UK NEWS

WIDOW, 77, HAD £1,300 OF COCAINE

GUILTY: Betty Lily Nicholls wanted 'a lift'

Thursday September 18,2008

By Padraic Flanagan

AN ELDERLY widow caught with £1,300 of cocaine in her handbag told police she planned to take the drug to give her “a lift”.

White-haired Betty Lily Nicholls, 77, was arrested after a tip-off that the car she was travelling in was being used to transport drugs.

Exeter magistrates heard that police stopped a Ford Focus car on the M5 last November. The male driver and female passenger – Mrs Nicholls – appeared “very nervous and avoided eye contact”. When Nicholls’s handbag was searched a bag was found containing compressed white powder.

Nicholls, from Bude, Cornwall, told police: “I don’t know what it is. I thought it was puff.”

I was told it will give you quite a lift

Betty Lily Nicholls

Police tested the 27.4 grams of powder and found it was cocaine with a street value of £1,370. Nicholls, who admitted possessing a Class A drug, refused to say where she had obtained the drug.

Asked about the incident in court, Nicholls, who represented herself because she could not get legal aid, said: “I am sorry. It will never happen again.

“It was in my bag. I don’t know what it was. I was done for possession, it was mine, I knew it was there. I did not know the value.