By JENNY JOHNSTON

Last updated at 09:15 25 April 2007

Angela and Roberto Casa are looking forward more than most to spending the summer months in their garden. In truth, it will be something of a novelty.

"For years now we've avoided coming outside at all," reveals Mr Casa. "It's a shame because the big garden was one of the reasons we wanted this house.

"But my wife has fled back inside in tears too many times to make it a nice thing to do. When we do venture out we have to bring a tape recorder, just in case it all kicks off again.

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"Or we'll have to run inside to check the CCTV, to see if something's been recorded. Even when it seems quiet, you are constantly on edge, wondering what is going to happen next.

"I'm still expecting that woman to appear and start screaming obscenities at me, calling my wife a prostitute and my daughter a witch

or threatening to kill our dog.

"I haven't quite grasped the fact that an afternoon in the garden might not result in us calling the police."

The sudden arrival of tranquillity in the Casa household - Angela, 40, Roberto, 54, and their two children Luciano, 16, and 13-year-old Gabrielle - is down to one simple fact.

Last week, their 81-year-old neighbour Dorothy Evans was sent to prison, convicted of harassment and six breaches of an Asbo.

The court heard how the whitehaired pensioner had waged an extraordinary campaign of intimidation against her neighbours - despite her advanced years and supposed illhealth.

Calling Mrs Casa - a softly-spoken nursery nurse - a prostitute was only the start.

She had also attacked her with her walking stick, flashed her bottom to Mrs Casa's bewildered mother, told her husband to go back to his native Italy and, in a particularly bizarre incident, got down on her hands and knees to draw round Mrs Casa's car, with her in it, with chalk.

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The harassment had been going on for a staggering ten years, and Mrs Evans had a string of previous convictions involving neighbourhood disputes between 1999 and 2005, including four for harassment and eight for breaching a restraining order.

Exasperated to find her again before a court, Judge Roderick Denyer QC said he had no option but to take the unusual step of sending a woman of her age to jail. He described her as the "original neighbour from hell".

Were it not for the police paper mountain relating to this case - and the weary look in Mrs Casa's eyes - it would be impossible to believe what had been going on in this pretty street in the market town of Abergavenny, South Wales.

It is - or should be - a lovely place to live. The Mr and Mrs Casa's house, worth around £250,000, is wellmaintained.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for their neighbour's. Mrs Evans's home is a ramshackle affair, surrounded by high black wrought iron gates, padlocked to deter intruders.

Still, how the house next door looks is not of such concern to Angela and Roberto.

It is the fact that you can no longer see Mrs Evans - who lives with her daughter Barbara Thomas - at one of her windows, making obscene gestures or clambering out onto her flat roof to hurl abuse, that matters.

They gaze around their suddenly silent garden, savouring the peace, but unsure of exactly how long it will last.

"She got a six-month sentence but we don't know how long she will have to serve," says Mr Casa. "At the most, we've probably got three months without her. After that, she'll be back, and God help us then.

"But for the moment, we've got our lives back, and we've got an awful lot of time to make up for."

By rights, the couple's story should be a fairytale one of how hard work brings just rewards.

Born in Italy, Roberto Casa moved to Abergavenny with his parents when he was a boy. Eleven years ago, the builder got his dream house in Park Crescent.

What really upsets the couple now is that for the first year, they truly felt that Mrs Evans was a wonderful neighbour.

"For the first year we had a very good

relationship with her," Mrs Casa says. "She seemed a sweet, normal old woman. We'd chat a little over the wall.

"I remember her buying my two children presents for their birthday, and she'd bring us back something when she went on holiday. We'd do the same."

About a year after they moved in, however, things soured quite suddenly.

"One day she came round complaining that water was leaking into her garden, and said it was coming from our property," recalls Mrs Casa. "We'd been made aware from the previous owner that this was something she'd complained about before."

More technical investigations followed, but again it was confirmed that the problem was nothing to do with the Casas. Mrs Evans, however, seemed convinced she was being victimised.

"I don't know what happened after that, but the whole relationship changed," says Mrs Casa. "She became obsessed with our front wall, saying that rain was running down the stones and that we'd have to remove some. My husband refused, and she called him everything under the sun.

"We were shocked. She seemed to flip, called him a "b*****d" and said he should go back to Italy. He was very hurt and angry.

"Then she started on me. At first it was just swearing for the sake of it, but one day I was sitting on the step, having a cup of tea when she just launched herself at me, calling me a whore and saying she'd been watching me go with men at all hours of the night. I was shocked beyond belief."

For the next ten years, things went from bad to worse. The caring old lady who brought back presents from her holidays turned into a vicious and vindictive individual who seemed to take delight in haranguing her neighbours publicly.

To this day, none of them can explain the reason for the apparent Jekyll to Hyde transformation.

Although the Casas weren't her only victims - at one point a countywide order banned her from causing trouble in the entire Gwent area - they came in for particularly intensive attention.

"She had a thing about parking, and seemed to think that if we were on the road at all, we were in her way," recalls Mrs Casa.

"I got home one day to find she'd called the police because of where my car was parked. It was on the road, nowhere near her gate, but she wanted it moved. The officers were explaining I wasn't committing an offence.

"When I went to go out later, I got in the car and suddenly she was on the ground, drawing round it. She was ranting all the time. I wound down the window and said:

"Mrs Evans, what on earth are you doing? Please get up. You will get hurt."

By this point, Mr Casa had accepted a job working on the construction of the new terminal at Heathrow Airport, which mean he was away in London for the entire week, returning home only at the weekends.

Back in Wales, the odd behaviour escalated. "One day, I looked out of one of my windows to see her at hers, making obscene gestures at me," says Mrs Casa.

"I tried to ignore her, but then she actually came out onto her flat roof and was prancing up and down, giving me a v-sign."

Then there was the infamous "mooning" incident. That day, Angela's mother was with her.

"I looked round to see Mrs Evans pulling faces behind my mother's back. I asked what she thought she was doing. Then she turned round and pulled her trousers down. My poor mother was horrified. She said: 'Go away, you disgusting woman'."

Slightly odd behaviour is one thing, but with Mrs Evans, things could also be potentially dangerous.

"One day, she tried to run us off the road," says Mrs Casa. "Another day, she drove straight into us when my husband was driving. I was petrified. I feared for my children's lives.

"People - even the police - kept telling me 'she's batty, but she won't do you any harm', but I knew she could. Then she struck me with her walking stick, and confirmed it.

"While we were reporting it at the police station, she was there too, complaining about us, and she hit me right in front of the officers."

And listening to what they have been through it seems perfectly just that Mrs Evans is finally behind bars. Thanks to her, the Casas' well-deserved family life has been simply trashed.

Every day is dominated by the need to fill in the "log book", a vast well-thumbed diary in which every incident, no matter how trivial, is recorded. The reported incidents run into hundreds.

Quite early on, the police explained to the Casas that addressing anti-social behaviour is

extremely difficult and the courts can take action only with meticulously documented evidence.

Thus, they cannot leave the house without carrying a tape recorder, so that any tirades of abuse can be recorded. The CCTV cameras outside their house are constantly in use.

"It's so tiresome. Every night, I come home and have to watch eight hours of footage to see what she's been up to," says Mrs Casa.

"Our friends say she has taken over our lives, that we are obsessed with her, and we are. But to stop her harassing us, we've had to document every cough and spit".

So now they have their evidence - but at what price? Mrs Casa has clearly been to the brink. "My doctor wrote a letter saying I was on the verge of a breakdown," she says. "He wanted to put me on anti-depressants.

"My work suffered because I'd be in such a state. Once, she told me she was going to call the nursery school where I work and report me for child abuse.

"That terrified me. If she'd done that, my career would have been over because they'd have had to suspend me while the allegation was being investigated."

As the months passed, Roberto, away in London during the week, became increasingly distraught about what his family were going through.

When Mrs Evans started on their 13-year-old daughter - calling her a witch and threatening to kill her dog - Mr Casa was incandescent.

"It got harder and harder to ignore her," he admits. "Every time she went for me, I'd try to walk away, but it was difficult. I remember saying to the police: 'You have to do something, because if you don't I will snap and then you will be arresting me too.' I was terrified about what she would push me to."

That the couple's marriage has survived it all is quite remarkable. Angela admits they have been close to the edge.

"We did come close to splitting up over it," she reveals. "It got to the stage where we were just arguing all the time because we were under so much pressure.

"Family life went out the window and it became all about Mrs Evans - what she'd done that day, what she was likely to do tomorrow.

"The more it went on, the more I blamed my husband for bringing us here. He felt guilty for making us move here - then leaving us to work in London.

"We could so easily have lost our marriage in all this. It's only because we stepped back and said we can't let her split us up."

Quite what a decent couple they are is evident when they talk about what has happened to Mrs Evans.

At first they, too, wondered if she was simply ill, or insane, so erratic was her behaviour. But medical reports concluded that she knew exactly what she was doing.

Still, Mrs Casa says she feels a little guilty that the old woman is now languishing in prison.

"It is no place for someone her age. I wish they'd put her in a hospital or something - just anywhere away from us, but I am uneasy at the thought of her in there."

Her husband is more concerned, though, about her new neighbours - her fellow inmates.

"I only hope she isn't sharing a cell," he concludes. "No one deserves to have Mrs Evans thrust on them, whatever they've done."