Commercial sex worker turns out to be robber after attacking a would be customer

Warwick: A prostitute attacked a man with a pair of scissors when he refused to give her and a fellow sex worker money for drugs.

The women, who were in the man's home, then robbed him.

Both women had denied the robbery, but as they were about to stand trial Sarah Valance changed her plea to guilty, while Jemma Lewis admitted the offence shortly after her trial began, reports the Coventry Telegraph.

Lewis, 27, and Valance, 38, were both jailed for four years for the robbery by a judge at Warwick Crown Court.

But Lewis was given a consecutive one-year sentence after she admitted robbing a ten-year-old boy on the doorstep of his home just five days after she had been granted bail.

And Valance received a two-month consecutive sentence after pleading guilty to a theft while she was also on bail.

Prosecutor Hugh Williams, said the sex workers met their joint victim at a bus stop in Paynes Lane during the afternoon of May 7 last year.

The man, who knew Lewis, was on his way home, and they went with him to his flat where they had some of the meal he had prepared.

Valance then began complaining about needing drugs, and both of them asked him for money to buy drugs.

When he refused, both women attacked him, punching and kicking him, and Valance picked up a pair of scissors and tried to cut a hole in his jacket pocket to get to his wallet.

“She then directed the scissors at his face and neck, causing small cuts to the side of his face.”

The man grabbed her by her hair, at which Lewis, who was subject to a four-month suspended sentence at the time, began kicking his legs, causing severe bruising and swelling, before they left with his wallet containing £40 and his phone.

After they were later arrested Valance claimed things had been friendly until Lewis demanded money for boots which had been stolen after she had left them outside the man’s flat on a previous occasion.

She claimed Lewis had then assaulted the man, adding that Lewis was then given money by the man which they spent on drugs.

Then on March 14 this year, while she was on bail, Valance went to another man’s home and told him she wanted to come in and asked for some tobacco.

While his back was turned she took his phone from a table and put it in her pocket, refusing to give it back when he asked.

And when the man tried to block her way Valance, who had originally been charged with robbery, got two knives from the kitchen, threatening to use them on him if he prevented her from leaving, so he stepped to one side.

Mr Williams said that on March 30, a ten-year old boy was sent by his mother to get some credit put on her electricity card at a shop near their Coventry home.

Having forgotten how much she wanted him to put on it, he returned to their home holding the £10 note he had been given.

And as he waited for his mother to open the front door Lewis, who had only been granted bail five days earlier, pushed him from behind, knocking him to the ground, and took the money.

Amy Jackson, for Lewis, who she said had a long-term heroin addiction which was behind her offending, asked for her to be given credit for her guilty pleas, even though the plea to the first robbery had come very late.

In court Andrew Molloy, for Valance, accepted that custody was inevitable, but said she could be distinguished from Lewis in that her plea was entered before the trial began, and her second offence was a theft rather than a robbery.

Sentencing the two women at separate hearings, Recorder William Mousley QC told Lewis: “The aggravating feature of the joint robbery is that this took place in someone’s home, although you perhaps played a lesser role in that; and so far as the other robbery is concerned, that was a street robbery.”

He told Valance: “Until these two matters you had had no convictions since 2005.

"But this was a robbery committed in someone’s home and, in my view, you were the instigator of that robbery and played the leading part in it.”