FIVE YEARS AFTER DESERTING HIS POST in the British Army, Billy Petherick spent 2014 raiding forty-odd churches across Northern France. Entering during normal operating hours, he used a crowbar to pry open locked chests holding chalices, tabernacle keys, and other religious artifacts. His French girlfriend, Gwendoline Mouchel, heiress to the Lesaffre yeast fortune, remained in their Porsche, operating as a lookout or, as she later told the court, playing on her phone and writing her marketing dissertation. Her partner, she later offered by way of explanation, “did not have a high opinion of the Church.”
Two years after the heist, Billy and Gwen spent €1,050,000 on Château de la Basmaignée, a neo-Gothic hunting lodge without electricity or running water in the rural region of Pays de La Loire. The Russian couple who previously owned the estate—complete with a private chapel, six cottages, and sixty acres of parkland—had left it in near ruin. But between Billy’s limited building experience, the artistic vision of his brother Michael, a network of British tradie expats, …
