A ‘model’ prisoner who terrorised Macclesfield in a series of knife raids after escaping custody has been given a new jail sentence.
Nicholas Overton, 35, held up four stores in Macclesfield and nine stores in total over 22 days after absconding from HMP Thorn Cross in Warrington, a court was told.
He had gone on the run after stealing £1,500 from a Max Spielmann store in Chester he was working at on a ‘back to work’ scheme organised through the open prison on Friday, August 23.
Overton was caught after 28 days on the run when his wrist watch had dropped into a till drawer as he grappled with a shop worker during a raid in Crewe.
Police later traced him from DNA taken from the watch, a hearing at Chester Crown Court on Monday (October 28) heard.
Meirion Lewis-Jones, for the prosecution, told the court Overton used the same method in most of the nine raids, entering shops and making to pay for a low cost item before producing a knife and grabbing money after the till was opened by workers.
Mr Lewis-Jones also told the court that Overton had nine previous convictions for 60 offences, and had been jailed for a minimum of eight-and-a-half years at Sheffield Crown Court in 2006 for 23 gunpoint robberies and six charges of possessing a fire arm.
He would have been eligible for parole for those crimes in 2014.
Myles Wilson, defending Overton, told the court that his client had admitted to crimes the police could not initially link him to because he wanted to ‘wipe the slate clean’.
He said Overton’s appearance in court was ‘a tragedy’ after describing him as a model prison inmate who had lectured at conferences on the ‘mistakes he had made in the past’.
At an earlier hearing at the court Overton had pleaded guilty to a robbery at Park News on Brown Street in Macclesfield, and asked for raids at Portland Wine Company on Chester Road, the Co-op store also on Chester Road and the Co-op on Thornton Square to be taken into consideration.
Overton also pleaded guilty to two robberies in Crewe and Staffordshire and asked for three other robberies to be considered by the court.
Overton, originally from Sheffield, was sentenced to six years in prison for each of the three robberies he was charged with. The sentences will run concurrently.
Judge Edwards, sentencing, said: “The tragedy is that you have been a model prisoner who may have been released next year.
“You went around causing terror to happy young ladies only doing their job.” Speaking after the sentencing, detective inspector Robert Hassall said that Overton’s arrest had been the result of hard work from officers around Macclesfield and Staffordshire.
He said: “Our initial thoughts were that the robberies weren’t connected.
“Knife-point robberies tend to be localised and these were happening in two different towns and in a different county.
“A lot of work went into identifying how they could be linked, in order to gather enough evidence to get a breakthrough.”
