An edited version of this article, which is the true story told in my book, Dangerous Love, appeared in Prima magazine July 2006

 

‘Don’t make me commit a terrible sin,’ Tim said. His words made my blood run cold. I did not recognise my lover behind those hollow eyes. ‘Let me go,’ I screamed, but he had me in an iron grip.

 

‘No,’ he snarled. ‘I can’t trust you. You’ll go to the police and I’ll end up back inside. And this time, they won’t let me out.’ I saw then that he was man with nothing to lose, and the consequences terrified me. Tina, his former lover, had wanted to leave him, too. He’d always told me her death was an accident, and I’d believed him. Until now.

 

It had taken almost four years for me to realise how dangerous Tim was. Four years in which I had lived with a convicted murderer – now free on licence, having served his time in prison – believing that he, in fact, was the victim.

 

I met Tim Franklin in October 1981 during my first week at Exeter University. Tim was a 56-year-old mature student; I was just 20. It was in a pub where he regularly held court, debating politics and philosophy with a clique of post-graduates, and by his air of authority and well-spoken voice I assumed he was a professor.

 

Tim singled me out almost immediately and insisted on buying me a drink. I’d never met anyone like him before, so confident, so clever, so in control. It was the charm offensive of a pro and I was hugely flattered by his attentiveness. When Mike, a fellow student, whispered to me that Tim had been in prison – ‘He killed a woman, everyone knows’ – I didn’t, at first, believe him.

 

Tim confirmed this. ‘It was someone I was with. We had a row and I was trying to restrain her. She fell and hit her head against the wall. I got the blame.’ He exhaled cigarette smoke through his nostrils. ‘It was a complete miscarriage of justice, Kate. I acted in self-defence.’

 

My mind buzzed with questions but his guarded expression warned me not to pry. He had a haunted look in his eyes and I assumed it was painful for him to talk about such a terrible tragedy.

 

Later, Tim asked if he could walk me home. I hesitated. He wasn’t tall but he was powerfully built with a thick neck and muscular biceps that seemed constrained by his short-sleeved shirt. Yet nothing about him suggested violence; indeed, with his cultivated image and courteous manners he seemed the perfect English gentleman.

 

Convinced by his obvious popularity with the other students, I said yes, swayed by his charisma and two pints of beer and a brandy chaser. Tim bade me a formal farewell at my hall of residence and went on his way. It didn’t occur to me that he had an agenda. I assumed his interest in me was purely paternal; he was, after all, older than my father.

 

Tim and I didn’t see much of each other in the first term. I was preoccupied with a new boyfriend, a relationship that foundered when I got pregnant. It was a traumatic time – my mother threw me out of the house when I went home for Christmas – and I underwent an abortion and returned to Exeter an emotional mess.

 

Tim stepped into the breach immediately, offering me a shoulder to cry on and extra tutoring with my studies. The mentoring sessions, which included dinner and wine at his lodgings, grew later and later into the evening until, one night, he casually suggested I stop over.

 

The sleepovers became a regular thing although, ever the gentleman, Tim kept a bolster between us. After three weeks of this, the sexual tension was unbearable and I clambered over the bolster and kissed him. We made love, and his passion surprised me. From then on, we were, scandalously and deliciously, an item.

 

Looking back, I can see that Tim had been grooming me, though I wouldn’t have even understood the phrase then. He had sensed my vulnerability right from the start: the quiet, unconfident, comprehensive-school girl, out of her depth in the university environment. I was naïve for my age, sexually inexperienced and narrowly educated, and when Tim shone his spotlight on me, I blossomed like a flower.

 

It was love, to start with, on my part, anyway. Tim’s motives were more complex. He courted me with flowers, Champagne and perfume, sending me cards and posting little notes under my door, begging me to let him whisk me away on holiday.  No man had ever made me feel so special before and I had no qualms about agreeing to go.

 

Once we got to our hotel in Gran Canaria, however, Tim began drinking, something I’d never seen him do before. He became bad-tempered and unpredictable and one night drank so much he became psychotic, hallucinating and screaming accusations at me in Spanish.

 

I was absolutely terrified and locked myself in the bathroom. When I finally came out, he’d passed out on the bed. I sat on the hard tiled floor and sobbed, wondering, for the first time, what I’d got myself into.

 

The next day he was contrite and swore he’d never touch a drop again. ‘I’m not going to risk our relationship. Not for a drink. Not for the world.’ He held me tight. ‘I need you, Kate. I need to care for you. Without you, I’d rot. Physically and mentally rot.’

 

Need is not love. Dependency and emotional blackmail are tools that some men – and women – use to control their partners, and Tim was a past expert at it. I knew he had tried to commit suicide before; his throat and wrists bore great white tractor-tread scars where he’d slashed them with a Stanley knife and been crudely stitched back up.

 

He told me he’d done it because he’d had no hope left. He had been recalled to prison on a technicality a few months after his original release in 1979 and, although he was let out again soon after, at the time he could see no future. He wept as he told me this and I clung to him, profoundly moved, vowing that I’d save him from such a fate again.

 

Tim’s vulnerability, underneath that powerhouse exterior, was an attraction in those early days, though it soon became a burden. I felt chosen (as indeed I had been), honoured, even. I won’t deny I got a kick out of our unusual relationship – people would see us holding hands in the street and tut – but while I was going through a kind of delayed teenage rebellion, Tim’s motives were much darker.

 

At the end of my first year at Exeter, we moved in to a rented house together. That was when the gloves came off. Not physically – Tim never hit me; he knew he’d be straight back in prison if he did – but emotionally. Something about us living together as a couple seemed to trigger a hardening in his attitude. He seemed to want me to be bizarre combination of wife and daughter and his real need – the need to control me completely – finally became clear.

 

Under Tim’s early tutelage – he had educated me about the world, about art and literature and poetry and philosophy – I had become more self-assured and at first I didn’t take kindly to him bossing me about. His response, having built me up, was to undermine me. He became critical of everything, from what I ate to how I dressed, even my make-up, putting me down with scathing remarks about my intellectual ability and bullying me by shouting at me.

 

From a man who had been so supportive, this change in Tim’s behaviour towards me was deeply destructive.  Despite my outward confidence, I had a deep self-loathing of my appearance. I had acne, which, combined with debilitating PMS, made me very depressed. I didn’t believe anyone else could possibly fancy me, let alone love me, and a great deal of my dependence on Tim stemmed from gratitude that he wanted me at all.

 

I was also extremely insecure about my body image, having had an undiagnosed eating disorder two years earlier in which I became borderline anorexic. Since the abortion, my doctor had put me on the pill, which had caused me to gain weight. Feeling fat and unattractive was bad enough, but Tim’s remarks shredded the little confidence I had left and I turned the pain in on myself, adding to the punishment.

 

I began drinking heavily, once polishing off half a bottle of brandy. This was lonely, angry, late-night drinking fuelled by tears and tantrums, but I drank more than I should during the day, too. It was all too easy: Tim was an alcoholic whose drinking was normally curtailed by medication, so he drank by proxy, pouring alcohol down me and our fellow students instead.

 

 I also became addicted to prescription painkillers, again fed to me by Tim, who got them for his back pain. Looking back, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself with an accidental overdose. I did overdose on one occasion, deliberately, but it was a token gesture and I woke up with a thick head and no sympathy.

 

The sheer frustration at being Tim’s puppet drove me to start cutting myself, slicing my arms on one occasion with the jagged edge of an opened meat tin. I wanted to escape, and I tried to leave him several times, but he always promised he’d change, or said that he needed me, threatening suicide if I left, making me feel hopelessly trapped and responsible.

 

I did leave once – for a weekend – and he went on a toxic bender that landed him in hospital.  On another occasion, just before my finals, his behaviour became so extreme that my father and an old school-friend, Sharon, drove down to Exeter to rescue me. By then I had become isolated from my university mates and was, Sharon remembers, kept virtually under house arrest by Tim.

 

I got my degree – a good one, in the end – and set about trying to make a career for myself in journalism. In 1985 Tim and I moved to Oxford in a last-ditch attempt to make a go of things, but by now his mood swings, rages and increasingly erratic performance, both personally and professionally (he had resumed his job as a company director) were starting to be noticed by other people.

 

Tim tried to sabotage my attempts to get a job, knowing that work would give me independence, and stalked male friends of mine, telling me vicious lies about them. Interspersed with the threats and plots, the suicide warnings continued, together with a sustained campaign to convince me that I was mentally ill.

 

I was fragile, depressed and weepy, but I wasn’t insane. Tim was, and I knew that if I stayed with him any longer, he would drag me under with him. After a calamitous Christmas I finally marshalled enough strength to leave him and moved back in with my parents.

 

The relief at living a normal life – playing board games, watching TV, eating with the family, even laughing at a joke – was massive, yet I felt guilty about enjoying these simple pleasures. Being conditioned to emotional abuse leaves a legacy of complex reflexes. When love becomes synonymous with suffering it isn’t easy to shake that feeling off.

 

I got a job on the local paper and the ties with Tim loosened, although we still kept in contact. I acquired a new boyfriend and Tim, to get his own back, tried to use his mentoring seduction technique with a 20-year-old nurse. He was 60 by then and came on to her so inappropriately, taking her back to his house and showering her with demands and offers, that she was frightened by his strange intensity.

 

When I heard about how he’d treated her, I was furious. ‘You practically abducted and terrorised her,’ I shouted. Tim went ballistic. I didn’t know, until that point, why he’d been recalled to prison all those years before. Now, as he blocked my exit from his house where we were alone together, I found out.

 

‘Someone else used those words against me before. She accused me of abducting and terrorising her, too. So you can see, Kate, why I can’t let you go …’

 

That was when I realised the true nature of the man I’d been living with. Keeping as calm as I could, I talked my way out. I hate to think what he would have done if I’d flown at him or fought back. When he said to me, ‘Don’t make me commit a terrible sin,’ he knew what he was capable of. And the only way you know that is if you’ve done it before.

 

It was only after Tim’s death a year later – he committed suicide, as he’d always promised – that I discovered from newspaper archives what he’d really done. His crime, committed in January 1971 in North Yorkshire, was a brutal one. He had smashed his lover Tina Strauss’s skull in repeatedly with an iron bar after they’d fought about her leaving him. He had then finished her off by garrotting her with a plastic clothes line and buried her body by night in the back garden.

 

Horrific as that sounds, for me there was a revelation that was even more disturbing. After the murder, Tim had continued to live in the same house with Tina’s 15-year-old daughter. He constructed an elaborate lie about his mistress moving abroad and took the girl to the Canary Islands and Malaga with him, sending forged telegrams home to ‘prove’ this. There was no suggestion that the girl had been a party to his deception, or knew about the crime. What shocked me was that Tim had never once mentioned her to me.

 

 Tim had never hidden his attraction to young women – I knew there had been other undergraduate girlfriends before me – but I’d always thought I was ‘the one’. Now, I didn’t know what to think. It had sometimes felt as if he was repeating a pattern: the heavily scented freesias he used to give me, the cuddly toys, Je Reviens perfume and the holiday destinations (he had taken me to Malaga, too) weren’t my choices.

 

Whose were they? And who had I been to Tim?

 

After seven months, local gossip about Tina’s unlikely and lengthy disappearance prompted a police investigation and Tim’s cover was eventually exposed. At his trial, the jury didn’t believe his claim that he’d acted in self-defence and he received a life sentence for murder. It was a major story, covered by all the nationals, described as having ‘overtones of Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie’ and ‘one of the most sensational and horrifying crimes the North has ever known.’

 

When I came to write the book of my relationship with Tim, 20 years later, I was only able to do it because I had come to terms with a lot of things about myself in the meantime. Powerful relationships like that leave scars and it wrecked my first, brief marriage, which I’d rushed into on the rebound from Tim.

 

I’d glamorised Tim in death and racketed around looking for love with various unsuitable men, trying subconsciously to replicate the drama that we’d had. It wasn’t until 1991 when I met Stephen, a divorcee three years older than myself, that I discovered what a healthy, truly loving partnership could be like.

 

I’d caught sight of him at a concert in Covent Garden – he’d said ‘goodbye’ to me as I left. Not knowing who he was, I asked a friend to set us up on what amounted to a blind date, or at least a short-sighted one: I hadn’t been wearing my glasses that night and couldn’t tell what he looked like!

 

When we met up for a beer I discovered he was very tall (6’5”), with warm hazel eyes, a kind face and a wicked sense of humour. We clicked from the start, and within three weeks he had taken me away for a weekend in Paris. He was calm, reliable, even-tempered and, most importantly, comfortable in his own skin. After the emotional rollercoaster and mind games I had become accustomed to with Tim, it was a revelation to discover that passion, imagination, romance and commitment could be so uncomplicated.

 

Having learned the hard way, we waited five years before marrying, and I’m glad we did. We now have a wonderful 8-year-old daughter and a happy, contented life. Telling my story in Dangerous Love was therapeutic for me, but I hope, more than anything, that it will strike a chord for other women, too. You don’t have to have lived with a lifer to relate to it; many people have come up to me since and told me that it’s helped them come to terms with their own experiences.

 

Why do women stay in abusive relationships? I wish I could give you a straightforward answer. Tim fooled almost everyone – he turned out to have all the hallmarks of a psychopath – but for all his manipulations, I played my part. I could have left him earlier and I didn’t, for all sorts of misguided reasons. I accept that, though it’s perhaps not politically correct to do so. We’re only victims if we choose to be. 

 

I had the opportunity to make contact with Tina’s daughter after the book was published, but in the end I chose not to. That part of my life was over and the obsessive need to find answers to those questions had gone.  Instead, I found answers to questions I hadn’t been able to ask myself before. Best of all, I discovered that I’m strong, stronger than I ever thought I was.

 

It’s a brilliant feeling, believe me. If you need it, you can find it, too.