January 13, 2014, started as a typical day for me. By the end of it, I’d realised my husband was a monster. Then began a horrifying nightmare that engulfed me, my two daughters and my whole family. It was the soul-destroying actions of a vile predator that led to our lives becoming a legal living hell.

Family abuse is horrific enough, but justice delayed is justice denied. Credit:Bombaert

When you've been married for 12 years, you don’t imagine that your husband is drugging you at night so he can abuse your daughter without you knowing. But my husband, Timothy James Stewart, was. No doctors could explain why I felt so unbelievably tired all the time.

He was drugging Alice, too, and sexually assaulting her. She was only 12. Over four years he groomed her and sexually abused her.

Then he tried his filthy behaviour on my younger daughter, Sally. She wrote us a letter blowing the whistle on him, but he destroyed it before I saw it.