Geelong night stalker: Police, Reddit step in to identify creeper

For three months, perhaps longer, a masked man has been snooping around the streets of Geelong, and now fed-up locals and internet sleuths are working to out the creepy menace.

Residents are baffled by the tracksuit and face mask-wearing man dubbed the “Night Stalker” by local media.

Police are just as eager to unmask the alleged offender, believed to be behind numerous trespass incidents between January 29 and March 7.

The man has terrified a number of homes in Geelong and the nearby Surf Coast since the disturbing behaviour began, hitting the localities of Rippleside, Bell Post Hill, Highton and Torquay.

In the most significant update yet, Divisional Response Unit detectives have released CCTV images of the man’s uncovered face.

The images were captured during his latest creepy visit to a home in Werribee on March 7 and 8, where he reportedly attempted to enter numerous properties in the outer Melbourne suburb, 45km north of Geelong, over two days.

Consistently though, the man has not taken anything, nor have there been any direct confrontation with residents.

For the most part, he just snoops around residents’ front doors.

Rippleside man Scott Holbrook, who captured the unwanted visitor on a doorcam, told the local paper: “He seems to be snooping … he moves around quite nonchalantly with his hands behind his back.”

The footage captured the man assessing the locks on the front door around 4am.

“I’m in [the home security] industry because we got robbed when we first moved in — a lot of my neighbours had footage of him it was a matter of time before he came up our driveway,” Mr Holbrook told The Daily Mail.

“I think he’s just looking for keys left under mats and scoping the place out. He never goes for cars or anything.”

Mike King, an ex-FBI criminal profiler from the US, told the Geelong Advertiser that after assessing a map of the incidents, he believed the man was “working his way down from Melbourne.”

“It’s not someone who just happened to be walking home from the beach in their flip-flops and T-shirt and is peeking through a window. This guy is preparing,” he said.

Local Reddit users asked if the online forum had any answers.

“Geelong isn’t that large. One of us knows this f**ker,” a member posted on the Geelong group.

“Rippleside is not a well-thought-out place to attack. It has lots of local parks, which would be good for coverage and shortcuts, but accessibility by car is limited to a few roads,” said another member, who suggested putting cameras on said roads.

Another suspected the man could be from the North Geelong area, which is “sandwiched in the middle” of some reported sightings.

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While authorities have had no luck identifying the man, the community continues to speculate online.

“He’s actually winning this game of cat and mouse,” one local said.

“He will get caught only a matter of time,” another hopefully wrote.

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