I left the court feeling sure that Rose West would never walk free again. That thought made me happy.

Rose West was starting 10 life sentences with no prospect of ever being released, Fred West had gone to hell, I had got my life back and the media circus had moved on to the next big scoop.

I always thought of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a ‘jinx’ and I was ‘jinxed’, or so I thought!

As a child, I was attractive to paedophiles. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was 13 years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there, but I had got over that episode in my life.

Straightaway, they started chatting and telling me their names: Fred and Rose West. I was surprised that they were married, I wouldn’t have fancied someone like him, and she was pretty. I felt she could have done a lot better for herself, but they seemed happy and he was quite charming, in a roguish kind of way.