FORT WAYNE – He once called 88 times in a two-hour period. He repeatedly drove past her house in his black BMW. He sent rambling emails and countless text messages.

Between October 2006 and January 2008, Michael McClellan harassed and threatened his ex-girlfriend to such a degree that she had to dramatically alter the way she lived, prosecutors said.

In January 2011, prosecutors charged McClellan, 42, now of Waterloo, with three counts of stalking. Two are Class C felonies punishable by up to eight years in prison that accuse the former Allen County resident of putting the woman in fear of being seriously injured, sexually assaulted or killed, as well as violating a protective order. The third charge, a Class D felony punishable by up to three years, accuses McClellan of stalking the woman’s husband, stemming from repeated threatening emails McClellan sent him, according to court documents.

The woman testified Tuesday during the first day of the trial about how 11 months after she ended the relationship, McClellan popped back up in her life. She told jurors that McClellan once told her the best way to get revenge on someone is 11 months from the time you decide to get revenge. It was almost 11 months from their breakup when McClellan called her about how his dog ran away.

Her encounters with him in the next few weeks increased in number and intensity, so much so that in November 2006, she obtained a protective order against him, according to her testimony.

But that only seemed to escalate his behavior, according to her testimony.

“I’ve said throughout this thing, I’m not trying to ruin the guy’s life,” she told the Allen Superior Court jury of seven men and five women. “I just need him to leave me alone. Just stop it.”

She said she called the police and filed report after report. And still, according to her testimony and prosecutors, McClellan, 42, came on “like a freight train.”

After the protective order was filed, the woman testified she had a few days without contact from McClellan. Then it resumed again with phone call after phone call, email after email, she said.

She testified she picked up the phone a few times out of frustration and desperation.

“Sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and say ‘stop, stop, stop, stop calling me,’ ” she said. “He had to stop.”

But he didn’t stop, according to testimony.

In January 2007, he hacked into her email, changing her password and locking her out. He forwarded information from her inbox to her friends and family, her boyfriend, co-workers and clients. She changed her phone number and her email address, but McClellan found them. And it started all over again, she said.

Prosecutors told the jury they’d see evidence of McClellan’s behavior and hear how she stopped going out, changed her routine and her vehicles and had her children stay elsewhere out of fear for what McClellan would do.

His attorney, John Bohdan, said the state would fall short of proving that McClellan committed the crimes and would be unable to deliver on the evidence prosecutors promised the jury.

But at the end of the day, the jury heard recordings McClellan made, then digitally altered and edited. He then left those on the woman’s voice mail at home and at work.

As prosecutors played the recordings, jurors had a visible reaction to the string of angry expletives, vulgar phrases and threats to kill her, her family and her favorite pet.

The recordings, as they were edited by McClellan, repeated themselves over and over, either in their entirety or simple phrases.

“I’m going to (expletive) kill you” echoed clearly throughout the courtroom, repeated over and over again.

While the recordings played, the woman looked away from McClellan, crying and obviously uncomfortable.

Throughout testimony Tuesday, the first day of the scheduled four-day trial, McClellan took notes on a clipboard and shuffled through papers. While he often looked right at the woman while she testified, she rarely looked in his direction, only to identify him at the request of prosecutors for the jury.

“He was everywhere,” she told the jury. “Everywhere.”

The trial is expected to continue through Friday.

rgreen@jg.net