I’m shaking, I’m sorry...
Heartbreaking last words of burgled OAP who died on the phone to police:
A HEARTBREAKING emergency call of a pensioner who died reporting a burglary as she gasped for breath has been released.
Maureen Whale, 77, collapsed and died of shock while she was on the phone to a 999 operator as two ‘utterly wicked’ thieves ransacked her cottage ‘for a few pounds’.
Terrified, the former nurse and air stewardess called the police for help after the gang fled with her handbag.
Miss Whale’s distraught family yesterday released the harrowing 999 recording of her last moments as they appealed for help in tracing the thieves who struck last December. The ‘fiercely inde- pendent’ pensioner – who was born and lived all her life in the cottage in Barnet, north London – died of heart problems brought on by the shock of the raid, a pathologist found.
In the recording, she could be heard struggling for breath and stuttering as she told the operator of her ordeal.
On hearing her laboured breathing, the operator asked: ‘ Are you on your own? Are you ok?’ Miss Whale replied: ‘I’m shaking, I’m sorry.’ The operator called an ambulance after Miss Whale said she was finding it hard to breathe. Thirty seconds later, Miss Whale collapsed as she whispered: ‘I can’t talk, I’m sorry.’
For the rest of the two minute call, the desperate 999 operator can be heard saying: ‘Maureen hang on in there please.’
At the end of the call, officers can be heard knocking on her front door. Miss Whale’s niece Gina said that releasing the call was distressing, but added: ‘Our aunt was a fiercely independent woman who should have been safe in the home she had lived in all of her life.’
Police are now treating Miss Whale’s death on December 4 last year as manslaughter.
Detective Chief Inspector Noel McHugh said: ‘Maureen died for the few pounds that were in her purse. It is so wrong that a woman who was so adventurous, travelling the world in her younger days, should die in such awful circumstances, for just a few pounds, in her own home.’ He added: ‘Just imagine. It could have been your mum or nan – burglary is a horrid crime, but what happened to Maureen is utterly wicked.’
Mr McHugh said the pensioner, who loved gardening, classical music and art, had lived alone happily for years and would have felt safe in her £400,000 detached home.
Police have released CCTV footage showing a gang of three men approaching the cottage and peering inside at 5.52pm to check she was alone. They then walked away, only to return moments later to climb over her garden gate.
Police now want to speak to the driver of a small hatchback car who drove directly past the suspects, and are appealing for information. Detectives believe the gang are professional burglars who had raided three other properties that day, including two flats opposite her home.
Days later, police found the victim’s empty handbag dumped in a hedge on the outskirts of nearby Ravenscroft park.
‘What happened is utterly wicked’