Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
It’s just about two years since my neighbour messaged me mid-evening to say some people were having a violent altercation in my house.
He could hear screaming, he said, and the sound of big furniture being tipped over. Someone female seemed to be at risk, he said.
We called the police, they attended my house, someone who was inside “ran away”, I was later told. When I went to check, it seemed someone had been living there. The house was empty, waiting in a long queue of north London properties for repair work to damage caused by summer flash floods. I changed the locks and thought no more of it.
A couple of months later the police were called again. Same guy, strolling in and out of my house (still yet to be repaired). This time, they arrested him inside. He was standing under the rubble of the one ceiling in my house that hadn’t really been affected by the original problem. As he awaited trial on several charges over the break-in, with damage and evidence of several other varieties of illegal activity strewn round the property, he kept turning up at the house. Once, memorably, he tried to pop in while the police were inside and we were sorting through piles of rubbish, evidence and my and my children’s wrecked belongings. He strode past a police van and car to ring the doorbell and demand his stuff.
He went to prison, eventually, sentenced to two 12-month terms without my being involved in any way. I felt lightly, irrationally, guilty. He was only in his thirties. Last November, a much-worse-damaged house finally fully repaired, we moved back home, festive glasses raised to the end of the nightmare and a wonderful new start in 2024.
In May he was back. Presumably fresh out of HMP, jumping up and down outside the windows. He was persistent and seemingly fixated on my home. Every few days there’d be something left outside the house — a monitor, an umbrella, or the gas main would be tampered with. These incidents escalated. After the gas main cost me thousands for a new boiler, I bought a doorbell camera. Not long after I woke up to find a large knife lying on the doormat inside the front door. The camera revealed exactly who had posted it at 3am, staring fixedly at the lens.
Not 48 hours later he turned up again, rattled at the door as if trying to gain entry and posted some more random items — most likely nicked merch from the nearby market — through the door. It was daylight this time, he was in full view. I saw him and rang the police. They responded in minutes and picked him up round the corner. He went back to prison on remand.
When he appeared at the magistrates’ court, he refused legal representation. He wanted to question me, the only witness, himself. He was denied. Much of my evidence was inadmissible because there was no corroboration for parts deemed hearsay. The judge constantly and apologetically interrupted to tell me I could not say what I wanted to say, while I sat just a few feet from the intruder. I hadn’t asked for anonymity, but someone arranged for a velvet curtain ensuring he didn’t see me — when I heard at the end of the trial he’d asked to question me himself, I felt less silly about the curtain.
The police had been amazing at responding to emergency calls about crimes in progress but when it came to putting together a case, mistakes were made, I was told in that courtroom. The CPS decided the charges but the only evidence was my doorbell camera, my photographs of a knife on the doormat and my testimony. No police were there. The judge was excoriating about the police. He said I’d been badly let down. He said he could only return a guilty verdict on one of the three charges, but he demanded an extensive restraining order be presented at the sentencing hearing in a month’s time for him to sign. Never having been in the situation where I absolutely knew for certain and not rhetorically that the defendant was guilty before, I was pretty shocked by how hard it was to get a conviction.
At the sentencing hearing, a month later, nobody in the courtroom had been present at the trial, including the judge. No one there knew that the defendant had previously lived in the house. Nobody knew anything about the previous judge’s request for a restraining order, which had not been made. Two years ago this man went to prison for a year for crimes at this house, was released and immediately resumed the same; despite this, he will be released from the same prison in a few months and nothing will prevent the cycle continuing. A very nice police officer suggested I pursue a private restraining order — in the same tone that the NHS GP asks if you could possibly afford to pay for your own scan because it would be much quicker. The intruder will be back, of course. Probably really quite soon.
This man, who has caused so much fear, lack of sleep and distress to my kid, who caused us to have to live elsewhere for months, who was arrested for indecent exposure a mere hour before one of his crimes at my house, is still under 40. He already has 50 convictions. I’m not sure the system is serving either of us terrifically well.
I do know that if I’d realised it was my job to build the case against him, I’d have done a much better job of it.
Janine Gibson is FT Weekend editor
How the English courts reached breaking point
A record backlog of criminal trials has left lawyers ‘drowning in cases’. Henry Mance goes in search of the answers Read
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
