EXCLUSIVEHorror of the traffic warden who stalked me: He bombarded me with graphic messages... then came to my home with a rope. Influencer ALEXANDRA SAPER tells her story for first time
Alexandra Saper has frequent nightmares in which she sees images of the man who stalked her for three years.
She has never met him, but it has proved impossible for the 33-year-old influencer and travel blogger to clear her mind of all the sickening and often violent fantasies with which Rob Keating bombarded her in hundreds of explicit messages and videos.
A 39-year-old traffic warden, who lived in his sister’s garage in West Sussex, Keating was not simply content to torment Alexandra from afar either.
As he wrote in one message, he intended to ‘come and shove you in my suitcase and kidnap your a**’.
Not long afterwards, Keating travelled from the UK to Bali, the tropical Indonesian island Alexandra calls home, with a rope in his suitcase. ‘You’re never getting rid of me,’ he messaged on arrival.
‘This man thought we were in a relationship,’ Alexandra recalls. ‘I felt I was being hunted like prey. I have never been more frightened.’
And with good reason. For, despite her pleas to police, little was done to tackle her tormentor, and Alexandra had to flee her home in order to feel safe.
Alexandra Saper, 33, a travel blogger, has frequent nightmares in which she sees images of the man who stalked her for three years
Traffic warden Rob Keating, 39, who had never met Alexandra, bombarded her with hundreds of explicit messages and videos
It would take nearly three years, during which Keating continued to threaten and harass his victim, for him to finally face the consequences of his depraved obsession when, earlier this month, he was found guilty of two counts of stalking involving serious alarm or distress. He faces a possible prison sentence.
Justice is in process then – albeit at a price. For as Alexandra points out, it has only come after a prolonged battle to be taken seriously by a system which, as she puts it ‘seemed to be waiting for something bad to actually happen to me’ before it acted with any force.
It is one reason she is speaking out now. ‘For a long time I would wake up scared, I would fall asleep scared,’ she says. ‘This guy wasn’t even hiding who he was. He was sending videos showing his face and where he worked. Yet even though he was making explicit threats, I still had to fight so hard for what was happening to be taken seriously.
‘I felt so disempowered. I want people to understand the toll this takes.’ Indeed, the softly spoken and undeniably beautiful Alexandra admits even though Keating was remanded in custody last November, she is still struggling to shake off what happened.
‘I’m so grateful he’s behind bars, but the problem with obsessions is that they tend not to go away,’ she says. ‘I worry about what happens when he is released from prison.’
She is aware, too, of the irony that it is the life she chose for herself that left her feeling under siege.
Keating first came across Alexandra, a law graduate from Phoenix, Arizona, through her Instagram account The Wayfaress, in which she posts pictures of adventures as a lone female traveller.
She now has 109,000 followers on Instagram and also runs her own travel and coaching business.
It was not her initial ambition. After law school, in her early 20s Alexandra joined a large law firm in Washington DC, only to find herself restless and unfulfilled.
So in 2018, at the age of 26, she upped sticks and moved to Bali with what she admits was little in the way of a plan.
‘I had visited the year before for a blogging workshop,’ she recalls. ‘It was the first time I saw people working online – prior to this I had never heard of the term “digital nomad” but here were people making money online. I figured, if they can do it, why can’t I?’
Initially living off her savings, she focused on honing her photographic and social media skills, as well as travelling to other far-flung places, from Yemen and Myanmar to taking the Trans-Siberian Railway from Russia to China and into Mongolia, documenting her travels as she went and, over time, attracting sponsorship.
‘It just blossomed into what it is now,’ she says. The only downside was the not-infrequent disturbing messages from male followers. So when, in June 2022, Alexandra received her first message from Rob Keating – the exact contents of which she can’t recall – she thought little of it. ‘I remember it was weird and creepy, but I get messages like that fairly frequently,’ she says. ‘I don’t engage and quickly block them.’
Even when Keating found the business email connected to her website and started contacting her that way, she confides she was not overly worried at first.
‘I felt some alarm at the frequency at which he was emailing me and tried to contact Gmail to figure out how to stop it, but got no response, so I decided the best I could do was ignore it and hope it would go away eventually,’ she recalls.
It didn’t. In fact, it got worse. Emails poured in, day in day out, growing increasingly graphic, sexual and violent over time. Still she did her best to ignore them.
But then, in December 2022, she caught sight of one she couldn’t ignore. Keating messaged to say he was leaving his job to ‘come and find her’ in Bali.
Keating first came across Alexandra, a law graduate from Arizona, through her Instagram account The Wayfaress, in which she posts pictures of adventures as a lone female traveler
In December 2022, Keating messaged Alexandra to say he was leaving his job to ‘come and find her’ in Bali
Keating sent Alexandra a photo of a body in a suitcase and said he was going to kidnap her. Chillingly, he added that he knew she was only 5ft 2in, which meant she would easily ‘fit inside’
‘He sent me a photo of a body in a suitcase and said he was going to kidnap me,’ she recalls. Chillingly, he added that he knew she was only 5ft 2in, which meant she would easily ‘fit inside’.
Still Alexandra continued to ‘gaslight’ herself, as she puts it. ‘I was continually telling myself, “don’t overreact, don’t make a drama out of it... it’s just words and nothing’s going to happen”.’
Only a few weeks later she saw a message that chilled her to her core: it was a picture of a one-way ticket to Bali, with the message: ‘Flights booked baby girl.’
‘Now I was really scared and freaked out,’ she says. Determined to establish who he was, Alexandra went back through her emails and started to look through the video attachments. What she saw horrified and disgusted her.
‘There were dozens of videos, and that was when I really understood the gravity of the situation. He talked about tying me up and how he would force sex on me.’
On January 30, 2023, the situation took a sudden, dramatic turn. Keating arrived in Bali, and messaged Alexandra with the words: ‘You’re never getting rid of me.’ She says: ‘I didn’t follow him on Instagram, but friends said he had posted from a bar I regularly went to, and another at a cafe just 50 metres from my house.’
Genuinely terrified, Alexandra finally went to the police – as well as contacting the US and the UK embassies. ‘The general vibe was “not our problem”,’ she says.
‘After eight hours being interviewed I was sent for a psychiatric evaluation, which I had to pay for to prove I was genuinely scared. It felt like it would only be taken seriously if something happened to me – but by then it could be too late.’
At one point, police suggested she act as ‘bait’ and arrange to meet him in a public place. She refused. It meant Alexandra felt she had little choice but to flee her home. ‘I lived in a small beach town at the time,’ she says. ‘It wouldn’t have been that hard to find me for someone who was committed to doing so.’
She booked a hotel room, where, as she tried to sleep, she had her first panic attack. ‘I was lying in bed shaking, thinking he was watching me, waiting for me to fall asleep and would wake up to find him standing over me with a rope,’ she recalls. ‘I called a friend, and they picked me up and took me to their house.’ Another friend also said she would call the police in the UK on her behalf. ‘She made dozens of calls in a bid to get them to take it seriously.’
Barely able to go out due to ongoing panic attacks, Alexandra realised she had to leave the island. ‘I couldn’t work. I felt sick. It became really obvious to me the police in Bali were not going to ensure my safety, so the only thing I could do was leave,’ she says.
She booked a flight to Laos, north-east of Bali. ‘That evening I felt safe for the first time,’ she says. Emboldened, she posted a video on her Instagram page explaining to her followers that she was being stalked. ‘It went viral, which I was really not expecting,’ she says. ‘I was inundated with messages of support but also from other stalking victims. It was heartbreaking, but it also made me realise this wasn’t just a “me” thing but a huge problem across the world.’
In March, as she continued to hide out – and struggled to work – Alexandra received a call from UK police telling her they had been monitoring Keating’s activity and that he had booked a flight back to the UK. He was arrested on landing in London and remanded in custody. ‘For the first time in a long time I felt relief,’ she says. ‘I thought it was over.’
It wasn’t: two days after he was arrested, Keating was released on what Alexandra was told were ‘strict’ bail conditions. His passport was confiscated, and he was told he could not contact her, otherwise he would be arrested.
But the restrictions proved to offer only short-lived comfort. ‘The bail conditions expired in three months anyway, and no charges had been pressed,’ she recalls. ‘The UK police then told me he had left the country, and it was now out of their hands. So in effect I was back to square one.’
In fact, while the police didn’t appear to know exactly where Keating had fled, Alexandra quickly learned where he was. ‘He sent me multiple videos saying he was in Switzerland escaping the police in the UK,’ she says. ‘Switzerland has not criminalised stalking or cyber stalking, which is perhaps why he went there.’
It left Alexandra drained and helpless as yet more taunting, vile and deranged messages started to flood in. ‘What is hard about stalking is this sense of every bit of your life being monitored however much you try to protect yourself. He knew where my parents lived, and I was worried he was going to go after them, too,’ she says.
The stalking continued for another 18 months, during which an increasingly desperate Alexandra tried to persuade police to act. ‘It was extremely frustrating and upsetting,’ she says. ‘It was constantly transferred to new police officers who weren’t passing on all the evidence, so the investigation was being run based on 2 per cent of the evidence I submitted.’
Only when it arrived on the desk of an officer called Amie Caddy did events take a turn for the better.
‘She worked so hard to do things thoroughly and properly and I am eternally grateful to her,’ Alexandra says. Nonetheless, who knows how long this horrifying situation could have continued were it not for the fact that in November last year, Keating posted a photograph of Alexandra on his own Instagram page alongside a plane ticket suggesting he was coming to Bali once more. ‘Round Two,’ he wrote, and uploaded a sexually explicit video.
Alexandra contacted British police again – and this time Keating was arrested and charged on his return from Switzerland.
She was aghast to learn how Keating told police in interview he wasn’t sexually attracted to her but ‘she’d shown an interest in him’ and thought ‘there could be something there’ between them.
He remained in custody until his trial at Portsmouth Crown Court earlier this month, at which Alexandra gave evidence from behind a screen. ‘It sickened me to be in the same room as him, as that is what he wanted all along. I never wanted him to have that satisfaction, but I really appreciate the lengths the court went to in order to help me feel safe and protected,’ she says.
The jury returned a guilty verdict on both charges after deliberating for just two hours following which, addressing Keating, Judge Michael Bowes KC told him a prison sentence was ‘inevitable.’ He will be sentenced on July 25.
It means Alexandra can stop looking over her shoulder – for now. As we’ve seen, she has no idea what will happen when he is released. ‘This doesn’t just go away because he’s been convicted,’ she says. ‘For now I just have to take it one day at a time.’
