£296,173.68. That is the sum Pamela Gwinnett took from the savings of Joan Green, according to the Mirror, and it is the figure that ties the whole case together. On Monday, at Preston Crown Court, Gwinnett was handed two more months in prison. Her total now stands at six years and two months.
The extra time is for running. Gwinnett, 63, of Adlington, Lancashire, left for Tenerife in April 2025, only hours after a court turned down her request to change her bail conditions so she could scatter her brother’s ashes. She was waiting to stand trial for theft and fraud by abuse of position. She had also failed to hand over her passport, the Independent reported.
Judge Michael Maher did not buy the story. “No evidence of a brother has ever been produced, much less that he passed away,” he said, and he described the flight as a deliberate, sustained effort to dodge justice. Her barrister, Rosalind Scott Bell, apologised and put the departure down to “fear and anxiety” and “poor mental health”, adding that Gwinnett still considers herself not guilty. The judge was unmoved. “Frankly your apology carries no weight at all,” he said.
Sixteen months in Tenerife
A jury had already convicted her in her absence last October, and she was sentenced to six years. She spent 16 months abroad. Greater Manchester Police said in July that she had been arrested, after officers worked with the National Crime Agency and Spanish authorities to find her. She was picked up at her apartment on 14 July and landed at Manchester Airport the week before the hearing. In court she wore the clothes she had arrived in, and she admitted breaching bail.
A Sky News crew had found her outside that apartment earlier. Asked about the money, she answered: “I don’t need to answer these questions. Did I heck take the money.”
How the money went
Joan Green, an 89-year-old retired accountant from Chorley, was the victim. Gwinnett had come into her life as a friend and carer during the Covid-19 pandemic. She then made false accusations against Green’s stepdaughter and step-grandchild, including theft and neglect, and secured power of attorney over Green’s finances.
The family were shut out. Gwinnett changed the locks and the landline number at Green’s gated bungalow, the Manchester Evening News reported, and told the pensioner her relatives “weren’t good enough”. Carers who visited said they saw Gwinnett “barking” at her. In March 2022 the family got the power of attorney revoked, but by then Gwinnett had opened a joint account with Green and kept drawing on it.
The money paid for a £22,500 car, Botox and other beauty treatments, expensive meals and mortgages on properties Gwinnett owned. The savings had been built up by Green and her late husband Stanley, a retired senior manager at British Aerospace. At the original sentencing Judge Maher called Green “simply a cash cow to be milked until she was dry”. A later Proceeds of Crime Act hearing ordered Gwinnett to repay what she took.
Green did not live to see any of it resolved. She died in November 2022.
Sources
- Fraudster who stole £300k from pensioner before fleeing to Tenerife finally jailed
- Fraudster who swindled £300K from grandma before fleeing to Tenerife is jailed
