The boy who stole £100,000 from his grandparents – and how they found the heart to forgive him
LI KE many hard- working couples, Gordon and Jenny Bird nurtured simple dreams for their retirement. After years working long hours and weekends running a thriving shop, they looked forward to seeing a bit of the world and enjoying the comforts of a mortgage-free home.
Yet today, aged 71 and 69 respectively, those dreams lie in tatters. Effectively bankrupt, the couple now live in rented accommodation after being forced to sell the home which was their pride and joy. After bills and food, every spare penny from their meagre pension goes towards servicing their debts.
It is a horribly distressing situation from which there is little prospect of any relief — and one rendered even more upsetting because the reason for the couple’s dramatic reversal of fortune lies so close to home.
For three years, behind their backs, their teenage grandson, Ryan, stole almost £100,000 from their business to fund his £1,000-a-week heroin habit. So cunningly did he cover his tracks that the couple had no idea of the true reason behind the collapse of their business, instead blaming the faltering economy and their own mismanagement.
They only discovered the truth six months ago, when Ryan, now 26 and attempting to rebuild his life following a stint in prison for drug-dealing, finally confessed.
Under the circumstances, you could understand the couple wanting nothing further to do with him. Yet instead, in an astonishing act of selflessless, not only have Gordon and Jenny chosen to forgive Ryan, but they insist they are proud of him for confronting what he has done.
‘We could have disowned Ryan but where would that have got us?’ asks Gordon. ‘He is our own flesh and blood. We have been angry and cried many tears over what has happened, but there is no point carrying that around with you.
‘We’re proud of him for turning his life around. He is off drugs, he has a job, and he is trying to make up for what he has done.’
Their selflessness is inspiring — because, undoubtedly, Ryan has ruined what should have been some of the happiest years of their lives, years they worked hard to save towards.
Married for 48 years, Gordon and Jenny are a decent middle-class couple, paying their own way and raising two daughters, Maria, now 46, and Charlotte, 44. In 2000 they decided to realise their dream of owning their own business, downsizing their family home to a terrace in order to buy a stationery and arts and crafts store in Twyning, Gloucestershire.
The couple proved to have a flair for business — in the first four years, they increased the shop’s takings by 25 per cent.
Business was going so well they were able to invite their daughter, Maria, to come and work in the shop, too, following the break-up of her marriage. She moved to live near her parents, bringing with her Ryan and his younger sister, Sarah, now 24. ‘At the time, they were both young children and the apples of our eye,’ Jenny recalls. ‘Ryan was a lovely little boy.’
BY SECONDARY school, however, Ryan’s behaviour had become a worry. ‘ He hated it and often played truant. When he did go, he was always in trouble,’ says Jenny. And so, when Ryan left school at 16 with little in the way of qualifications, his grandparents decided to give him a job in the shop, too.
‘We thought that this way we could channel him in the right direction,’ recalls Gordon. And initially it seemed to work. ‘ He had a nice manner and he worked hard. I was pleased with him,’ says his grandfather.
Less pleasing were Ryan’s rough ‘friends’, who congregated around the shop at lunchtime. ‘I was irritated as I felt they were putting off the customers, but when I mentioned it to Ryan, he would shrug it off. now I know why they were there — Ryan was supplying them with drugs.’
But as the months wore on, Gordon and Jenny had bigger worries. While business had boomed in the first four years, their accounts for 2005 were a different matter: despite turning over £420,000, their books showed a loss of £34,000.
Puzzled and anxious, the couple tried everything they could to improve profit margins, but nothing seemed to make any difference. In 2006, their books showed a turnover of £370,000 — and a loss of £31,000.
What they know now, but didn’t then, was that Ryan had been stealing vast swathes of cash from the business, putting customers’ money directly into his pockets, and selling expensive stock on the internet.
What they did notice was that their previously sunny-natured grandson was changing before their eyes. ‘He had become sullen and abrupt. We did have suspicions about drugs, but we ran shy of asking him,’ Gordon admits.
Matters came to a head when, in early 2007, Gordon told Ryan he no longer wanted his friends hanging around outside the shop. ‘He flew into a rage. He was like a different person, swearing and screaming in my face. I sacked him on the spot.’
The incident left Gordon and Jenny shaken. The couple were also plagued with anxiety as their debts mounted. ‘We were in way over our heads,’ says Jenny. ‘We had a bank loan of £25,000 and £30,000 on five different credit cards to stay afloat. When interest rates went up, we couldn’t afford to pay our mortgage.’
The couple realised they needed to sell their home to service their debts. ‘It broke our hearts,’ Jenny says quietly. ‘We put the house on the market and moved into rented accommodation.’
Bewildered by the turn of events, the couple placed the blame on the credit crunch, rising interest rates and local events such as flooding which had affected trade.
Things went from bad to worse: in August 2007, six months after Ryan had been sacked, Gordon arrived at the shop one Monday morning to find nearly £500 had gone missing.
‘We hadn’t had a break-in, but the money in the till and our petty cash was all gone,’ recalls Gordon.
This time, however, he had no doubt as to the perpetrator. ‘I rang Maria, who had keys to the shop, and asked her if they were in her bag. They weren’t. That’s when I rang the police.
‘I told them we had had a theft and I knew exactly who had done it — our grandson. We were gutted he could do such a thing, but I remember thinking that if he went to prison so be it: it would make or break him.’
In fact, while the case did go to court, Ryan received community service and a fine. ‘He didn’t apologise. He said he couldn’t remember anything about it,’ says Gordon.
What the couple didn’t know was that by then their grandson, still only 18, was in the grip of a searing heroin addiction which was costing him £1,000 a week.
THEy discovered t he unedifying truth when, two months l ater, he arrived at their house with his mother, terrified and begging for money. ‘ He was panic-stricken,’ recalls Gordon. ‘He told me he owed £1,000 to drug dealers and if he didn’t pay it some heavies were coming for him. We managed to scrape together the money on different credit cards.’
It forced the couple to confront the truth: ‘We were horrified. It was incredibly upsetting and after everything we’d been through, we both felt enough was enough. We washed our hands of him.’
Meanwhile, the couple’s financial situation deteriorated further: £30,000 raised from the sale of their house had not proved enough to shore up their debts and 2008 they put their business on the market.
But it took three years to sell it, to a leading stationery chain for just £30,000 — £110,000 less than it had been valued at three years earlier. With a small pension, the couple were forced to make a deal with their creditors to pay their debts at £250 a month for six years. ‘After bills and food, there’s nothing left,’ Gordon says quietly. By then, the couple had received other sobering news: in 2009, their grandson was jailed for 18 months for dealing drugs. ‘We were upset, but it was a relief when he was finally sent to prison. I said to Jenny that it would make or break him,’ says Gordon.
‘Shortly after he went to prison, we received a letter from him in which he apologised for the way he had behaved, saying he couldn’t believe what he had done because he loved us so much,’ says Jenny.
‘After that, he wrote every couple of weeks, always saying the same thing. He seemed genuinely contrite, so much so that I felt sorry for him. We both did.’
The couple even went to visit him in prison. ‘It was an emotional visit for all of us,’ says Jenny. ‘He told us time and again how sorry he was. He told us he’d made a decision in prison to turn his life around, and we believed him.’ Of course, at that time the couple still did not know the extent of their grandson’s betrayal.
Which is why, when Ryan was released from prison in early 2011, it was, initially, to his grandparents’ home. ‘It wasn’t easy. We worried about leaving him alone in the house. But I made it clear that if he let us down in any way whatsoever, our relationship was finished,’ Gordon explains. Ryan later moved into a flat and found a job with the council
Six months ago, he finally came clean about the extent of his deception: ‘The subject of what had happened with our businesses came up over lunch, and I told Ryan he must have cost us a couple of thousand pounds over the years. ‘He looked at us and said “and the rest”, but then he filled up with tears,’ recalls Gordon. Then he finally confessed: during his time at the shop, he had taken around £100,000 in cash and stock. ‘ Of course, I felt angry,’ Gordon says. ‘Suddenly everything made sense. What he had done had ruined everything for us. Everything.’
Ordering him out of their home, Gordon told his grandson he did not want to see him again. ‘The knowledge festered inside me and I couldn’t speak to him for a while. I sent him a text message telling him he had cost us our business and our home, but worst of all he had stolen our retirement. I had to get it out of my system.’
Ryan responded with his own message, an outpouring of shame and repentance. ‘When I read it, I realised he knew how much he had hurt us, and that he was genuinely sorry. I rang him to say we needed to talk, and we met up to thrash it all out,’ recalls Gordon.
‘We needed him to understand how much he had hurt us and how much he’d taken from us. And he does. He’s full of guilt about what he’s done.’
Six months on, the family are close again, with Ryan seeing his grandparents for lunch most weekends. The last time they met, he paid for lunch. ‘He can’t afford much, but the gesture means the world to us,’ says Jenny.
What he cannot do, of course, is repay the money he took to such devastating effect — a betrayal for which his grandparents have fully forgiven him.
‘We could so easily have shut the door on him, but what would it have achieved?’ says Jenny. ‘Ryan is our grandson. And ultimately, nothing is more important than that.’