Bus pickpockets snared by Lancashire Telegraph readers (From Blackpool Citizen)

Bus pickpockets snared by Lancashire Telegraph readers

9:33am Tuesday 10th February 2009

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By Camilla Sutcliffe »

TWO pickpockets have been sentenced to 40 months each in jail after one of the pair’s elderly victims recognised their picture in the Lancashire Telegraph.

Liverpool drug addicts Joseph William Woolrich and John Turner, both 45, admitted to stealing from eight victims aged between 65 and 88, between March and June last year.

Their eldest victim suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

The pair, who both have criminal records spanning 30 years, had continued to target elderly people at bus stations in Accrington, Blackburn, Cleveleys and Preston, even after being arrested and bailed.

One had distracted elderly people by dropping money, or pretended to help some-one off the bus, while the other searched the victim’s bags and pockets, covering their hand with a coat.

They took more than £300 from one 72-year-old man, but believed they could not be caught because they had obscured their crimes from CCTV cameras.

But when a CCTV still of the men targeting a 65-year-old woman at Peel Street bus station, Accrington, was published in the Lancashire Telegraph, Second World War veteran Richard Wills, 84, of Burnley, recognised them as the men who had stolen £40 from him as he and his wife Betty boarded a bus at Blackburn Boulevard in May last year.

He said: “One of the chaps pushed in front of my wife and spilt money on the floor, and really took his time picking it up.

"I could feel the man behind pushing into my back and I nearly turned around to tell him to wait his turn.

"It was only once we were on that we realised neither of them had actually got on the bus, and the £40 had gone from my back pocket.

"Goodness knows how I didn’t feel it, because it was buttoned up.

"They must have been really well practised.

“My daughter brought a copy of the Lancashire Telegraph round at the end of May, a couple of weeks after it happened to me, and I recognised them straight away.

"I got back on to the police and told them.

“I’d remembered he had got out a white inhaler and used that as well, because it reminded me I needed to use mine, and apparently that helped them prove it as well.

“I’m glad they have gone to prison. They have taken advantage of elderly people.

"It was really upsetting at the time and shook me up a bit – nothing like that has ever happened to me before.

"I’ve worked hard all my life from the age of 15 to retiring, and I spent three years in the RAF when I was called up for the war.

“But I don’t think those two have ever done an honest day’s effort.”

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