A YORK man who made two failed armed robbery attempts as a teenager gave himself up 12 years later with a guilty conscience, a court heard.

Ashley Neal, who is now 32, dubbed himself the Gingerbread Man when he attempted to steal £4,000 from two banks using a replica gun and a bicycle.

After the botched raids in 1988, the former bank employee moved to Thief Lane, in York, where he laid low until his conscience led him to hand himself in to police.

He was today beginning a 17-month sentence in prison after pleading guilty to two charges of attempted robbery at Lloyds Bank and the Nationwide Building Society in Dunstable, Bedfordshire.

At Luton Crown Court prosecutor Amanda Pinto said a female cashier told the 17-year-old Neal to clear off, adding: "You will have to find a dozier cashier than me to put money in that envelope."

Afterwards his family moved from Dunstable to York, and the crimes lay unsolved until May 2000 when Neal walked into a Luton Police Station and confessed.

Neal told the court he owned a replica gun because he was a keen fan of John Wayne and had signed his ransom notes with "I am the Gingerbread Man, catch me if you can".

He had asked for precisely £4,000 as that was his annual salary at Nat West Bank, a job he had just left because he was fed up.

Helen Guest, mitigating, said although her client confessed in 2000 he did not finally come to be sentenced until 2003 because he absconded while on bail, having "lost his bottle" thinking of the consequences.

She said: "He was a troubled teenager at the time, but his conscience had bothered him for 12 years. He has now sorted his life out and his confession has been part of the process. He is a reformed character."

Judge Ronald Moss said: "Even a young man with problems would have been looking at a sentence of five years if you had been caught at the time."

Updated: 12:35 Saturday, February 15, 2003