When Cameron Meiklejohn got out of bed and headed towards the bathroom on Monday morning, she encountered the country's most-wanted man in her home.
Meiklejohn, who lives in a garden cottage in Craighall Park with her daughter Eryn, 2, screamed when she saw the slender stranger in the passage outside her bedroom just before 6am. Annanias Mathe, 27, brandished a gun as he pushed her back into her bedroom.
"It was like a dream. He walked into my bedroom and I was just standing there in my pyjamas ... very skimpy pyjamas in fact. I couldn't believe it," she said.
Mathe saw her dressing gown on a chair and pulled the belt off it. Eryn was sleepy and confused, so didn't make a noise as Mathe tried to tie Meiklejohn up.
"I asked him to do it in such a way that I could hold my daughter, but he refused and tied my hands behind my back. Then he told me to be quiet and walked out of the room," said Meiklejohn.
Mathe found Meiklejohn's car keys and gate remote on her dining room table and unlocked her blue Citi Golf.
He found her purse, threw down her ID book and credit card and took only her money. Then he unplugged her 74cm TV, put it in the car and left.
"The whole thing couldn't have lasted longer than 10 minutes altogether. He was completely calm and absolutely composed," Meiklejohn said.
Once the intruder had left in her car, Meiklejohn called Altech Netstar and asked them to activate the tracker on the five-year-old Golf. It was the unanticipated activation of a tracking device on the car that led directly to Mathe's arrest.
"I had to call Netstar because I have the cheap one (a tracking device which doesn't activate automatically). And the guys were amazing. Within about 45 minutes they called me back to say my car had been recovered," she said.
Unnerved and shaken, Meiklejohn is grateful neither she nor her daughter was harmed.
Eryn, who went to nursery school after her ordeal, reportedly said "the funny man's stolen the TV". She received trauma counselling on Monday.
Meiklejohn, who works as a sales rep for Media 24 family magazines, is relieved to know that her car will be returned, but is concerned mostly about getting "all my Josh Groban CDs and the TV back".