Graham Lee had lived near his author neighbour for two years before he spoke to her for the first time.
Two weeks later, she set fire to his beloved Land Rover Freelander.
The kindhearted wildlife volunteer couldn’t understand why an innocuous conversation about badgers being kept on his driveway had sparked the fury of 63-year-old Susan Lupton.
If anything, Graham walked away from what he described as a ‘nice and pleasant’ conversation with a feeling of optimism that someone was talking, as he thought, positively about the black and white omnivores.
But what followed next was a near year-long period of his life being made hell, compounded by what Graham believes was police incompetence to fully protect him from his nightmare neighbour.
It left Graham petrified and fearing for his life, and led him to take the drastic action of arming himself with a crossbow for protection.
The 56-year-old was born and raised on the Isle of Wight, and is a recognisable face on the island due to his work for the last 16 years with local volunteer group the Badgers Trust.
His heroics include the daring rescue of an injured badger who was stranded on a cliff on the island.
His great-grandfather was a respected Mayor of Ryde, and members of his family held senior positions in the military and on local councils.
Graham Lee, 56, from the Isle of Wight, pictured here with a rescued badger. He was a victim of an arson attack by his neighbour who set fire to his Land Rover
Susan Lupton had taken umbrage with Graham keeping badgers on his driveway and wrongly believed they had killed a cat in the area
On June 20, 2024, his tranquil life in the idyllic coastal village Freshwater Bay, where he lives with his solicitor wife, was turned into a nightmare.
It began a fortnight earlier, when Graham was walking to his garage on a 90ft by 10ft piece of land he had inherited from his late grandfather.
He was heading to his Freelander he had recently bought to tend to his seriously ill, widowed mother in hospital, when a woman he had never seen before approached him.
‘She just came out of the gate and said “oh, you’ve got badgers in your garden”. So I told her I feed them and I do wildlife work,’ Graham exclusively told the Daily Mail.
‘And that the badgers sometimes live on the driveway in a purpose-built cell that I had.
‘I mean, some people are nasty about badgers because they hate them – digging up the lawn, killing hedgehogs or whatever, but they don’t do that.
‘So to meet someone who was nice and pleasant and enjoyed seeing them… I thought she seemed quite OK with it.’
He found out her name was Susan and she had been living opposite his garage for the last two years. Another brief conversation followed, where she mentioned to Graham that he was going to feature in an article in the local press about his badger escapades.
He thought nothing of it until a few days later when a neighbour told him Susan had posted online about him on Facebook.
‘I didn’t even know who it was, so my partner looked her up and saw this Facebook post saying I’m an evil badger man, and my [Border Collie] dog is vicious. I’m keeping badgers on the driveway.’
Those messages have since been taken down. But unbeknownst to Graham, Susan had been watching him for years.
Days later, after returning from a dentist appointment on the mainland, a frantic neighbour rang his doorbell on a crisp summer’s morning to tell him his car was on fire.
Graham first put it down to the morning mist or steam coming off the Freelander due to condensation.
But he got dressed and made the short walk to his garage just to make sure. When he arrived, he was met with a huge plume of black smoke in the sky and a scene of carnage.
‘My stomach just dropped and my legs went like jelly,’ he said.
‘I thought Christ, so I got down there as quick as I could. The smoke was one hundred feet in the air. The flames were about twenty feet in the air.
‘The fence had gone all on fire. My tree was gone. Flames were licking at the neighbour’s window upstairs. Everything in the garden was on fire.
Susan set fire to his ‘pride and joy’ Freelander just two weeks after the neighbours had their first conversation
‘And Susan Lupton is in the road. I immediately said to her, “You did this. Why do you do this?” First off, she said “prove it”.
‘Then I said to her again that she had done it and she said, “Your badgers kill cats”. And then she ran off inside.’
Graham grabbed hold of a hosepipe and bravely battled the flames for 15 minutes until firefighters arrived to stop the blaze from spreading to his severely disabled neighbour’s home.
He believes his heroics saved his neighbour’s life, but it has also had lasting, damaging effects.
Graham was treated for smoke inhalation on the roadside and suffered a burn on his arm. A week later, he was still coughing up black mucus.
Today, he has to use a CPAP machine to help with his breathing.
Graham said he later submitted a claim to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority for compensation for his injuries.
But he said this was rejected because ‘he had put himself at risk of harm by fighting the fire’.
The inferno caused more than £20,000 worth of damage, with Graham’s 4×4 completely gutted.
A window, toolbox, guttering, cooker extractor and a Japanese Maple Tree were all beyond repair.
The immediate impact caused the most angst. Graham’s elderly 83-year-old mother at the time was fighting for her life in hospital with sepsis in the spine that had eroded two of her vertebrae.
He had bought the Land Rover as it was the right height to collect her when the time came that she was deemed well enough to go home.
Susan admitted two counts of arson and was ordered to pay costs of £1,000 and compensation of £7,835. She has also been banned from the village of Freshwater indefinitely
But it is the emotional torment he endured at the hands of Susan for nearly a year afterwards that he could not fathom, due to what he says was a catalogue of police failures.
His neighbour immediately admitted her guilt the moment she was arrested when police arrived, with discarded matches scattered over her patio, as she told officers: ‘I did it. I’m responsible.’
She had used the matches to light a tray of white spirit that she placed under his car. A method she said that a ‘fireman friend’ had allegedly told her to use.
It later transpired that Susan lives with bipolar and was experiencing an episode of mania at the time of the arson. She was sectioned after her arrest.
At the first hearing at magistrates’ court, Graham says he was told he could safely return home as Susan was being kept in hospital and was unfit to plead.
Yet when he pulled up, he chillingly saw her watching him from her window. It then began to dawn on him that she had been bailed back opposite to the scene of crime – despite Graham claiming she owned two other properties on the island.
‘She spent the rest of the day staring at me, whilst I desperately emptied the contents of my garage in case she decided to set fire to that as well,’ he said.
He set up security cameras and a padlocked fence to protect his garage.
But it did not stop his tormentor. Instead, he says Susan would watch him constantly, who had set up a ‘Google Nest camera’ on her window that he believes alerted her to his arrival.
There were days when she was caught on camera, chillingly standing at the end of his driveway watching his every move while smoking a cigarette.
Graham says she would park her car opposite his garage to make it difficult for him to access his vehicle. He claimed in October she walked out in front of his car to falsely claim to police that he was trying to run her over.
And then there were the 999 calls from Susan making claims of harassment. Between June and October 2024 she called police six times.
On one occasion, he says it led to four officers turning up at Graham’s 85-year-old father-in-law’s home in search of him.
Before the arson, she had posted videos online of her hurling bricks at Graham’s rescued badgers.
He said: ‘It made me very afraid, and very stressed. I didn’t want to go down there [to the garage], but I had to make sure it was safe. I was scared, afraid to go down there because of her being there and not knowing what she’s going to do.’
That feeling of terror led Graham to take some extraordinary measures to protect himself and his loved ones.
‘With the house, because she’d breached bail, because nothing is being done to her, because of the arson attack on my car, I had to have fire extinguishers in every room by the doors,’ he said.
The burnt remains of Graham’s Freelander that he bought in order to tend to his seriously ill, widowed mother in hospital
‘We’re not Doomsday preppers or anything. Never had reason to have any type of weapon in the house at all, ever. But because the police were failing us and the CPS was doing nothing, we had to buy weapons.
‘Knives, basically, hidden in every room. And a tactical crossbow that was kept by the bed.
‘The police had let us down. They would do nothing at all. Harsh words were not going to get rid of this woman if she came onto our property at night.
‘When we were cooking in the kitchen in the evening, I would have the back door open in the summer. But I felt fearful that she was going to walk through the back door while I was cooking.
‘It was constantly checking the CCTV on the house. We had to have that installed as well. I couldn’t even take my dog to the garage [as I didn’t know what she would do].’
Graham could not understand why the legal system had not come down harder on her.
He points to a series of failures throughout the investigation, the most damning of all in allowing Susan to return to live opposite where she carried out the arson attack.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary has apologised to Graham for the way officers handled the case, and in a letter in January, seen by the Mail, admitted the service was ‘not acceptable’.
It blamed ‘admin errors’ and a lack of communication between custody sergeants and officers for Graham’s allegations of harassment initially being ‘overlooked’.
Astonishingly, the letter states it was Susan’s ‘specific needs being met’ in the decision to bail her back to near where she had destroyed Graham’s Land Rover.
‘The custody sergeant believed that he could have made her homeless with a condition not to live at that address, having explored the options with her son on the mainland which were untenable,’ the letter reads.
‘I have to take into account that she has not expressed ownership of other address as you have indicated.’
Detectives did eventually submit evidence to the CPS in February – a day before she was originally due to appear in court to be sentenced for arson – to consider charging Susan with stalking without violence.
It was dismissed, with the CPS later telling Graham in a letter, seen by the Mail, there was not ‘a realistic prospect of conviction’ as he and Susan had both made allegations of harassment against each other which were ‘finely balanced’.
Susan had claimed in her defence that she was recording Graham as she ‘had been encouraged by the police to gather evidence to show they were the victim of harassment’.
Graham is a recognisable face on the island due to his work for the last 16 years with local volunteer group the Badgers Trust. He sometimes kept them on his driveway
A spokesperson for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary told the Mail: ‘A complaint was made to our Professional Standards department around the handling by police of the allegations in this case.
‘Organisational learning was identified, and an apology was issued to the victim.
‘The allegations of stalking and harassment were revisited, and all lines of enquiry were thoroughly investigated before police consulted with the CPS regarding a criminal charging decision.
‘Based on the evidence gathered, the CPS decision was to not take any further action.’
A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said: ‘We secured convictions for two counts of arson in this case and successfully applied for a restraining order to be put in place to provide further protection for Mr Lee.
‘Our prosecutors carefully reviewed further evidence in this case relating to other possible charges but ultimately were not satisfied there was a realistic prospect of conviction.
‘This decision was twice reviewed under our Victims’ Right to Review Scheme, and specialist prosecutors independently agreed with the original conclusion.
‘We have written to Mr Lee to explain our decision-making in detail.’
When sentencing, Judge James Newton-Price said that the victims in the case had suffered a ‘terrifying experience’ and that Susan had developed a ‘fixation’ with Graham and had became ‘irrationally obsessed’.
The judge told Susan: ‘You didn’t like Mr Lee attracting badgers to the area, for reasons of your own.
‘You had been harassing him online, calling him “Evil Badger Man” on Facebook.’
The judge continued: ‘You developed a fixation on Mr Lee, him feeding badgers and believing they killed a neighbour’s cat.
‘You became irrationally obsessed with that and started posting your views on social media.’
Susan was ordered to pay costs of £1,000 and compensation of £7,835. She was also handed two years’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, with a restraining order to stay away from Graham.
Susan has also been banned from the village of Freshwater indefinitely.
Today, Graham says life is slowly returning to some sense of normality.
The tactical crossbow is gone. His mother is out of hospital, and he is now happily married, with the couple last year having to postpone their wedding because of the untold amount of stress.
But he still, at times, checks over his shoulder just to make sure Susan isn’t there.
