Allen made between $70,000 and $100,000 a week from drugs and was on bail for 60 different offences with sureties of $225,000, then the price of five inner suburban homes. He invested heavily in properties in the Cremorne pocket of Chestnut, Stephenson and Cubitt streets, using them for an illegal brothel, to house relatives, traffic drugs, kill enemies and dismember victims. Now we can reveal he used them for another purpose. For more than two years he kept a young model prisoner – turning her into a drug-addled sex slave and an accessory to murder. Jenny was the good girl with a sense of fun and a self-confessed rebellious side. She was expelled from Ave Maria ladies' college at 15 when a teacher on a bus “saw me chasing a boy and smoking in my school uniform”. She had two brothers and two sisters: “They were angels and I was the naughty one.”

That summer, holidaying at her grandparents’ home, she was urged by friends to enter the Miss Rye competition and did it as a dare. She won, aged 16. Jenny became a Miss Victoria and Miss Australia contestant at the age of 17, was picked up by a South Melbourne agency and was contracted as a Myer lingerie model. “Everything took off from there. It was my dream job - I always wanted to be a model - and then it turned into a nightmare,” she says. A 1991 family photo of Dennis Allen pointing a pistol at his mother, Kath Pettingill, during a party in Richmond. The turning point was moving into a South Yarra unit with a friend. “She was the sister of my first boyfriend. He told me to keep away from her because she was bad news. I didn’t understand; I had lived a very sheltered life and was very naive.” The friend was dealing heroin out of the unit and persuaded Jenny to smoke drugs to beat her nerves before a TV shoot. “It totally changed me. I was not in control and a total mess.”

Eventually the flatmate persuaded her to go to the Cherry Tree to meet her supplier, the very pub that was Dennis Allen’s local. “He didn’t like Dennis and when Dennis turned up with Jason Ryan [Allen’s young nephew] he left.” Even though Allen was the drug dealer from central casting, wearing overalls, at least a dozen gold chains (usually provided by junkies in exchange for drugs) and covered in tattoos, the girls stayed and partied. The next day, at Allen’s Chestnut Street home, Jenny’s mate left. “Then he stood in front of me and said 'you aren’t going anywhere'. He raped me that night.” She says she became his sex slave, imprisoned by fear and a never-ending supply of drugs, once being kept awake for 21 days on a diet of amphetamines and takeaway food. When she tried to escape he beat her, shackled her with chains, kicked, stabbed and tried to drown her. ‘‘He fired a shot right between my legs inside the house. “He used to hit me up with speed all the time. He said if he killed me no one would ever find the body.”

"I lived a sheltered life." Allen’s then lawyer, Andrew Fraser, recalls: “She was so young and innocent. I think she suffered from Stockholm syndrome and couldn’t leave. Dennis got her on the gear [drugs] and kept her on the gear. He wrecked her life, no doubt. I watched her disintegrate before my eyes.” As Allen took massive doses of speed, he would stay awake for weeks at a time – sometimes deciding to renovate one of his properties at 2am, using a sledgehammer to smash out a wall. A builder around the corner would be called in to finish the job. In her time when the world had largely shrunk to a few streets in Cremorne, she witnessed three murders and had to clean up after one – Wayne Stanhope, who was shot dead inside Allen’s home in August 1984. “He was just out of jail and Dennis invited him for lunch. Jason [Ryan] and I got some KFC. He [Wayne] wanted some speed and Dennis tried to kill him with an OD [overdose]. “They went to the Cherry Tree for a few drinks. When they came back he put Wayne’s favourite music on. I was sitting on the floor. Wayne went to the record player and Dennis pulled out a gun and went bang, bang. Wayne said 'Dennis what are you doing?'.

“He emptied it into his head. He got another gun from Jason – bang bang, and emptied that into his head although he was already dead. “He then told me to pass a him a knife, then he slit his throat. He rang his brothers to help and they dragged him onto the tiles. Dennis said: ‘Don’t you bleed on my carpet.’ Murder victim Wayne Stanhope. His body was never found. “They dragged him outside, there were trains going past. We had to clean up, there was blood everywhere. He told us to burn our clothes in the incinerator. He told me ‘You open your mouth and you’re off (dead).’ I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Jason was vomiting. He was a nice kid, he didn’t have a chance there.” In 1988 members of the Allen clan were charged with the murders of constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, ambushed in Walsh Street. Ryan became the key Crown witness in the failed prosecution.

On November 8, 1985, she was in a bedroom playing with Allen’s two young children when she heard shots. Allen had ambushed Hell's Angels associate Anton Kenny in the next room. “Dennis told me to take the kids to his brother’s place [Victor George Peirce]. “Victor pretended he was not that bad but he was a nasty, vicious person, he would rip your eye out if you crossed him.” She was ordered to buy lime and concrete. Peirce and Allen used a chainsaw to cut the legs off the victim and the remains were dumped in a 44-gallon barrel filled with concrete and rolled into the Yarra. Occasionally they would leave Cremorne and stay at a motel, but that was only when tipped off by a corrupt detective that they were about to be raided. When Allen wanted Jenny to get a gun licence, the same detective drove her to the city office to apply.

“I used to hide Dennis’ gun in my pants," she recalls. "I was terrified it would go off.” The centre of Allen’s social life was the Cherry Tree, despite repeated attempts to ban him. One night when a cover band was playing, the lead singer ignored the drug dealer's request to play a Bob Marley tune - that is, until Allen followed him into the toilet and stuck a gun to his throat. The singer returned and performed reggae complete with a West Indian accent. Once, when his captive told the crazed drug dealer she was leaving, he seemed to react calmly. “He stood there and let me pack my stuff - he let me get to the car and then went bang, bang, shooting out the windscreen and tyres. He bought me another car. “There were these tiny, gorgeous puppies from his dogs Julie and Fatso. He shot every one of them - he was getting worse and worse. He would take shots at the tower clock and the neighbour’s cat.” There is no doubt the information Allen provided to stay out of jail led to many arrests. There is also no doubt that it was a scandal that a man who provided heroin for 100 people a day through an inner-city massage parlour and banked $7000 a week was given the green light by police.

Eventually Jenny fell pregnant and had a son by Allen. He began to let her visit her mother with the boy and one night she just didn’t come back. By this time Allen was losing his power, his faculties and his health. A police taskforce was investigating him over 11 cases - a fatal shooting, three suspicious drug overdoses, two missing persons and five confirmed homicides. In March 1987, Allen was charged with the Stanhope murder but he was already terminally ill, his chronic heart disease brought on by prodigious illicit drug use. Dennis Allen was finally charged with murder. He died before his trial. Credit:The Age On April 13 that year he died, aged 35. “Thirteen was his favourite number, it was the devil’s number and he was the devil. He said he killed 13 and I reckon he hung on to die on the 13th,” says Jenny.

She made statements to police and moved to Queensland, later living with a policeman she met at a nightclub. “I spent five years looking over my shoulder. My life was complete chaos. He took the life I wanted and turned me into something else.”