Domestic abuse victim failed by system demands legal reform

Now McNulty, 50, has decided to go public. Ferociously determined, she wants to warn other women that domestic abuse can happen to anyone; to show how the justice system fails victims; and to highlight the support she received from Women’s Aid.

McNulty bought her new home in East Dunbartonshire in November 2021 in the hopes of making a fresh start after her relationship with Hazlett, a joiner, ended. The pair had met on a night out in 2017. Back then the mother-of-three was a hospital-based pharmacist, who also ran an aesthetics clinic from home.

With two long-term relationships behind her she was in no hurry for commitment. But when Covid struck in 2020, Hazlett came to live with her. “At first he had portrayed himself as well-to-do,” she says. “He dressed very smartly, wore a Rolex watch, drove a Jaguar. He praised me a lot and made me feel good about myself. But after he moved in, he began to become controlling. He’d tell me what chores needed done each day - and he alienated me from my friends and family.” He also became suspicious when McNulty looked at her phone messages, and falsely accused her of infidelity.

After a row in December 2020, McNulty told him to go. Hazlett left, but did not return his key. Early the following year, she began stripping out her kitchen to put in a new one. Hazlett, who was still visiting to pick up belongings, offered to help and, by March, 2021, he’d moved back in. The reunion was short-lived. Within weeks, McNulty says, he’d started making odd remarks. He said he knew how to follow someone without being seen, and how to puncture people’s tyres. He told McNulty of a “plan” he was hatching to seek revenge over an unpaid debt.  

During lockdown, McNulty had been unable to run her aesthetics clinic. She was pleased some patients had booked appointments for the day restrictions were lifted. But Hazlett said she should spend the time with him instead. She said she didn’t think the relationship was working, and he told her it was over. But he wouldn’t leave the house so McNulty asked a police officer relative for advice. “He helped me compose a text telling him he must go or I would involve the police,” she says. Within minutes of McNulty sending the text from an upstairs bedroom, he was by her side, snatching the phone from her hand. “He said: ‘I am just checking you are not recording.’ And then he spoke right into my ear. He said: ‘If you go through with this, I will have someone take your fucking face off.’ At that point I thought: ‘God, you are dangerous.’ I fled to my mum and dad’s.”

Not long after, Hazlett did leave. But despite being told she did not want to hear from him again, he kept on contacting her. Strange things began to happen. Her windscreen wipers were damaged, her tyres were punctured; her security light stopped working. Then Hazlett wrote a letter telling her he was going out with someone she knew from work. She contacted Women’s Aid who advised her to print out all his messages and emails. Feeling unsafe, she put her house on the market.

McNulty kept her new address to herself. The day after she moved in - a Thursday - she arranged for someone to come and talk about installing CCTV, but it couldn’t be fitted until the following Monday. Hazlett’s attack on the Friday night was calculated. She believes he slipped in through the back door while she was having a bath, and hid in a gap between the front door and the living room door until she went to bed. By then she had locked up, putting the nest of tables against the living room door and a mop across the back door for extra protection.

Hazlett was wearing a balaclava and gloves. McNulty braces herself as she recalls the attack itself. “First he punched me and my nose burst. It was gushing,” she says. “I pushed him against the settee, and he punched me on the side of my temple.” She fell to the floor and he started stomping on the back of her head. McNulty wasn’t sure her attacker was Hazlett. She turned her head in the hopes of finding some way to identify him and saw his Timberland boot come down on her face. She thinks she lost consciousness, then, because the next thing she remembers is him lying on top of her reaching for her phone which she’d thrown onto a stair behind her.

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McNulty knew Hazlett had lost the pinky of his left hand in a childhood accident so she reached for her attacker’s glove to check if he was missing a finger. As she did so, his glove and jumper parted to reveal his Rolex. “He saw me see it and his demeanour changed,” she says. In the struggle that ensued, his right glove was ripped off. Sure she was going to die, she bit and scratched him in an attempt to secure some DNA evidence.

Eventually, Hazlett picked up the back door keys from the kitchen and left. McNulty staggered out to the house next door where her neighbour phoned the police and ambulance service. She shows me photos her neighbour took: her face swollen, her right eye black and the imprint of his Timberland boot close to her chin.

At the hospital, alone and disorientated, McNulty was X-rayed then released. Because, at this point, she was not sure she had lost consciousness, she was not given a brain scan. “My blood pressure was sky high but they let me walk round to get the X-rays myself,” she says. “They weren’t really bothered about me because I was able to talk.”

Victoria McNulty, with dog Roxie, is speaking out to help other women. Photo Colin Mearns. (Image: Colin Mearns)

The police were able to retrieve DNA from the glove and from beneath her fingernails. There was no match on the database, but, because McNulty had printed off the messages and emails as Women’s Aid suggested, the police were able to arrest him in connection with the domestic abuse. Then they took his DNA and matched it to the intruder’s.

An emotional wreck, McNulty stayed with her mum and dad for 17 weeks. By January 2023, she was suffering flashbacks so severe she was finding it difficult to function. Her colleague recommended EMDR treatment, but there was an NHS waiting list so she had to pay for private sessions. She also attended a brain injury clinic. Still highly articulate, she sometimes struggles to find the right word, and she tires quickly. “Bright lights and noise drain my mental batteries,” she says.

Hazlett was charged with assault and robbery, but released on bail. Not long after she returned to her own house, a man was spotted walking up and down a patch of grass which looked directly onto her front door. She sent witnesses a photograph of Hazlett and they agreed it was him. At first, the police told her he was not breaking his bail conditions (not to enter the street she lived on). But later they came out to look at CCTV footage and interview her neighbours. “The next day I got a phone call from the domestic abuse officer saying: ‘We can’t find Garry to arrest him; you can’t be on your own’,” she says, “so I ended up going off to my parents again until they lifted him on the Monday.” This time, McNulty says, he was remanded for a week, then bailed again.

Her experience of the justice system is mixed. She was allowed to give evidence by video link and to be accompanied by a support worker from Women’s Aid. But she did encounter Hazlett in the court buildings. And she feels communication from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service was patchy.

Because the case was heard in the sheriff court, the longest Hazlett could be jailed for was five years. When McNulty heard the attack described as “very unpleasant and deeply violent” she expected a significant sentence. Instead, he was given six months for the domestic abuse and 15 months for the assault and robbery, to run concurrently. He would have been eligible for parole after seven and a half months. “I thought that wouldn’t give me much time to regain my confidence,” McNulty says.

The Appeal Court judges, who increased the sentence to four and a half years, ruled the sheriff had taken insufficient account of the “highly sinister nature of the offending.” They said he also accorded greater weight to the alleged mitigation than the factors in question  - limited criminal history, good work record, being in another relationship, having family support - merited.

McNulty is grateful for the support she received from Women’s Aid and her family, and believes more should be done to ensure victims are not retraumatised by the court process. “Victims should be aware the statements they make will form the basis of the prosecution so they should ensure what is written down accurately reflects events,” she says. “If they remember more afterwards, they need to ask to be allowed to make another statement.”

She also wants additional measures to prevent victims encountering their attackers in the court building, and legal representation to ensure their cases are prosecuted fairly.

Women’s Aid says McNulty’s ordeal is a heart-breaking example of what happens to many women.  “We know coercive and controlling behaviours are the most important signal of danger for women and children, and yet the justice response so often ignores or minimises that information,” says Chief Officer Dr Marsha Scott.  “The Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 makes coercive control a crime, but our justice system fails survivors every day when it minimises the impact of a pattern of controlling behaviour and the terror of being attacked. One of the consequences is sentences that do not reflect the harm and trauma caused by abusers.”

Despite her ordeal McNulty remains positive. And yet she has lost so much. “Garry ruined the life I had professionally, mentally, socially and financially,” she says. “He will be eligible for parole after half his sentence - twenty seven months for taking away all that is hard to swallow.”

Scottish Women’s Aid oversees Scotland’s Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline which provides confidential support to anyone experiencing domestic abuse or forced marriage, as well as their family members, friends, colleagues and professionals who support them. The helpline is available 24/7. Call free on 0800 027 1234 or email and web chat at www.sdafmh.org.uk ​ or text or WhatsApp on 07401288595.