DUPE OF GANG

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23719, 27 July 1940, Page 2 (Supplement)

DUPE OF GANG

Crooks Left Woman to Face Police

REFERENCE to a mysterious gang which broke into a London post office and stole a safe containing stamps, postal orders, and cash to the value of £I4OO, was ihade at the Old Bailey, last month when Mrs. Hilda Sharry, aged 28, was charged with receiving 33 orders knowing them to have been stolen.

asked to come back. JYhen she went out the car and the three men had disappeared. She. had been abandoned. Later, she was arrested, and when she realised that she had been assisting criminals she thought -it best to say - that twice previously she had been out with the men changing. postal orders, and had been paid £5. Detective-Inspector Daykin, of Scotland Yard, said the Bedfordshire police received information that three men and a blonde woman were heading for Dunstable. A police officer ; there saw the car with three men .in. it. When Superintendent Whitehorn approached the car, one of the men sprang up and aimed a blow* at him tnrough the sunshine roof. The three men then drove off. Detective-Inspector Daykin revealed that Sharry had been sentenced to three months' imprisonment for theft at Middlesbrough in 1928.

Sharry pleaded guilty, and the Common Sergeant, postponing sentence, said that perhaps something might be done for the woman.

Mr. Derek Curtis Bennett, prosecuting, stated that the postal orders were part of the proceeds of the Seven Sisters Road Post Office robbery, which was the work of . a gang of eight or nine men, not one of whom had been traced. Stolen Postal Orders

Some of the stolen postal orders were cashed at a post office in Dunstable, and later the same day Sharry tried to cash more stolen postal orders at another post office in the town.

Sharry told the Court that she met a man in a Soho cafe, and he asked her to help him change postal orders. Ho first told her he had bought them, and later that he received them in his business as an advertising agent. She did not realise they were stolen. With two other men she was driven out into the country in a car, and she went into one or two country post offices and changed orders. At Dunstable she went into the post office, and after about ten minutes' conversation with assistants she was