WHEN Terry Cannings’s second son died, a doctor came out of the Salisbury hospital to which he had been taken and offered some advice. “Terry,” he said into the distraught father’s ear, “this time expect crap in your life.”

Whether uttered out of malice or concern, it was a mild warning. Hours after Matthew Cannings’s death, at 18 weeks in 1999, his parents were taken to Salisbury police station and questioned for several hours. It was the start of a purgatorial journey through Britain’s justice system that ended yesterday with tears of relief on the steps of the Court of Appeal.

That journey showed the family that even after losing three babies to sudden and unexplained respiratory collapse, things can get worse. But it failed to shake his trust in her, or hers in him.

Angela Cannings, then 38, was arrested at her home the day after Matthew’s death on suspicion of murdering him, his brother Jason, and his sister Gemma, who had died in 1989 and 1991 respectively. The arrest marked the start of a waking nightmare, Mr Cannings said, that deprived him and his wife of each other as well as their son, and barely let up for four years.

After her eight-week trial last year, Mrs Cannings told an interviewer she had done “everything in my power to show the jury what I was like as a person”; a person known to family and friends as a devoted mother. Yet her performance as a witness was eclipsed by those of expert prosecution witnesses who damned her on the basis of statistics.

A show of compassion from Judge Dame Heather Hallett at the sentencing only heightened the Cannings’s distress.

“I have no doubt that for a woman like you to have committed these terrible acts of suffocating your own babies there must be something seriously wrong with you,” Judge Hallett said in what was meant as an attack on the mandatory sentencing guidelines that impose a life sentence.

Asked after his wife had been jailed if he had any doubts as to her innocence, Mr Cannings said: “None at all. If I had any doubt I would not have had a second or a third child and she would not be part of my life now. As far as I am concerned (the deaths were) an act of God and that is where it should be left.”

The couple met in 1983 while both working at a Tesco supermarket. Angela was 19 and a Roman Catholic; Terry was 29 and divorced with two children. They were married in 1987 and Gemma, their first child, was born two years later.

“Angela was a natural mother,” Mr Cannings told the Daily Mail. “She seemed to know instinctively what to do.” Gemma lived for three months. She died in circumstances that were not suspicious, listed in records as a victim of sudden infant death syndrome (Sids), the umbrella term now under scrutiny. Her parents were at least free to grieve.

Their first son, Jason, was born in 1991 with dislocated hips but otherwise, hospital staff insisted, perfectly healthy. He lived for seven weeks.

Despite everything, the couple vowed not to lose hope. Angela never suffered from post-natal depression, her husband insists, but they agreed she should see a psychiatrist for reassurance and duly received it. When Matthew was born four years ago, they used electronic monitors that let them hear him breathing in any room in the house.

When Matthew died, however, practicalities were far from his mother’s mind. When she realised he was no longer breathing she phoned her husband instead of an ambulance. “It’s happened again,” she said.

Her failure to first call 999 helped to seal her fate at trial, but as Mr Cannings later explained it: “She knew he had died. The only person she wanted with her was me.”

As a convicted child-killer in Bulwood Prison in Essex, Mrs Cannings was taunted viciously and burnt with scalding water. “Not only have I lost three babies, but also the woman who is the love of my life,” her husband said.

Yet there was a drip-feed of hope. In January this year Sally Clark, a solicitor convicted on similar evidence, was released on appeal. “The tide is turning,” Mr Cannings declared two months later when Angela’s case was accepted by the Court of Appeal. In June Trupti Patel, a third mother convicted of murder with the help of testimony from Sir Roy Meadow, was also released.

Last month, the BBC broadcast the results of research into a string of infant deaths in Mrs Cannings’s extended Irish family — grounds for suspecting a genetic cause behind the loss of her three children.

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