Suzanne Cherry, a company director, beloved mother and stepmother, lived her life by the rules.
She never broke the law and ‘did everything by the book’ her husband Clinton Harrison said after her death.
It was only by a cruel twist of fate that she came into contact with a man who did anything but.
For John McDonald, the cowboy roofer who was fleeing police when he mowed her down in his van, is a career criminal with scores of previous convictions, the Daily Mail can reveal.
On the day of the crash, which left Mrs Cherry with devastating injuries from which she could not recover, he was following a woman called Gill Smith, 71, to a cash machine after tricking her into paying for shoddy roofing work she did not even need.
He had lied to her telling her if she did not have the work done it would cause a lot of trouble for her neighbour. She agreed to go to the bank to take out £2,000 after her card did not work in McDonald’s portable card machine.
McDonald, 52, driving an unregistered grey Nissan van with defective tyres and brakes, along with his son Johnny, 23, and third man Brett Delaney, 35, followed her, no doubt to make sure she took out the money.
It was part of scam which saw the McDonalds net £50,000 – none of which has ever been returned to their victims.
It was during this trip that they were spotted by police in a marked car, who gave chase after Delaney saw them and turned his head, raising their suspicions. For 12 minutes, the officers pursued the van being driven by McDonald.
In terrifying footage he can be seen crashing into cars, including one carrying an 11-month-old baby.
Reaching speeds of up to 70mph, the chase through the streets of Birmingham saw multiple vehicles damaged by McDonald’s van as he weaved in and out of traffic, drove through red lights and over pavements and tried to ram the police car following him at least eight times before he fled onto the golf course where Mrs Cherry, 62, was playing with her husband.
After the collision all three men fled the scene.
At Worcester Crown Court on Tuesday, McDondald, who lived in local authority housing in Walsall with his wife, was jailed for 13 years and six months after he admitted causing death by dangerous driving.
He also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud in relation to the roofing scam, along with his son and Delaney.
The court heard McDonald had nine previous convictions for 14 offences. It can now be revealed that in 2019, he was jailed for six years after he stole thousands of pounds from an 85-year-old woman and her daughter, 62, who was terminally ill with cancer, after posing as an odd job man.
He also tricked a man, 86, into handing over £450 by claiming to have been sent to smarten up his garden.
McDonald was on the run at the time after failing to appear at court for conning a 98-year-old woman into thinking he had done £300 of repairs to the roof of her Sutton Coldfield home.
He then pushed a female police officer in a failed bid to get away. McDonald was arrested and bailed but failed to appear at Birmingham Crown Court to face charges of fraud and assault in June 2015.
He was still wanted when, the following year, he entered the home of the 85-year-old through an unlocked rear door and told her there was a hole in her fence he could fix.
When she went to get money to pay him and he saw her taking £25 from an envelope that held £3,000 for her sister’s funeral. McDonald told her to go upstairs and open a window and took all the money from the envelope.
The victim did not live long enough to see him locked up. Judge Barry Berlin told him his offending was ‘repugnant’.
He was released after three years and in 2022 was subject to a wanted appeal by West Midlands police, along with his son over a series of distraction burglaries in Walsall and Great Barr where elderly people were targeted and money stolen.
Police said no further action was taken due to insufficient evidence and by April last year, they had managed to convince a man called Ashley Hill, 36, to set up a business and a bank account for them in the name of Approved Roofs Ltd, which they then took over.
The court was told all three defendants conned elderly women out of thousands of pounds by carrying out unnecessary and shoddy roof repairs to their homes. Prosecutor Michael Burrows KC said they had charged ‘exorbitant amounts for bad work’ with their victims left feeling pressured to ‘go along with it’.
Four separate victims – aged 61, 79, 83 and 88 – had been deceived into paying for unnecessary roof works, with one forking out nearly £10,000, with an extra £7,000 needed to repair the damage the defendants had done to her roof.
Mr Burrows said the fraud was ‘sophisticated and required significant planning’ and victims were targeted on the basis of vulnerability – their age.
One woman believed she was paying them £70 for work after she saw them type in the numbers ’70’ in their portable card machine but they actually took £7,800.
Another of their victims told the Daily Mail this week how they had conned her into handing over £11,000.
The woman, 83, who asked not to be named, said she was confronted by the men as she carried bags of shopping into her modern bungalow in Walsall.
‘They said they were doing some work on a neighbour’s house and had noticed a problem with my ridge tiles,’ she said.
‘They told me they would take a look for me and when they were up there they said they discovered a leak.’
With the benefit of hindsight, the widow accepts she made an error in trusting what they had to say.
The men spent several days on her roof before presenting her with a bill. ‘I was shocked but they talked about the material costs and the number of days they’d been up there,’ she said.
‘They weren’t intimidating but I didn’t really feel in a position to argue with them.
‘They had one of those card machines and they got me to pay in instalments.
‘When I tried to pay them a third time, the bank blocked the payment.
‘It is horrible what they have done. People of my age have to fight to keep our independence and they undermine it.
‘I will never see the money again but when I think what happened to the poor lady on the golf course and her husband, it puts it into perspective.’
It was just a few weeks later that McDonald mowed down Mrs Cherry, who was excited to become a grandmother for the first time the following month.
She was playing golf with her husband at Aston Wood Golf Club in Shenstone, near Sutton Coldfield when the van hit her.
McDonald, the court heard, stepped over her body as he made his escape on foot and feigned surprise that she had died when arrested days later, trying to rent another van at a dealership in Walsall.
Mrs Cherry had suffered multiple catastrophic injuries and died in hospital four days later, on April 15, the day before her 63rd birthday.
Her loved ones sobbed in the public gallery as the list of injuries she had sustained were read out, including multiple rib fractures, torn carotid arteries and lacerations to her liver and spleen.
McDonald’s wife and children, who were sitting next to Mrs Cherry’s bereaved family in court, also cried and shouted out his name as he was jailed but it can hardly have come as a surprise to them.
Mr Harrison, who married Mrs Cherry three years ago after being together for 18, said he had ‘no thoughts’ for the man responsible but wants to remember his ‘inspirational wife’ who ran a firm selling spare parts for electricals, and was also an advanced motorcyclist, cyclist, scuba diver and horse rider.
‘All the young ladies wanted to be like Suzanne Cherry because of what she achieved in her life,’ he said. ‘She never broke a rule in her life and did everything by the book’.
