Concerned parents contacted police when they suspected their teenage daughter had been abducted by a former fellow school pupil and driven 134 miles to the Highlands.
But a trial at Inverness Sheriff Court heard that Kirsten Munn, now aged 18, had gone willingly with 17-year-old Joshua Moody on March 13 last year because she was “bored.”
However, she told Sheriff Eilidh Macdonald that she became “worried” when Moody, now also aged 18, had taken her mobile phone off her because she was using it too much on the journey.
Questioned by fiscal depute Adele Gray, Miss Munn, from Stirlingshire, said she had been using her phone a lot to text her ex-boyfriend and her best pal at the time.
‘It got more tense’
She added: “I was going out with someone else at the time and went with Josh after he asked me to go with him to Aviemore to pick up some of his stuff he had left there.
“We had been in school together since S1. He said that the individual was not good for me, he was controlling and I should go out with him instead.
“It got more tense. I was on my phone a lot and I was getting increasingly more uncomfortable as he was asking me to stop using my phone.
“I carried on and he took it away from me twice and put it in his pocket. It took a few tries but I got it back. I could tell by his voice and the way he looked at me it was annoying him.”
She said that her ex and her friend got in touch with her parents, who contacted the police.
Police received report of alleged abduction
Pc Gary Duncan said he and a colleague got a report of an alleged abduction and went to trace the van, which they stopped near Grantown on Spey.
He said: “I spoke to her and she seemed okay. But she said she was frightened earlier when he took her phone away.”
His colleague, Pc Christopher Mackenzie, told the court: “She didn’t seem to be in fear and alarm. She didn’t appear to be distressed in my opinion.”
Provisional licence holder Moody, of Wilson Avenue, Denny, was arrested not for abduction but for behaving in a threatening or abusive manner by taking the phone from Miss Munn.
He claimed he had taken it as a joke and told his defence solicitor Myhrin Hill that the brightness from the screen was distracting him in the dark.
‘This behaviour, however unwise, was not threatening or abusive’
“I put it on the central console, not in my pocket. She could quite easily have got the phone herself,” he told the court.
Moody denied putting Miss Munn in a state of fear and alarm but pleaded guilty to driving without a full licence or insurance.
Sheriff Macdonald found him not guilty, saying: “It does not meet the objective test for a reasonable person being in a state of fear and alarm.
“In any view, this behaviour of removing her phone, however unwise, was not threatening or abusive and I find you not guilty.
“However you were a new driver on the A9 without insurance for a considerable journey and it is something you should not have done.”
She fined Moody £250 and banned him from driving for 10 weeks.
