A wreck to some, when Amanda Hutton and her partner Richard Burton set eyes on the dilapidated stone farmhouse, to them it was the fairytale idyll they’d been dreaming of. Surrounded by woodland and meadows in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, Fox Hill needed imagination – but they had that in spades.
So, moving into a converted double decker bus on the land, they set about renovating the property – having moved from Suffolk, where they’d run a bathtub painting company together, in search of a complete escape.
Describing life before Fox Hill, Amanda, 58, says: “We had a sign painting business, and worked all the time. We were burned out and wanted to escape. When we found Fox Hill we thought it was going to be the start of the rest of our lives.”
In the summer of 2018, six months after they took up residence, a sleek BMW pulled into their driveway. Francis and Cassie Collins, a couple in their 30s, got out and introduced themselves as their new neighbours, who were buying the land next to theirs.
Seeming affable enough, the two couples formed a WhatsApp group. At first, says Richard, 60, Francis and Cassie seemed keen to be friends. He adds: “They began to text us, asking questions at first about the land, and we invited them over for dinner. A friendship of sorts was forming. They seemed harmless.”
Amanda and Richard planned to buy a small piece of land from the Collinses. They asked for some money – a kind of down payment – saying it would help them to complete their own purchase. Amanda says: “They said they had been living in Thailand and there was an issue with an account abroad.
“We gave them £10,000, saying it was a deposit against the small slither of land we intended to buy from them. In December, when their purchase went through, we sent a further £15,000 to cover the two little paddocks we were buying from them. But when we asked to get the Land Registry sorted, everything changed.”
Instead of receiving documentation from the couple, confirming that the land had changed hands and now belonged to them, Amanda and Richard’s relationship with the Collinses turned very sour. The couple even started sending pictures of weapons – machetes and crossbows – to Amanda and Richard on WhatsApp.
Francis also, weirdly, changed his profile picture to a Harley Davidson. Richard says: “Underneath, he thanked us for it. I Googled how much it cost – £25,000. He’d spent the money we sent him on the bike.”
Bombarded by strange WhatsApp messages from the couple, Amanda says: “I was getting hundreds a day.” Then Francis and Cassie began to turn up at their home uninvited. Amanda says: “Cassie set her profile picture to a snap of our water meadow.”
To take it, Cassie would have to have trespassed on their land. So, Amanda decided to investigate the spot, saying: “They were there. Francis had his phone out and began to film me. This happened again and again. They’d wear bodycams and film us, while making gestures in which he [Francis] mimicked slitting his throat.”
Amanda, who has now written a book with Richard called Stalked, charting their ordeal, says the unnerving behaviour continued for years – escalating all the time. She continues: “We had four dogs and they had two dobermans. They would let them over the fence and they would attack our dogs. They turned from happy pets to terrified animals, quivering inside with fear at the slightest noise.”
Amanda, who has a grown up daughter, Grace, adds: “They began to message her too.” Eventually, the police got involved, urging the Collins’s to stay away from Amanda and Richard. But they carried on stalking them.
In 2019, Francis cut their waterpipe. When Richard had it fixed, he did it again. And again. Then, he began erecting a fence. Richard says: “It was palisade security fencing, two metres high, stretching the length of the boundary where his land pressed against ours.
“It was a continuous wall of galvanised steel, each section topped with jagged spikes that glinted in the sun, like rows of bayonets.”
Amanda adds: “It wasn’t so much a fence as a message… ‘you’re trapped’. By this point, my stress levels were off the charts. We just didn’t know what to do anymore.”
The messages kept coming, too. Richard says: “One read, ‘I got approval for a campsite. It will overlook your special glade. Enjoy your privacy for the next month or few. I never stop, I never lose’. It was just unbearable.”
Then, one day, in 2020, Amanda looked out and saw Francis and Cassie doing target practice. She says: “They were firing a crossbow at our fence, looking up at the house every time they hit the hessian bag that was their target. It was sinister. He wanted us to see.”
Later that night, things got decidedly worse. In the pitch dark, as Amanda and Richard turned off the TV and headed up the bus stairs to bed, two of their windows shattered, one by one. Amanda says: “Scattered among the shards of glass were small round 10mm ball bearings. “Francis had manipulated his crossbow to fire what were essentially bullets.
“My whole body was shaking, my knees buckled. What if we’d been in bed? What if we had come up sooner? We would have been hit.”
Calling the police, they were told, ‘stay inside, officers are en route.’” Later that night, Francis was arrested. When he was released, he firebombed the farmhouse – an act of blatant violence that in 2021 landed him in court. Amanda says: “The relief that this could finally be over was overwhelming. But we’d been on edge for so long, scared to leave the house, scared to be in the house, it was hard to shake the feeling.”
Francis pleaded guilty to malicious communications and the petrol bomb incidents, but walked free, as the judge considered a seven month stint he’d already served on remand sufficient punishment. Amanda says: “We found out that he was being watched by police for much bigger things – a whole crime ring, with drugs involved. What he was doing to us was small fry.”
With a restraining order in place, the Collinses moved to Devon. While relieved, Amanda and Richard don’t believe justice was served. Richard says: “They ruined our lives for five years. They made us fear for our lives. It felt like they were let off the hook.”
Meanwhile, Amanda and Richard tried to move on. Then, in June 2023, they received a call from the police. Cassie and Francis had been found dead at home alongside their dogs, in what appeared to be a suicide pact. Amanda says: “It was a strange mix of emotions. Obviously there was relief. The Collins were gone. But there was sadness, too. How had it come to this?”
She and Richard are now rebuilding their lives and found writing their book a cathartic exercise. Amanda says: “We wrote this to tell our side of the story. We also want to tell it for our dogs, who we believe died early as a result of endless trauma. We only have one left.
“We don’t know what drove Francis and Cassie to do what they did. Or why they felt they couldn’t go on. But now our focus is on healing. Maybe now we can start to enjoy the idyllic future we’d hoped for.”
*Stalked by Amanda Hutton and Richard Burton, £10.99, HarperElement, is out on July 16th
