It was a Tuesday morning. As soon as the bus stopped in the middle of Twickenham, she hurried out along the pavement with her bag on her arm, down towards the river, to the darkness of the ladies toilet there. The shops were full of people, most of them women, just like her.
Inside the cubicle, she started pulling everything out of the bag: the notebook, the dark glasses, the Sainsbury’s carrier bag and her husband’s old clothes (for some reason, it seemed right to dress like a man to do this). She was still calm as she changed and wrote the note and combed her hair and clamped the blue and white sunhat over her head with the brim down over her eyes, but as she walked back out she began to seethe with fear.
She started to shake and then to cry and she had to duck back into the toilet to throw up. Slumped in there, sobbing, she started arguing with herself, spurring herself on, mewling “You’re a failure at everything.”
Somehow, she walked back out again, back along the pavements full of ordinary people, through the heavy glass door of the Chelsea Building Society, and straight up to the counter where without a word or a pause for thought, she pushed her note under the glass screen. “This is a hold-up,” it said (She had borrowed the wording from an episode of The Bill). “Stay Calm. Don’t panic. I’ve got a gun. So just do as I say. Put all used notes in plastic bag and pass back to me. Wait five minutes before raising alarm.”
The truth was that she had no gun, only a little brown paper bag which she had stuffed with toilet paper in the ladies a few minutes earlier so that it would make the right sort of bulge under her jacket. She pushed her crumpled Sainsbury’s carrier bag across the counter and half a minute later, she was walking out again with £405 in cash. She had to hurry. She had to get to the playschool to pick up Elizabeth and Clair, but when she checked her watch, she couldn’t see the time. She was crying again.
Until that Tuesday morning in September last year, Sue Jones had never knowingly broken a law in her life. She lived quietly in a neat little house in the red-brick maze of Hampton, west London, devoting her time to her four-year-old twin girls and to her husband, Keith, who worked for British Rail at Feltham where he was in charge of drawing up duty rostas. They were the model of a stable, suburban family.
Yet Sue Jones’ life had fallen apart for the simplest of reasons: she did not have enough money. She had twisted and turned in search of help but there was none. She had tried pawnshops and bookies; she had contemplated suicide and prostitution. She had worked and saved and stalled and in the end, she had run out of choices and so she got on the bus to Twickenham to steal the money she needed to keep her family fed and clothed. In the next three months, she committed seven robberies, stealing a total of £7,020.
Looking back now, she can see that the tide of debt had been sweeping up around her for years. In the hope that she can help other women, she has written her own account of what happened. It is the story of a family that started to drown and found there was no-one to rescue them.
Sue Jones, who is now 37, had always lived a most ordinary life. She grew up in a one-bedroom flat over a dry cleaners in Battersea opposite the old Granada cinema; her father cleaned windows; her mother kept house for her and her two sisters, Maureen and Debbie. She left school at 15, worked as a telephonist and a secretary until she was 21, when she met Keith who called the numbers at the local Casino bingo hall. He was clever and confident and a bit of a rebel and when he took her out walking one evening and draped his jacket round her shoulders to keep her warm, she felt better and safer than she ever had in her whole life. They married a few weeks before Christmas, 1976.
They did well. Keith was marketing director of a building company. Sue had office jobs. They moved away from Battersea to a bigger house in Hampton. They went on holiday to Greece and talked about having children. Then, in the autumn of 1983, it all started to fall apart: the government forced the economy into recession; the building industry collapsed and Keith was made redundant. He was so shocked that he developed a nervous illness, Bell’s Palsey, which paralysed one side of his face and kept him off work for 15 months. Sue was working in Sainsbury’s, filling shelves, but they had to borrow from the bank to stay afloat.
Then Sue’s mother developed lung cancer. On her last night at home before she went into hospital, her mother sat up in bed and took Sue’s hand: “Sue, I know I don’t have to ask. You will take care of Dad and Debbie for me?” So when she died, in May 1984, Sue’s father, who was no longer working, and her 14-year-old sister Debbie came to live with them. To cover the extra cost, Sue took on a night job, cleaning railway carriages from eleven until 5.30 in the morning. And she borrowed a little more.
By chasing every vacancy he heard of, Keith managed to find himself a new job, with British Rail. During his illness, Sue had taken over the household finances and she knew that they were sinking. They owed the bank £6,000 and they had fallen behind with their rent, but she did not want to worry Keith and risk bringing back his illness, so she kept it to herself and tried to get by. Then she was pregnant with the twins. Now she could work only part time and they were spending more than ever.
By the beginning of 1990, Sue Jones knew she was in trouble. “I had got our bank account overdrawn, mainly with a credit card. Bills, standing orders, direct debits, cheques were not being paid and everything was in a complete mess. I began to hide demand letters in plastic bags and put them in the wardrobe upstairs. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ became my motto. I wouldn’t answer the phone, took it off the hook.”
Keith was bringing home £745 a month from his work at British Rail. And Sue got £50 a month in Child Benefit. But it seemed to vanish: £200 on rent, £80 on poll tax, £170 to pay off the bank loan, £50 in rent arrears. She had barely £60 a week left for gas, electricity, food, and clothes for herself and Keith, her father, her sister and the twins, Elizabeth and Clair. More and more bills went unopened into the little bags in the wardrobe.
One morning, Clair tore open a letter before Sue had a chance to hide it and showed it to Sue’s sister. It was a repossession notice from the landlord. Still hiding the truth from Keith, Sue begged and borrowed £800 to keep the house. Desperate to turn back the tide, she started an evening job, cleaning offices for £3 an hour and then added a second, late evening job in a nursing home, putting old people to bed. Her great goal was to save enough to pay for a week’s holiday in a caravan at Great Yarmouth, so that she and Keith could relax and enjoy being with the girls alone, so that she could escape for just seven days.
But before she had a chance to save anything, British Rail cut back Keith’s overtime and then, in June, they told him they were closing his office in nine months and that he might be made redundant. Within days, he was suffering from Bell’s Palsey again. Sue began to despair. “Everything was now in turmoil. If he was ill again, like before, there wouldn’t be any job. There wouldn’t be any holiday. No escape. And now I thought ‘Please, whoever you are, don’t do this to me. I’ll do anything. Just don’t take this away from me.’
“I was now beginning to crack. I felt as if I was hanging on by a thread and as the weeks followed I could feel myself slipping further and further down the thread, later to feel I was hanging on by my fingertips.”
Keith got himself back to work very quickly, but before Sue had a chance to feel relieved, her cleaning company made her redundant and the nursing home which had promised her a permanent job, told her that they no longer needed her. “My immediate thought was: no job, no money, no holiday, no escape. The feeling of being trapped was overwhelming.”
She was still stuffing official letters into the wardrobe without opening them, hoping that somehow she would find a solution before the bills caught up with her. Then a neighbour showed her a letter she had just received from the council demanding her poll tax and threatening to send in the bailiffs. “I just froze. I had had the same letter, which I had hidden upstairs.”
Just as she felt she had nowhere to turn, fate seemed to offer her a solution. Her father had won a little money by betting on a dog race and he asked her to go into the bookies to pick up his winnings. The bookie was a friendly man, quite charming in his way. Why didn’t she try a little bet herself, he suggested. Her dad was a winner. Maybe she would be, too. As a favour, said the bookie, he would let her have a little credit. So she tried it. And she won. Looking back, she wonders whether she really won or whether the bookie was just baiting his trap. But she went home with £60 in her pocket and a bright light at the end of her tunnel.
For the next few weeks, she became a regular punter. The bookie gave her a telephone account and she would simply call up from her home, place bets and hope. She lost, but it was all on tick. She bet some more in the hope of covering her losses. She lost more. She lost track of how much she had lost. Until one morning, when one of the bookie’s friends came round to her house. He was not at all friendly and he made it very clear that if she did not pay off her account, there would be trouble. She gave him her £50 Child Benefit and pleaded for time. But he kept coming back. The bookie had added interest to her debt and he was now asking for £2,300.
Still, Sue would not tell her husband for fear of driving him back into his illness. Once, Keith came home just as the bookie’s debt collector was leaving with another bundle of scarce cash in his pocket; Sue told him he was just a passer-by asking directions. She went to Battersea to a money-lender but he refused to lend her anything without having Keith’s signature for the paperwork. She went to the pawnbroker and sold him everything: her ear-rings, her cross and chain, even her engagement ring.
A few days later, the bookie’s man came back. He barged into the house, shouting and threatening, pushed past Elizabeth and Clair and pinned their weeping mother against the kitchen wall. He wanted more money and he threatened to go to Keith if she failed to pay. She managed to bargain for one more week.
“I was now desperate. Time was running out. I had to do something. I coldn’t let Keith find out. If he found out about this, he’d find out about the poll tax, the rent, the overdraft. He’d find out everything. What would he do? Would he leave me? Would he take the girls?. I couldn’t stand it. Everything was now in a spin. It was my little girls’ birthday that week. They were to be four years old. I had no money for a birthday present, no birthday party, nothing.”
That Saturday morning, she told Keith she wanted to visit her mother’s grave on her own. Instead, she walked along the edge of the river. “I needed time to think. Everything was catching up on me. I started to think as I stared into the river, I had tried to work. I had tried to get a loan, I had pawned everything of value I had. None of this had worked out. What could I do? I stood there thinking. I thought about prostitution. Where could I go? Kings Cross – that was the place they all went. But how could I get there during the night? I had never left my little girls at nighttime. Then I laughed out loud: ‘My God, who’d have me?’
“I began to walk along the river, around the back, by the Church. Should I go in? ‘No. What’s the point? He didn’t help me before. Look what He did to Mum.’ I carried on past the new council office, along the shops. As I came to the building society, a lady came out. She held the door open for me. She must have thought I was a customer wanting to go in. As I looked in the open door, I saw a girl sitting there and she looked up and seemed to smile.” An idea began to take shape.
On Monday, the bookie called to say her time was up. On Tuesday, she collected Keith’s old jacket and his gardening shoes, the pair of sunglasses she’d worn on holiday in Greece, a notebook and a Sainsbury’s bag, she took Elizabeth and Clair to playschool and then she caught the bus to Twickenham.
After the first robbery, she found, to her amazement, that life went on. She went home and hid the money in the wardrobe, cooked lunch, played with the girls, cooked the evening meal. The only problem was that she had not stolen enough to pay all the bills. Ten days later, she did it again, this time in Clapham where she came away with £980. She told Keith that she won some money at bingo and they agreed that they could afford their week in a caravan at Great Yarmouth. The truth was that she was still nowhere near to paying off the bookie’s debts, the poll tax, the rent arrears and the bank loan. When they arrived in Great Yarmouth a week later, Sue had only £37 in her pocket to pay for the whole week.
“We were all sitting on the grass verge feeding the swans. I told Keith that I had left my Building Society book at home, so we would have to be careful that week. He said not to worry, he’d go along with me and sort it out at the local branch and if there was any problem, he’d ring up our bank and ask for a small overdraft. He wasn’t angry at me. He was trying to be helpful. If he only knew what he did to me. I was in a state of frenzy. I just kept thinking ‘If he goes to the building society, he’ll find out. Oh, my God what am I going to do?’”
The answer was that while Keith and the children walked along the beach, Sue said she had to go shopping and went instead to the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society in the Market Place with her usual note and stole £500. Back in London, still fending off debts, she stole again and again. As the robberies continued, she found herself consumed by guilt and fear. She ceased to care whether she was caught or not.
She committed her fifth robbery, in Richmond Road, without any attempt at disguise. Afterwards, she slumped down on a park bench around the corner with the bag of money between her feet. “I just sat there. I heard the police cars go by. I didn’t move. I was glad. I thought they would come any minute now and it would all be over. I waited and I waited, but no-one came. I sat there saying to myself ‘Why are you so upset? It’s no different than usual. Here you are, all alone. Even the police don’t care.’”
She began to worry that she was frightening staff in the building societies and started apologising to them while she was robbing them. The girl behind the counter on her sixth robbery reminded her of one of her nieces and she thought of how angry she would be if someone treated her niece like this. “I ran and ran, not from fear of being caught. This never entered my head. I just had to get away from that young girl’s face. It seemed to chase me along the street. I don’t know how I got there, but somehow I made my way to the cemetry. I fell on to the grass by my mum’s tree and cried and cried and cried.”
After seven robberies, in which she stole £7,020, she had still not paid all her debts and she was finding it almost impossible to hold together her normal life. Then the world closed in on her. It was a Thursday night, November 29. The phone rang and Sue heard her older sister, Maureen, tell her that her husband had brought home a copy of the Sun and it had this story about a woman who had been robbing building societies – and there were photographs. They had been taken by security cameras and Maureen said they looked just like Sue.
Sue persuaded Maureen that it must be her double, then she called The Samaritans who advised her to go to the police. On Friday morning, she went to a call box and telephoned Scotland Yard and told them that she would give herself up on Saturday morning. Then she went to playschool to pick up Elizabeth and Clair.
“I spent extra time with them. I bathed them, washed their hair, read stories, played, made cakes – all those wonderful things you do with your children. That night, I pushed their beds together and got in bed with them. I told them stories, tickled their feet, kissed, cuddled and fell asleep with them.”
The next morning, she took the girls to Maureen’s house where they were putting up Christmas decorations, hugged them and turned away. She asked Keith to drive her to the shops but at the railway station, she suddenly got out and leaned back through the open car door and told him: “I did it. Go back to Maureen. It’s in the paper. Maureen will tell you.” Then she ran.
At Scotland Yard, she told everything to the the Flying Squad. Detectives could see that she was no hardened criminal. A psychiatrist said she was an unselfish and highly moral person. Her family were told that she would be given probation, but at Kingston Crown Court on April 26 of this year, Judge Wakley told her she was guilty of “wicked crimes” and he sent her to prison for four years, tearing her away from the family she had been so desperate to protect. Now, she is in Holloway Prison.
On Monday (July 29), her lawyers will ask the Court of Appeal to cut her sentence. Her solicitor, Brian Raymond from Bindman’s, said: “The normal sentencing tariff is meaningless in cases like this. We shall be asking the court to treat her as an extraordinary case, arising out of exceptional circumstances and demanding a special response.”
Raymond says that her separation from her children has had a devasatating effect on Sue Jones: “In nearly twenty years of legal practice, I have never come across anyone who has exhibited such profound and acute distress.”
* At Mrs Jones’ request, the names of her children have been changed.
