As Sion Jenkins left court today to start a new life of freedom with his second wife Christina Ferneyhough, he challenged the police to take seriously at last his claim that an intruder was to blame for the murder of his foster daughter, Billie-Jo.

At his trial, it was alleged that the former teacher had a row with Billie-Jo during a three-minute visit to the family house in Lower Park Road, Hastings, on February 15 1997. The prosecution claimed that he lost his temper, hit her over the head with a tent spike up to 10 times, and then calmly drove off on a shopping trip to a DIY store with two of his four natural daughters.

But doubts always hung over his conviction. At Mr Jenkins’s first trial at Lewes Crown Court in 1998, close friends of the family said that the defendant and his wife Lois were so worried about prowlers and break-ins in the area where they lived that they had security lights and window locks fitted to their home - and had decided to move.

Peter Gaimster, a gift shop owner who lived near the Jenkins family, told how at a dinner party just days before the murder, Mr and Mrs Jenkins had spoken of a suspected prowler. Mr Gaimster said: "At one point Sion took me outside and we discussed at length how the prowler could have got around the back of the house. Sion also showed me security lights he had had fitted.

"They felt sure they were being watched. They were so worried they had decided to move house. They had had enough with the area. Their car had been vandalised, there was the prowler and strange phone calls they had been getting."

Further evidence appeared to give weight to Jenkins’s claims that an intruder was responsible for the brutal killing, during which part of a black bin-bag was forced into Billie-Jo’s nostril. At the start of the Court of Appeal hearing on June 30 last year, it emerged that a mentally-ill man said to have a bizarre obsession with pushing pieces of plastic bags into his mouth and nose was nearby at the time of the murder.

The unnamed man, dubbed Mr X, was dismissed as a suspect when his clothes tested negative for Billie-Jo’s blood, although he did not have a complete alibi for his whereabouts on the day of the killing.

When Mr Jenkins was arrested, it came as a surprise to many. He was seen as a loving family man whose position of deputy headmaster cemented his image as a respectable member of the community. But the investigation uncovered aspects of his past that helped to paint him in a less favourable light.

Sion David Charles Jenkins was born in Deptford, south east London, in September 1957. His father, David, was a police constable who joined Michelin, the tyre firm. The family moved to Scotland and Jenkins started to attend Glasgow Academy in 1971. He became a boarder two years later when his parents moved to Slough with his younger brother, David.

Mr Jenkins, 48, never excelled in class. He was a D-stream pupil. He was later to claim to have 10 A-grade O-Levels but in reality achieved only four poorly-graded ones. After leaving school, Mr Jenkins announced he wanted to become a journalist, but instead went to work on a part-time basis for confectionery giant Mars, based in Slough. He was not taken on full-time because of his "uncooperative" attitude.

Mr Jenkins then decided to try his hand at teaching, a career he would later develop through deceit. He married Lois Ball in 1982 in Bournemouth, near her parents’ home town of Poole. The couple moved to the East End of London, where Mrs Jenkins became a social worker in Tower Hamlets.

Mr Jenkins worked at several schools and became English teacher at the McEntee Secondary School in Walthamstow in 1989. When Mr Jenkins and his wife answered a newspaper advert seeking new foster parents, Billie-Jo was placed with them in the family home in West Ham, east London. She was already a school friend of the couple’s eldest daughter.

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