TWO women tried to blackmail a man with a ‘high public profile’ for £15,000 by telling his wife they had slept with him.
Holly Moorehouse, 22, and Carol Lancaster, 55, threatened to sell their story to the newspapers if the married couple didn’t pay up.
Both women sobbed, and Lancaster collapsed, as they were jailed for 12 months each at Bournemouth Crown Court.
Lancaster, posing as a woman called Angela, rang the couple seven times in January to say she had slept with the man while his wife was in hospital and on holiday, the court heard.
Following a plan the pair had concocted over a boozy dinner, Lancaster asked for £15,000 to be left in a porch in Whitecliff Road, Poole.
But the net quickly closed in on them as the victims called in the police and they were placed under surveillance, prosecutor Stuart Ellacott said.
Detectives got the wife to ring one of the blackmailer’s mobile phone numbers while they watched Lancaster at a Bournemouth restaurant.
“Lancaster was seen to leave the table to take the call in private,” Mr Ellacott said.
“The wife recognised the voice as one that had been used previously, and officers went into arrest Lancaster and then Moorehouse and her partner joined the table and both were arrested.”
Brian Sharman, mitigating for Lancaster, said that his client’s son becoming a heroin addict had made her depressed and suicidal.
“Her behaviour became irrational,” he said. “She entertained involving herself in a scheme that at an earlier time she would have simply walked away from.”
James Newton-Price, for Moorhouse, said she was a “foolish and rather naive” young mum who hadn’t understood the seriousness of her crime.
“It is not the most sophisticated scheme of this kind,” he told the court.
Lancaster, of Studland Road, in Poole, and Moorehouse, of Knowlton Gardens, Muscliffe, pleaded guilty to the charges last month.
Sentencing, Judge John Harrow said the nine-day blackmail attempt caused the victims strain and anxiety.
“They were subject to a considerable degree of stress,” he said. “They were very worried as to who among their close friends would do this to them and were very fearful.
“Particularly because of the high public profile their family enjoys.”
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