A woman who gambled away £100,000 of public donations raised to help her terminally ill son has not been jailed after a judge accepted she had been under “enormous pressure”.

Nurse Stacey Worsley, of Osmondthorpe, Leeds, was given a suspended sentence on Friday after convincing the judge, Guy Kearl QC, that she started gambling online with the money to raise funds to help her son, Toby Nye, who had a rare cancer, neuroblastoma.

Leeds crown court heard Leeds United paid for Toby’s £200,000 treatment, which was not available on the NHS, after the football club learned the boy was a fan. But the treatment did not work and Toby died earlier this year, shortly after his sixth birthday.

Sentencing her, Kearl described how Worsley started gambling money raised by Toby’s school as well as on a Just Giving page, and the situation “spiralled”.

The judge told her: “You became overwhelmed by the situation in which you found yourself.”

He added: “You were under enormous pressure and I have no doubt that all of this started as a result of you wanting to raise the money for his treatment.”

He also accepted she had not spent the money on luxuries for herself.

Worsley, who had pleaded guilty to fraud at an earlier hearing, had struggled to deal with Toby’s illness while caring for her other two children, now aged two and seven, the court heard.



The judge was told police had recovered £135,000 of Worsley’s gambling debts from the online gambling companies, which would be given back to donors and other charities.



Nicholas De La Poer, defending, said: “The gambling started with the best of intentions and it became a compulsive distraction from the horrors of the situation.” He said the online betting “spiralled hopelessly out of control” and “she was in the grip of it”.



The court heard that none of the money raised by Leeds United went through Worsley and was all spent on Toby’s treatment.

Arfaq Nabi, the senior crown prosecutor for Yorkshire and Humberside, said: “The circumstances of this case are tragic. However, Stacey Worsley not only abused her position as trustee of the fund, but also cynically abused the trust and compassion extended to her by members of the public, including Toby’s primary school, who raised money towards the treatment of a very seriously ill little boy.”