A man has been convicted of domestic abuse after he tried to smother his former partner.
Craig Hayden straddled the woman and squeezed her neck, restricting her breathing and placed pillows and towels over her face.
Hayden, 29, had initially denied the charge of assaulting the woman to her injury but changed his plea following emotional testimony from his former partner at Inverness Sheriff Court.
Giving evidence via video link, the woman spoke of how she had fallen for Hayden and allowed him to move into her Alness home just a month later.
“It was his smile that got me,” she said.
Relationship was ‘mental torture’
But the court heard that the relationship quickly soured as Hayden became controlling, affecting the woman’s relationships with family members and introducing her to class A drugs.
The woman said that initially it was “all mental torture”, but Hayden then progressed to assaulting her.
“He just flipped – he pinned me to the bed, he put his knees to my shoulders, he pinned me down. He had his hands around my throat,” she said.
“He got a pillow and he started smothering me with it.”
The woman continued: “That happened a lot of times, him doing that. It happened in the bedroom, it happened on the staircase as well.”
Woman believed she would die
She said: “One time I believed I that I was going to die.
“I got to the point I though that is it – this is my last breath.”
The court heard that during a family break in Spain – described by the woman as “the holiday from Hell” – Hayden had got drunk and hurled insults at her on the beach.
Following the woman’s evidence, Hayden’s advocate Bill Martin offered a guilty plea to an amended charge on his client’s behalf.
He told the court his client had “a lengthy record” that was the result of “a rather tragic upbringing, which then moved onto a rather tragic and wasted lifestyle”.
He said Hayden, of Mansefield Estate, Tain, was “very sorry for what occurred” during 2015 and 2019.
Sheriff Sara Matheson said there was no alternative to a custodial sentence due to Hayden’s status, record and the nature of the offence.
She jailed him for 24 months.