I’ve posted before about MIL’s estate.
OH and MIL were in partnership before she died (farming). She has gifted OH the business, livestock and machinery in her will but has split the land, houses and buildings on the farm between OH, SIL, BIL and OH’s nephew. So between 4 of them.
BIL and SIL are both executors.
There is history between OH and BIL included but not limited to BIL having a criminal record for GBH against OH around 13 years ago.
We’ve had years of harassment/spying and even threatening behaviour from BIL and his wife.
Examples of this include but are not limited to, threatening to maliciously report us to social services, glass placed around our children’s toys outside, telling us we’d better ‘watch out’, threatening to undo/damage any improvements OH has made to the farm (fencing, infrastructure etc) blocking access to farm gates and much more. We all live on the farm so it’s difficult but with the way MIL has left the will we have to stay put for now.
He has recently started to turn on the children. He has come down from work shouting, raving and swearing like a lunatic at them, thrown their toys over fences. He left my eldest DD’s sobbing over the Easter holidays. He also threatened to take my eldest some where to ‘square her up.’Him and his wife both make a point of glaring at our children when they walk past them too. We involved the police who came to our house. They also cautioned BIL who said his issue was that they were playing football and his wife didn’t like it as they were making noise and she’s working from home and she was worried that they were disturbing her hens (I have plenty of video footage of children and hens coexisting in harmony outside, I can’t believe this is what it’s come to). They’re not rowdy, they make ‘noise’ but all children do and that is a safe, enclosed environment for our DC’s to play in. Farms are dangerous places for children.
Anyway we hoped we’d nipped it in the bud. DC’s were out playing on Monday afternoon for 20 minutes, it was around 4pm. DC’s came back in for dinner. Saw BIL come home from work at around 5:30pm (we share an access to our houses and he walks past our kitchen window) he glared in and smirked at me and seconds later all of the cows stampeded down in front of our house. We knew he had opened the gate and let them out and despite having a camera in the shed he’d managed to do it so that the camera didn’t catch him. You can only see his hand and arm.
DC’s were outside again on Tuesday night after school playing catch this time. Not being rowdy, just playing in their own garden. BIL came home, ran in full view of myself, opened the shed gate, booted a heavily pregnant sheep and let all of the ewes out of the shed. Newly lambed ewes were separated from their lambs as they jumped from their pens when the gates were opened. We think we’ve identified the ewe he kicked and have kept her in a pen to monitor her.
I actually managed to get this caught on my mobile phone. The whole incident and you can clearly identify him on the footage. We’ve reported it to the police again and they’ve asked us to make a statement which we are going to do. I’ve also sent them the footage. Not only is this disrupting the running of OH’s business, it had potential financial implications and could’ve been incredibly dangerous if the children had been in the way of the cattle and even the sheep (there were around 150/200 that he let out and we have a toddler who would’ve been trampled)
Could we have him removed as an executor? We have a list a mile long about him. Including planning permission fraud. He has verbalised to several people and my OH that he wants to put OH out of business and my children, myself and SIL are frightened of him.
Where do we stand? We believe he has already tried to be underhanded with the distribution of the estate and he is refusing to seek any sort of legal advice to resolve matters that have arisen.