Pensioner torments neighbours with ‘fat lady’ figurine

A “nightmare neighbour” in Lancashire harassed a couple in the quiet cul-de-sac where he lived by playing songs non-stop through a loudspeaker, setting up a bank of cameras to watch them and intimidating them with a three-inch pottery figure of a “fat lady”, a court has heard.

Barry Carr, 66, carried out his bizarre 18-month campaign because he believed that his neighbours were jealous of his wealth, which he had made from running a string of fish and chip shops in Blackpool. “He was found guilty of harassment and given a suspended ten-week jail term,” reports The Times.

The court heard that Carr moved the three-inch figurine so that every time his neighbour Jasmine Anderson went to and from her home she saw it.

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Anderson said: “This man has tormented me... he knows that figurine looks like me.”

The pensioner also used cameras to film Anderson and her partner, former Royal Protection Squad bodyguard David Smith.

Carr played Will Young’s song “Jealousy” and Frankie Laine’s “Strange Lady in Town” on a continuous loop through a loudspeaker. The court heard the songs had lyrics designed to torment Anderson.

The couple “decided to try to block out Carr’s view of their home and cut down the vision of his battery of cameras by raising the fence between their homes by 6ft,” says The Blackpool Gazette.

However Carr then fastened the ornaments and a poster of Smith to his fascia boards so they were still visible, the court heard.

Smith admitted in evidence that he got "so sick and tired of one of Carr’s cameras pointing down their drive that he tried to adjust it by using a long handled brush," says The Sun. He also admitted he had lost his temper with his 66-year-old neighbour.

He said: “He kept goading me saying I wasn’t a man and that my partner was fat and ugly. I am a former member of the Royal Protection Squad and can keep my nerve. But I did go up his drive a little and shoved him. I had had enough.”

“He tried games like putting a bundle of £10 notes in a bush near our garden. Like he was trying to tempt us to take the money and he would have it on film.”

Carr, who stood for election for the BNP in 2009, told the magistrates: “I was being called a Neighbour from Hell – a nightmare. I only have the cameras for my own protection.”

“I could not believe it when two police officers turned up at my home and said they were investigating the positioning of a figurine of a fat lady following a complaint.”

The pensioner was given a ten-week jail term suspended for a year and was ordered to pay his victims £200 each of compensation and £900 of court costs.

According to The Times, he mustn’t communicate with them, display photos of them, or have cameras pointing at the front of their home.

David Hearton, chairman of the bench, told Carr: “Some of these issues may seem trivial individually but together they become much more serious. It was like the dripping tap syndrome, time after time after time causing stress and distress.”