She planned to make herself pregnant by him

BABY PLOT: Gang member Marvin Berkeley ( talked of having a ‘chocolate baby’ with Alison Sharples ( A FEMALE prison guard collected a bag of a jailed gangster’s sperm so she could get pregnant by him when she got off duty.

Alison Sharples, 46, who began a jailhouse romance with an underworld Mr Big, during which they planned to have a baby together, has been jailed for nine months.

She became besotted with 31-year old Marvin Berkeley after he sent her love letters from his cell while he was detained for kidnap and firearms offences.

Within the confines of Category B Garth jail in Leyland, Lancs, the pair vowed to be together after his release from jail.

As part of their plans to have a baby, Berkeley even secretly passed her a plastic bag containing his own sperm so she could artificially inseminate herself when she clocked off duty.

But the seven-week affair was exposed after a routine search of Sharples’s handbag as she made her way past a prison security gate for a night shift at the jail on October 22, 2014.

A custody manager seized a purple medicine syringe with the plunger depressed and traces of semen on the inside which was matched by DNA testing to Berkeley.

A month later police searched Sharples’s home and found a handwritten letter from Berkeley hidden in her underwear drawer.

At Preston Crown Court, Sharples, a grandmother from Chorley, who is now working as a cleaner and as a carer for the elderly, was found guilty of misconduct after a trial.

Berkeley, from Salford, and his twin bother Michael, then 22, had been locked away in 2007 after police investigating Manchester crime gang The Fallowfield Mandem found incriminating pictures of the pair smiling proudly with guns and adopting James Bond-like poses after bringing terror to innocent people in pursuit of easy cash.

Officers discovered the photographs during raids on the homes of the bragging men, who hijacked cars, kidnapped motorists and shot their way around Greater Manchester.

Victims would be targeted in the street and one was hit in the back with a bullet which later took surgeons six hours to remove.

Another terrified man was kidnapped and told he would be “chopped to pieces” unless he agreed to work for them.

Marvin got an indeterminate sentence for public protection, with a minimum of seven years after pleading guilty to conspiracy to kidnap, possess a firearm with intent to endanger life and conspiracy to commit robbery.

Sharples, who was working as a support officer at Garth, met Marvin after he was moved to the 847 inmate jail and the affair began just weeks before he was due to be freed on parole.

Miss Camille Morland prosecuting said: “Their relationship was close, covert and sexually intimate, if not necessarily physically so. She seemed besotted by Berkeley and she had been promised by him they would be together when he was released from prison.”

Work colleague Nicola Ball – who herself left the prison service after developing feelings for an inmate – claimed she had tried to warn Sharples off Berkeley and said the officer had even told her she had taken a phone into jail for her lover.

Ball added: “She said she and Marvin had been talking about having a baby.

“Marvin had been talking about having ‘ a chocolate baby’.”

Passing sentence Judge Simon Newall told Sharples: “The integrity of a prison service is dependent on officers acting in a professional manner.

“What you were doing was abuse to the public’s trust as a prison support officer.”