A man accused of plotting to rape and murder the TV presenter Holly Willoughby has told a court he spent 99.9% of his time online as he struggled with mental health problems triggered by his life-threatening weight gain.
Gavin Plumb, 37, who denies plotting to kidnap, rape and murder Willoughby, told the judge, Mr Justice Murray, he would be unable to stand as he started to give evidence in his defence at Chelmsford crown court on Friday.
Plumb described Willoughby as his “celebrity crush” whom he would frequently think about “four, five, six times” a day and said some of the “dark” conversations he had about her online were “massively regrettable”.
The jury was played footage captured on a police officer’s bodyworn video camera of Plumb’s arrest. Apparently shocked, Plumb was in bed when the police arrived at 9.45pm. He repeatedly asks “what is going on?” and when told he is being arrested under suspicion of plotting to kidnap Willoughby, he said: “I’m not gonna lie. She is a fantasy of mine.”
A dreamcatcher with an image of a wolf in the middle can be seen above his bed.
Under cross-examination by the prosecutor, Alison Morgan KC, Plumb repeatedly told the jury the discussions he had online about raping and kidnapping Willoughby were “fantasy” and “bravado”. He added: “Chatting online and chatting in real life are two different things.”
Questioned by his barrister, Sasha Wass KC, Plumb said his previous convictions for attempted kidnap and false imprisonment, for which he served a jail term, were attempts to escape a toxic relationship he had entered into at the age of 18, later describing them as a “cry for help”.
In 2006, he had tried to force two women off a train using a fake gun and a threatening note, and in 2008 attempted to tie up two teenage girls in a Woolworths stockroom.
Plumb told the court that after he was released from prison in 2010, he spent “99.9%” of his time online. “If I wasn’t on the console, I would be on the phone, and if I wasn’t on the phone, I would be on the console,” he told the jury.
The defendant also said he would communicate with others in “fantasy” chatrooms, adding: “It was all clean, it was all fantasy chat.”
Plumb said he would chat about having sex with celebrities and when asked if Willoughby was “on [his] radar” at the time, he said she “would have been – I was at home all the time watching daytime telly”.
Plumb said he later met a man called Marc in an online group about Willoughby whom he later engaged in one-to-one chats. He said he and Marc would talk about a “fantasy of setting up an abduction” of the TV presenter and agreed the language they used “degraded her”.
“Looking back at it now, it’s something that is massively regrettable because it’s not the kind of chat I would normally participate in,” he told the court.
Plumb told the trial that at one point his weight was “ballooning to dangerous levels”, saying he reached “35 stone and I was housebound”. He told the court he had struggled with weight fluctuations since he was 13.
“I physically couldn’t move without being in pain or being breathless. It was making me feel so low to the point I felt I didn’t want to speak to anybody because I was a burden because of my weight,” he told the jury. “I had to have members of my family come over to help me with my housework.”
He said that in 2018 he had an operation after a doctor told him he would be dead within four years. Questioned by Wass about his relationships, Plumb said he was “regularly in the friend zone”, adding: “I was regularly their friends, nothing more.”
Turning to his previous convictions, he said he had a “stewardess fantasy” at the time he attempted to kidnap two female cabin crew members from separate trains in August 2006.
He told the court he had wanted to be jailed to escape a relationship with a woman with whom he would later father children. “For me it was my only option – being in the relationship I was in, it was toxic – I was extremely young and I needed to get out,” he told the court. “It was going to get me caught. It was going to get me incarcerated.”
He told the jury that similarly in 2008, when he attempted to tie up two 16-year-old female colleagues in a stockroom in Woolworths at knife-point, he had wanted to “try something really big again to get away from the relationship”.
The trial continues.