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Paul Douglas Peters has no memory of attaching a fake collar bomb to a Sydney teenager's neck and now believes his action was "bizarre and stupid", a court has heard.
In the months before he confronted Madeleine Pulver on August 3 last year, Peters was suffering from "major depression" and had taken on the role of a character in a book he was writing, forensic psychiatrist Dr Bruce Westmore told a sentence hearing at the District Court in Sydney on Friday.
Peters, once an affluent banker, has pleaded guilty to breaking into the Pulver family home and attaching a fake collar bomb to Ms Pulver's neck after cornering her in her bedroom.
An attached document demanded an unspecified sum of money and said the device would explode if tampered with.
The incident sparked a 10-hour police operation before the device was confirmed to be fake.
Peters was arrested in the Kentucky home he had shared with his ex-wife, Debra Peters, in the US a couple of weeks later on August 15.