Award-winning Neighbourhood Watch coordinator Pauline Palmer took her role seriously.
When she wasn’t on the lookout for criminal goings-on in her neighbourhood, the 71-year-old was keeping an eagle eye on what neighbour Brian Collins, 51, was up to.
She watched him from the day he moved in, a court was told.
For three years, Palmer kept a detailed diary on his activities – including sessions in his garden hot tub with women, and when he had sex in his bedroom.
In one of her notes, she wrote: “I saw Mr Collins in his hot tub with two women. He said ‘get your t**s out, b****’.”
In her diary, she also recorded when women stayed overnight with Collins. And she noted the comings and goings of male visitors, some of whom “wore baseball caps”.
Palmer took down vehicle registration numbers, noted conversations and admitted putting her ear to the adjoining wall of their Victorian terraced homes – hers at No 12 St Julian Grove, Colchester, his at No 14.
Chelmsford Crown Court heard that she amassed sufficient information to persuade Colchester Council to serve a noise abatement order on Collins, even though his neighbour on the other side said she had never heard any noise.
Collins, who is on incapacity benefit, was fined £100(R1 099) for breaching the noise abatement order, and faces a further bill of £365(R4 013) in legal costs after failing in an appeal.
Collins said Palmer was “obsessive”, and claimed she was invading his privacy and stalking him. He said: “She’s nosy, interfering, been on her own for at least 30 years. Her attitude is obsessive, it’s almost damned near frightening.
“I have never had anyone perv over me before, write down that they’ve heard me having sex in my bedroom or watch me in a hot tub with a couple of women.” Collins, who said he had never spoken to Palmer, added: “She’s a complete pain. This is obsessive behaviour. She’s complained to everybody, it’s what she does.”
When questioned about her “extraordinarily detailed diaries” from December 2006 to September 2009, Palmer said: “It was my role as Neighbourhood Watch.”
In January she was awarded Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator of the Year by Essex Police. Environmental control officer Guy Milham visited Palmer’s home in September 2009 and said the music from next door was a statutory nuisance.
“I could hear Mr Collins in his hot tub,” he said. “The music changed to panpipes to which Mr Collins was occasionally shouting ‘Oh yes, oh yes’.” But Collins’s other neighbour, Nicola Bailey, told the court she never heard him play loud music.
Last night Palmer, a divorced mother of two, told the Mail: “He made my life a misery. Sometimes the noise got so bad I had to go and stay with a relative for a few days.
“It’s been one of my most unusual cases but it does show how important it is to keep a record of what’s happened.”