A knife-wielding thief from Royston who went on a crime spree despite being on a suspended sentence has been jailed for just under a year.

Tracy Devonshire, 38, brandished a 14cm-bladed knife while stealing £105 worth of clothes from Primark in Stevenage on June 24.

She also stole cosmetics and other items worth a total of £441.98 from the town’s Boots store on May 14 and 18, and two electric toothbrushes together worth £270 from the chain’s Hitchin branch on May 1.

Devonshire, of Field Crescent in Royston, has been sentenced to a total of 51 weeks and four days behind bars – just shy of a year.

Devonshire pleaded guilty to four charges of theft, one of having a knife in a public place and one of entering Stevenage town centre in breach of a year-old criminal behaviour order.

She had been sentenced to eight weeks’ imprisonment, suspended for 12 months, in March for a similar shoplifting offence in Stevenage.

Chairman of the bench Kevin Shults, sitting at Hatfield Remand Court, noted that the theft from Primark was Devonshire’s second knife offence.

He sentenced her to 26 weeks in prison for possessing the blade in public, adding a 12-week consecutive sentence for the theft from Primark and activating the eight-week suspended sentence to make 46 weeks.

An extra 39-day jail term, added due to Devonshire’s failure to pay a previous court-imposed £1,926.20 fine, brought the total sentence up to 51 weeks and four days.

Concurrent 12-week prison terms were imposed for the three thefts from Boots, with Devonshire ordered to pay £711.98 in compensation.