A burglar was today starting a three-year jail sentence for stealing from two Wolverhampton pensioners – just months after being released early from prison for a string of other raids on the elderly.

Jamie Haworth, aged 31, walked into the elderly couple’s home through an unlocked door as the victims, both aged in their 70s, tended to their front garden. He stole a handbag containing credit cards, £60 in cash, glasses and a mobile phone, but was spotted by witnesses and arrested nearby.

Haworth admitted the burglary, which happened in the Merry Hill area of Wolverhampton, on May 9 this year.

At Wolverhampton Crown Court yesterday, Judge Michael Dudley told him: “You have an appalling record of burglary that goes back many years. You say you didn’t know there were victims in the house, but burglars take their victims as they find them.”

Sarah-Jayne, Buckingham, defending, said Haworth had been “devastated by he circumstances he finds himself in”.

She said Haworth, of Lichfield Road, Wednesfield, was not a drug addict, but was “unemployable” and stole money just to get by in life.

Haworth is thought to have been released less than halfway into a three-year sentence handed out in January last year.

He had been targeting vulnerable elderly women and stealing their wedding rings, bank cards and family photographs in a string of distraction burglaries.

Judge Michael Dudley told him at the time that his crimes were “of the most evil kind”. The court heard how he would knock on pensioners’ doors posing as a gardener or handyman looking for work before stealing cash, jewellery, house keys and purses containing precious family photographs.