A MAN with a fetish for stiletto heels is such a menace to women he has been jailed for 16 months.

York Crown Court heard how the sound of a woman’s clicking footsteps as she walked home late at night drew Jess Robert Collinson to follow her.

Alan Mitcheson, prosecuting, said as she climbed the steps to her home, the 24-year-old man came up behind her, knelt down and tried to snatch her shoes off her feet.

Fearing she was about to be raped or sexually attacked, she struggled, kicked out and he fled empty-handed.

It was the second time he had targeted a woman’s footwear while she was wearing it.

His barrister Taryn Turner said: “While this man is motivated by desire and needs he doesn’t cope with, then this will happen again.”

However, there was no mental-health treatment available for him.

Judge Guy Kearl QC said Collinson was considered a high risk, particularly to women on their own wearing high-heeled shoes.

“You do have a fixation or fetish about female shoes which have stiletto heels,” he said as he jailed Collinson for 16 months, put him on the sex offenders’ register for ten years and made a restraining order, banning him from contacting or going near the woman.

Collinson is already banned from possessing stiletto heels and approaching a second woman whose shoes he stole, under a sexual offences prevention order made in 2010 after he was convicted of robbing her.

Collinson, of Cooks Garden, Scarborough, pleaded guilty to attempted theft of the first woman’s shoes in Scarborough on November 26 last year.

Mrs Turner said he had not intended to harm the woman and he lacked the ability to understand the distress and upset suffered by her.