Victims reveal the real-life horror of discovering the 'Night Watcher' burglar in your house - he's stolen £10m across England and left police baffled, but these clues might end his trail of terror: BETH HALE By BETH HALE Published: 01:40 BST, 2 April 2025 | Updated: 01:49 BST, 2 April 2025 There are many recurrent nightmares that run through Mary’s mind about the sunny Friday afternoon, last summer, when the sanctuary of her home was shattered. The absolute terror of it is seared in her memory. The moment the muscular man, with a gun in his hand, appeared at her right shoulder as she walked to her own front door; his piercing eyes above the balaclava. The moment he demanded entry to the safe and – when she acceded – pistol-whipped her in the face. She recalls it all, right through to the moment he pushed her to the dining room floor, hog-tied her by binding her hands and feet together with cables, and placed a chair on her back so that if she moved so much as a whisker, he would know. ‘I was petrified,’ says Mary, a softly-spoken businesswoman in her 60s whose name we have changed to protect her identity at her request. Nine months on, she is still so shaken by her experience she can’t bear to be in her home in affluent Sevenoaks, Kent, alone. The robber made off with jewellery and watches worth an astonishing £1.4 million – but more significantly for Mary, he took away what so many of us take for granted, her sense of security within her own four walls. ‘Everything goes through your mind,’ she says. ‘Is he going to kill me? You are in absolute terror.’ Susan Morris was injured after being attacked by an armed burglar in October 2017 Mary’s terror that day was made palpably clear to the public last week with the release of a dramatic audio recording and camera footage, as part of a Crimewatch appeal, documenting the moment the home raider struck. It includes not just the businesswoman’s piercing screams, but the robber’s own voice. ‘The key to the garage. Open it! Open the garage,’ he demands. The voice is chilling, but also intriguing, for it could prove the turning point in a mystery that has defied the combined prowess of police forces across the South-East for nearly two decades. The brusque tones - those of, according to a linguistics expert, ‘someone from the prosperous southern counties’ - could be the key to unmasking the identity of the elusive robber dubbed the Night Watcher. The Night Watcher, so called because of the meticulous level of planning behind his raids – watching his targets and their homes, night and day, before striking – is thought to have been responsible for upwards of 17 separate raids on the homes of wealthy residents around south-east England, since 2006. His crimes have netted him as much as £10 million, yet what has happened to his plundered bounty remains one among many baffling pieces of a deeply unnerving puzzle. Police think he may have disposed of his loot abroad or even had sets of jewellery dismantled or melted down – for not a trace of the haul, which includes distinctive items of cherished jewellery and heirlooms, has been found. The thief’s trail of terror has led him from Berkshire to West Sussex, London and more widely in Kent and Surrey. The investigation reached a crescendo in 2018, when Surrey Police launched Operation Prometheus in a bid to snare the villain; but he has remained frustratingly elusive. Police in Kent, who have been investigating the violent raid on Mary and the home she shares with her businessman husband, have been cautious about linking it to the Night Watcher, who is thought to have been behind the 2016 raid on Goodwood House in West Sussex, and its occupants, Lord and Lady March. Yet in that incident, as with Mary, the intruder hit the Duke on the head with a ‘blunt instrument’, causing an injury to his ear, before tying the couple up, and escaping with more than £700,000 of jewellery and heirlooms. They were were only freed when a member of staff arrived for work the next day. Police have linked the latest case, however, to five earlier violent robberies in affluent corners of the county in which, on each occasion, dating back to 2016, there are chilling parallels – two of the most striking being the presence of a firearm and the fact that on every occasion at least one homeowner was present. Camera footage shows the moment Mary came face-to-face with the robber Mary became aware of his presence when he arrived at her shoulder, wielding a gun The robber was wearing a face mask, cream coloured baseball cap and trainers with distinctive red soles His racing bike, likely from the late Nineties or early 2000s, was equipped with tribars (handlebar extensions often used in racing) Speaking to the Mail, Detective Inspector Maxine Harris was reluctant to dwell on the subject of the Night Watcher for fear it become a ‘rabbit hole’ in a complex investigation. But she is well aware of the similarities. A Night Watcher connection was something detectives were ‘actively exploring’, she says. ‘We are working with other force areas to see if there are other linked offences.’ In a green, tree-lined corner of Sevenoaks, Mary is speaking now because she wants whoever it was who attacked her to be stopped in his tracks. ‘I just want him to be caught and not do it to anybody else,’ she says. ‘I don’t know whether he is capable of killing somebody, but you don’t take that chance.’ Mary had popped outside to dispose of a bag of rubbish, taking a diversion to check on the fish in the pond, and was, in her words, sauntering back to her front door on June 21 when an otherwise unremarkable afternoon turned into the stuff of nightmares. Dramatic footage of the moment of the attack, at around 3.55pm, shows the assailant running up behind his victim. But the first Mary was aware of his presence was when he arrived at her shoulder, wielding a gun. Shouting to be taken to the safe, Mary’s first thought was to keep him outside, so she took him to the garage where she duly opened the safe and watched as he rifled through the contents, casting aside boxes and loading jewellery into his bag. But he wasn’t satisfied. ‘He dragged me back inside and wanted more,’ says Mary. She opened a second safe, located upstairs. ‘I was in the process of punching in the code when he took the gun to my forehead and split my head open. I couldn’t see for the blood. ‘He bundled everything into a satchel and then he dragged me down the stairs, into the dining room and put me face down on the floor.’ What happened next brings a tremor to Mary’s voice. Her assailant proceeded to take electrical cable from her own lamps and tied her hands behind her leg, before binding her ankles and fastening all four limbs together. The pain was, says Mary, excruciating. Her assailant began to rifle through office drawers. ‘Then he came in and put a dining room chair on my back so that he would know if I had moved,’ says Mary. ‘I think he had fractured one of my ribs and I was in so much pain I couldn’t move anyway. I was in agony, totally bound up. ‘It felt like an eternity.’ In fact, she now knows it was at around 4.30pm that her attacker left. It was 75 minutes later, each of them spent wondering if her balaclava-clad assailant was still lurking and poised to kill, that her husband returned home, by which time her tightly-bound hands were turning blue. What happened next underlines Mary’s remarkable clarity of thought. As her husband walked into a scene like something from ‘a horror movie’, she called out. ‘There’s an armed robber in the house, I don’t know if he’s still here. Get the police.’ ‘Once he’d done that,’ she says, allowing herself the wryest chuckle. ‘I said “Now take a photograph of the way this man has tied me up, because I think it’s really professional.”’ As she now knows everything about the attack that day was meticulous. ‘I know people have said his modus operandii is similar to that of the Night Watcher,’ she says. ‘And if it was the Night Watcher, he knew we had night security [a dog and a person], so struck during the day.’ Quite how the robber selected his target is unknown, but the string of Kent raids alone netted more than £2 million, suggesting a forensic surveillance mission to identify his prey. On the day of the raid on Mary, police believe he spent some five hours hiding in the vicinity of the house. Watching, before striking, shortly after workmen had left for the day. The similarities with other offences that have been linked to the Night Watcher are striking. Previous victims have been beaten, their limbs tied with plastic cable ties, forced to listen to the sound of their homes being ransacked. Then there is Susan Morris, who was 61 when a robber struck at her Surrey home, in November 2017. She feared she would be raped or killed, and spoke at the time. The words the robber yelled? ‘I want the jewellery, take me to the safe’. In a dramatic appeal, all the more striking now, she said: ‘I gave him a lot of jewellery from the safe and I said to him, “You have got very valuable stuff there, now get out”. ‘But he wasn’t happy with that, he asked for more jewellery, I gave him some more jewellery and he then wanted more jewellery, and this is when he really got angry and started to hit me. ‘He hit me very hard on my face, not enough to knock me out, he knew exactly how hard to hit me, he hit me three times on my face, it was very painful, I couldn’t believe the blows kept coming.’ She suffered a broken jaw and lost a tooth as he beat her and bound her hands with plastic cables. One of the earlier and most shocking attacks was on a family living in a substantial country mansion in Kingswood, in Surrey. Entrepreneur Robert Stiff was at work when the masked man struck at the family’s six-bedroom gated home, backing on to Kingswood Golf and Country Club, at around 5.40pm on a November evening in 2014. His wife Catherine and daughters Chloe and Katie, were at home and Katie, who was pregnant, was kicked in the stomach by the raider, who wore a balaclava. Lord and Lady March, who were targeted in a similar attack Lord and Lady March's home, Goodwood House, in West Sussex It was terrifying and the family spoke on Crimewatch to try and draw attention to the hunt for the perpetrator. Eleven years on, Robert Stiff, 64, reiterates that appeal to the Mail: ‘We’re really disappointed to hear of another incident,’ he says. ‘We have made every effort to move on from what happened, it’s not a case of us sitting here worried about it. ‘We’re disappointed he’s still out there doing it and that he has not been caught.’ In the Kingswood area where the businessman still lives, and where there was another similar robbery three years later – private security guards now patrol the tree-lined streets. But as Mary says, there is little comfort in security if someone as meticulous as her assailant is watching. ‘We had good security,’ she says. ‘But even if I had top of the range security, nothing would have helped me. You just don’t expect that someone is going to jump out of the bushes when you go out to your garden on a Friday afternoon.’ Profilers from the National Crime Agency have been consulted on the Night Watcher enquiry and have previously warned he is ruthless, highly organised and may have served – or still be serving – in the armed forces. One thing is certain, the man who attacked Mary is well-built, his bulging upper arms indicating he works out. ‘Someone must know who this man is,’ says Detective Inspector Harris. ‘He is a dangerous man and the outcome of this case could have been far worse. I won’t forget hearing those screams. It’s terrifying and has left the victim physically and mentally traumatised. Horrifying truth about father who stabbed his daughter in heart during 'playfight' ‘I want people to listen to his voice, look at the video. You can’t hide your mannerisms from your partner, your family. Someone knows who he is, but that person could be frightened, this man could be coercively controlling, he might be violent at home. ‘I want to reassure anyone [thinking of coming forward] that they can trust in my team and me.’ While Mary’s robber left almost no part of his body uncovered; there are clues, not least in the trail of footage police have pieced together of him after the robbery. On such a warm day he would have stood out, travelling with a bicycle from Staplehurst to Sevenoaks railway stations, then, after the robbery, taking trains between Hildenborough, Tonbridge and Marden before being seen cycling in Staplehurst. On the train his balaclava was swapped for a face mask, cream-coloured baseball cap and trainers with distinctive red soles. He sometimes wore a high-visibility top when cycling – a racing bike, likely from the late Nineties or early 2000s, equipped with tribars (handlebar extensions often used in racing) and two water bottles. At liberty, or incarcerated, the robber has taken from Mary something that won’t easily be returned. She’s lost her love of jewellery and now wears only her wedding ring. But she’s lost so much more. ‘This area is so peaceful, the garden is lovely, we are not overlooked; I used to have the curtains open to look out, but he has taken all the away now. ‘I wouldn’t even feel comfortable sitting in the garden now. I’m always on guard. I’m suspicious of everybody. It’s scary that somebody can just do that. Life will never be the same.’ Additional reporting: Isaac Crowson Share or comment on this article: Victims reveal the real-life horror of discovering the 'Night Watcher' burglar in your house - he's stolen £10m across England and left police baffled, but these clues might end his trail of terror: BETH HALE Add comment