Jailed carer ordered to pay back £315,000 she stole from 102-year-old
A CARER jailed for stealing £315,000 from a thrifty 102-yearold woman has been ordered to pay back every penny.
Julie Sayles, 59, was entrusted to look after Edith Negus because relatives mistakenly believed she worked for a respectable charity.
But Friends of the Elderly Bridlington, in east Yorkshire, which Sayles ran, had no link to the national Friends of the Elderly charity.
After realising the frugal pensioner, who lived in a dirty house and wore second hand clothes, was sitting on a fortune, Sayles set about taking it for herself.
She set up a joint account with Mrs Negus and siphoned £288,000 of her savings into it, before also writing herself into the pensioner’s will.
Sayles used the cash to buy two properties, in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and Scarborough.
But relatives became suspicious when the new will was presented to a solicitor following Mrs Negus’ death, in October 2014, and contacted police.
Following a lengthy inquiry and trial, Sayles was found guilty of five counts of fraud, two of concealing or converting criminal property and one of making an article for use in fraud and sentenced to nine years in June last year.
But earlier this week she was hauled back before Hull Crown Court for a hearing under the Proceeds of Crime Act. A judge agreed the total benefit from her crimes was £315,000 which she must pay back to Mrs Negus’ estate. The court heard that Sayles has £297,000 in her bank, which she must hand over within a month, plus the outstanding £18,000 within three months. If she fails to do so she could face another six months in prison.
During the trial, Mrs Negus’s relatives were appalled to hear Sayles describe the money she had stolen as a ‘donation’.
Born the daughter of a Methodist lay preacher in 1911, Mrs Negus met her late husband, Jack, in a Lyons bar in London, while working there during the war. She survived the Blitz after being rescued from rubble after a German raid.
Later they ran a guesthouse in Bridlington and, although had no children of their own, were close to their nieces. Mrs Negus was active until a few years before her death and was often seen riding her bike aged 98 around town.
The judge said Mrs Negus came from a bygone, make- do-and-mend era, and probably never realised she could spend and enjoy some of her hard earned savings.
In an emotional statement following Sayles’s conviction, Mrs Negus’s great-niece, Ann Ruthven, revealed that her family did not want her life to be remembered for the callous crimes committed against her.
She added: ‘Edith Negus was a beautiful, kind, warm and loving woman who had many friends and family who loved her dearly.’ Miss Ruthven urged all those with elderly relatives to scrutinise the credentials of carers to avoid the ordeal they had suffered.