Violated by a woman who looted my life: A chilling warning to trusting families - by a mother betrayed by the duplicitous thief she welcomed into her home

• Emma-Jane Currie was jailed for stealing £900 from Zoe Appleyard-Ley
• Currie fled her boss's home with a loot of valuable possessions
• The 45-year-old then used credit cards to withdraw cash and go shopping
• Here, Mrs Appleyard-Ley issues a stark warning to other families at risk   

By Zoe Appleyard-ley For The Mail On Sunday

Published: 16:01 EST, 27 June 2015 | Updated: 11:51 EST, 28 June 2015

Court ordeal: Zoe Appleyard-Ley at home last week with her dog 

Just over a week ago, I stood up at the Old Bailey in front of a judge who jailed Emma-Jane Currie for theft. She had driven off one morning in my car, along with my handbag and credit cards, some of my jewellery, four computers, much of my wardrobe and many of my most treasured possessions.

Shortly afterwards, she withdrew £900 cash using my credit card and tried to take another £400. 

She then went shopping at Victoria station in London, before her spree was stopped by a bank security check.

When Currie was arrested the following day, she was driving my car, loaded up with an astonishing haul of items she had plundered from my home while I and my children were asleep.

She pretended that I had given her permission to take the fully packed car away. She even accused the police of stealing my money. She then proceeded to lie about me and my family, and make entirely false allegations that were then used as character assassination ammunition against me in the trial.

What happened to me and my family is every mother’s nightmare. I let her into our home, treated her kindly and she betrayed that trust by brazenly looting what she could. It has now transpired that she did exactly the same thing to another victim, 75-year-old Karin Bather – shockingly even driving off with her dog.

I would like to share the sense of violation and desolation I felt when I was betrayed by a person in whom I had placed the highest degree of trust possible. I’d also like to suggest ways of dealing with such crimes in future in the hope that no other family will be made to suffer in the way mine has – or at least that they will be better prepared for the ordeal they may face in trying to bring the criminal to justice if the Crown Prosecution Service brings charges and they are called as a witness. 

When I answered Currie’s ‘situations wanted’ advert and interviewed her, she seemed everything I was looking for – charming, well-educated and kind, with experience in both child care and charity work.

Even though I thought I was a good judge of character, I still wanted to be sure before inviting her into my and my children’s home. I carefully read her CV, interviewed her at length, witnessed how she was with my children, took up her references on offer and checked her file with the DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service – the new name for CRB criminal record checks). There was no sign of what lay ahead.

The first thing I noticed when I woke up on June 17, 2013, was the silence. I couldn’t hear anyone moving around the house.

I went downstairs to find a bag of 12 footballs that had been locked in the boot of my new car unceremoniously dumped in the hall.

Jailed: Emma Currie (pictured above during her Old Bailey trial) was imprisoned for stealing £900 

The car itself was missing, as was the computer from the dining room table and my handbag.

At that moment, it dawned on me that she had gone. Any mother will relate to the deadening horror that tore at me as I realised what had happened and rushed to check my children had not been taken, too.

I rang Currie, but she did not answer her private mobile or the iPhone I had given her. I called the bank, who told me of all the shopping activity I had apparently been doing at Victoria station in the previous hour.

Those moments will haunt me for ever. I had been betrayed.

I called the police and told them where she had been only minutes before. Since I had been left without a single house key, a friend came to take my children to school.

I started to make a hurried inventory of what was missing. A friend drew my attention to the emptied coat cupboard and it turned out that not just obvious things had gone missing. Can you remember everything in your house and where you left it?

It was only when I saw what was in the car when I collected it from Crawley police station, with no ID to prove I was me, that I understood the full extent of what had been taken. Places we had not even thought to look for missing items had clearly been targeted too.

That sense of cruel violation is something I hope few people will ever experience. However, as with any bad event, you get over it for your own sake and also for the sake of your children. You retain your belief in justice and want them to understand that justice does exist so you do everything you can to help the police in their investigation and of course you accept you’ll have to be a witness for the CPS.

Currie then jumped bail and went on the run, failing to turn up for her first court hearing. When she was finally caught and brought before a jury, I soon realised that a criminal trial can be even more traumatic than the crime itself.

Possessions can be replaced, but when someone sets out to destroy you publicly you are blind-sided. I was shocked that she could be capable of such cruelty. Suddenly everything was at stake.

I did not discover until the trial that, when Currie was arrested in my car near Gatwick Airport with my passport beside her, she had immediately started lying to cover her tracks. I was astounded to find out that the reason she gave for having been in Victoria Station was to deliver my dry cleaning to Jeeves of Belgravia. There is no Jeeves there and CCTV footage showed her without any dry cleaning.

Worse still, she exaggerated heinous lies she had told to social services in August 2013 and began to make up wild and unfounded allegations about me and my family. Until that moment, I had not realised that the British criminal justice system allowed criminals open season to ruin the lives of their victims by tarnishing their reputation and smearing their character without any effective right of reply.

If criminals are so inclined, they can stop at nothing, they can say anything they want. In court there are no holds barred. The oath to them means nothing. It does not matter that innocent and already violated children will be traumatised still further.

The things I was accused of were, to say the least, colourful.

As soon as I was called to the witness box, I realised that I was defenceless. I had no legal representation or say in what had been presented to the jury.

I was to answer only the questions I was asked and was unable even to whisper to friends the full facts. I had no forum in the witness box to state what really happened for fear of being held in contempt of court.

It did not seem to matter that Westminster Social Services had investigated Currie’s evil allegations and judged them to be false and malicious, or that their report was at the disposal of the prosecutor and had been submitted to the defence counsel from the outset – which, begrudgingly, she had to admit to the judge at the end of the trial.

Betrayed: Mrs Appleyard-Ley wants to share her experience in the hope of informing other parents 

No one elects to be a victim of crime. You have no choice if you are summoned to appear as a witness for the CPS. But as a witness, your interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the CPS. It is not their job to defend you. 

Indeed, collateral damage to the victim is of no interest to the CPS, even if they are hurt far more viciously in the pursuit of justice than in the original crime. Indeed, you do not actually realise that the prosecutor may have only been given the case that morning, and can even dismiss key witnesses not knowing what else they could independently verify.

Meanwhile the defence counsel will have been working in close collaboration with the criminal for weeks or even months. 

I understand Currie went through three legal teams in two years. Unlike the criminal, the victim has been given no briefing or training for how to deal with the witness box experience (it’s awful), or expectation of what they may face in cross examination – however irrelevant to the charges under consideration.

Your inquisitors come across as cool and collected, you can look like a car-wreck.

Even worse, anything you may have said or done in your life may be twisted and used against you while the track record and previous bad character of the criminal must apparently be withheld from the jury – even if that includes, as it did in Currie’s case, jumping bail, going on the run from the police and apparently even performing a remarkably similar theft on a vulnerable elderly lady taking her car, heirlooms, silver and her beloved pet dog.

Until I appeared as a witness, I had never realised that victims of crime and witnesses are often treated worse in our courts than the criminals themselves.

The rules must be changed to stop criminals like Currie further abusing their victims while the court stands silent, as they do so. I have also come to believe that victims and witnesses should be given anonymity in cases where their private home and children are involved. At the very least, reporting restrictions should apply.

I hope my story will not discourage anyone from employing people to help them at home. It’s often a matter of necessity, rather than choice. There must be thousands of people with small children or aged relatives who thank God daily for the help they receive from carers, house-helps, baby-sitters and nannies. For them, a world where you never let another person inside your home is not realistic.

However, my ordeal is a wake-up call that you need to be very careful about whom you place your trust in. Leave no stone unturned in your background checks. You need to know everything to make a proper evaluation of the risk.

And in my opinion the DBS check is not worth the paper it is written on (unless, of course, it actually shows a criminal conviction). Most thefts end up as a crime reference number, not a prosecution.

At one stage Currie’s barrister tried to get her a suspended sentence by blaming me for placing an inappropriate level of trust in her.

Until Emma-Jane Currie was finally convicted, I was in many ways the accused.

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