A MAN who beat his ex-partner before pursuing her halfway across the country to York has been jailed for four months.

Daniel Christodoulides, 45, shouted abuse as he hit the woman three times on the head in the street, said Jessica Lister, prosecuting at York Crown Court.

He had also banged on her windows, reduced her to tears when he joined her walking and sat in a car outside her home as he phoned.

The woman had initially fled to a women’s refuge in the north-west to escape from him and then moved to York to start a new life without telling him where she had gone.

But after a time, he tracked her down and moved to York himself, before three times breaching a court order designed to protect her.

His barrister Holly Clegg said he knew he had to change and wanted help to change.

“You said you will ‘….. kill her’ as you hit her with the bag three times,” Judge Simon Hickey told him. “You cannot quite understand if you don’t get your own way why you cannot behave in the way you have.”

He jailed Christodoulides for four months and made him subject to a new restraining order which bans him from contacting the woman and going to her home street for 15 years.

Christodoulides, who lives in a static caravan and had previously given an address in Dringhouses, York, pleaded guilty to three charges of breaching a restraining order and one of assault.

The woman told the court in a victim personal statement she had been much more relaxed since moving to York.

But after Christodoulides’s reappearance she was frightened of what he might do and was always looking over her shoulder again.