A SHOP worker plotted an “inside job” as her debts spiralled and drug dealers turned up on her doorstep looking for money which one of her sons owed them.

Jacqueline McNeilly drew a floor plan and a map of the rear store room at the Co-op in Stockton Road, Hartlepool, to help convicted burglar Kevin Brown.

But police became suspicious when CCTV from the shop showed the intruder took just two minutes to break in, find keys to the safe and flee with £7,400.

Their investigations led to mother-of-five McNeilly after she used the same taxi which took Brown to a neighbour’s home just 20 minutes after the burglary.

The mother-of-five went to a 24-hour filling station to buy cigarettes, and the cabbie was able to confirm the drop off, Teesside Crown Court was told.

Prosecutor Uzma Khan said the handwritten maps were found ripped up in rubbish bins outside 49-year-old McNeilly’s home in Kintra Road, Hartlepool.

Miss Khan told Judge Peter Armstrong that the manager of the shop described the plans as “very accurate” and revealed a bizarre chat a week earlier.

McNeilly told him that she was about to come into some money as a result of a television show, and she was also expecting some sort of inheritance.

In interviews, she was adamant the burglary had nothing to do with her, accepted the maps appeared to be in her writing, but did not know how or why.

Nicci Horton, mitigating, said she was suffering from stress and depression at the time of the crime, and has since lost the job she loved.

She said the grandmother was not a “criminal-type” and added: “While she didn’t think he would be able to achieve the burglary, she rather hoped he would.

“What she got out of it was the 80 cigarettes she got from the service station . . . and she has now found herself in a position that is significantly worse.”

McNeilly, who admitted burglary, was given a 16-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, with 100 hours of unpaid work for the community.

Brown, 38, of Wynyard Mews, Hartlepool, was jailed for six years and eight months in January for a series of burglaries and an attempted robbery.