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A millionaire property developer in South Wales was fined £300,000 [$470,000] by a Newport Crown Court on Tuesday for illegally altering a famous mansion and using the headstones of three dead children to, among other things, build himself a patio.
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The developer, Kim Davies, snagged the 150-year-old gravestones from a deteriorating chapel in Llechryd, South Wales, and recycled portions of the gravemarkers to make wall plaques and patio stones. According to the BBC, the headstones marked the graves of three young children—four-year-old David, three-year-old Rosie, and 11-month-old Thomas.
Davies bought the 16th-century Llanwenarth House mansion back in 2007 and spent over £1 million [$1.6 million] illegally remodeling it with the intent to flip it for a profit.
As a Grade-II listed building—it’s the spot where poet Cecil Frances Alexander supposedly drew inspiration for the famous hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” in 1848—renovations are only allowed if they keep its original, gravestone-free look. Davies advertised the renovated mansion, hoping to sell it to some wealthy potential homeowners, but wound up accidentally alerting the police to his illegal modifications. Officers got a warrant and gained access to the historic building, revealing Davies’s massive illegal changes, including the “patio paved with the gravestones of dead kids” feature.
The Daily Mail reports that so far, Davies has sold his Aston Martin and a Lamborghini Spider to help cover his court costs, but that’s nothing compared to the terrible, Poltergeist-style haunting he has coming.