Ex-policewoman Mandy Dunford, a 54-year-old farmer, was upset by Kenneth Ward who followed her around her nine-acre smallholding dressed only in socks and boots for up to eight hours a day.
Maggot-infested animal carcasses were left outside her home and military historian Ward, 67, would stand on “sentry duty” with a rifle outside her window for hours on end.
Former fellow officer Wendy Coulthard, 54, helped her trap Ward using hidden camera footage after North Yorkshire Police continually failed to investigate.
Images showed Ward repeating the ritual – even standing half-naked in deep snow during one of the hardest winters on record.
Eventually police raided his dilapidated cottage in the North York Moors National Park. Ward, who ran a museum from his home, was arrested as officers found a huge cache of bombs and live weaponry, including a loaded Luger pistol and an aircraft cockpit with functioning loaded guns.
RAF bomb experts had to conduct controlled explosions. When Ward was jailed for five years at Teesside Crown Court Miss Dunford thought her ordeal, which had stretched from 2002 to 2011, was over.
But he is now released and free to go to his home after a restraining order was changed. Miss Dunford said: “I feel yet again that the offender has been given more rights than the victim.
My punishment for his crimes has been far worse than anything he has ever faced.” Ward was jailed after admitting 11 counts of exposure and various firearms offences.
A Sexual Offences Prevention Order banned him from a safe distance of Miss Dunford, meaning he would never be able to return. But it has been changed with a restriction limiting Ward to his boundary walls.
She said: “He can follow me around with only the width of a wire fence between us. When I heard the order had been changed without my knowledge I was horrified. I knew my only option was to pack up and go.”
Five police officers who failed to respond to complaints were criticised in a disciplinary inquiry.