IT WAS one of the most bizarre trials ever heard at the Old Bailey. Susan Whybrow and her lover Dennis Saunders were sent to prison for plotting to murder her husband by tying him to a sit-on lawnmower and aiming it towards the garden lake. This week, after serving three years, a retrial at the Old Bailey found them not guilty of conspiracy to murder and they were freed. Today, for the first time, Saunders talks about that extraordinary affair and why he has returned home and not to his lover.

DENNIS SAUNDERS is, he says, bitter, vindictive and full of revenge towards his ex-lover.

It is a tale of sex, passion, betrayal and near tragedy between the rural affluent and the man they considered a bit of rough.

Saunders, 57, a former flying instructor, and his ex-lover, Susan Whybrow, were convicted three years ago of conspiring to murder her barrister husband, Christopher Whybrow.

They were sentenced to 10 years and eight years respectively. On Monday, they were cleared of the same charge at a retrial at the Old Bailey. The prosecution alleged the couple planned to kill Whybrow after luring him into a sex trap. She backed her husband into Saunders’ arms; he trussed, gagged and blindfolded him, then frogmarched him to the garden where Whybrow broke free and fought with Saunders. The couple, who are no longer lovers, have always admitted conspiracy to cause Whybrow actual bodily harm. But they insisted the plan was to beat him up to teach him a lesson for hitting her. Murder was never in their minds, they said.

The sitting room in Saunders’ modern detached Colchester house is gleamingly clean with a painting of sword-wielding soldiers and four guns on the wall.

He asks whether I’ve bought a minder, then says I should have bought him some gin. He is spruce, full lipped with a beer tummy, steel-rimmed specs and the back of his tie tucked into his pink shirt.

He fancies himself and is wily and talks self protectively. His eyes look glazed and when he talks, he moves his feet shiftily.

What was it like on that fateful day pretending to be a burglar and beating up Whybrow?

‘The adrenaline … it was like being on a drug. It was bravado on my part. I didn’t want to go too far.’

How do you cope with people who don’t believe you didn’t intend to murder Whybrow? ‘To begin with it was hard, now it doesn’t bother me,’ he says, unconsciously rolling up his sleeves. Do you hate Susan? ‘I’m very bitter towards her.’

Saunders left prison two months ago, having served three years. He’ll do voluntary work and plans to market a device he invented. ‘Prison was sheer hell to begin with. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I’d only been in Parkhurst six months when the governor let me out unaccompanied to see Maria – his wife. The first man to go down for 10 years and go out alone after six months.’

He ended up in a ‘semi open’ prison. ‘At weekends I used to ride round Kent on my bike. Just like a health farm. I used to go into the pub at lunch time.’

Originally from Walthamstow, Saunders had three siblings. He can’t remember his father, a roof tiler, who died in the war. There was never a man at home.

‘There wasn’t much money and never much to eat,’ he said. ‘My sister looked after us because mother worked as a tailoress.’

Saunders was the leader of a school gang – ‘We used to nick things to eat’ – but has no recollection of ever fighting,’ he said. He left grammar school, aged 15, with no qualifications and became a lorry driver. At 22, he married Italian-born Maria by whom he has four grown-up sons and is keen now to repair his marriage.

They are together, working at reconciliation, but she does not appear during our talk.

His relationship with Susan started after he gave her 10 flying lessons. He seems reluctant to talk about her. She was ‘bubbly’ and they talked about their ‘rocky’ marriages and were ‘mutually obsessed. I’d never felt like that about anybody.’ He is macho, half Italian and the sort of man who’d like to brag about his conquests. He was dubbed a Romeo, accused of other affairs.

Tales of their making wild love in the car and on his flying club bar are also untrue. But he boasted to Maria of the affair. ‘I was just being nasty at the time,’ he said.

He last saw Susan at the retrial and wants no further contact and only met Whybrow only once.

MERLYN Nuttall, 29, today uses her real name and has her picture printed for the first time. Formerly known only as Miss X, she was snatched off a Brixton street in February 1992 by Anthony Ferrira, a convicted killer, viciously raped, brutally attacked, set on fire and left for dead. ‘I’m going public because I want to help people who’ve had similar experiences,’ she says. ‘I want them to have someone to relate to who looks well and is getting on with her life.’

She gave up her work as a fashion designer a year ago to write a book about her rape and fight for reform to help victims. She wants women doctors to attend rape victims, guidance on the Crown Prosecution Service and advice on criminal injuries compensation. In February, she addressed the Home Affairs Committee at the House of Commons, ‘lobbying for changes so the victim isn’t victimised by the system’.

She’s motivated by rising statistics on violence against women and by a need to find answers. ‘My work seemed so trivial compared with the issues which now dominate my life. Nobody tells you how to rehabilitate your life.’ She’s one of the campaigners de nos jours: the women who have turned adversity to advantage, transformed personal tragedy into something positive and found in their own catastrophe a cause. Open any newspaper and there they are – raising funds and awareness, presenting cheques, lobbying politicians and plugging away at injustices and anomalies in the law. These past few days have been typical for this high-profile, admirable band of tirelessly campaigning female fighters. Jill Saward, victim of the Ealing vicarage rape eight years ago, launched a £150,000 appeal for her brainchild HURT (Help Untwist Rape Trauma charity). Jayne Zito, whose husband Jonathan was murdered 14 months ago by a schizophrenic, appeared on television campaigning for improvements in mental health care on behalf of MIND and ‘holding Mrs Bottomley accountable for Jonathan’s murder’. Fran Davies, whose five-year-old daughter Laura died last year after a series of transplant operations, accepted a £200,000 cheque for the World Transplant Games.

Such behaviour is a predominantly female phenomenon. Fran Davies, although distressed, was determined to appear in public this week and did so with composure; but her husband Les left her five weeks ago, unable to cope any longer. Equally it was Diana Lamplugh, not her husband, who launched the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, named after their daughter who was abducted in 1986. From the moment Suzy disappeared and Diana stepped dramatically on to centre stage at the press conference, she has toiled hard to prevent further abductions.

The late Baroness Ewart-Biggs became an indefatigable proponent of reconciliation in Ireland and a staunch defender of the downtrodden after her husband was murdered by the IRA in 1976, and there are women like the three members of Women Against Pit Closures who did a sit-in at Parkside Colliery with Anne Scargill. But most recent campaigning women are middle class, with concomitant education.

Men playing a similar role are a strange breed: sometimes hysteria-led, other times obsessed by their grief. Consider the odd behaviour of so-called ‘tug-of-love father’ Peter Malkin who dealt with his sense of personal loss by abducting his 12-year-old son Oliver from his ex-wife’s home in France and leading him on a merry Egyptian dance. Or Ron Smith, father of Helen who died at an illegal drinks party in Jedda in 1979; still he pursues an obsessive quest to find out how she died and keeps her much forensically examined body, vital evidence to him that she was murdered, in a cask in a Leeds mortuary.

THEN there’s Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter was killed at Lockerbie and who, motivated by outrage, has worked – again obsessively – to represent the victims. Or hotelier Peter Ward – father of Julie who was brutally murdered in the Masai Mara game reserve – who has been driven by a rankling sense of injustice and spent five years and £400,000 trying to prove misconduct. There are, of course, male campaigners who prove the exception. Take Colin Parry, father of the Warrington bomb victim Tim, who became an articulate spokesman about the unconscionable act. Or Senator Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was killed by an IRA bomb in Eniskillen on Remembrance Sunday 1987, who met members of the IRA to try to persuade them to lay down their arms.

Dr Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and writer, says: ‘People behave like this because if you can put your experience to some good, then you can comfort yourself that it hasn’t been wasted. It’s easier for women, many of whom have worked in some voluntary capacity, to turn such experiences around and put them into a caring context.’

One can posit that women want conclusions and refuse to fade into obscurity or grieving despair; that they know that out of pain comes strength; realise such campaigning lends an enviable power and purpose to their lives; and find sweetness in the uses of adversity.

Jayne Zito, who works tirelessly to ensure her tragedy was not in vain, analyses her behaviour thus: ‘When Jon died, my life stopped. It’s about trying to take control of something you have no control over.’ She’s driven primarily by love for Jon but her media profile has been a way of dealing with grief. ‘Every time I go on television, I think Christ, they’re analysing me and saying, ‘Here’s Jayne Zito dealing with her grief.’ Taking control is a way of dealing with grief. But it’s just avoiding the inevitable – I’m never going to be satisfied because Jon’s not going to come home.’

Merlyn Nuttall recognises gender differences in campaigning behaviour: ‘Men get angry and want to hit out,’ she concludes. ‘Women are carers, and more logical about rebuilding things to make them better.’

A BRIDE GROOM who killed himself 19 days after his wedding attempted suicide with his former lover hours before he ended his life. An inquest on 16 February heard how Stephen Hartwell, 46, had an emotional reunion with his ex-lover Nicola Cordrey, 22, when she discovered he’d remarried. In a bizarre suicide pact, they put a hose from the exhaust into his car. Nicola said she’d never intended them to die and pulled him, semi-conscious, on to the passenger seat. Shortly after, he drove her home. Then Stephen, a divorced father of two with a printing business, drove off, re-attached the hosepipe and killed himself. The inquest, attended by his first and second wives and ex-lover, heard how he’d split up with Nicola last year just a month before meeting Rosemary King, 45, whom he married three months later.

Rosemary, a nurse, has a drawn face, dead eyes and a smoker’s voice. Sometimes she wenches her fingers when she talks, other times her voice cracks and she breaks down crying. She tortures herself with questions. Was Stephen still in love with Nicola? Did he regret his marriage to her? If he wanted to be with Nicola, why did he kill himself?

Rosemary went on a blind date with Stephen last June. They had both divorced after long marriages and she found him attractive. ‘He was clever, liked classical music and wore odd socks.’ Stephen told her then how his brother had shot a man and then killed himself.

Next date, he said his old girlfriend, Nicola, lived with him and his sons. ‘He slept in his son’s room. He said she was living with him because she had nowhere else to go.’ Two months later, he moved into a new flat with just his son.

In September, Stephen proposed. They wanted to marry immediately, but had to wait six weeks for his decree absolute. Why the rush? ‘After his divorce he felt, ‘Do you ever really know anybody?’ We decided to grow together.’ THEY married in a register office, Rosemary wearing a lace wedding dress. ‘I put it in with him in his coffin,’ she says, crying. ‘It didn’t make sense to keep it.’ With chilling prescience, the couple aren’t smiling in their wedding photos.

They made love for the first time that night. ‘He’d kept saying, ‘I don’t want to sleep with you until I marry you.” She laughs. They didn’t have a honeymoon: business, which had been patchy, was now brisk.

Their 19-day marriage was blissful. ‘We looked at Anglo-Saxon architecture, had all-day breakfasts and talked and talked.’ His family had never seen him so happy, says Rosemary, crying, and she didn’t notice in him any sign of anxiety.

On the day of his death, she drove him to work. ‘I phoned, as usual, to say, ‘I love you.’ He wasn’t there.’

His mother, who phoned Stephen twice daily, immediately rang his brothers. ‘Only his family knew he’d been suicidal over the years.’ They opened his office and found a note saying, ‘To all those who love me, thank you.’

‘The bloody bastrd’s left me,’ Rosemary screamed. ‘He’s run off with another woman.’ It didn’t make sense; he’d been desperate to marry her. That night the police searched her house then sat in the kitchen with the wedding cake. ‘We hadn’t yet posted it to people.’ At 9.30am, six police cars arrived… there was a bomb scare. Then two policemen approached her, unsmiling.

‘An emotional bomb exploded inside me. ‘You’ve found Stephen. Has he robbed a bank?’ I joked. I thought, ‘Has he murdered somebody?” They told her, they’d found a man answering Stephen’s description. His children identified him.

‘I went to see him three times before I could believe he was dead.’ Rosemary screws her face in anguish. ‘‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ I asked. Here was this wonderful man I’d just married, lying dead.

‘I wanted to scream but there were no screams inside me. Just this terrible vacuum.’ She lost her voice for days and wept for three weeks until she became dehydrated. She left her job of eight years.

A policeman then told her Stephen had left a note for her. ‘Well love, I haven’t done very well,’ it read. ‘I’m sorry I’m taking the easy way. I’m going for peace (or not, who knows?) I love you, Stephen.’ Then the policeman told her about Nicola. How she’d gone to the police after Stephen died and said they’d spent the day together and had a suicide pact. The police, Rosemary felt, treated her like a murder suspect. They thought Stephen had been deceiving her; but Stephen’s mother said he only saw Nicola, an anorexic who worked at Tesco, because she had nobody else to confide in.

Things became daily more complicated. Stephen’s first wife claimed his watch. ‘I took my marriage certificate to the police station and said, ‘I’m the authentic Mrs Hartwell,” says Rosemary, laughing absurdly. ‘But I didn’t want anything. It was such a mess.’ His relations got everything. Rosemary saw Nicola for the first time at the inquest. ‘This kid recited how they chose the tubes together as if describing making a cake.’ Th emotion in the room was palpable. ‘His mother kept calling out, ‘You bitch,’ to her.’ For Rosemary, the facts didn’t act up. But the police told her they had no proof to charge Nicola with aiding and abetting.

After Stephen’s death, one of his brothers slit his wrists unsuccessfully. Stephen’s first wife told Rosemary how Stephen would sulk for months, had a vile temper and could never be faithful. And his family told her that Nicola threatened suicide each time he attempted to give her up.

Was Rosemary’s life with Stephen a lie? Was Stephen such a good actor? Did she overlook things?

Now Rosemary is picking up the pieces with help from counsellors, friends, her priest and the Samaritans. ‘I just don’t know who the hell I am,” she says. “I have to ask people.’

THESE are true stories of everyday happenings in the genteel suburbs. An obsessive woman looked after a multiple sclerosis sufferer for years and every day scrubbed him in the bath with a Brillo pad. A bearded man attacked his wife brutally and then confided to the police he was a practising transvestite. ‘I’m trying to give it up,’ he explained. ‘As you may appreciate, a beard and dress don’t go well together.’

A woman was put in a stranglehold by her ex-husband and raped each time he visited their child. Another wouldn’t scream for fear of causing her handicapped child distress each time her partner beat her. And an 84-year-old endured emotional abuse and intimidation from her husband – he’d urinate on her washing and let down the tyres on her car – for 50 years. This last woman now has an injunction and an ouster order and is happy. For some of the others, the horror continues.

These are the tales one hears as Zero Tolerance, the campaign launched to publicise the prevalence of domestic violenc, continues (you’ve probably seen the posters: ‘He gave her flowers, chocolates and multiple bruising’). The aim is to emphasise that violence in the home is a crime, is grave, should be reported and that early intervention can prevent further abuse. It hopes also to heighten awareness that broken bones mend and bruises heal, but emotional damage can blight a victim for ever.

The figures are shocking, and the more harrowing since they may simply represent the rumblings of a volcano. On average a woman has been attacked 35 times before she calls the police. In London alone, 100,000 women a year seek treatment for violent injuries received in the home and a quarter of all murders in the capital are domestic.

ABUSERS and victims come from all classes, ethnic groups and ages. ‘Abusers are monsters behind closed doors. Everyone from judges and policemen to refuse collectors,’ says Inspector Shirley Tulloch, who co-ordinates the 62 Metropolitan Police Domestic Violence Units set up to inform and support victims.

The first Domestic Violence Unit began in 1987 in north London. DVUs now employ 126 officers – all with at least two years of police experience and a week of specialist training – two-thirds of whom are women. ‘We choose the best person for the job,’ she says. ‘Some women may actually be less sympathetic than men, finding it hard to understand why the victim doesn’t leave the situation.’

After emergency measures – sometimes an arrest or removal of the abuser – have been taken, the DVUs follow up cases. They inform the victim of her options, offer legal protection, get her medical attention, assist with court appearances and offer advice and support: everything from finding her a solicitor to a space in a refuge.

Sgt Sue Reed, 34, and Pc Ann Snowden-Thomas, 33, run the Cheshunt Domestic Violence Unit. Started in March 1992, they cover 40 square miles and have seen 1,628 victims. All the case histories mentioned are their clients. To date, one of their victims and two aggressors have committed suiide.

Their police station room is filled with office paraphernalia, a poster saying ‘Scars of domestic violence aren’t always visible’, a fish tank, soft toys and nappies. Victims often come here with their babies. But the officers – who wear their own smart office clothes and are warm and energetic – also meet their clients everywhere from Wimpy bars to car parks. The latter was the meeting place for one victim who was forced to tell her husband exactly where she was going each time she left the house and was then timed on every occasion.

It can be difficult for victims to speak out. Eight per cent of (reported) victims are male – not necessarily the victims of female violence – and it may be harder for men to admit their problem. Men or women with professional partners may also face particular difficulties – the fear of social stigma and the loss of her husband’s job and company flat, for example. And so too ethnic women, who may have a language barrier, arranged marriage or immigration difficulties.

‘Hundreds of my clients tell their parents first and are admonished with ‘I told you you shouldn’t have married him’,’ says Reed. ‘If they tell their friends, their friends may just say ‘Get rid of him’.’ In addition, lawyers, policemen and journalists have exacerbated the difficulty by sometimes treating domestic crime dismissively.

Reed and Snowden-Thomas do not sit in judgment of their clients. ‘We’re supportive and validate their feelings,’ says Reed. ‘I say, ‘I know you still have feelings for this person.’ You can’t be sexually intimate with a partner, have a history and children and then not have feelings.’ Many people (including some colleagues and social workers, notes Reed) fail to understand why a victim doesn’t leave a worsening violent situation. The current sluggish property market means that divorced couples can be stuck under the same roof, with horrendous results. But the majority of women being battered want the violence to stop and to be able to stay in the relationship.

An abser uses physical and emotional strategies to control his victim. After years of criticism (of her as a mother, her looks, her performance in bed) a victim feels useless. ‘The abuser may then control her by not allowing her money and with the threat of physical violence,’ says Reed. ‘At other times the relationship is good. Then there’s another build-up of tension and another explosion of violence after which the abuser is remorseful, begs forgiveness and promises he’ll never do it again. It’s what the victim knows and is comfortable with and it may be someone she loves.’ But then the cycle of violence repeats itself. ‘The time between incidents becomes shorter and the abuse gets worse. Frequently when a woman believes she’s going to be killed, she tries to escape – which is often the most dangerous time.’ Reed doesn’t find it dispiriting that women may leave a violent relationship and end up in another. ‘People are human. Just as an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, you can always be a potential victim.’ She believes the law should be changed. ‘The legislation doesn’t take into account the circumstances of a woman who has been battered for 10 or 20 years and ends up killing her partner. She’s nearly always charged with murder rather than manslaughter.’

A PIONEERING charity is claiming success against the spiralling problem of drug crime by treating prison inmates for drug and alcohol abuse. The Addictive Diseases Trust rehabilitation programme is the first to establish itself full-time in a British penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey, and has rehabilitated a third of the people it has treated. The work comes at a time of growing public concern about the links between crime and drugs. Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said drug-related crime cost £2 billion a year, half of all property crime was drug related and the number of notified addicts had risen five fold since 1982. The ADT programme began in 1991. It is modelled on 200 such programmes in American prisons, most of which now have drugs-free wings. The reoffending rate among ‘graduates’ of one course in Arkansas is down from 65 per cent to 20 per cent.

The ADT programme, which has been followed by 127 people, involves complete abstention from mood-altering substances plus group and individual therapy. ‘Over a third of those who have completed our 72-day treatment programme are clean and sober today,’ says Jonathan Wallace, its director. In England and Wales there are more than 45,000 people in prison, of whom over half have addiction problems. There are only 14 places on the ADT course, which receives no statutory funding and is struggling for financial survival. I sat in an ADT therapy group in Downview Prison with 14 men – from murderers to thieves.

Their crimes, committed in the grips of addiction, were harrowing. To send a man on an ADT course costs £1,000; to keep him in prison costs over £19,000 annually.

The men talked about how one landing shared a needle for a couple of months; how they maintained drug habits of up to £100 a day (people get hurt when debts are unpaid); and how a desperate addict will go to any lengths – including stabbing an inmate – for his drugs.

Johnny, 31, pimp, burglar, drug dealer and addict completed the ADT programme. He has spent a third of his life in prison and this month was released for the 12th time. Now he intends, sincerely, never to reoffend. He started smoking marijuana at the age of nine, did 30 burglaries when he was 13, lived off immoral earnings at 16 and carried guns for protection when dealing in drugs.

His cousin was a prostitute. ‘She told me to take money off the hookers and have sex with them. I didn’t know what to do with all the money. I didn’t have any hopes or aims. ‘

Today things are very different. He has lost contact with his two children from different women but intends to settle down, have a family and become a counsellor. ‘I want to be honest.’

His mother was 17 when he was born and he was sent to live with his grandmother. His mother was a prostitute, which brutalised him. ‘When I was seven I saw her having sex with her clients.’ He played truant from school from 13 and was then sent to approved school. Johnny started taking drugs when he was nine and his habit eventually cost him £300 a day. ‘For several years I did four burglaries a day to feed my habit.’ Each time he was released from prison, he would reoffend within two weeks. ‘I’d even go on home leave and commit burglaries, sometimes taking stolen property back to prison.’

Prison made him feel resentful towards authority and the criminal justice system. ‘There’s nothing to do apart from listening to music or taking drugs. I saw myself as a lost cause.’

He decided to change last year when, hallucinating on Ecstasy and running from the police, he fell from a roof and broke his neck. ‘I wanted to do something constructive while I was locked up. The programme taught me to accept the things I didn’t like about myself and confront my past. It made me want a drugs-free lifestyle. It wasn’t prison that changed me. It was the ADT programme.’

TODAY, Valentine’s Day, divorcée Richard Fleet will propose to divorcée Gina, just as he has every day for the last six months. He’ll arrive from work a say: ‘Hullo love, marry me.’ If she says no and starts arguing, he’ll call and propose later. Sometimes he proposes on one knee, often he begs her, and other times tears of supplication splash down his cheeks.

Some men might hesitate to marry a woman who divorced just 18 months ago. A woman on the rebound from an acrimonious break-up. One that was horrific for Gina, who cried incessantly and was really nervous and ill. But Richard knows the score… because Gina divorced him. They were married for 25 years and have three grown-up children.

After one row, early in the marriage, Gina went to stay with her mother. Gina remembers the day, 9 February 1969. She was pregnant and was driven through the night and thick snow by her Uncle Jo in his Consul. Suddenly she gave birth in the car to Kim, her second daughter, delivered by Nigel, a friendly policeman outside the Co-op in Rye Lane, Peckham.

Gina, 44, was born on Friday the 13th, which ‘explains everything’. Richard, 46, believes God put him on earth to see how much Man could handle: big ears, nohair and putting up with Gina, he says, for starters. We’re sitting in the marital home in south London, a compact semi which they share with a giant poodle clipped like a topiary bush. Gina, who looks timid, wears leggings and baggy shirt. Richard, a scaffolder, is in jeans and ear stud.

They met first when Gina was 13 years old, in the block of Peckham flats where she lived. He used to hang around there with his friends. Was it love at first sight? ‘I fancied her from the off, but didn’t think I had much chance. I wasn’t the best looking of people,’ says Richard. He dated other girls and they didn’t see each other again until she was 16. Then he asked her repeatedly to go out with him. Finally they went to see Dr Zhivago and held hands. Did they kiss? ‘No, she was prudish and my hands were sweating.’ That night Gina asked her mother: ‘How will I know when I’ve met the right person?’ Her mother said: ‘You’ll know.’ And Gina replied: ‘I’ve met the right person.’

In fact, Richard proposed to her after Dr Zhivago. On their very first date. Did he kneel? ‘Nah,’ he replies. ‘I was a bit embarrassed. I just said, ‘Can we get married? I love you and all that.” Gina said she was too young but he asked her (‘loads of times’) over the following months. ‘She kept knocking me back. I don’t think she fancied me.’ ‘No, not at first,’ she agrees.

Gina was a virgin when she met Richard and had only ever dated one other boy. ‘Richard was different,’ she says, firmly. ‘He could drive.’ Six months after Dr Zhivago, she accepted his proposal. They became engaged on her birthday.

They married in 1966 at St John’s, Peckham. Did they believe in the vows? ‘Oh yes,’ says Richard.

‘Come on,’ remonstrates Gina.

‘Well, I believe in the vows but when you go through a sticky bit you think,‘Oh well, it’s only a bit of paper.”

They didn’t have a honeymoon because they were broke. They spent their wedding night at Gina’s mother’s.

‘That night I went to bed and mother told Richard he couldn’t. She told him when he was allowed to go. It all went wrong from the beginning,’ says Gina.

They then lived in a house furnished with only one chair. Thereafter they argued frequently and sometimes Gina didn’t talk to him for weeks. ‘She used to tell the kids, ‘Tell him his dinner’s here.”

Was the sex good? ‘No, because I married too young and had been too sheltered. I’d missed out,’ says Gina.

‘She’s not experimental,’ adds Richard. ‘She’s very prudish and even refuses to undress in front of me. That bugs me rotten. But our sex life was good.

‘Well you said it wasn’t and I didn’t know any different.’

EIGHTEEN years after they married, Richard started an affair. ‘She was a mistress,’ hisses Gina. It took a while before Gina became suspicious. Her friends disagreed, saying Richard was too nice.

One evening, Richard didn’t come home and Gina discovered his car outside the Other Woman’s flat. ‘I stood outside in the pouring rain. He was my world.’ Later, Gina went to the pub where Richard’s mistress worked. ‘I was so naive I asked the Other Woman, ‘Do you have sex with my hsband?’ and she said, ‘Well of course I do. Hasn’t he told you?” Another time Gina went to the pub and hit her rival. Richard adds that the relationship was based on nothing more than sex. ‘He thinks he’s a conservative,’ says Gina.

Gina filed for divorce on legal aid and cited the Other Woman (who admitted adultery) as co-respondent. Gina lost two stone, sobbed incessantly, went to marriage guidance counselling (‘rubbish,’ she says) and lost confidence. Was the divorce painful for Richard? ‘No, because I never even read what I signed.’

‘Twice since, I’ve caught him trying to burn the paper.’

Gina dealt with divorce by finding a job in a canteen on a building site of 300 men. She started an affair with a 27-year-old bricklayer. When Richard found out, he thought: ‘I’m not having that.’ He looks at his hands. ‘She was my Gina, my little virgin waiting for me to come home every day.’ So he knocked at her door with his suitcase in hand and said he was back. They’d been apart nearly a year. ‘I lost a stone when I found out he was younger than me,’ explains Richard.

THIS week it was Jacqueline Bodger’s 40th birthday and she attended the inquest to hear why her five year-old son Terry died after going to have six baby teeth extracted, visited the stone which covers the ashes of her eight- year-old child Martin, killed by a car just six years ago, said ‘goodnight’ in her head to her dead children as she does every night, and sat on the sofa in her sitting-room with her husband Philip just wondering why. We’re talking in their council flat in Hendon. They moved there to start afresh, away from the painful memories of the home outside which Martin was run over. Now Terry’s bicycles stand in the hallway by the front door and and toys lie untouched in his bedroom. There are framed photographs of two smiling, healthy boys on the walls, and 70 sympathy cards line the sitting- room shelves.

Philip, 41, is a refuse collector and Jacqueline worked as a clerk in Edgware General Hospital after Martin died there. They have both been off sick since Terry died. They are a sweet and gentle couple, honest and unblaming, and were clearly doting parents.

One day Terry had toothache and Jacqueline took him to the local dentist, who said his tooth would have to come out. He was terrified of needles, so was refered to Eastman Dental Hospital for a general anaesthetic. ‘I told them about Terry’s asthma because I was concerned about gas, but they said not to worry,’ says Jacqueline.

Terry had a bad reaction to the gas. ‘Having lost one child, I went into complete panic. I thought ‘Oh no, not again. We can’t lose another child.” Then Terry’s heart stopped. So they transferred him to University College Hospital. ‘Someone, I don’t know who, said, ‘Mum can’t come in the ambulance.” (The hospital blame the ambulancemen for the decision, and vice versa.) Jacqueline went by taxi and got stuck in traffic.

At UCH, she waited two hours to see her son in intensive care. ‘He looked the same as Martin when he died. I couldn’t cope.’ Suffering further complications, Terry was transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital by ambulance. Jacqueline wasn’t allowed with him and again took a cab, which got lost.

When she arrived, Terry had had another heart attack and the consultant told Jacqueline he was brain damaged. Next day there was further trouble with his heart. ‘We went and put our arms round Terry and he died,’ she says, fighting back tears.

‘I went mad,’ says Philip. ‘I was screaming that we’d already lost Martin. I wanted to smash the place up.’

Martin’s death had been more rapid. He was run over crossing the road, picked up by a passing ambulance and died an hour later. Jacqueline only knew about the accident when a neighbour knocked on her window, minutes after it happened. When she and Philip got to the hospital, the consultant said Martin had died. ‘It happened so quickly,’ she says. ‘I was confused with shock.’

Martin was cremated. ‘I always felt upset wondering what they did with Martin after I left the chapel,’ she explains. She can’t remember much about his funeral. ‘It felt like watching a play. I felt I was going through the motions, watching myself doing these things.’ They put his ashes in the chapel under a stone inscribed with a poem Jacqueline wrote. ‘We felt unhappy, because you couldn’t put flowers on it. So we bought a grave plot, had a headstone made for Martin and put plants on the spot. We knew Martin wasn’t there, but it was in memory of him. We went there every week, rain or shine.’ She pauses. ‘Then we buried Terry in the plot we’d made for Martin.’

Jacqueline’s face lights up when she recalls happier days. Martin, she says, was lively, outgoing and friendly. He loved walking with his parents, adored collecting worms and snails in the garden when his father was digging and enjoyed school.

Terry, a Thundercats fan, was at nursery school and was shy, generous, artistic, bright and loving. ‘He was always saying, ‘I love you Mummy and Daddy.’ But he was a real Mummy’s boy.’

When Martin died, it was very difficult for them to cope with Terry who was just nine months old. ‘But then he’s what kept us going. When you’ve lost one child, the one left becomes extra precious.’ (They keep saying they ‘lost’ him, as if that’s less final than his being dead.) When they first returned home after Terry died, they couldn’t sleep upstairs. ‘Every night Terry used to wake and I’d hear his thud, thud along the corridor. After losing him I expected to hear that noise for ages. We just couldn’t face him not being in his bedroom so we slept in the sitting-room for a week.’

With Terry’s death, it was the wait for his inquest which kept them going. ‘We hoped to find out a reason why a healthy child should have his teeth out and die. We still haven’t got that answer.’ Anaesthetics carry a rare risk and the inquest recorded a verdict of misadventure: there was no question of a lack of care.

Now Eastman Dental Hospital has set up an independent inquiry. ‘If there’s a machine or procedure that’s wrong, it should be altered. We didn’t want to find someone to blame. But we don’t want other children to suffer. No, no, we’re not interested in compensation at all.’

The Bodgers get up every morning, aimlessly. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any future,’ says Jacqueline. ‘We don’t do anything. We just sit at home. It feels like one long day since we lost him. We just don’t accept that he’s gone. It makes you feel empty all the time. Like there’s a big blank space inside and you don’t know how to fill it. We go to bed at night and hope we won’t wake up the next day. All the time I say ‘why me?’ and then why twice.’ She doesn’t get an answer. ‘You just think they were fit and well, so why were they taken away?’ Does she believe in God? ‘No.’ ‘Definitely not after we lost Martin,’ adds Philip.

They don’t want to move house or pack all Terry’s things away. They learnt ‘the first time’ that that didn’t work. Now Philip is prepared to return to work. But not Jacqueline. ‘I can hardly bring myself to go out of the door at the moment. If I go out in the car it has to be somewhere I hadn’t been with Terry. I can’t face it. It’s too painful.’

They are a close couple, married for 19 years, and the trauma has made them closer. ‘We’re just hanging on for each other. We haven’t been apart since we lost Terry.’

Emotionally, they’ve reacted very differently. ‘Phil’s been able to get a lot out by getting upset and angry,’ says Jacqueline. ‘I just don’t seem able, it won’t come out, though I’m very, very angry that I’ve lost Terry this way.’ They saw a psychiatrist for the first time last week. They’ll continue if it helps.

THE man who looks like George Bernard Shaw is queueing for Court One where two schoolboys stand accused of killing James Bulger. He has wild long hair, a streaming beard, carries three plastic bags and later, in the public gallery, he wears odd socks on his hands and eats a Cornish pastie. After him, another man tries to gain entry to the court with a bus ticket instead of a public gallery pass. He mumbles incomprehensibly as the police officers turn him away.

Next day, Matt Jones, a 26-year-old aspiring novelist, comes by train from London for his first visit to a court. He arrives in Preston at 3am. Outside the court, photographers camp to snap the two police vans with blocked-out windows which hide the two defendants. I go through security, body search and past uniformed police with radio earplugs into the imposing wood-panelled Edwardian courtroom. Inside, there are 19th century oil paintings of High Sheriffs and Clerks of the Peace – among them Judge Batty Addison, ‘the terror of the criminal’ – and white plaster cherubs holding up the ceiling corners with swags of fruit and flowers.

>From the public gallery, one sees only the backs and neat haircuts of Child A and B, in charcoal jackets. They are seated on grey chairs on a specially raised dock and next to a burly social worker.

The call comes for the court to rise – and the children barely reach the social workers’ shoulders.

Ralph Bulger, father of James, sits on the seat in front of me. On the first day he listened impassively as the court was told by Richard Henriques QC for the prosecution, the defendants had subjected James to a beating with bricks, stones and metal, before his body was placed on a railway line. The second day, Mr Henriques puts the prosecution case that the children denied all knowledge of the two-year-old and then blamed the murder on each other. As more horrifying details are disclosed to the hushed court, Mr Bulger – with slicked back hair and a gold heart on his lapel – swallows hard. His brother sits nearby, tearing at the skin on his fingers. Behind them in the public gallery, women press their hands to their faces in gestures of self-comfort.

As Mr Henriques recounts Child A’s police interviews – ‘he picked up a big metal thing that had holes in it and hit him on the head,’ – Mr Bulger’s eyelashes flutter frantically in an attempt to stop himself crying. As the QC quotes – ‘I was trying to see if the baby was still alive and he would not move. I got my ear against his belly and he wasn’t breathing’ – the muscles in Mr Bulger’s face twitch uncontrollably. As we hear of Child B’s account that ‘A’ (had) thrown paint in (James’s) face. ‘A threw a brick into his face . . . I picked up little stones because I would not throw bricks at him’ – Mr Bulger bends his head. It’s hard not to cry in this courtroom. There are frequent breaks for the children, legal language is simplified as for a classroom and the court finishes at schooltime.

Mr Henriques invites the jury to steel itself for photographs of the two-and-a-half-mile route along which the boys are alleged to have led James.

Mrs Z, a young housewife, gives evidence of the boys’ alleged attempt to abduct her two-year-old son on the day of James’s death. At the end of the proceedings, Mr Bulger stands watching Boy B’s parents as they leave. On the third morning of the hearing, written evidence from Denise Bulger, mother of the dead child, is submitted to the court. It is heard how she looked desperately for her little boy as she shopped at the Strand centre in Bootle, Merseyside. That is where I am this morning – following James’s march to death.

Outside the shop, T J Hughes, in which Mrs Z was shopping when the boys allegedly attempted to abduct her son, grannies in woollen hats gossip on a wooden bench. Nearby a board displays photographs of the bruised faces of two children. ‘The faces change, the bruises don’t,’ it reads. These are NSPCC posters depicting a child in 1884 and one in 1984. Past them, anoraked children trail after their shopping parents.

A three-year-old girl is being led around by a 14-year-old boy – whose mother is in H Samuels. This is a school morning and, in five minutes, I see half a dozen schoolchildren with skinhead cuts sagging off school. Nearby, the canal – to which it is claimed the boys took James – looks bleak, like a floating rubbish tip. In neighbouring Bootle Library a man is reading a story to a group of schoolchildren dressed neatly in grey: a tale of a child who leaves his home without telling his parents and is presumed lost. ‘What should you do if you go out to play?’ the man asks them. ‘Tell yer mum, cos she’d be worried,’ they chorus.

Then on to Breeze Hill and up to the grass-covered reservoir where James was allegedly dragged. Today, at 11.50am a lone child in school uniform stands kicking his feet. Then past grey high-rises under a grey sky and under a grey subway beneath a grey flyover. I am tired of walking. But on to the alleyway opposite the Walton Lane police station, past desolate houses with the rubbish stacked outside and trails of dog excrement, to the two tracks of the railway where James is said to have met his end. Today, a magpie sits on the line.

In court in the afternoon, I sit in the row in front of the jury. The defendants are wearing stripy school ties. Boy A has forsaken his jacket. Next to Boy B sits his father, a slight man in a turtle-neck sweater and jacket. His face looks wan. He hunches his shoulders and his forehead is constantly furrowed. Then the children settle to watch the television – these are the videos showing two boys allegedly abducting James in the shopping precinct. Child B points to the screen and speaks to his social worker.

As the figures come onto the screen, with arrows from the prosecution to highlight them, both boys sit peering through the rail of the dock. Child B’s father stares at the monitor intently, then he gives up and just looks down. Like some early silent cinema, the court is quiet for 18 minutes but for the sound of people shifting on their seats. Mr Henriques puts his hand up, as if to ask the teacher a question. In reality, he wants to freeze a frame. Next to Boy B, junior counsel Richard Isaacson, props his slipping head on his hand and closes his eyes for a moment.

The jury asks to see the last part of the video again. Boy B’s shirt is hanging out. Nearby, eight men in wigs and gowns, a multitude of uniformed policemen, a jury of nine men and three women and the world’s Press concentrate on the screens.

Down the road is the media annexe, in an office block with panoramic views of Preston. In court it is sometimes hard to hear witnesses. ‘Do speak up please,’ Mr Justice Morland implores frequently but in the annexe on the audio system, the sound is better. And the world’s Press eat McDonald’s, smoke and drink coffee.

IN PASSAU, a picturesque Bavarian city at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers, the Second World War is still being fought.

On one side are the respectable citizens of Passau and on the other, 33 year-old Anna Rosmus. Since she was a teenager she’s been obsessively trying to expose what she sees as the truth about her home town, an outwardly affluent and charming Catholic community.

Frau Rosmus has worked single-mindedly to expose Passau’s Nazi past since she wrote a schoolgirl essay on My Home Town During The Third Reich. She is known locally as ‘the nasty girl’ after the title of an Oscar-nominated movie based on her story. She has since exploded single-handedly the post-war conspiracy of silence that allowed prominent Passau Nazis to disguise themselves as former resistance men by publishing material that might not otherwise have appeared.

In return she has been spat on, called a Jewish Whore, threatened with death and had stones thrown at her. Frau Anna Rosmus still receives threatening phone calls and is told her house will be burned down. Today sees the publication of her book Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders, which records the mass murder and mistreatment of the Russians in 1945 and includes more than 300 names, including surviving local perpetrators and further documentation about the late Dr Franz-Maria Clarenz, a local obstetrician.

Earlier this month, the family of the late Dr Franz-Maria Clarenz of Passau took Rosmus to court over her allegations that the surgeon had carried out brutal late abortions on women from eastern Europe used as forced labour. The family won an order banning Frau Rosmus from repeating allegations that all the abortions were brutal and made at a late stage of pregnancy.

She faces a £200,000 fine or six months imprisonment if she refers to the alleged atrocities again.

The publisher expects the book to be stopped. Frau Rosmus thinks several ‘honourable citizens,’ perhaps ‘even the government’, may take her to court. And Bavaria’s criminal prosecutors will consider whether there are grounds for trials of any of those mentioned.

‘She makes untrue accusations,’ lawyer Klaus Zehner shouts, punching the air with his fist. ‘She selects her documents to fit her case.’ He doesn’t yet know what’s in her book.

The allegations are chilling. ‘Rosmus said that Clarenz performed abortions on mothers sometimes in the eighth month of pregnancy,’ says Zehner who fought the case. ‘Rosmus said the babies were wrenched out of the womb, limb by limb, and that the mothers, slave labourers, received no anaesthetic. That many of the babies forced into the world were left without food to die.

‘But this is not true. He performed over 200 abortions legally on eastern prisoners, under order of Hitler’s government,’ says Zehner. ‘There were no late abortions.’ He says they were natural births forced prematurely with medicine. ‘The mothers consented willingly and many babies survived and are still alive today.’

So why would a mother in an era before incubators want to induce birth at eight months? ‘They were women who had been frightened to have abortions and now wanted to be rid of their children because they knew the Russians were coming,’ he replies. ‘If the Russians found their women pregnant by Germans, they knew they would have an awful time.’

Frau Rosmus has painted the town brown. Behind the facade of caring Catholics and friendly bakers is a town which played host to three forced labour camps. Hitler lived here briefly, so too Heinrich Himmler. Anti-semitism is still rife. Passau is 80 per cent Catholic and officially there are no Jews registered, although Rosmus knows 19. ‘They are afraid to declare themselves,’ she said. The town’s Nazi constructed concrete Nibelung Hall is the annual meeting place for the far-Right Deutsche Volks Union. A local baker, she claims, makes swastika shaped bread for the occasion and the flea market sells SS memorabilia.

But Herr Riederer, a baker who recalls the Russian soldiers looting the shops and being executed afterwards, has never heard of the swastika bread. He is uneasy about Frau Rosmus’s other claims.

‘’Thomas Heller, an antiques dealer, who otherwise supports Frau Rosmus’s research, says it is strictly verboten to sell SS regalia. ‘She’s mad to say this.’

The town of 50,000 inhabitants is riven. Everyone has an opinion on ‘the nasty girl’ and, according to the letters to the local newspaper, the majority have had enough of her. Most think her motives pure, but there is a feeling that she should now be quiet.

She is seen as a woman obsessed. ‘There is a very bad taste and feeling in the town,’ says Gisa Schaffer-Huber. ‘We feel she’s doing it mostly for her own publicity.’

In the Fifties Passau’s town council removed all crosses marking Russian graves. In one cemetery, the desecration failed to wipe out the wintergreen, a hardy flower. The bones were exhumed in the Fifties and placed in a mass grave. Even the wintergreen has gone.

The nearby Innstadtfriedhof graveyard, set in the lush Bavarian forest, has stone crosses and metal plaques to commemorate the dead. Some were SS soldiers, some high-level perpetrators.

Back with Klaus Zehner in his gloomy office I ask whether he can help put me in touch with the family of the accused? ‘I am the accused,’ he says. ‘I’m the son-in-law of the deceased doctor.’

‘’‘’He feels outrage that Frau Rosmus has opened the wounds nearly 50 years after Clarenz was cleared of war crimes.

Frau Zehner says her father was patient, artistic and musical. ‘He only joined the Nazis to get a job.’ And what of anti-semitism? ‘I don’t have any Jewish friends. But my grandfather did.’

When I meet Frau Rosmus it is unexpectedly when she was broadcasting outside her home.

Inside there are two huge yellow cardboard Stars of David fringed with pencilled barbed wire and a massive collage depicting Moses. She is an unpredictable and volatile woman. Her eyes dart around fearfully. She wears a Star of David ‘out of sympathy’.

‘If I’m alone they say whatever they like. If I’m broadcasting they’re terrified.’ Now Rosmus, who has an open face, is natural and compelling. But her story contradicts the lawyer’s tale.

Back in town there is graffiti on a wall behind the cathedral with a Star of David daubed in red paint and the legend ‘Nazi raus.’ It means ‘Nazis piss off.’ On another wall, there is a poster advertising an anti-fascism disco, depicting a fist smashing a swastika.

THE HERCULES in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground. I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane, known to the crew as Fat Albert, is used for Operation Irma.

The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly. The humour of the crew is macabre, like that in an operating theatre, a doctor comments later. The lashing tape is marked in red pen, ‘same shit, different day’. And they have sayings like: ‘You can kick ass or save Sarajevo – but you can’t do both.’ On the ground in Sarajevo, Foreign Legionnaires run around among white UN armoured vehicles. We deliver 26,000 lbs of tinned tuna and flour, with the plane engines still running. They like to get out in three minutes flat. But we’re picking up 30 Canadian soldiers going on rest and recreation leave, so we don’t manage to turn around for a full eight minutes.

The Canadians have been there for three months. What’s it like? Squaddie Guy, 20, smiles and looks puzzled. ‘I hope it’ll never be like that again.’ Tim Gunter is horrified. ‘There are little kids stepping on mines and people skinny and with fear in their eyes.’

Sergeant Renaud Marc asks: ‘Any news on that little girl? Nice of your PM to do that.’

In the body of the aircraft, eight racks for stretchers are pinned at the back, ready for the following day.

Azure lakes, ravines and hills blue in the morning mist of former Yugoslavia stretch beneath us. ‘They should be lying on the beaches bathing,’ says Flight Sergeant Steve Askey, with a bewildered expression. A UN Tornado buzzes underneath us in the opposite direction. ‘Why are the Press all here now?’ asks another crew member ingenuously. ‘Where have you been for the last 15 months?’

Back in Ancona, the doctors and those they teasingly call ‘just nurses’ are preparing themselves. They’re learning useful phrases like ‘are you thirsty or in pain?’ from the Red Cross phrasebook. ‘What’s Serbo-Croat for ‘I want to see a proper doctor?” jests one.

‘How about ‘are you private?’ or ‘I want a second opinion?” ‘Or ‘wait’. After all, they are going to the NHS.’

They are working intensely, lightening their load with humour. You couldn’t meet a nicer, better-meaning bunch. One doctor talks sensitively about the effects on his psyche of dealing with emergency cases. ‘It’s OK while I’m doing the job, because I’m plugged in. But afterwards I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

They mind about the added load their absence forces on their colleagues at home. And they care deeply about the well-being of those to be evacuated. To many of them, the ages of the evacuees are immaterial: Their health is more important.

They express fear at inadvertently saying to journalists something construed as politically inflammatory. Their leader, Tony Redmond, has worked so hard to achieve these mercy missions and is paranoid about the Press.

By Saturday afternoon, the medical team has been forbidden to speak to journalists. The instruction came from ‘very high up’, they say. Information is scant, but Operation Irma, they think, is becoming very political.

The question of whether Bosnian soldiers are to be evacuated is denied by officials. And the international slanging match about who to evacuate is hotting up between UN officials and cynical politicians keen to score political advantage.

You sense the doctors’ acute awareness of being used as pawns by politicians. They seem to want to mutiny against their enforced silence. You point out that they are only there because of the media and you note grateful recognition and a wish to help on their faces.

They are here simply because they want this to be the start of many humanitarian operations to rescue the sick and injured from a war zone. But they know they are simply putting a plaster on the gaping wound that is the medical problem of Sarajevo.

You find yourself thinking, simplistically, that children deserve priority in evacuations in this increasingly shambolicly organised public relations exercise with a media circus, photo opportunities and allegations of soldiers being rescued.

Now the medical team, which has divided into teams with specific duties, is preparing the field hospital on the civilian and military airbase of Ancona. It is set up in a cargo hangar next to three army tents – one with a Union Jack, one with a French flag and one with a Sky satellite dish. ‘’‘’‘’

There are canteen and toilet facilities and another area for walking wounded. And stretchers, toys, blankets, boiled sweets and fizzy drinks. Huge plastic bags filled with drugs hang on the walls. And hand-coloured nursery pictures of animals – a mouse carrying a breakfast tray on his head reads, ‘a little love makes a lot of difference’.

Information on the number and ages of evacuees and time of airlift changes frequently. As does the appallingly coordinated Ministry of Defence list of journalists allowed to accompany the flight.

I beg a place on a German plane going to Sarajevo, in an effort to see the casualties being loaded. ‘Welkom to zer Germunn airforce,’ they say, beaming. But a little MoD hiccup puts paid to that. So I secure a place on a Canadian flight and maybe it is the Overseas Development Administration which sees an end to that.

At 1.40 local time on Sunday, the tail of the Hercules carrying out Operation Irma opens. Three ambulances, assorted military and a Red Cross representative in fluorescent green jacket stand by. There are 21 people including seven children, plus 16 relatives. Some of the children the RAF team saw as priorities stayed behind.

A doctor stands by the hangar door, keeping telephone contact. The first through the tailgate is chronic meningitis sufferer Belma Salaka, three, with a breathing tube taped to her mouth. Seven people, mostly soldiers, carry her stretcher, careful not to jog her. It was her plight that prompted John Major to demand the number of children on the flight be increased. They bring out nine-month-old Eldar Kalamujic, a nurse shielding his face from the sun. He has liver disease. The TV crews and photographers fight for space, pushing through the restraining rope. The media throng becomes more unmanageable as time goes on and the police offer to make arrests. Now there are some relatives and walking wounded with bandaged eyes – clean but thin. They look tired but relieved. Then a third emaciated boy is carried out. There is 11-year-old Edhen Dedovic, denim-clad, with his right cheekbone eaten away by a mortar wound and his left eye gouged out by shrapnel, walking off, waving delightedly to the crowd.

There are nine on stretchers and walking wounded of military age. One man on a stretcher sticks up his fingers in a Bosnian army victory salute. Curiously there is only one woman, 44-year-old Branka Franic. Then they start to load them on the chartered Russian Tupulev 154 jet, a blue striped plane beneath a blue sky. It made the Red Cross ODA trip to Banja Luka last year.

It is five years old with torn carpets and seats folded down to accommodate stretchers. The doctors dub it a flying intensive care ward, saying its equipment is comparable to a ground hospital.

Professor David Southall, the only consultant paediatrician in the team, said: ‘The mission is orientated to moving children from the war zone. That’s what we’re hoping for if the Bosnian doctors and parents agree. Otherwise they have no hope. They are in a war zone which is getting worse.’

DOUBLE-killer Norman Parker, 48, was freed last week after spending more than half his life in jail. In 1963, aged 18, Parker, who is Jewish, shot dead his Nazi girlfriend who was two-timing him. He might have hanged, but pleaded self-defence and was jailed for manslaughter. In 1971, he was convicted of a gangland killing – the sensational Body in a Trunk murder – in which his victim was hammered, shot six times and disposed of in the New Forest.

During 28 years in more than 20 jails, Parker rubbed shoulders with notorious criminals like the Great Train Robbers and the Krays. He was also befriended by tycoon Gerald Ronson in Ford open prison, where Ronson was serving his sentence for his part in the Guinness scandal.

While inside, Parker gained an Open University degree and wrote Parkhurst Tales, a harrowing book about prison life. When Ronson left prison, he got Parker an agent to help him sell the book for television. ‘I’ve seen Gerald three times since he’s been out,’ Parker says in his Cockney accent. ‘I met him in schule (synagogue). We treated each other as equals. We’re both proud men.’

Parker is short with strong features and a prison gym physique. He is tough, lucid, looks you in the eye and never laughs. He wears jeans, and a chain around his neck.

He shot 18-year-old Susan Fitzgerald one afternoon in Notting Hill. She admired Adolf Hitler and kept guns and books on concentration camps. ‘It was strange for a Jewish boy to pick up with a Nazi. Both her brothers were guards to Sir Oswald Mosley and her family was deeply involved in armed robberies. She was a violent and unbalanced girl who slept with a gun under her pillow. It was a tempestuous relationship.

‘One day we had a hideous argument. She pulled out a gun. I thought she was going to shoot me, so I pulled out my gun and fired one shot,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘It hit her in the head.’

Parker then talks about his second killing, clenching his wrist with his hand. He was in his office with his co-defendant, David Woods, and Edward Coleman, a violent robber from Glasgow. ‘We had an argument about the way we wanted to hijack a lorry. Edward pulled a gun on me. I struggled for it, David hit him with a hammer, he fell to the ground and I killed him with his own gun. I killed a man who seconds before was trying to kill me. ‘At worst it was manslaughter. (This is the subject of a current judicial review.) That’s what I’ve done 23 years for. I don’t think the public lose much sleep when violent criminals kill one another. I covered up the murder. But we bumped into a policeman when we were trying to dispose of the body, and I assaulted him.’

How does he feel about having terminated two lives? ‘That’s something you can’t put into words. When you’re young and unfeeling, you can’t empathise. Now I’ve had quarter of a century of suffering. I feel diabolical about Susan. I loved her deeply. I visit her grave and pray for forgiveness.’ What drove him to murder? ‘I used to experience intense rages and a deep sense of frustration. I was emotionally unstable. I don’t think the roots were in my childhood, though. I just wasn’t happy with my lot in life.’ (His father was a bookkeeper, his mother a post office worker. He went to grammar school, did well academically and left aged 17.) Was he a psychopath? ‘That’s a catch-all term. I lacked empathy for people, so it was true in that sense.’ His last psychiatric report said he had high self-esteem and a sense of responsibility.

He’s changed in prison. ‘My first prison sentence definitely made my rage worse. But it is a corrosive emotion and I’ve learned to chill out. Things no longer touch me. I’ve become almost totally self-sufficient. I didn’t have any emotional relationships in prison. I pulled up the drawbridge and retreated into the castle.’

His Judaism also grew. ‘It’s rare to have a Jewish murderer. Anything related to crime is frowned on by rabbis more than ministers of any other denomination. I’ve been in jails where the rabbi has refused to talk to me or even shake hands.’

Does he believe in divine retribution and punishment when he dies? ‘I believe in God. So almost certainly.’

He doesn’t know whether he might re-offend. ‘Nobody can know. Emotional violent crimes are unpredictable. I could show you priests and bank managers who have committed or attempted murder. I’m not going to get involved in crime again.’

The world Parker has re-entered is different and shocking. He’s astonished at the dirtiness of London, powerful cars and the number of foreigners. ‘I can’t believe the homeless people on the streets. People actually sleep in cardboard boxes.

‘I’m also shocked by sex and promiscuity. Take these phone lines where people talk dirty to you. If someone had come out with that 23 years ago, he’d have been dragged into a psychiatric hospital.’ (He says when he went into prison he read The Daily Telegraph. ‘Now I’d describe myself as a radical socialist.’) He has returned to his 82-year-old mother. ‘Waiting for me kept her alive. She’s the only person in the world that I’m close to. I’ve had to get to know her again. She’d become a stranger.’

His father has gone into a rest home and his sister, an ex-bunny girl and model, disappeared. ‘She attempted suicide and turned to drink. Nobody’s seen her for 15 years.’

Parker thinks he’ll ‘adapt easily’ to life outside. ‘I’m ready to work for two or three years. I hope I’ll be able to get enough money to buy myself a nice place in Portugal and sit in the sun for a few years. I hope I’ll do something with my writing.’

His book, Parkhurst Tales, bears his pen name ‘Fred Barabbas’. ‘Barabbas was crucified on the cross next to Christ, not just any old criminal. In case that was grandiose, I added Fred …

THAT fateful Saturday night Heidi read an Agatha Christie thriller before falling asleep. She had always dreamed of living on her own in London and had moved into her rented Shepherd’s Bush flat just the day before. It was on the ground floor but had good security. Yet she awoke at 2am with a strange man standing by her bed. It was the start of a three-hour ordeal.

Heidi is good-looking, her face expressive. She speaks seamlessly and with remarkable self-possession, her constant smoking being the only indication of her nervousness. Yet this composed young professional woman now lives in fear because her assailants, who terrorised her in her own home, have not yet been caught.

That night, on Saturday 3 July, the apartment upstairs was empty and her neighbours were having a noisy party.

Suddenly she awoke. In the darkness she made out a man standing in her bedroom. ‘I screamed like an animal,’ says Heidi, a 25-year-old fashion publicist.

Her intruder was startled. ‘Stop screaming or I’ll kill you,’ he shouted. ‘Put a blanket over your head.

‘I’m going to knock you unconscious. But I won’t rape you,’ he went on. ‘I’ve come to teach you a lesson not to leave the windows open.’ She had left the tiny top bathroom window ajar.

At first Heidi thought she was dreaming. She pulled the blanket over her head (she was wearing a short nightdress) and wondered whether he had a gun. ‘I kept telling myself not to panic and do as he said, so he wouldn’t kill me.’

Her assailant asked why she wasn’t at the party, blindfolded her with a T-shirt and the blanket, and pushed her through the flat to the bathroom, where he wiped off his fingerprints.

‘You have a wonderful body. If I saw you on the street I’d chat you up,’ he said. She could feel him kissing her through the T-shirt. ‘But I’m not here to rape you.’

He pushed her back to the bed. She breathed heavily, trying to stop herself breaking down. He told her to ‘shut up’. Then he took her purse. ‘There’s only £25,’ he said, ‘I should have gone to Knightsbridge.’ Heidi was shaking, terrified. ‘He kept threatening to kill me. But I kept making conversation to make things easier. I felt I had to be truthful with him.’

Her head covered, she led him to her hidden antique ring and bank cash card. She was relieved when he asked for the PIN number, thinking that meant he was going, and gave him the wrong number.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, chillingly. ‘My mate outside will check it.’ Heidi was horrified. Suddenly both men were standing in her bedroom. With astonishing presence of mind, she played for time; she told the second criminal to go to the (distant) Kings Street cash machine.

‘Take a cab back,’ her first assailant ordered his accomplice, handing him Heidi’s money. Then he left.

Heidi sensed the man drop his guard. She grabbed her can of CS tear gas, hidden by her bedside. ‘I knew if he saw me, he’d kill me.’ Suddenly she smelt him standing near her, and sprayed the gas where she guessed he stood. He swore madly.

But the gas was five years old and didn’t work properly. ‘I couldn’t believe it. He should have been lying on the floor.’

The man screamed at her. ‘You fucking bitch. I trusted you and what did you do? Now you deserve to be raped and I am going to kill you.’ Heidi punched and kicked. The man was holding her by the wrists and in the struggle bit a chunk out of her arm.

Then he took a kitchen knife, held it to her neck and, to Heidi’s horror, started to molest her. ‘I thought, ‘Don’t think about it. Block it completely. Don’t feel anything. There’s nothing you can do.’ ‘I kept thinking, ‘This is how people feel when they’re being raped’.’ The knife blade was still sticking into her while he assaulted her. ‘‘Wibble’ your hips,’ he repeated, curiously.

Suddenly the accomplice returned, furious that he’d been given the wrong PIN number. ‘I don’t think he wanted his mate to know what he was doing to me. I gave him another wrong number and he left again.’ (She had £500 in her account, but he never withdrew any money.) Heidi was once again alone with her abuser. He now threatened to tie her up and lock her in a cupboard. (He said he’d then call the police.) ‘I didn’t have any rope. I told him to lock me in my cellar. I was afraid of cellars when I was a kid.’

He pushed her to the cellar, with the shirt over her head. ‘He kept marking places on my back with the knife, saying ‘This is your heart and here’s your liver’,’ she says, in astonishingly measured manner. ‘My legs turned to stone.’

Her body was exposed. ‘It didn’t really matter any more what I looked like. I thought, ‘Just kill me. Let my mind have peace. Free me from this.’ He sprayed tear gas on her gaping wound. ‘Thank God it was empty.’ Then he imprisoned her in the cellar, alone and petrified. She listened for sounds from upstairs. Then in a box in the cellar she found two kitchen knives. She didn’t know whether the villains had gone. ‘I thought now I’ll kill them.’

She threw her body against the door, but it didn’t yield. Then she found a garden spade and smashed at it. Finally she crawled through. ‘I don’t know how. The hole was tiny, just 12 inches across.’

Intrepidly, Heidi went through the flat, brandishing her knives. When she found it was empty, this extraordinarily self-possessed woman sat down and smoked a cigarette.

Heidi is German, has only lived in England for 18 months and couldn’t remember the number for the emergency services. ‘I rang 192 and broke down.’ When the police arrived she cried uncontrollably.

They took her to the Brentford Rape Suite – ‘They apologised that it was a male doctor, but I didn’t mind’ – where she underwent forensic tests and gave her 18-page statement.

‘It’s very strange but I didn’t feel dirty. It didn’t occur to me until 12 hours later to take a shower.’

Today Heidi wears jeans, chic green jacket and bohemian jewellery. University educated and smart, Heidi is lively, open and optimistic. The police say she becomes daily more lighthearted and friendly. She had never before been the victim of even petty crime and her experience has had a profound effect on her. (She had the CS gas, which is legal on the Continent, simply because she felt ‘more secure’ with it.) Her assailants had seen photographs of her on the walls of her flat. ‘I feel really frightened in the street if a black man approaches me. Scared he’ll recognise me.’ She has altered her appearance, but not radically. ‘I refuse to change my life completely.’

She has also changed her behaviour. ‘I used to ride my bike in the middle of the night in Brixton, going from one party to another. Now I always take taxis.’

And she has moved. ‘I’ll never dare live alone again. I’ll have a panic button fixed wherever I live. I don’t care what it costs.’ But she doesn’t feel compelled to return to her homeland. ‘This could have happened anywhere.’

She hasn’t ‘yet’ had counselling. ‘I hope it won’t affect my attitude to men. I don’t think it will.’ Her mother is a teacher and her father died when she was an infant. But her sister, an actress, flew to England and helped her to relive the experience while doing cathartic breathing exercises. ‘She made me imagine he was there again.’

Now she says: ‘I feel like skinning those men alive. ‘The worst part wasn’t the sexual side. It was the feeling that this guy could decide whether I should live or die.

‘How easily someone can snip your life.’

Can you help trap the attackers who dropped a key and stole a ruby ring? THE CRIME took place at 8 Leysfield Road, Shepherds Bush, between 2am and 5am on Sunday 4 July. Police are also interested in anyone using the Midland bank cash machine in Kings Street W6 at that time.

Of the two male attackers, one is definitely black. One is 5ft 10in tall, of medium build with broad shoulders and had short afro hair. He was wearing a white T-shirt, with numbers or writing and black vertical stripes, with blue jeans and a belt with large buckle.