A heartbroken widower has spoken of his “sickening” pain after drug addict paramedics stole his late wife’s crucial medication.

Hours after Linda died from terminal cancer, Ruth Lambert and Jessica Silvester, a couple from Margate, raided her medicine cabinet.

Lambert, 33, and Silvester, 29, were jailed for five years for the “callous” theft of pain-relieving drugs from almost 30 patients, at Canterbury Crown Court yesterday.

Doting husband Colin Singleton, who cared for his wife until her final moments, told how the South East Coast Ambulance medics were scamming “within five minutes.”

“Within five hours of my wife’s death someone phoned me from the district nurses.

"I couldn’t believe they would be so callous as to phone me so quickly, but they put me under pressure to come around and collect the drugs,” he said.

“They were there within five minutes.

“They asked for more (and) when I gave them some of them, I was so annoyed I basically told them to go away, or words to that effect.”

The retired construction boss was “sickened” by their actions, and so phoned the hospital for answers.

But Colin and Linda, together for 30 years, had been victims of the duo in their plight for free, off prescription opiates.

“I couldn’t believe it, I felt sick,” he said, recalling Lambert inside the couple’s Strood home: “she looked scared.”

Lambert and Silvester carried out at least 24 similar burglaries over a period of nine months from December 2020, Kent Police would discover.

Now Mr Singleton, who has struggled to grieve, believes the pair should have been handed longer prison sentences.

“I wish it was more, I’ve got to live with the fact that when I think about my wife, I cannot get that situation out of my head.

“They didn’t allow me or my family to grieve properly,” he said.

“I think the main closure I will get is that they have been stopped, that other people don’t have to go through this.”

Lambert invaded properties while Silvester raided NHS databases for potential targets.

They also sought victims in Thanet, Canterbury, Whitstable, Faversham and Herne Bay.

The pair, formerly of Gap Road, pleaded guilty to conspiring to burgle and conspiring to commit theft, having stolen a £14,000 ultrasound machine from the NHS.

They asked for a further five counts of conspiring to burgle to be taken into account during their sentencing hearing.

Emergency services have since condemned the duo who, according to their lawyers, succumbed to addiction to help cope with mental and physical pain.

Jailing the pair for five years, Judge Rupert Lowe dubbed the crimes "unusual and extraordinarily callous."

“It was an extraordinarily callous and uncaring form of exploitation of the most vulnerable people - often, when they were terminally ill, or dying, or in some cases when they had actually died."