The son of a businessman found dead five days after wrecking his mansion home with a JCB said his father had been devastated by the prospect of divorce.

James Rigden, 36, said his father Peter faced losing everything he had worked for after splitting from second wife Gabrielle.

In an exclusive interview with The Argus, he said: "My father was a great man and a loving father. He was always a great role model."

James said his father was upset at the sale of his house.

"Gabrielle was going to receive about £900,000 but he was only going to get about £150,000 after the divorce. Dropping the price would have left him with even less money.

"Out of what was left he would have needed to have bought a flat and you can't get much for £150,000. He was 64 and had no savings - he had been forced out of business a couple of years earlier and had debts.

"My dad was a self-made man, he had built his fortune up from nothing. He was classy and liked to surround himself with good quality things. He took us skiing and all around the world on holiday.

"Can you imagine going from that to a pokey flat. It would have been humiliating. He felt he would have no dignity left. He was annoyed at the apparent injustice of it all. He was driven to despair."

Police had been searching for the 64-year-old businessman since last Thursday morning, when he locked his French-born second wife in an outside toilet before demolishing part of their £1.2 million mock-Tudor country house in Crawley Down with a JCB digger.

With the couple's teenage son and daughter at school, he is thought to have used the bucket of the JCB to rip open the garage and punch a hole through the roof of the five-bedroom house before the outbuildings were burnt to the ground.

The family car was left a charred shell.

Mrs Rigden, 45, crawled through a small window as flames took hold and fled to a neighbour's house to raise the alarm while her husband sped off in a Land Rover.

The businessman disappeared and was found dead in the early hours of Tuesday after apparently leaping to his death from a multi-storey car park in Lincolnshire.

Graphic designer James, who lives in Horsham, said: "The thing that's so shocking is that my dad was a very strong person with a lot of principles. He deplored suicide. He always said it was a coward's way out."

James said the last time he saw his father was on January 31 - five days before the JCB digger attack.

"He told me he was going away, that he had been offered work abroad. He asked if I wanted the Range Rover and said he'd drop it round that week."

The next time James heard from him was minutes after the JCB attack.

He said: "I got a phone call at work and his voice was all croaky. He said the Range Rover was at my home and that was it. He didn't give me any details."

James believes his father had planned the JCB rampage at his home in Sandy Lane.

He said: "He wrote me a letter saying he wanted to take his share of the house with him. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision. He locked his wife in the toilet for her own safety."

James said his father was born in Croydon and moved to Horsham and later Crawley.

Peter Rigden started his career manufacturing and selling paper for magazines and newspapers before starting his own office consumables business in East Grinstead.

He had two children from his first marriage, James and his sister Tiffany, 38. He married for the second time about 18 years ago and had another son, now 16, and a daughter, 13.