Your Letters
Iread your article on thieves using illegal tracking devices ( CCW, 24 July) with great interest.
On Saturday 20 July my wife and I took our Sunbeam Alpine to the Sunbeam National show at Gaydon. The car was unattended for most of the day, parked in the museum’s car park. That night we stayed with friends in their large detached house in Solihull, about 25 miles away. We slept in a downstairs front bedroom with the Alpine about 30ft away tucked in between our friend’s two modern cars close to the house at the top of their long driveway. It would have been barely visible from the road.
My wife woke me in the early hours to say that the Alpine’s alarm was going off. I got up, looked out of the window, the alarm reset itself and as everything appeared to be okay I dismissed it as just being a cat or a fox setting the microwave off and went back to bed.
Five minutes later my wife woke me again and said that it sounded like there was a motorbike in the driveway. I got up, looked out again and it wasn’t a motorbike – it was a truck that had reversed all the way up my friend’s driveway from the road and was by our Alpine. The car’s alarm was again going off, siren sounding, hazard lights flashing. We grabbed our clothes, called the police and disturbed the thieves as we unlocked the doors and got out of the house. They drove off and three police cars were with us in a matter of minutes. The police searched the area but failed to find the truck.
We thought that it was unlikely that we were followed all that distance from the show and just assumed that it must have
been an attempt at an opportunistic theft. We just felt ourselves lucky to still have the car.
Now, having read your article, we think that perhaps a criminal put a tracker on our Alpine at the show. That would have enabled the potential thieves to track the car to where we had parked it. Possibly the car alarm activated when they were recovering their tracker, then when no-one came out of the house when the alarm sounded they brought the truck to take the Alpine away.
It is sobering to think that if we had been sleeping in any other bedroom in the house we would not have heard the alarm and would have just found an empty space on the driveway the following morning.
Tim Raymond, Hythe, Kent