‘Possessed’ neighbour from hell threw bricks at couple over their fence
A woman who ‘acted like a person possessed’ as she threw bricks and cement over her neighbours’ fence as they stood behind it is facing jail.
Joanne Shreeves, 51, was convicted of assault, criminal damage and threatening behaviour after subjecting Trevor Dempsey, 62, and Sandra Durdin, 58, to an 18-month campaign of harassment at their home in Chingford, east London.
Stratford Magistrates’ Court heard how, after 20 years of friendship, a feud broke out over a concrete post that Mr Dempsey had knocked over in the driveway and replaced without consulting her.
While Mr Dempsey was out of the house one day in October 2020, CCTV caught Shreeves kicking a fence, throwing a kitchen cabinet panel into their driveway and launching debris at an expensive new potting shed.
As the couple worked on their new fencing later that afternoon, she could then be seen scooping up cement on a shovel and lobbing it across, narrowly missing Ms Durdin’s head.
The 51-year-old was watched from the doorway by her father, Peter Shreeves, a former football manager who led Tottenham Hotspur for a season in the 90s and is now said to be suffering from Alzheimer’s.
At around 10.15pm that evening, she allegedly returned with a sledge hammer and continued her ‘barrage of criminal damage’, launching bricks and rocks into the couples’ garden which broke a hosepipe and a camera.
Mr Dempsey told the court: ‘That evening, the big crunch came along, she went berserk. I could hear crashing and banging, I could hear it two stories up, so I went to our middle ground where we could see the CCTV on the monitor. She was throwing boulders, bricks and stuff over the fence.
‘She was like a woman possessed, laughing hysterically. This went on for a while, I actually phoned the police while it was ongoing.’
Shreeves then rang 999 herself and pretended to be Ms Durdin in an attempt to cancel the call-out, the court was told.
Shortly after 11pm that night, she could be seen coming outside in what appeared to be a dressing gown before dropping a pair of bricks over the fence.
In another incident she could be seen shaking the fence as she shouted: ‘You’re a dirty c***, you are. A f***ing dirty c***. You know what happens to dirty c***s?’
The common assault charge related to an incident, also caught on CCTV, in which Shreeves spat at Ms Durdin’s son Mitchell as he stood in the doorway, after which she was heard ‘laughing and cackling’.
Ms Durdin said she felt ‘petrified’ after Shreeves approached the couple’s office window before making a slicing gesture across her throat and saying ‘you’re dead’, which Mr Dempsey managed to film on his phone.
Elizabeth Ajaya, prosecuting, said there had been ‘attempts to mediate and intervene without the matter becoming criminal proceedings’ but ‘despite all that, we ended up having four criminal cases before the court’.
Shreeves refused to attend court on Monday, claiming she was suffering from a medical condition and sleep deprivation.
But District Judge William found this ‘highly suspicious’ given that she had failed to attend previous hearings due to Covid-19 and ruled the trial could go in her absence.
He rejected her previous claims that the couple had doctored the CCTV and editing in her swearing, adding that the victims’ evidence was ‘clear and consistent’.
She will face sentencing at Thames Magistrates Court at a later date.
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