A LIFETIME of “bad karma” has prompted an Oxford man to atone for a sin he committed half a century ago in the style of hit TV show My Name is Earl.

Arthur Edmond-Jones was living in Bracegirdle Road, Wood Farm, Oxford, in 1958 when he took a neighbour’s car without her consent and drove it, without oil, to Cambridge.

The vehicle seized and the 16-year-old left it on the side of the road. He told the owner but did nothing to compensate her or retrieve the stricken car.

Since then, a catalogue of misfortune has dogged Mr Edmond-Jones, from the California to New Zealand.

Now he believes it’s time to find the car’s owner and make amends in a bid to end his run of bad luck.

Mr Edmond-Jones, who now lives in Thailand, said: “Fifty-one years ago I committed an unforgivable sin against a Mrs Spinks who lived either on Northfield Road or Hawthorn Avenue just off the London Road in Headington.

“Ever since I caused such pain and anguish to that poor lady I have been plagued by bad karma.

“Karma is the belief that what you do and say affects everything around you on a cosmic level.”

In the same year as he broke Mrs Spinks’s car, Mr Edmond-Jones bought a used motorbike in Oxford for £15 and decided to visit relatives in Thame.

On the way home, the bike broke down and he ended up leaving it in a ditch and walking 15 miles home.

In 1965, he led a five-man sales team to sell carbon paper in Manchester.

He bought a Commer Cob van for £600 and insured it for the minimum requirement. But in thick fog on the journey north he had a crash and wrote off the van.

The insurance company would not pay out, as he had stopped in the middle of a busy intersection.

In 1967 in Auckland, New Zealand, he owned a 22ft motor launch. On a calm evening, he took the boat into a small bay and began fishing but, as darkness fell, a freak four-metre wave capsized the boat.

He said: “I found myself standing on the seabed with the boat inverted over my head. The waves had pounded the launch into a thousand pieces.”

Twelve years later, he imported a $22,500 4x4 into New Zealand, but it was seized in lieu of payment by a car painter.

In 1982, Mr Edmond-Jones married in Nevada, but the following year his wife died, on her birthday, of leukaemia.

On the same day, Mr Edmond-Jones’s Lincoln Continental car was destroyed by fire.

Thirteen years ago, in California, his motorhome was vandalised to the tune of $5,000 by tenants he evicted for non-payment of rent.

Despite the litany of mishaps, Mr Edmond-Jones did have one fortunate episode on his travels, when he rescued an elderly woman from the sea in Hawaii.

The woman turned out to be his landlord’s aunt.

The pair became good friends and she left him $6,000 in her will.

Now he wants to apologise for his original misdemeanour.

He said: “I regret what happened, it was not my intention to cheat Mrs Spinks. I was unemployed and penniless at the time, indeed most of my life.

“I do hope Mrs Spinks is still around. If she is I will come to England and talk about ways to make amends.”

Mr Edmond-Jones never knew Mrs Spinks’s first name, but said she was in her 20s in 1958.