Ted Joy woke up to a living nightmare when three masked thugs burst into his New Forest home and shone a torch into his face, threatening to kill him in their demand for money.
“They kept insisting I had a stack of money hidden away,” the pensioner recalled of his ordeal. “I told them I only kept my pension in my house but they wouldn’t believe me.”
The 67-year-old was attacked by the balaclava wearing trio at his remote cottage at Furzehill in 1985. As one intruder pinned him down on his bed, accomplices ransacked every room in his house. The gang eventually fled with just £1 from a pair of trousers he had draped over a chair after ripping out telephone wires and threatening to tie him up unless he promised not to contact the police.
Ted Joy. (Image: Echo)
The trembling retired farmer wandered around his house for two hours before hammering on a neighbour’s door to raise the alarm. “I didn’t know what to do,” he told the Echo. “It was just like a bad dream.”
It left a shaken Mr Joy fearing he might have to move out of his home of 49 years. “It will break my heart to leave but living here can never be the same again.”
A month later, the paper reported how William Ross, 73 and his 51-year-old wife, Anna, were enjoying a quiet of tea when a gang invaded their Southampton shop and held them captive for ten minutes in a ruthless robbery.
The four men, all of West Indian appearance, had posed as ordinary customers but when told the business, Anna Jewellery of Distinction, had closed for the evening, two suddenly leapt over the counter, grabbed Mrs Ross and threw her onto the floor.
“I was pinned down by this young man who had his arm across my throat and leg across my chest. I couldn’t see what happened to my husband but I heard this terrible thump as he went down onto the floor. Then, there was this dreadful breathing as though he was dying.”
One raider grabbed several heavy gold chains, bracelets and rings, valued at about £10,000, from a display before they bolted from the Northam Road shop she had owned for 22 years.