Sheldon Rodrigues stabbed Stephanie Hansen more than 60 times before battering her lifeless body with a hairdryer and a tower fan. And what came next was horrifying…
It’s the devastating phone call every parent dreads. And when police telephoned Glenda Hansen to say her beautiful daughter Stephanie had been found dead, her first thought was she’d had an accident or perhaps been attacked by a burglar. Her second thought was to wonder if Steph’s flatmate Sheldon Rodrigues was OK. But as Glenda tried to make sense of what had happened, Rodrigues, Steph’s apparently mild-mannered friend and colleague, was actually being investigated by police.
Within days it became clear that the 30-year-old had murdered Steph – stabbing her more than 60 times before battering her lifeless body with a hairdryer and a tower fan. He’d become obsessed with the friendly, animal-loving young woman he’d met at work, stalking her on social media and via secret cameras he’d installed in the house they shared – bombarding her with thousands of pleading and abusive WhatsApp messages, begging her to love him and threatening her and her boyfriend.
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Tragically, Steph, 39, hadn’t told anyone about his increasingly deranged behaviour – believing she could deal with it herself. Now her mum is warning others to learn from her family’s pain and be alert to cyber-stalking and dangerous behaviour. “He would have been the last person I would have thought capable of doing what he did,” says Glenda, 67. “But when you look at the messages he sent her that all changes.
“The last three months of her life must have been absolute hell – but she kept it to herself, she thought she could handle it. When you read the messages, he was becoming increasingly obsessed. He was googling, ‘What can I do to make someone love me?’ ‘How can I have plastic surgery to make someone love me?’ He actually said, ‘I’ll go to prison for you’. She was getting 80 WhatsApp messages a day from him, demanding she answer him. He’d installed cameras in every room of the house – so he was watching her all the time without her knowing.”
Glenda, a former PA who lives in the Midlands, adds: “If this happens to you please tell someone and recognise this is stalking. Look for the patterns. Is this getting worse? Talk to somebody, get their opinion. Recognise that this can be very dangerous behaviour. We can’t change what happened to Steph but if anything good comes from this, it will be that we’ve helped someone else. It’s still hard for us to believe that Sheldon did this.”
As Glenda says, when Steph first introduced Rodrigues to her family it was as a quiet, lonely workmate. They worked together in the cargo department at Heathrow Airport. Steph was kind and outgoing, she made friends easily, so it didn’t surprise anyone when she took Rodrigues under her wing. He would tag along to family meet-ups or days out and when he suggested renting a house together in Hayes, West London – close to work – Steph jumped at the chance to share the bills and have a garden.
“She was always the one to pick up waifs and strays,” Glenda says. “If anyone had anything going wrong in their life she’d be there to try and make it better. Rodrigues was one of those. They both worked shifts and he’d come along when we met sometimes and just sit in the background. We didn’t think anything of it. She was so excited about getting a garden.”
They had known each other for 13 years. But over the next nine months Rodrigues’s behaviour became increasingly strange. Despite Steph making it clear she wasn’t interested in dating him, he spiralled into obsession – sending her thousands of messages and spying on her and her new boyfriend. When she met her mum for the last time on Christmas Eve 2022, she didn’t mention the stalking – telling her how happy she was with her new partner and sharing her hopes of maybe starting a family of her own.
Even when Rodrigues continued to send her message after message, she played down the situation and said she was planning to move out. “Her phone didn’t stop pinging,” Glenda explains. “I said, ‘Who on Earth is that?’ and she said, ‘It’s just him, ignore him’. She said, ‘I’m getting fed up with him, I’m thinking of moving out’.”
Steph was working over Christmas but she kept in touch with her mum by phone. But on New Year’s Eve, Glenda received the phone call that changed everything. “I’m lying in bed and I get a phone call from the police to tell me my daughter’s been murdered,” she says. “I was on my own. I was screaming, running round the house. I was saying, ‘What do you mean she’s dead?’ I was thinking, ‘Has she choked?’
“In my head I thought it’s a stroke or she’s choked. I was trying to get to London, phoning everyone I knew, but it was New Year’s Eve, everyone had had a drink. When I got there, that’s when they told us she’d been murdered. And the first thing I said was, ‘What about Sheldon? Is Sheldon alright?’ I was thinking someone’s broken in.” While Glenda scrambled to make sense of what she was hearing, the police were looking at Rodrigues as a suspect.
He’d called 999 saying he’d found Steph dead – and even suggested her boyfriend may have killed her. But a deep cut on his hand made them suspicious. He told them he’d hurt himself carving a chicken for himself and Steph on Christmas Day, but work CCTV showed his hand was fine on Boxing Day, contradicting his story.
Within days, he had been arrested on suspicion of murder. He pleaded not guilty, subjecting Steph’s family to a gruelling, seven-week trial. It was then they realised the extent of his behaviour – and what Steph had been through. “She’d gone to hell and back with him,” says Glenda sadly. “The things that he was doing: following her around, following the boyfriend around, spying on her.
“He was listening in to them, to their conversations, he literally had a camera and a listening device in nearly every room in the house and he spiralled. All she ever wanted was to be married and have a baby. I think she spoke to the boyfriend about all this but Sheldon was listening in, thinking, ‘I’m losing her now’. And that’s where it all spiralled from. It was only when one of the detectives said ‘He’d been stalking her’ that I thought of it like that.”
She added: “You think stalking is someone physically following you around, but it isn’t always that. It’s difficult, we need to name it, to say, ‘This is stalking’ and recognise it. We need to update what stalking is and to get across that it can happen with someone you live with.”
Rodrigues was found guilty of Steph’s murder in March 2024 and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years. The case is highlighted in a new ITV documentary called WhatsApp Obsession – The Murder of Stephanie Hansen, which is out now. Glenda hopes the programme will serve as another chance to celebrate the life of her wonderful daughter.
This week would be her 43rd birthday – one of the many occasions they mark with joy. “She was a daughter and a sister and a friend, she’s so much more than just a victim of crime,” says Glenda. “We all have our memories. We get together for a gathering at her garden, we turn up, go to the pub, have a drink, talk about her. At Christmas time we hang Christmas ornaments on her tree and in the summer we have a party in the park – we have a bench there, we have prosecco and a picnic. I often get texts from her friends, saying they were thinking about her and that never stops.”
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