“Manipulative and dangerous” serial conwoman Wendy Francis has been jailed for four years for a slew of offences including stealing a puppy and swindling car buyers out of money.Francis — a mother-of-three who worked as a caregiver for the elderly — committed so many crimes that it took the prosecutor an hour to read out all the charges during a previous court hearing.She has more than 20 previous offences of dishonesty and has undergone jail sentences, probation orders and counselling to no avail.Yesterday, Francis, her lawyer and her husband all pleaded with magistrate Khamisi Tokunbo to be lenient on her.They asked him to give her another chance by releasing her from prison to find a job and pay her victims back.Francis suffers from kleptomania, which is an obsessive and motiveless urge to steal, according to her lawyer Rick Woolridge.The sentencing proceedings had been put on hold while various treatment options were explored. Reporting back on that issue yesterday, Mr Woolridge told the court: “There are no facilities that would be publicly funded for Ms Francis.“It’s an unfortunate state of affairs because there are facilities that can help, but not publicly-funded, and the family cannot afford anything we have seen.”Husband Benjamin Francis said: “I would urge the court to be as lenient as possible on Wendy. She is not a bad person, but she does need help. My daughters really need their mother at this time.”Francis, of Devonshire, apologised to her victims and asked for their forgiveness.She also complained that having her picture published in the newspaper had upset her daughters, who are aged five, eight and 12.Locking her up, Mr Tokunbo said: “If she’s not a bad person, I don’t know what to call her other than a person who’s extremely dishonest and has done a lot of damage to people.“She’s a dishonest person in terms of her depriving people of their property, conning them, manipulating people, lying.“She lied to the authorities when these [pre-sentence] reports were being put together for her. Clearly there is something wrong.“It’s a combination of something wrong and [also] she’s just a dangerous person that the community needs to be protected from.”He told her he did not believe she planned to pay her victims back, and the sentence was being imposed to deter others from committing similar crimes.Mr Tokunbo said of Francis’s children: “You have put them through this. You cannot rely on the fact that you’re a mother to escape responsibility when you do these types of things.”The defendant had previously pleaded guilty to 36 charges relating to five separate scams. Some of them were committed while she was on probation and bail for previous crimes.On Christmas Eve 2011, she stole a puppy from his owner in St George’s, and pretended he had gone missing while she was taking pictures of him.The puppy was found after a public appeal, and reunited with his owner.A month before the puppy theft, Francis stole a credit card from the daughter-in-law of an elderly woman she was caring for, and used it for a $1,343 spending spree.In March 2012, Francis embroiled her husband in a scam. Mr Francis had been paid $150 by cheque by a client for repairing a bedroom wall.His wife changed the words and letters on the cheque to read $1,050, and then cashed it.Mr Francis sat with his head in his hands yesterday as his wife was sent to prison.In May 2011, Francis stole a credit card from the daughter of an elderly woman she was caring for, then used it to rack up more than $6,000 worth of purchases.In July and August 2012, Francis used an advertisement on the classifieds website eMoo to con five people out of money in relation to a car sale.The five months she has already served on remand in prison will be subtracted from her four-year sentence.Following her release, she must spend two years on probation, with the magistrate recommending that she be enrolled in counselling and rehabilitation.