A British grandmother serving a 9-year sentence for smuggling $1.4 million of cocaine in four suitcases aboard a cruise ship bound for Portugal has died. Susan Clarke, 72, and her husband Roger, 73, have been kept in separate jails since their conviction in 2019, and Susan died alone due to untreated breast cancer earlier this month following a final visit with her husband.
Susan Clarke, 72, was serving an eight year sentence in Portugal and had been suffering from breast cancer. https://t.co/WSATkJZ973
— Metro (@MetroUK) October 18, 2021
- Susan wasn’t able to speak when she died. As a source told the Daily Mail, Susan had a lump in her throat that kept her from speaking and was “in pain” when she passed away. “She was handed a life sentence – left to die in a foreign prison with no loved ones around her,” they said. “Four weeks ago she was given one last visit with Roger. They saw each other through a Perspex window. She was in so much pain. Roger seems to think they had won a battle to come back to the UK too, so he’s devastated that she wasn’t well enough to make the move.”
- Susan and Roger smuggled 20 pounds of cocaine aboard the Marco Polo cruise liner from the Caribbean to Lisbon. Authorities believe they had been doing so over the period of two years on four different cruises, bringing thousands of pounds worth of drugs into the UK each time.
- She claimed that she thought she was smuggling “fruit.” She told the court at her trial that the couple would never have smugged drugs and had instead been bullied into packing fruits sewn into their suitcase. That would have been easier to believe if it weren’t for the fact that this wasn’t their first rodeo.
- Susan and Roger previously served time for smuggling marijuana. They were convicted of smuggling 240kg of cannabis into Norway in 2010 and moved to Guardamar, Spain after serving their sentence. Looks like they didn’t learn their lesson.
