Heartless carer who fled to Tenerife after stealing £300,000 told to sell home

A cruel and manipulative fraudster dubbed the ‘black widow’ after fleecing an elderly woman out of nearly £300,000 has been ordered to sell her home to repay the stolen money.

Pamela Gwinnett, 62, treated frail and vulnerable Joan Green as a ‘cash cow to be miked’ – even stealing her money after she died in November 2022.

Gwinnett, who claimed to be the 89-year-old widower’s friend and carer, isolated her from her family and callously accused them of mistreating her.

She used the pilfered cash to knock ‘substantial’ amounts off her mortgage and splashed out on an Audi Q2, expensive meals, beauty treatments and Botox.

Gwinnett fled the UK for Tenerife after being charged with fraud and theft. She was found guilty and jailed for six years in her absence last October.

The scammer remains on the Spanish Island, where she has been nicknamed ‘The Black Widow’ due to her reputed interest in wealthy retirees.

At a Proceeds of Crime Hearing, which she also failed to attend, her barrister Abigail Holmes said Gwinnett intends to appeal the convictions for fraud and theft.

Judge Michael Maher made a confiscation order for £350,180.79, which Gwinnett must pay within three months.

He said that Gwinnett’s house in Adlington would have to be sold and that the time limit could be extended to allow completion of a sale, should it be required.

If Gwinnett fails to pay the money she owes, she will be liable to 42 months in prison in default of payment.

Judge Maher said: ‘This is a rare case where I am able to make a full confiscation order for the funds which were stolen.

‘Unusually the available amount exceeds the proposed confiscation figure. Against that background I have made a compensation order to the estate of Joan Green.’

Gwinnett’s trial heard she discovered Joan was wealthy having worked as an accountant, while her husband had been a senior manager at British Aerospace.

‘Both had worked hard during their working lives, and they had invested carefully and shrewdly for their old age,’ Judge Maher said in his sentencing remarks last year.

‘But to you, Joan Green was simply a cash cow to be milked until she was dry.

‘And so having inveigled your way into their lives behind the charade that you were a benevolent friend to Joan, you set about playing the long game to isolate and control a vulnerable woman and thereby enrich yourself.

‘The masquerade was so successful that she made you a lasting power of attorney within a relatively short time of knowing you.’

While claiming to care for the pensioner, she was also isolating Joan from her friends and family by lying that her closest relatives were stealing her pension money.

She went so far as to move Joan into a care home near where she lived in Adlington to keep her close when Covid hit in March 2020.

When the country emerged from lockdown a year later, Gwinett took Joan back to her own home in Chorley – but padlocked the gates and changed the landline number to protect her ‘golden goose’.

During the final months of her life – which the court heard had become ‘pock marked with increasing periods of bewilderment and confusion’.

By March of the following year, Joan was deemed to have no capacity and Gwinett’s power of attorney was suspended.

But she had already plundered £161,000 by that time and was able to steal another £119,000  by opening a joint account and transferring huge sums of Joan’s money into that.

In a victim personal statement, step-daughter Katherine Farrimond, 65, said Joan believed in her final years that her family ‘hated her’ and ‘didn’t want to see her’ due to Gwinnett’s ‘lies’.

In April, Gwinnett applied to vary her bail conditions so she could fly to Tenerife, claiming she wanted to scatter her late brother’s ashes.

The request was denied but she still boarded a plane just hours later and has remained there since.

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