Kelly Kirk talks about the life that led to her daughter's conviction for manslaughter.

Kelly Kirk has a habit of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong guys.

In February last year, she was living with violent partner Adam Watkins when he was shot and killed by her daughter, Daryl, who was found guilty on Wednesday of his manslaughter.

A jury found her guilty of manslaughter instead of murder, after a trial that centred on whether she had been acting in self-defence when she shot Watkins after he waved a meat cleaver around.

KEVIN STENT/FAIRFAX NZ Kelly Kirk, mother of Daryl Kirk.

In 1992, aged just 15, she was out night-clubbing in Wellington with then-boyfriend Graeme Burton when he killed for the first time.

Burton had urinated on the floor at a Willis St heavy metal club, The Carpark, and began attacking its bouncers after they tried to kick him out.

He was overheard asking the club's lighting technician, Paul Anderson, who was not on shift that night, whether he worked there.

Phil Reid Graeme Burton in court in Wellington.

Then he stabbed Anderson so hard that the blow lifted him from his feet. Anderson collapsed on a landing, and died of blood loss.

Kirk, now 40, says she was wasted on drink and drugs that night.

Witnesses at Burton's trial said she had been seen dropping a knife early in the evening. It was never proven whether that was the murder weapon.

KEVIN STENT/FAIRFAX NZ Daryl Kirk, 20, was found guilty on Wednesday of Watkins' manslaughter. She shot him with a rifle after he had been waving a cleaver around.

Today, Kirk is big-haired and has a warm presence. But a hard edge emerges when she is asked to revisit some of the ugliest chapters of her past.

"Even now I can't walk down the street with my head up," she says.

"I tend to walk with my head down. I don't make eye contact. I feel very exposed out in public because of a lot of the stuff that I've been through."

FAIRFAX NZ Double murderer Graeme Burton, who was dating a 15-year-old Kelly Kirk in 1992 when he committed his first murder.

A police source who crossed paths with Kirk during the nightclub murder remembers the young woman mixed up with Burton.

"She was a strikingly attractive woman, then – a young girl. If you see the lifestyle that she's followed and the drugs and what it's done – she's a completely changed person.

"She was a typical sort of young Hutt girl: naive, a bit vulnerable, she was in the control of Mr Burton."

SUPPLIED Paul Anderson, who was murdered by Graeme Burton at a Wellington nightclub in 1992.

Two decades later, a giant portrait of Marilyn Monroe in the hallway welcomes visitors to the Taita home where Kirk still lives after her daughter killed Watkins there in February 2015.

There was a time, "early on", when it was seductive being a bad girl running with bad boys, she says.

She thought Burton's violence meant he really loved her – a pattern that was to be repeated throughout future relationships.

FAIRFAX NZ Gary Duffin, Kirk's current partner, with a picture of his daughter Karla Cardno, who was murdered in 1989.

She was still 15 when Burton chained her up. "He tied me to a bed and left me for two days."

The violence kept her by his side, she says. "If I left him [he said] he'd kill me, kill my family."

She stayed with Burton for about a year after the murder, but ended the relationship in the visitor's booth in Rimutaka prison.

The glass screen barely shielded her from his rage: "He attacked me, I told him that was it."

The police stopped him writing to her, but he got his prison visitors to dump threatening notes in her letterbox instead, she says.

The last time she heard from him was before his escape from Paremoremo with career criminal Arthur Taylor in June 1998.

Burton sent her a letter: "He said 'I'm coming for you, revenge will be sweet.' "

Police whisked Kirk and her young girls – she had no children with Burton – into hiding until he and his comrades were captured in a mansion in the Coromandel.

By then Kirk had taken up with Adam Little, and had developed a heavy morphine habit. The month after Burton's escape, the couple got young Erana Hickmott doped up in their lounge.

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The young woman slipped into unconsciousness while Kirk and Little ate KFC. Kirk stopped to smoke a cigarette on her way to drop the unconscious Hickmott off at Hutt Hospital, where she would die days later.

Two jury trials did not convict the pair, after arguments over whether it was the injection Kirk and Little gave Hickmott that killed her, or whether it was the cocktail of drugs Hickmott had been taking in the days before her death.

Still, Kirk feels some responsibility.

"I really feel for Erana's family, especially her mother and father and her young daughter … she was a young girl at the time and she's grown up without her beautiful mother, and I do feel a lot of guilt about that."

Burton later went on to kill father-of-two Karl Kuchenbecker during a shooting rampage in the Wainuiomata hills in 2007.

Kirk heard Burton labelled a psychopath during that time. She thinks it fits.

"They say psychopaths, they imitate emotions, and that is so accurate to him. Like, he doesn't know how to portray emotions, so he imitates what he sees around him …

"It's hard to explain, because sometimes he doesn't quite hit it. His reactions will be strange."

"I always knew he was going to murder someone. He actually said to me that he knew he was going to kill.

"But I never thought it would go through to be as bad as it is now. You know, he's killed two people now and hurt God knows how many others."

These days, Kirk is in a new relationship – with murder victim Karla Cardno's father, Gary Duffin.

Karla was 13 when she was snatched in Taita, Lower Hutt, on her way home from school in 1989 by Paul Dally. She was raped, beaten and murdered on the Pencarrow coast.

​​Duffin himself got out of prison last August. He had known Kirk since she was a teenager.

When he heard of Watkins' death, he sought her out again, saying they both understood the pain of a hard life.

"I know the good side of Kelly," he says. "She's got a good heart and good soul, she just took up with the wrong people."

"I think I'm in a great place," she says of Duffin. "He's been my rock."

She admits she has been locked up 13 times, and spent two decades on and off morphine.

During her daughter's trial, she has achieved the lowest dose of methadone since starting the drug treatment programme at 18.

"I think now's the time. I mean, I turned 40 last month, and I thought, 'Jeez, I don't want to be in this place in another 20 years'."

She wants a different life for herself and her family: "The majority of the bad choices I've made I wasn't in the right frame of mind when I made them."