More on KentOnline
Home Whitstable News Article
An abuser who brutally attacked his former partner and tormented her in court has been jailed.
Mark Walker, of Whitstable, punched three of the woman’s teeth out and kicked her “full pelt” in the face as she lay on the floor.
The 46-year-old, who also throttled the woman, paused mid attack to smoke a cigarette as she tried scrambling to escape.
After fleeing out of a window she told a 999 call-handler: “He is going to kill me.”
Walker would later make a series of chilling phone calls to his victim trying to persuade her to drop the case against him.
He was jailed for four years at Canterbury Crown Court for the attack in Whitstable in December last year.
The brave woman told jurors: “He knocked out about three of my teeth, I had to have five stitches in my mouth.
'He then came over and kicked me full pelt in the side of the mouth...'
“I had marks around my neck and a swollen face from where he kicked me.
She explained when Walker stopped to smoke a cigarette she fled but slipped in his blood on the kitchen floor, a result of an earlier skirmish with a bread knife.
“He then came over and kicked me full pelt in the side of the mouth,” she said.
Asked how many times, she replied: “Several kicks.”
She jumped out of a window to call 999 from a pay phone after he threatened to kill her, she explained.
In a recording played in court Walker’s panicked victim told the call-handler: “He is going to kill me.”
Officers discovered Walker hiding behind a wardrobe.
He exploded into a rage and punched a female officer in the face after she touched a cut on his hand trying to arrest him.
The attack came after years of torment where Walker stabbed his victim in the leg, cut her ear, and hurled a garden fork at her, prosecutors argued.
But following his latest bout of brutality the woman pressed charges, prompting Walker to try convincing her from his jail cell to drop her case against him in a string of recorded phone calls.
But Walker told the court the phone manuscripts were doctored and his victim regularly abused and manipulated him.
He claimed she invented the allegations in a revenge attack, was a bully, and set out to destroy his life by giving false evidence.
Walker even erupted into an outburst from the dock when she took to the witness stand to “throw her off her stride,” prosecutors said.
In a series of elaborate speeches he told jurors she fell out of a window drunk, adding: “I’m not being funny but if I punched her three or four times, I would have broken her jaw.”
'Walker practically exploded from the dock when she first walked into the court...'
But jurors convicted Walker of grievous bodily harm, making threats to kill and perverting the course of justice on Monday following a five day trial.
Prosecutor Tom Dunn told the jury: “Walker practically exploded from the dock when she first walked into the court.
“Imagine how nervous she must have been coming into the court for the first time and taking her place in the witness box.
“She deserved dignity and respect. She got it from us and from you. But not from Walker who chose that very moment to start yelling at her.
“'She’s pregnant’ he scoffed, ‘that explains everything, that’s why she is making up these lies.’
“That was a deliberate and manipulative ploy to put her off her stride. A brazen effort from the dock to introduce complete nonsense to distract you but much more importantly to distract her.”
He went on: “When he came to try and answer the highly damaging evidence contained in the prison phone calls he resorted to out and out gas-lighting.
“He told you that transcripts were incomplete, missing important points of context, in essence that these extracts had been unfairly selected – rubbish.”
Walker, of South Street, Whitstable, was jailed for four years and slapped with a nine year restraining order.