SHIRLEY Ballas says she’ll never feel safe after she was harassed by a deranged stalker.
Kyle Shaw, 37, was handed a 20-month prison sentence after brutally threatening the Strictly Come Dancing legend.
Shirley, 64, who endured years of vile messages from the brute, who even confronted her 86-year-old mother, Audrey, in a supermarket.
Reflecting on her ordeal, she said she didn’t feel safe in her own home and at one point worried he might set her house on fire.
In her book Best Foot Forward, she wrote: “I didn’t feel safe in my own home and had sleepless nights worrying about what he was going to do. Would he put a bomb through the letterbox? Or try to set the house on fire? I had smoke detectors installed everywhere.
“He’d shown he was prepared to follow a little old lady round the supermarket, what else was he capable of doing to frighten the living daylights out of my family.”
“He’s taken my peace of mind away from me and I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover it. I will never feel completely safe again.
Shaw first contacted her in 2017 because he believed her late brother was his dad due to information his mum provided.
He accused the star of being responsible for David Rich’s death after he took his own life aged just 44.
She said how he was “hounding” her through every social media and was demanding a DNA test.
One of his messages read: “Just a reminder, my dad is dead because of you, because you left him alone. He’s dead. You killed him. You murdered him. You did this. Why did you leave my dad to die?’”
“He’d seek out my friends and post the most awful messages to them, using language I can’t even bring myself to repeat,” she wrote.
Shaw also tailed Shirley’s elderly mum Audrey Rich and told her she was his “grandmother”.
By 2020, Shaw began messaging Shirley on Instagram sending chilling threats and asking: “Do you want me to kill myself Shirley?”
She contacted police but the stalker continued his campaign and shared photos from outside Shirley’s home.
He branded the former dancer “Auntie Shirlie [sic]” and set up a profile in the name of her tragic brother.
Shaw told her: “You will ruin my life, I’ll ruin yours and everyone else around you.”
The nightmare came five months after Shirley said she called in police after a man took photos of her house and car.
He also “lunged” at her on one occasion – although it is not known whether that case is connected to Shaw’s.
Speaking about her ordeal, Celebrity Bear Hunt star Shirley said: “I like to be kind of like a free bird, but we’re coming into times now where you have to be more vigilant of yourself.
“You’re upping your level of alarms. And I always tell my mum, ‘I’m here, I’ve arrived’. I wouldn’t bother normally but it’s become a thing that we do.
‘‘I always like to say, ‘I’m safe, I’m in the right place, I’m where I should be.’
“Thankfully the BBC’s duty of care towards me has been one thousand per cent. They have been fantastic.
“So, in some of these instances, when it was difficult — this stalker came from the North of England — I had somebody walking me from the hotel. They checked in on me to make sure that I was OK. I just felt very well protected.”
Shaw wept as he was handed a 20-month sentence suspended for 20 months after pleading guilty to stalking the star and possession of cannabis.
He was later heard telling his family: “I thought I was going down”.
Sentencing, Judge Gary Woodhall said Shaw “engaged in persistent unwanted online contact”.
He continued: “I’m satisfied your motivation was a desire to connect with people you believed were your family. Whether there was any truth in that belief is difficult to determine.
“However, you then embarked upon a consistent campaign of contact involving implicit threats involving not only Shirley Ballas but those connected with her.
“This was a menacing threat against her and her family and involved intrusion of her privacy which caused her real concern for her own safety.”
