Sandbanks stalker ‘lived a champagne lifestyle built on a lemonade budget’
‘His Ferrari was taken off him’
A JEALOUS businessman followed his ex-wife around a millionaires’ enclave, ‘tracked her movements’ and bombarded her with calls and messages, a court heard.
Anthony De Havilland enjoyed all the ‘accoutrements of wealth’, including a Ferrari, a Porsche, holidays to Mexico and Vietnam and a luxury flat he shared with his wife, Simone Jackson.
But his ‘champagne lifestyle’ was built on a ‘lemonade budget’, and a decade after being convicted of dishonesty offences the ‘ controlling’, three- times bankrupt 54-year- old has now been convicted of stalking around the affluent Sandbanks neighbourhood.
At home in the wealthy Lilliput district of Poole, Dorset, De Havilland was a dominating and possessive husband, a court heard.
The former Conservative councillor, whose number plate on his sports car read ‘7ORY’, was said to have controlled his Miss Jackson’s finances and isolated her from her friends and family.
After the 33-year- old left him, De Havilland instilled ‘ a genuine sense of fear’ in her by ‘ bombarding’ her with phone calls and WhatsApp messages as well as ‘tracking her movements’.
On one occasion, De Havilland was said to have intimidated her by sending a photo of another friend’s property she was housesitting for at the time.
He messaged: ‘I am outside the flat. It has come to this.’
Fearing Miss Jackson was having an affair with a potential new landlord, he emailed the man to
‘put the kibosh’ on her plans of moving into his property.
De Havilland denied the offences, instead alleging that his ex-wife had been stalking him.
But a district judge rejected his version of events and concluded the defendant was unable to accept his marriage was over.
He was found guilty of stalking between May 15 and June 17 last year and will be sentenced next month.
Under his birth name Tony Ramsden, De Havilland once served on Bournemouth council – only to resign in 2003 after being made bankrupt for a second time. A decade later, the planning agent was jailed for ten months for dishonesty offences just months after being declared bankrupt for a third time. He reinvented himself as Anthony De Havilland once released from prison.
He met Miss Jackson in a bar in Bournemouth and they married in Cancun, Mexico, in February 2019 after a 12-month romance.
They launched a floristry business in Westbourne, Dorset, in 2020 which Miss Jackson said made money, but added: ‘I never saw any of it.’
Speaking after his conviction earlier this month, she had added that De Havilland lived a ‘champagne lifestyle on a lemonade budget’.
‘It was very much credit cards that he ran up to the max and I helped him pay them off,’ she explained. ‘ He bought a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti which was taken off him. We had holidays in Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand and Spain but it was on credit cards.’
Miss Jackson moved out of their flat in early 2023 and initially stayed with a friend.
She was soon on the verge of signing a contract to move into her own place before De Havilland intervened.
Poole Magistrates Court heard that on June 2, 2023 De Havilland called Miss Jackson 120 times in the space of a few hours.
And, five days later, he then accosted her on the waterfront at Poole Harbour. She said: ‘As I drove away I had to swerve to avoid him and then saw him run to his Porsche and start following me.’
She fled to a police station, staying there for six-and-a-half hours before she finally felt safe to leave at 4am.
The following week, Miss Jackson said De Havilland walked into a nail salon she was visiting and days later he appeared outside a Tesco Express in Sandbanks, taking a picture of her and her friend. The next day he sent the picture of the address she was house- sitting at, and was arrested soon after.