When 81-year-old David Woods passed away in the late winter of last year, a small group of friends and family gathered around a freshly dug plot in the graveyard of the local church and prayed that he would be allowed to rest in peace.

Unfortunately, it was soon to transpire that quite the opposite fate awaited the loving father and husband - and what was assumed to be his final resting place would prove anything but.

Because, in an extraordinary twist of fate, soon after Mr Woods’s burial, the graveyard plot immediately next to his was allotted to…his worst enemy.

That enemy was local ne’er-do-well Daniel Thomas, a career criminal, among whose victims just happened to be Mr Woods’s family.

So horrified was his widow by this cruel coincidence, that she was moved to take the ultimate remedial course and applied to the High Court for permission to exhume her husband’s body.

On hearing details of the cruel indignity that blameless Mr Woods had been posthumously exposed to, the Judge in the case granted this very rare dispensation.

And so last week the body of David Woods was exhumed from his grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas’s in the village of Ash in Kent and reburied, with minimal ceremony, in an alternative plot at a greater distance from that of convicted fraudster Daniel Thomas.

A legal source told The Daily Mail: ‘This is one of the more unusual or downright bizarre cases I have ever come across - it’s more like something from Trollope's Barchester chronicles than from 21st century Britain.

‘But, having said that, you can entirely see how Mr Woods’s widow and daughters would have felt when they learned who had been buried next to him so you can see how they must have felt this was the only option open to them, however unusual.’

The story began in the first few weeks of the new year in 2024 when Mr Woods died.

The elderly Arsenal fan and father-of-two had lived in the village of Ash, a quiet rural spot just inland from the port town of Sandwich, and it was duly arranged that he would be buried in the grounds of his local church, the medieval St Nicholas’s.

And after that unremarkable - but for his widow and two daughters no doubt deeply moving - funeral service last February, that would have been that, had it not been for Mr Woods’s nemesis Daniel Thomas, 47, also dying a few months later.

There is no suggestion that the trustees of The Canonry Benefice, which administers St Nicholas's and six other churches in the area around Ash, had any idea of any connection between Mr Woods and the local conman when they allocated the latter a plot adjacent to that occupied by the former.

But when the widowed Mrs Woods discovered who had been buried next to her husband she was plainly horrified.

And so upset was she that subsequent visits to lay flowers at her husband’s grave were only undertaken under the cover of darkness so that she would no longer be forced to see the adjacent grave of her husband’s enemy.

The precise details of just what Daniel Thomas did to incur Mr Woods’s abiding hatred remain unclear.

What we do know is that it began with him exploiting one of Mr Woods’s two daughters, Amanda, 56, and Tracey, 52 - and also that it involved a relatively large sum of money.

Thomas was said to have abused and exploited one of these sisters - and attempting to extricate his daughter from the ruinous position she had been left in ‘nearly broke’ Mr Woods who then spent years paying off the resulting debts.

And we know that it was sufficiently grave - perhaps an unfortunate expression in this context - for Mr Woods’s widow Christine and their two daughters, Tracey and Amanda to tell the court that their husband and father would have been 'seriously upset’ had he known who was to be buried next to him.

No charges were ever brought against Thomas for what he did to the Woods family - but other matters for which he was brought to justice give an insight to the kind of man he was.

The known victim in this prosecuted case was a partially blind pensioner living in nearby Sandwich.

Thomas had tuned up at the vulnerable elderly man’s house offering to clean his gutters for £15.

The man declined this offer but despite this a month later Mr Thomas turned up at his home asking for a £250 payment, claiming he had worked on the man’s roof, replacing tiles and cleaning gutters.

Intimidated and flustered by this brazen but aggressively put lie, the old man hastily cobbled together a portion of the sum demanded - £110 in cash, which he hoped would get Thomas to leave him alone.

But bullying Thomas - who later claimed to be dyslexic - demanded the elderly man take him to his bank to retrieve the rest of the money ‘owing’.

The terrified pensioner complied with this exploitative demand and withdrew a further £140 simply to rid himself of Thomas.

But three days later, Thomas turned up at his victim’s house a third time, soliciting for more ‘work’.

This time the elderly man refused - and called the police, who quickly worked out that Thomas was a fraudster.

He was sent for trial at Canterbury Crown Court in January 2015 and was quickly unanimously convicted by a jury of fraud.

As he was sentenced in January 2015, Judge James O’Mahony described Thomas’s attempt to talk his way out of being sent to prison as ‘the most dishonest evidence I have ever heard in this court in more years than I care to remember’.

A friend of Mr Thomas told the Daily Mail that in his later years he put on a lot of weight and died in his sleep. They believe the cause of his death was organ failure, possibly from a heart attack. 

The source said that in his younger days Mr Thomas was very attractive and that one of Mr Woods's daughters had been infatuated with him and showered him with expensive gifts such as mobile phone.

They said he was seeing someone else and it all became 'a bit complicated'. The daughter's parents didn't approve of the relationship, the friend added. 

On reading the family’s petition to be permitted to disinter Mr Woods, a High Court judge this month ruled the matter of the adjacent graves was causing the Woods’ family a ‘serious distress’.

To add to the Woods family’s distress, the court heard, it had been Mrs Woods intention when her time came to be buried next to husband in the same double depth grave - but now the presence of Thomas had disturbed her plans for eternal rest.

Thomas was not named in the High Court case but referred to only as X - but the Daily Mail’s investigation has learned his identity.

The judge ruled: ‘Mrs Woods says Mr Woods would have been seriously upset had he known he would come to be buried alongside X, that she finds this proximity abhorrent and cannot accept that she should come to be laid to rest in due course with her husband but adjacent to X.

‘She says this is a matter of serious distress to her and her family impeding their grieving and healing.’

He pointed out that the general Church of England view is that a last resting place should be just that unless there are exceptional circumstances or a mistake has been made consent for exhumation is rarely given.

But the judge ruled that in this case he agreed that circumstances were exceptional enough for him to grant exceptional permission.

The judge qualified that he was not in a position to evaluate the merits or accuracy of the family’s accounts of Mr Thomas’s actions but he accepted the distress that had been caused to them and in the circumstances he was satisfied that it justified the proposed exhumation.

And so it was that Mr Woods's remains were disinterred on Wednesday last week.

And he was reburied just a few yards further away from his old enemy - the maximum distance available in an historic cemetery where only nine spaces remained.

Now the space where Mr Woods's grave used to lie has been turfed over with fresh grass while Mr Thomas's grave remains in place with a small plaque and a stone love heart placed on top.

There are spaces for two graves in between the feuding pairs resting place, which is mostly crammed full of centuries-old gravestones.

Mr Woods's grave, which was moved only last week, is covered in fresh soil and a small plaque, alongside a new bunch of roses.

The judge said the family acknowledged that Mr Woods would still be in fairly close proximity to Mr Thomas but they felt that any distance that could be put between them would help them to feel better.

The Woods family declined to comment when approached about the case.

But one can only hope that they and Mr Woods can all rest easier now.