Burglar takes the cake for leaving evidence
HOW HILLINGDON POLICE BROUGHT CROOK TO JUSTICE
PRACTICE might make you better but it can never make you perfect.
If it did, 32-year-old Edward Gourley of Peterborough, who is linked to a total of 81 criminal offences, would never have made the rookie mistakes that allowed Hillingdon’s Proactive Crime Squad to bring him to justice.
The burglar and fraudster, who worked with a young accomplice, committed crimes in Hillingdon, Harrow and Ealing, as well as Cambridgeshire and his home town of Peterborough.
He was convicted of 17 offences at Cambridge Crown Court on January 14, all of which were committed between April 24 and his arrest on July 18, which averages out to five and a half crimes a month.
These were: seven non-residential burglaries, two attempted burglaries on retailers, seven acts of fraud by false representation and making off without payment.
With his accomplice, who cannot be named for legal reasons, Gourlay developed a routine for burglaries, focusing on stores that had closed up shop for the night.
In the first offence in April, the pair broke into a fast food store by forcing the shutters open and took £1,000 in cash and a watch.
The pair made an attempt to force open a safe but eventually gave up. Emboldened by their success, the pair continued their spree, often forcing doors or shutters of closed shops using car jacks or crowbars to make off with cash, laptops or sometimes credit cards. These credit cards would later be used for fraud offences totalling over £100.
Unfortunately, the large amount of practice Gourlay had committing burglaries didn’t stop him from leaving a wealth of evidence for police.
This included CCTV footage, fingerprints that were recovered from a discarded torch, stolen scratch cards retrieved from searching a property and even a cake taken from a café.
After his arrest in Cambridgeshire on July 18 2018, he was interviewed by officers from Hillingdon, who provided such overwhelming proof that he admitted all his offences.
Gourlay pleaded guilty in court and was sentenced to four years in prison. His accomplice was given 10 months in a young offender’s institute.