Grief-stricken families detail heartache after crooked funeral salesman pocketed their money
This is the first picture of a crooked salesman who sold headstones and memorials for a Wolverhampton funeral company and pocketed the cash which he spent on gambling.
Steven Drinkwater took at least £9,920 from eight customers of Chapel Ash-based Hopcraft Funeral Directors between March 2013 and November 2015 but Wolverhampton Crown Court heard it may have been much more, with other victims believed to have stayed silent.
Heart-rending victim impact statements were read out in court, including one from customer Jennifer Clark whose son Jay, aged 43, had collected money for the National Heart and Lung Foundation before he died.
The charity boxes he used went missing and were never found, as did the headstone the family had ordered in his memory. The statement also claimed during a meeting with Drinkwater, the urn containing his ahsed were left under the table, with Mrs Clark saying she wasn't sure whether they were still in there.
She said: "The whole experience has left me looking forward to leaving this world and telling my son how sorry we are to have got involved with Drinkwater.
"He was at best disrespectful the way he treated us, which I told him and obviously at worse, he has not only robbed thousands of pounds from people who are already dealing with the grief that comes from losing loved ones but has left them with a terrible experience which in some cases they will never get over.
"I don't know where our son's headstone went but we had to have an unmarked grave for his funeral. I can only speculate what happened to the charity boxes but the fact they went missing was just another stress we had to deal with.
"We are proud of our son who was the most loving, caring person you could wish to meet, he was helping people until the day he died and deserved a peaceful and fitting farewell but he was robbed of this by this man."
