THE verdict ends a saga that has taken months to go through the courts.

Fraudster Beryl Rowlands' first dip in the Dunbar Bank till started a private bank account that snowballed into a £1.7m stash.

She is already in jail for the theft, but the Swindon Crown Court verdict yesterday means husband Paul remains a free man. He was accused of theft, effectively siphoning off money from his wife's windfall. But the jury yesterday agreed that he knew nothing of the theft and did not consciously benefit from it.

Police who exercised a search warrant at the £400,000 Blunsdon home Mrs Rowlands shared with her husband Paul found two Cotswold stone cottages fused into one, packed to the gunnels with the best money could buy.

The court case heard Yew Tree Cottage contained a luxury cooking range, a bathroom with gold taps, an antique snooker table, a photographic studio and a garage with two prestige cars and two motorcycles.

The treasures even extended to a £500 scale model of the couple's Mercedes and personalised number plates idolising their dog Tess.

And they were found to spend as much as £6,000 on dream weekends away 58-year-old Mrs Rowlands once flying to Canada on Concorde for a Johnny Mathis concert.

The money came from the devious behaviour of Mrs Rowlands, a banking manager earning £46,000 a year.

From 1989, the implicitly trusted Beryl Rowlands, a nice, friendly, committed head of banking for Dunbar Bank in London, was stealing cash from under the business's nose and skilfully covering her tracks using the bank's own accounts.

She started because she was in debt and £1m is still missing.

Detective Sergeant Wayne Bagnell, Wiltshire Constabulary fraud investigator, said: "Beryl Rowlands has a vast knowledge and expertise in the banking world. In 1989 she stole £200 from the Dunbar Bank till with the intention of returning the money later in the month.

"But she took that £200 and it started to grow and she continued to pilfer from the till over 11 years until she was finally caught."

Because of her position of trust, Beryl Rowlands had easy access to hard cash from the bank, based at 9 Sackville Street, London, and a subsidiary of Swindon-based Zurich Financial Services.

But the hardest part of stealing at the rate of £15,000 a month was disguising it.

DS Bagnell said: "She covered her tracks by manipulating the internal accounting system at the bank. Monies were posted around the system and as the fraud developed Mrs Rowlands used the bank clearing system to hide the thefts.

"This process also allowed Mrs Rowlands to manage her fraud and after 1995 she would send large cheques, representative of the monies stolen, each month through the bank's clearing system."

The fraud meant that Beryl Rowlands had to be at work at the end of each month to ensure it seemed the stolen money was still inside the bank.

Though the scam was precision-engineered, said DS Bagnell, Mrs Rowlands had to accept it would come to light if she left her job.

In the end though, the financial expert was undone not by circumstances but by an office junior.

DS Bagnell said: "A junior saw Beryl Rowlands put information into a bank's computer without the banking documentation as proof. The junior made enquiries and asked questions about an 'internal tax account', asking why it was so large. It was brought to the attention of the bank's directors and an investigation was instigated."

The scam was so refined it even extended to Mrs Rowlands using Dunbar cheques to pay bills for her gas, electricity and telephone.

"The skills she employed displayed an unbelievable abuse of trust of colleagues, enabling her to live through lies for 10 to 11 years," said DS Bagnell. "Dunbar Bank was clearly a victim and if it wasn't for the greed of Beryl Rowlands this would never have happened."

When police confronted Mrs Rowlands she seem relieved, detectives said.

At first she seemed ready to tell all, and then she changed her mind, promptly pleading her guilt in court.

Police found Paul Rowlands contesting that he dishonestly received his wife's ill-gotten gains right from the start. He admitted splashing out on motorcycles, cars, photographic gear and holidays. But he maintained he had no idea his wife was a thief.

DS Bagnell added: "Mrs Rowlands is a nice lady, an intelligent, very capable professional who was initially, legitimately in debt and could see her way out of it. She put her hand in the till and couldn't control it."

The answer as to why Beryl Rowlands was able to get away with her crime for so long boils down to one thing; she was able to abuse the trust bestowed on her.