Savings Stolen As Woman Slept

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31000, 4 March 1966, Page 1

Savings Stolen As Woman Slept

j A widow pensioner, partly blind and deaf, with diabetes, lost her rent money and money saved to meet bills, including repairs to her washing machine, when her house in Sydenham was burgled early on Tuesday morning. ■ Mrs M. A. Gray, aged 72, was asleep, with £l7 19s 3d in her purse on a table beside ■her bed. : She was awakened by something brushing across the foot of her bed. Mrs Gray, because of her infirmities, took some time to get out of bed and switch on the light. She found the bedroom had been ransacked. Her social security passbook and papers that had been on the bedside table were strewn on the floor. The cash was gone. She went downstairs. The I back door, which she had locked before going to bed,

was open. Louvre windows in the bathroom had been removed. The rooms downstairs had been roughly searched. Detectives were called to the house. Mrs Gray said that a youth had called to her house the previous day, and had said he had come to collect money owed to Mr ——. Mrs Gray said she did not know the man named and asked how she could owe money to a man she did not know. She told the youth to get the man named to call if he said she owed him money. As a result of the burglary, Mrs Gray was left with only £4 on which to live for a month. On next pension day, she will owe two lots of rent and have to pay new bills as well as those for which she had saved money. . The Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Foundation for the Blind has given Mrs Gray a grocery order. Police inquiries are continuing.