Heiress, 25 beaten with radiator by intruder at £1m home
THE millionaire heiress of one of Britain’s most famous property empires was recovering yesterday after being battered with a radiator by an intruder at her £1million home.
Chloe Pidgley, 25, the granddaughter of Berkeley Homes founder Tony Pidgley, was attacked by a man she knew who smashed his way into her London flat.
Miss Pidgley, who received a ‘coming of age’ payment of £1million, was beaten as she went to investigate the break-in at 8pm on Monday evening.
She told detectives she was alone when she heard a smashing sound and ran to her bedroom, where a man had broken in and was waiting for her.
She was hit over the head with an oil radiator, punched and kicked in the face. She also had her fingers broken by a slammed door as she tried to escape.
Miss Pidgley managed to call her mother in Dubai, screaming down the phone for help.
As her attacker fled, he reportedly warned her he was going to get some acid and return to disfigure her.
Yesterday Miss Pidgley, a receptionist, was released from hospital covered in bruises and scratches. Officers are hunting for her attacker, a 29-year- old man who is known to her.
She has recently split up from her boyfriend following a fourmonth relationship.
Her mother, Denize Hewitt, 53, feared for her daughter’s life after receiving the phone call and wrote on Facebook: ‘ She screamed down the phone. I dialled 999. I thought she would be dead.’ Mrs Hewitt was quoted as saying: ‘Her attacker told her he was going to get some acid and come back to disfigure her. She is very worried.’
She described her daughter’s alleged assailant as living in a hostel but who ‘goes around with all the posh Chelsea kids’.
It is understood the alleged attacker has since texted the victim to apologise.
Yesterday Miss Pidgley was too upset to speak after returning to her home, where there were signs of a struggle.
Two large plant pots were shattered, with soil strewn across the entrance to the Kensington town house.
Another was broken halfway down the steps leading to a
‘She screamed down the phone’
basement flat and the front door of the elegant block has been boarded up.
Photographs on social media show Miss Pidgley with her sister Chantelle, 26, who is a model, enjoying London private members’ clubs, shopping and dining at restaurants in South Kensington, West London.
Miss Pidgley’s grandfather Tony, who is worth £310million, founded one of Britain’s biggest property empires.
Chloe’s father is Tony Pidgley junior who married Mrs Hewitt after they met at a Monte Carlo casino. They divorced in 1993 and fought a custody battle in 1995 which the former lingerie model won. She said later: ‘I never went after the family millions, I wasn’t interested. I got back what I’d put in. All I wanted was the children.’
Of her daughters’ £1million payments she said: ‘ Even though they’ve come in to over a million in a trust fund I still believe they should work.
‘I’m very down to earth and I really wanted my children to be the same as well.’
Tony junior tried and failed to take over the business from his father who was born in Surrey to a single mother and cared for by the charity Barnardo’s before being adopted by travellers.
Tony senior grew up in a disused railway carriage, sold logs with his family and learned to drive a lorry and dismantle its engine by the age of 14. He left school at 15 barely able to read or write but set up a successful haulage business.
He launched Berkeley Homes in 1976 in Weybridge, Surrey, and quickly developed a reputation for beating the market through a series of savvy predictions about when house prices were about to turn.
Tony senior divorced his first wife Ruby, a merchant seaman’s daughter, in 1999.
He is now married to his second wife Sarah, a dressage rider he met playing polo, and the pair have a large estate at their 16th century house in Windsor.