Dawn, her 'partner in crime,' being jailed, might have woken Bell up to the potential consequences of her stalking; but instead of bringing the abuse to an end, Bell 'stepped it up a gear'.

While Tracey describes Dawn's campaign of stalking as being more 'brutal' than the one Bell subjected her to, she still does not believe the threat Bell poses should be disregarded, and disagrees with assessments made by the probation service, ahead of Bell's most recent sentencing hearing, which deemed to her pose a 'medium risk' of harm.

"They can say she was a medium risk and we don't think she was going to turn up [at my house]. We’ve said that about people before and they’ve ended up getting attacked in the street, and dying because nobody took their stalker seriously and thought ‘oh it's just messages’."

Dawn was released from prison earlier this year, and Tracey has not heard anything from her, although police measures have been put in place to protect Tracey and her family in case of further offending.

During Bell's hearing last week, prosecuting barrister, Amy Earnshaw, told the court that Bell's malicious communication offence relates to a number of inflammatory comments Bell made across the social media pages of various news outlets and police forces. One such comment was made in response to an appeal to find a missing 15-year-old girl published by Merseyside Police in November 2022, under which Bell posted: "Serves her right if she is dead."

Bell also responded to an appeal from the Metropolitan Police concerning a woman being stabbed by saying: "Serves her right."

Connor Gurney attempted to intervene and reported Bell to the police when he saw her making such comments, and he himself became one of Bell's targets.

He explained: "I started to get a bunch of messages on Instagram telling me but I'm not going to survive until the next day, you know, that she’s going to kill me, she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that, and I'm just looking on thinking, thanks, that's just a way to start Christmas...I know she’s got previous for being linked to Natasha Dawn, and she has [Dawn] got previous for threatening to set Tracey’s house alight, so obviously I’m looking around thinking well, while this woman may not be a threat to me, she clearly knows people who are. Obviously, you never quite know what people are capable of.”

Connor and Tracey both say they are disappointed that Bell was given bail after she was arrested for this most recent set of offences, and that South Yorkshire Police failed to take her into custody when she breached her bail conditions to continue with the online abuse.

A South Yorkshire Police spokesperson said in response: "Bell was released on police bail with conditions imposed to reduce the risk of reoffending. A report was received relating to a social media post of Bell’s, however when enquiries were conducted, Bell was no longer on police bail.

"We received a further report at a later date of a hateful post possibly authored by Bell. The offending account was quickly suspended and therefore lines of enquiry were limited."

Bell even continued to send Tracey threatening messages when she was in the midst of her own family tragedy.

Moving forwards, Tracey now hopes to resume the work for her charity, Birmingham Homeless Support Team, which she says she was forced to suspend because Bell was spamming posts, published with the intention of collecting clothing and other essential items, with nasty comments.

Tracey is also focusing on collecting bleed control kits and defibrilators put in busy areas, to continue with the charity work that has meant so much to both her, and her husband.

She continued: "We've set up the Barrington Patterson memorial bout which is for the boxing to encourage youngsters to come into the gym and train in a controlled environment, so we'll continue doing all that because it gives me something to focus on.

Tracey hopes last week's court hearing will be the last she ever hears of Bell, but she does not have much 'faith' Bell will leave her alone when she is released from prison at the half-way point in around seven-and-a-half months time.

"I don't just want her to leave me alone. I want her to stop, full stop, doing what she's doing to anybody because I wouldn't want anybody to go through what we've been through as a family. I truly believe people like Natasha Dawn and Katie Bell could mentally push somebody to the edge where they feel they can't be here anymore because I just cannot bear with this, day to day, day in, day out, iPad pinging, phone pinging, pictures of your house, pictures of your grandchildren, contacting your husband's work, contacting your husband's gym."

“I hope this article will explain that it’s not just hurty words, because we can all just ignore hurty words, but not at that velocity and you know it's affecting you know when it's threats against your grandchildren and oh, it's just horrible.”