Policeman facing jail for stealing £60k from own mother
A POLICE firearms officer and his wife are facing jail after they plundered £60,000 from an elderly relative’s bank account in what prosecutors called ‘their version of Supermarket Sweep’. Former marksman Andrew Rough and his wife Jean, an ex-constable, drained the bank accounts of Rough’s vulnerable mother Gladys over a period of almost five years when she was aged 80 to 84, a court heard.
They squandered the cash on laser eye surgery for Rough – who shot for Scotland and the British Police team – plus trolley-loads of groceries worth up to £700 a month, and large mortgage payments on a new upmarket house in Alloa, Clackmannanshire.
The pair also put down deposits on a summer house for their back garden and indulged their fondness for field sports, including shooting weekends and buying a new hunting gun.
Prosecutor Sarah Lumsden told the couple’s trial that former detective sergeant Rough and his wife, described by his mother as ‘like a daughter to me’, were ‘money-grabbers’ who had ‘used her like a cash machine’.
Miss Lumsden said: ‘They were reckless with her money and had utter disregard for Gladys’s finances. They abused her trust and left her with nothing. This was an abhorrent, disgusting, disgraceful abuse of a lady in her eighties – and it went on for years.’
The Roughs, both 58, of Alloa, denied embezzling £60,000 ‘or a sum of money’ from Gladys Rough, of Gargunnock, Stirlingshire, between October 2010 and July 2015, after she gave the couple her bank card.
But following a ten-day trial at Stirling Sheriff Court, the jury of nine women and six men took less than two hours to find the pair guilty by a unaniand mous verdict. The court heard that the withdrawals began after Gladys Rough’s husband was taken to hospital after suffering a stroke. She handed her son and daughter-in-law her bank cards to do her £30 weekly shop, and to pay her gardener and cleaner.
The pair took up to £12,000 a year, running one account down to just 37p which caused a direct debit to bounce and Gladys Rough’s phone to be cut off, meaning she could not use her panic alarm.
The court was told the Roughs had wanted to gain ‘utter control’ over Gladys and became angry when officials started to probe their dealings. At one point Andrew Rough confronted his mother, raised his fist, and shouted: ‘We’re not thieves!’ By then, the couple were struggling to pay the mortgage of a four-bedroom home, which they bought in 2012 intending to share it with Rough’s mother.
When she decided to remain in her own home, the Roughs began to dig ever deeper into her reserves to make up the shortfall.
The pensioner told the court she had been ‘shocked and stunned’ to find that large sums had left her account, telling a horrified niece: ‘I’ll have nothing left.’
She said she had told the couple they could also use her cards for themselves ‘if they were stuck’ – but not for anything big.
Rough’s advocate Lewis Kennedy said there was ‘nothing sinister’ in the transactions. His wife’s counsel Dale Hughes said his mother had given them a mandate to withdraw whatever they needed. Sentence was deferred until September 13.
‘Used her like a cash machine’