Britain: Three vicious black robbers dubbed the Nappy Valley stranglers have been jailed for a crime spree that targeted wealthy young mothers

The black trio singled out vulnerable women as they walked their children in pushchairs along the street in daylight. Disguised with motorcycle helmets, hoods and balaclavas, they crept up on victims from behind and stripped expensive rings from their fingers after throttling them until they blacked out. Some of the victims, including one who was seven months pregnant and walking a 17-month-old baby, feared they would be killed. Detectives believe that the black males made more than £100,000 by selling the jewellery to a corrupt businessman in London’s Hatton Garden district. The career criminals, responsible for hundreds of violent offences between them, spent the cash on overseas holidays and shopping sprees for designer clothes. Judge Richard Southwell labelled the crimes gratuitous and motivated by pure greed as he jailed the black males for a total of 46 years. Speaking at Kingston Crown Court, he said all three black males roamed as predators and posed a significant danger to the public. Perrie Williams, 26, terrorized the affluent Battersea, Clapham and Fulham areas of South West London – known as Nappy Valley because of its high number of families with young children – with his school friends Christopher Byom, 29, and Anton Lord, 33. After stalking their victims on motorcycle or by car, they strangled them with a potentially deadly grip on the carotid artery in their necks. Some of the women were punched and kicked, including one who needed reconstructive surgery to her jaw. The black robbers, all on licence and bail for other crimes, lived on benefits and Williams even applied for a taxpayer-funded loan just a month before he travelled to Miami. They were convicted of nine robberies but detectives suspect that they were behind dozens more. Byom, of Clapham, was jailed for 21 years; Williams, of Wandsworth, was jailed for 17 years and Lord, of Croydon, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for eight and a half years. It can now be revealed that Williams’s life of crime began when he kidnapped a 13-year-old boy in an attack that shocked Britain and was compared to the killing of James Bulger. He and two accomplices abducted Michael Servante and strung him up by his feet before beating him to within an inch of his life in 2000 when he was just 15. But he has never been named publicly in connection with the crime because of an anonymity order imposed by an Old Bailey judge. It has emerged that he began strangling and robbing minicab drivers within a month of his release from the seven-year jail term in December 2006.