Richard William Cove Called NHS 111 1,263 Times Posing as an Elderly Woman to Talk About Feet, Then a Court Fenced Off 999
WORTHING, WEST SUSSEX — Between April 2019 and April 2021, the NHS 111 service run by South East Coast Ambulance Service logged 1,263 calls from a single nuisance caller in Worthing. The man gave false names, false telephone numbers, and false ailments. He put on the voice of an elderly woman. He talked about height and about feet, then asked the call handler about their feet. Sussex Police later said Richard William Cove, then 45, of Boundary Road, admitted every one of those calls and said he had a sexual interest in feet that he indulged on most of them. The ambulance trust put the cost at £21,869.21. Some of the fake calls caused clinicians to ring people who had never dialled 111. Some sent ambulances to addresses that had not asked for one.
The case reached police in a way that had nothing to do with a confession. In April 2019 a member of the public complained that NHS 111 clinicians kept calling him even though he had never contacted the line. That complaint opened the file. Officers traced the calls to a landline, and Pc David Quayle said Cove was arrested at the home he had been calling from. He pleaded guilty at Worthing Magistrates’ Court to malicious communications. In September 2021 the court gave him 16 weeks in prison, suspended for two years, 200 hours of unpaid work, and an order to pay £2,000 compensation toward a bill the NHS had already priced above £20,000. The BBC and the New York Post published the call count while the case was still fresh. The Bucks Free Press, carrying the police account, identified him as a buyer by trade.
A suspended sentence is a bet that the person will stop. Cove did not stop. Between June 2023 and September 2024 he called Sussex Police on the non-emergency 101 number, again pretending to be an elderly woman, again steering trained staff toward his own subject. The name he used often enough for the court story to stick was Helen Cheeseman. Metro reported that he was already known to 111 operators as “The Foot Fetish Caller,” and that he also tried the name Michael Foot, a pun wearing a dead politician’s name. He reported trivial matters, then asked personal questions, including shoe size, and tried to maneuver handlers into saying “cheesy feet” or “smelly feet.” On one day he made 60 calls from a mobile phone with the number withheld. The calls added up to more than three hours of police time. That is not a long film. It is a long time on a line that is supposed to be open for everyone else.
The targeting is the part that takes this out of the category of a weird habit and puts it in the category of a public harm. Investigating officer Rose Horan said a number of staff had reported strikingly similar conversations from withheld numbers, and that those conversations could be tied to Cove. “He pretended to be an elderly woman so that he could manipulate call takers into giving him time and attention,” she said. Then the line that should have ended any argument about privacy or kink. “He specifically targeted female officers, some in busy departments dealing with serious sexual offences and online child abuse, wasting scarce public resources to indulge his sexual fetish.” Those desks are not a switchboard for small talk. Every minute he held was a minute not spent on a report that already existed, from a victim who had not chosen to call him.
He pleaded guilty on April 8, 2025, to wasting police time, and came back to Worthing Magistrates’ Court for sentence on July 7, 2025. He was 49. The court imposed 10 weeks in prison, suspended for 24 months, another 200 hours of unpaid work, and £85 in costs. It also made a criminal behaviour order lasting five years. Under that order he cannot ring 999 unless the emergency is real. He must use his own name. He must not withhold his number. Non-emergency matters have to be reported in person at a police station, with the correct details. The Argus and a later BBC piece both set out the terms. The BBC’s headline framed the whole history, NHS and police together, as more than 1,200 nuisance calls. The 1,263 figure belongs to the 111 file. The 101 file is the sequel, measured in hours and in a day that produced 60 calls.
Look at the dates before treating the second sentence as a fresh start. The September 2021 prison term was suspended for two years, which runs the supervision window to about September 2023. The 101 calls, on the Argus account, began in June 2023, inside that window, and continued until September 2024. The July 2025 court did not send him to serve the earlier term. It suspended a new one and added the behaviour order. The AEGIS Alliance cannot see the mitigation, the reports, or the reasons a magistrate chose suspension over activation. What the public can see is the outcome. A man who had already cost the ambulance service five figures, and who had already admitted using a medical line for sexual gratification, was still on the phone to policewomen in units that handle sexual offences and child abuse, and he left court again without immediate custody.
His own account, given after the 2025 sentence, tries to split a hair the officers did not accept. He told Metro he enjoyed talking about feet, and that he had made clear to police he was not masturbating on the calls. The police description does not depend on that distinction. Horan called it a sexual fetish, aimed at specific women, on a withheld number, during shifts those women were spending on other people’s crimes. A person can insist a conversation was only conversation. The court record says the conversation was a crime, twice, and that the second crime borrowed the method of the first: an elderly woman’s voice, a trivial premise, and a swerve toward the call handler’s body.
NHS 111 exists for a narrow and unglamorous job. It is the free route to urgent medical help when the problem is not life-threatening. Call handlers assess, and they send people toward the right service, including an ambulance when the answers justify one. The NHS’s own explanation is simple enough to fit in a two-minute film: use 111 online, the NHS App, or the phone; call 999, not 111, when someone is dying or seriously hurt. That sorting only works if the answers are real. A man inventing an elderly patient does not just waste a wage. He can pull a crew onto a road for an address that never asked, while someone who did ask waits. The 2019 complaint, from a person being telephoned by clinicians about a problem he did not have, is the small version of that damage. The ambulance that rolls is the large one. £21,869.21 is the accountant’s version. None of the three is a joke.
The behaviour order is an attempt to make the sequel harder without relying on Cove’s judgment. Withholding the number was how the 101 calls stayed anonymous until one targeted officer recognised the pattern and the staff compared notes. Forcing him to use his name, and to show up in person for anything that is not a genuine 999 call, removes the costume. It does not remove the incentive, and a five-year order expires. The 200 hours of unpaid work attached to each sentence is real labour. It is also, spread across two cases, a milder answer than the units he interrupted would give a stranger who walked in and demanded the same conversation face to face. Phone crime gets phone sentences. The women on those desks still had to have the conversation.
Worthing Magistrates’ Court has now written this story twice, four years apart, with the same town, the same defendant, and the same subject. The first judgment treated a medical charity’s time, in the form of an ambulance trust, as something that could be priced and partly repaid. The second judgment treated police time as something that could be suspended again, then fenced with conditions. Readers who want a giggle about feet can find it in the headlines that have followed him since 2021. The file underneath is about a public system that has to answer the phone. When the person on the other end is performing an identity in order to consume a worker’s attention, the system has already lost the minute, whether or not a crew also loses a journey.
The AEGIS Alliance will not dress the case up as a harmless eccentricity that got out of hand. A fetish conducted on a medical line, and then on the police line that investigates sexual offences, is a theft of other people’s emergencies. The Queensland grandmother who chased a purse snatcher in flip-flops and tackled him is a different kind of odd story, one in which a bystander spent her own body to stop a theft. Cove spent other people’s shifts to stage one. The difference is the whole case.
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