A violent brother who shut his little sister in a wheelie bin, kicked her, beat her with a broom so hard the handle snapped, and shackled with her handcuffs, dodged jail on Monday.
Ryan Laird, 24, handcuffed his half-sister Mary Anne Deane, now 19, outside his flat on a winter's evening, chucking saucepans-full of water over her head until she was "numb" with cold.
Laird appeared for sentence after a series of delays, having been found guilty last October of a "series of systematic and violent attacks" on his half-sister, who went to live with him after leaving foster care when she was 16.
Sheriff Gillian Wade QC sentenced him to carry out the maximum number of hours of community service - 300 - as an alternative to jail.
She told him: "These were serious offences which caused distress to your victim, who clearly was particularly upset because of the relationship between you and because she thought she could rely upon you."
Sheriff Wade said Laird had no previous convictions for similar offences, and "no substantial record".
However, he did start offending when he was 15 - in a high profile offence in which he broke into a children's day nursery, killed the kids' pet goldfish, and attacked their guinea pigs with a rolling pin.
He snatched the fish, Dory and Nemo, from their tank at the Sweet Pea nursery in Stirling and kicked them up at the ceiling so violently that their heads were torn off.
He then kicked over the guinea pigs' cage and threw the rolling pin, taken from the nursery kitchen, at them as they ran to hide.
The rodents, Fifi and Nibbles, were so traumatised they had to be re-homed.
During Laird's trial for the offences against Mary Anne, the teenager said that the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of Laird "happened so often it started to feel almost normal".
He subjected her to an 11-month ordeal, attacking her repeatedly, taking away her freedom, and verbally abusing her, calling her lazy and smelly.
In the wheelie bin incident, which occurred sometime after Mary Anne's 17th birthday, he and a pal overpowered her and put her into the "stinking" receptacle, shut the lid, and tipped it onto its side.
Mary Anne, then a kitchen porter, told the jury of seven men and eight women that she heard someone suggesting tying the bin to the back of a car and pulling it down the road, and was terrified that she would die.
Jurors at Stirling Sheriff Court took less than an hour to find Laird, of Cowie, guilty of repeatedly abducting and assaulting Miss Deane, to her injury. An allegation that she was left permanently disfigured and impaired was deleted.
The incidents occurred between August 2012 and July 2013. Miss Deane said her ordeal ended after Laird eventually "chucked her out" and she went to live with her father in London. He told her to go to the police, and this she did in August 2014.
Mary Anne said she had been left suffering from depression and anxiety.
Weeping, she told the court:"I think he is dangerous.
"If he can do that to his own little sister he can do it to anybody."
Prosecutor Sarah Lumsden said: "Mary Anne Deane was subjected to a series of systematic and violent attacks on her by the one person she thought she could trust."
When he was a teen, Laird was sentence to four months in a young offenders' institution over the goldfish killing incident. He had pleaded guilty to breaking into the nursery, vandalism, and theft.