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A former cat burglar who claims to have broken into more than 20,000 homes has shared his top tips for how to burglar-proof your home from potential thieves.
Daryl Kennedy, 58, reportedly broke into his first home at just nine years old after his father – another lifelong career criminal – started taking him out on raids as a child in order to teach him the ‘family business’.
His career has seen him travel all around the world on ‘business trips’, including a five-year stint in Australia during which he targeted wealthy homes and stole jewellery from the rich & famous.
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At his peak, Daryl claimed to have been robbing up to 15 homes a day, with his reputation in the underworld growing to the point where he was even able to assemble his own gang of professional thieves.
But despite robbing houses from all over the world, the Manchester-born crook claims he only focused on the homes of the wealthy and powerful and that he 'never stole from working class people'.
Despite the wealth of talent in his chosen field, Daryl was eventually caught in 2014 and served five years in prison for a string of 140 high-value robberies in Cheshire, and after getting released in 2019 made the decision to go straight and hasn’t looked back since.
Nowadays, Daryl works for the other side, and wants to use his very particular set of skills to help people defend their homes from burglars such as himself.
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Darryl's first tip is not just to put CCTV on your own home, but to partner up with neighbours and watch each other's properties too.
He explained if you only have CCTV in your own home, a burglar can break in and steal the hard drive, leaving you with nothing.
But if your neighbour has the footage, it'll stay safe – because the thief would see it as too great a risk to break into two homes.
He said: "Burglars know to look out and dodge CCTV in your own home, but don't think to check for neighbours' CCTV."
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Daryl’s second tip was to invest in door bolts for your living room and kitchen doorways, as burglars who manage to break into either of those rooms will be locked inside and would likely run away in that situation rather than kick the door down and risk waking the inhabitants.
His final tip was an unusual one – hide your valuables inside a beanbag, as that’s the one place that a burglar would never think to look.
It's even safer if you have children and can put the bean bag in their room. Daryl said: "The first thing I would do after breaking into a house is go to the master bedroom.
"It's the first thing any burglar thinks of – it's where all the valuables are.
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"They don't want kids' clothes, and they especially don't want children waking up, so they'll never go for the kids' bedroom."
But despite his long and lucrative career, Daryl says he regrets his lifestyle now that he’s able to look back, and says that he changed his ways after meeting some of his victims during a rehab program in prison.
"When I met my victims, I realised I stole things which had been passed down for generations.
"It was traumatic for me and I see now that burglary is a horrible thing.
"I'm a changed person now, and I want to use what I know to eradicate burglary."
Tom Sanders