A pensioner found guilty of digging up his surgeon neighbours’ plants and moving their dustbins is to appeal his convictions.
The spat between John Weiniger his neighbours, surgeons James and Samantha Miller, simmered for two years before boiling over in the village of Mollington, near Banbury.
The 72-year-old claimed the man who lived next door before the Millers bought the £950,000 house had stolen a two-inch piece of land when the man moved a fence at the rear the driveway they shared.
Weiniger claimed it meant he could no longer take Captain, his African grey parrot, for trips out in the car.
Under the cover of darkness, the pensioner dug up the Millers’ flowerbed, tossed turf over a wall into their garden, dragged the couple’s dustbins down the road and put his own wheelie bins in their place.
Mr and Mrs Miller caught Weiniger’s midnight antics on camera after installing CCTV on their home.
Earlier this year, he was found guilty by the magistrates of criminal damage and harassment, fined £1,700 and ordered to pay £775 in costs and surcharge. A restraining order bans him from going to the Millers’ property or moving anything in the flowerbed for five years.
Weiniger, of Main Street, Mollington, now plans to appeal his convictions for both harassment and criminal damage.
Represented by Richard Davies, he appeared at Oxford Crown Court on Monday afternoon for a short hearing.
Judge Michael Gledhill QC fixed the two-day appeal for July 7 and 8.
At Oxford Magistrates' Court in January, Weiniger claimed he had merely been defending property that he’d owned before the previous owner moved a fence near the Millers’ garage.
He said he was the ‘best neighbour in the world’ and that all his actions had been to try to prevent the Millers seizing his land, despite Land Registry documents apparently showing the flowerbed belonged to the Millers. At that point, Weiniger fired back: “The Land Registry is wrong.”
The pensioner said: “At some stage, someone put up a fence two or three inches into our land. It is a couple of inches, but its on a diagram so therefore they get the land.”
He said the fence move ruined access to the back of his house and had forced him to stop taking his parrot out on trips in his car, because he could not get him into it.
He added: “I did not touch any flowers from the flowerbed, because it was pitch black. I dug up the flowerbed at 3am because it was my land, so I would not expect to see plants on that land.
“My spade may have strayed a little, but that was unplanned and I doubt it happened.”
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