Ex-nun convicted of stealing £500,000 from state school

A "shopaholic" headmistress was found guilty yesterday of stealing £500,000 from her former school and squandering the cash on designer jewellery, sunshine holidays and trips on the Orient Express.

Colleen McCabe, who is 50 and a former nun, was warned that she faced a lengthy jail sentence because of her "gross betrayal" of trust, which had left her school in a financial crisis.

McCabe, the former headmistress of St John Rigby College in West Wickham, south-east London, a Roman Catholic state school, was unanimously convicted of the 11 sample counts of theft and six of deception she had faced.

Southwark Crown Court was told that in a series of spending sprees that "would have made Imelda Marcos proud" McCabe had spent £7,000 on shoes alone.

McCabe also bought Gucci jewellery, dined out at expensive restaurants, enjoyed West End theatre "extravaganzas", trips on the Orient Express and sunshine holidays using school funds.

She started work at the school after leaving the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, where she was a nun, in 1994. She then proceeded on a course of "milking and attacking and abusing" the £3m annual school budget, which was largely under her control, Andrew Wilcken, for the prosecutiong, said.

Over the next five years, massive amounts were frittered away on furniture, electrical goods, designer clothes and cosmetics, while gifts were lavished on relatives and friends.

He said evidence of wrong-doing was overwhelming. McCabe "hammered" her Barclaycard in a "blatant display of profligacy" in the weeks before Christmas 1997. She spent more than £1,500 on two visits to a "favourite watering hole", the Monte Carlo restaurant in Sevenoaks, Kent.

There was also £1,500 for tickets and champagne receptions for the West End shows Saturday Night Fever and The Phantom of the Opera. More school money bought six seats for Grease.

Meanwhile, her school lurched from one financial crisis to another, with a library full of empty shelves and teachers forced to clean their own classrooms.

The theft was discovered when the grant-maintained school returned to the control of the London borough of Bromley in 1999. Council auditors were sent into the school and reported "grave concerns" over its accounts. Their investigations eventually led to the headteacher's arrest.

She will be sentenced on 22 August and was given bail until probation and psychiatric reports have been completed.

Her former friend, the one- time school bursar Maureen Stapley, 41, of Addiscombe, Surrey, was cleared of six deception allegations.

Councillor Russell Mellor, leader of Bromley council, said of the verdict: "It is good to see that justice has been done. McCabe abused her position to embellish her own lifestyle, draining college funds, and depriving pupils, parents and staff of resources, which greatly impacted the standard of education to which they were entitled.

"This sounds a clear warning that those in positions of trust and responsibility will not be allowed to misuse them for their own gain."