Coroner stole £2m from clients to fund lavish lifestyle Mr Goodwin's son, Ian, told The Telegraph: "What Alan Crickmore did had a devastating impact on our family. We considered him to be a friend, yet he betrayed our trust. My mother has still not really recovered from his betrayal. It hit her very hard. How on earth was he able to do what he did so easily and get away with it for such a long time? In the words of the police officers who investigated the case, Crickmore used his clients" assets as his own "personal piggy bank." The 57-year-old solicitor siphoned off hundreds of thousands of pounds from individual clients" accounts to pay for cruises, restaurant meals, expensive wines and champagne receptions, in what prosecutors described as one of the "most callous and brutal breach of trust" they had seen. Crickmore was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing £2 million from his elderly and vulnerable clients over a 13-year period. Police discovered that he had used his position as executor of his clients" wills to divert proceeds from their estates to his own bank accounts, taking money that they had left for relations and friends in their wills. He also stole from other personal and office accounts to which he had access. Indeed his fraudulent activities - one of the most serious breaches of professional standards to hit the legal profession - might have carried on unchecked, had it not been for the intervention of one sharp-eyed auditor. In January 2010, shortly after he began going through Crickmore's books for the first time, the auditor spotted something surprising. The firm had outstanding "loans" to two clients, amounting to £200,000. Shocked by what he had discovered at Crickmore's chaotic offices in Cheltenham, the auditor not only refused to sign off the books until the money was returned to the clients" accounts, but also reported the matter to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), which opened an investigation. This culminated in Crickmore's suspension in December 2010, and, the following month, he was arrested by Gloucestershire police. Crickmore, who drove a Jaguar with a personalised HMC number plate (for Her Majesty's Coroner), initially denied any wrongdoing. The former home of Alan Crickmore (CHRISTOPHER JONES) It was only later that he admitted 16 counts of theft, seven counts of fraud by abuse of position and one count of fraud, carried out between 1999 and 2011. Due to a legal loophole, however, he was able to keep drawing his £60,000-a-year salary as coroner for Gloucestershire until he formally resigned from his position on Nov 1 last year, shortly before the start of the criminal trial against him. Gloucestershire county council had been unable to sack Crickmore as coroner because he was a judicial officer, independent of political control. During the police's two-and-a-half year investigation, which involved as many as 50 officers, detectives discovered that Crickmore, from St Helens, in Merseyside, had stolen a total of £1,985,097 from his clients" accounts. Police said most of the money has been impossible to trace and will never be returned to its rightful owners. In one particularly shocking case Crickmore took thousands of pounds from the estate of Jozef Dziuma, a Second World War veteran who came to the UK in 1947 after fighting for the Polish army against the Nazis. Mr Dziuma had used Crickmore to write his will and act as his sole executor to his £56,000 estate. This included a £5,000 bequest to his GP and around £20,000 to his brother in Poland. After Mr Dziuma's death in 1998, police found that Crickmore had stolen more than £28,000 in "charges" from the estate. But he had made no attempt to trace either Mr Dziuma's brother or his GP, neither of whom received a penny. One of the largest thefts was from Kenneth Goodwin. On his death in July 1997 Crickmore became a trustee of Mr Goodwin's estate, which included houses and tracts of Herefordshire farmland. Through his position as trust administrator he was able to steal £894,442 from the estate, leaving Mr Goodwin's widow Marjorie and son Ian with only their home, just outside Hereford, and a small number of other properties and assets. To make matters worse Crickmore went on to claim £13,478 in false charges for handling the affairs of Mr Goodwin's other son, Martin, who died in July 2009 without a will. The legitimate costs should have been only £1,447. Ian Goodwin, 55, who runs what remains of the land and property rental firm left by his father, from his home outside Hereford, said: "He stole thousands and thousands of pounds from my father's estate and from lots of other of his clients. He just took what he wanted. What someone like Crickmore, in his position as a solicitor and a coroner, did to people who trusted him was appalling. Police were only able to unravel much of Crickmore's lavish spending of clients" assets after painstakingly examining his bank and credit card statements. They discovered that between 2005 and 2010 he spent more than £45,000 on restaurant bills, £33,500 on holidays, £16,874 on wine and nearly £23,000 on hotels. Crickmore also spent more than £12,000 on a number of luxury cruises, including the QE2, on which he travelled "Grill" - or first class - for two weeks in August 2006, with his wife Susan and their two sons, at a cost of £5,450. In March 2007 the solicitor threw a champagne reception and four-course lunch for 12 guests at the Cheltenham Gold Cup, to celebrate his silver wedding anniversary. The event cost £5,076 and Crickmore paid for it with a "loan" from Judith Lorman, a family friend. She neither knew about the loan nor was invited to the lunch. Sentencing him at Southwark Crown Court on Nov 28, Judge Anthony Leonard QC told Crickmore: "I have had difficulty thinking of such dishonest conduct committed by a practising solicitor over such a long period and with so many devastated victims. You used the money to maintain a standard of living that far exceeded your income. Crickmore faces being struck off as a solicitor by the SRA at a hearing next April, for taking unfair advantage of clients, misappropriating client funds for his own benefit and transferring and withdrawing money from client accounts without permission. Edward Henry, Crickmore's defence counsel, said: "He has lived with this secret and with the denial of the reality of this situation for many years and it has taken its toll." A number of Crickmore's victims have sought to recover their losses from the Solicitors" Compensation Fund, which has so far paid out £116,645 in compensation. The Goodwins are still waiting to hear how much of their losses they will be able to recoup. What they are unlikely to ever regain is their sense of trust.