WHEN twice-divorced policewoman Jill Owens met charming, successful businessman Dean Jenkins, she couldn’t believe her luck.
Despite living on opposite sides of the country – she in Wales and him in London – the smitten pair were meeting up every other weekend and texting 50 times a day.
Just six weeks into dating they enjoyed a romantic weekend away in Italy, and five months in began planning a family.
But on November 1, 2006, while four months pregnant, Jill's life came crashing down when she discovered Dean had been arrested for a string of armed robberies worth £339,000.
Not only that, he also had a secret wife.
In an exclusive interview Jill, now 54, opens up on that fateful revelation that led to her being forced to resign from the job she loved, lose her entire family and contemplate taking her own life.
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“I'd had a disastrous history of relationships, and I was searching for, probably the level of security that people want,” she explains.
“And he came along. We instantly clicked and I couldn’t believe my luck.
“For someone in Pembrokeshire, I felt like I’d hit the jackpot.
"There was nothing that made me think, 'Something is not right here'."
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6Jill – who shares her story in a new podcast, Stolen Hearts – was a decorated police sergeant for Haverfordwest.
She had worked for the force for 17 years and was a mum-of-two when she met Dean – who had male grooming products available in Superdrug with his face on the bottle – in 2006.
On the night of November 1, she became concerned after not hearing from Dean in 24 hours, which was "quite out of character".
Jill then received a bizarre message to go to a phone box and ring his sister.
Explaining why she didn’t think this strange, Jill explains: “My self-worth was on the floor.
“I was so desperate for an answer, I would have gone to the moon just to find out what the heck was going on.”
She had absolutely no idea that phone call would be to tell her that her partner was one of a gang of four men involved in an armed robbery in Kent on Halloween.
One had been shot dead by police, with the others arrested.
Jill was so clueless about her boyfriend’s double life that she assumed Dean was “an innocent bystander” who’d been caught in the crossfire.
Once she realised the love of her life was actually one of the armed robbers, her mind began racing.
She recalls: “It was like one of those old-fashioned spinning tops and somebody's plunging it down, and your head's going faster and faster.
“It just didn't make any sense at all. This couldn’t be my kind, considerate Dean.
It just didn't make any sense at all. This couldn’t be my kind, considerate Dean
“I couldn’t marry up the two.”
That night, Jill didn’t sleep.
“I spent the whole night in bed, turning the lights on and off. I didn’t tell anyone,” she recalls.
“I didn’t want it to be real, and just hoped it was a nightmare.
“As a police sergeant, everything was thrown in the mix – my personal life, my job… your thoughts are flying everywhere.
“So I’m thinking ‘Oh my god, is this true? This can't be true. If it's true, I’m dating him, I'm pregnant. Of course the police are going to have to look at you, you’re the girlfriend. I would. You’ll have the children taken off you…’ I was like a rabbit in the headlights.”
But when she turned on the news, her worst nightmare played out on the screen in front of her.
Dean was part of a gang that targeted security guards, delivering cash to building societies across Kent between March and October 2006, netting him a total of £339,710.
Jill went into work and told her boss, Chief Superintendent Amphlett, everything.
"[I was like] a child pleading their innocence,” she says.
“I had to put into words what I was struggling to comprehend myself.
“But the tears had started and the emotion was clouding my already incoherent thought processes.”
After a long silence, Amphlett simply said: “Jesus.”
And when Jill’s mother found out, she asked her: “Did you not have any idea he was up to something?”
Strained
It later transpired that Dean – and his parents who Jill had met – had also been hiding a secret wife.
Relations between Jill and her family became strained as they urged her to “snap out of it”.
Jill says: “The number of times people said that to me was countless, but they were not in my shoes and could not even come close to comprehending how I was feeling.”
Kent Police, who were investigating the robbery, began looking into her.
While this was expected, when police searched her house with a warrant – despite Dean never having lived with her – and confiscated her mobile phone and computer as evidence, she “knew the wolves were beginning to circle”.
She says: “Kent had to investigate me… In most domestics or anything like that, it's usually somebody known to the person or the partner who's involved, so I fully expected that.
“But I wasn't a suspect. I was a victim. And what I didn't expect was the total disregard for my welfare, for my physical and mental health.
"Especially as I was four months pregnant, and a single mum with two small children at home – dealing with such a huge, traumatic incident.”
'Colleagues told me to get abortion'
To her horror some of Jill’s male colleagues began implying she should get an abortion to “protect future career prospects”.
She wrote a letter to Dean in prison demanding answers.
He replied within a week, apologising and telling her he wanted to be kept informed about their baby, and at five months pregnant, Jill visited him.
In her book, Two Cops and a Robber, Jill details how Dean repeatedly told her he loved her, “didn’t mean to lie”, and that his marriage was over.
He insisted he "just wanted enough money to leave this f****g fake life up here and come down to you", and pleaded with her to wait for him.
Kent Police continued to investigate Jill, relentlessly questioning her despite the fact she was told she was no longer a suspect by her police federation representative, Peter Dickenson – and Dean continuously stressing Jill’s innocence in court.
Once their son Frankie was born in 2007, it got even worse.
Wanting her "innocent son" to form a bond with his dad, Jillregularly visited Dean in prison.
When word got out, a Service Confidence Procedure was carried out – where the officer under scrutiny doesn’t fall into the categories of disciplinary action or investigation, but where confidence regarding the integrity of that person is in doubt.
“It became vindictive,” Jill says. “At certain points, I probably could have easily gone and driven the car to a remote spot and jumped off the cliff.”
'Counselling used against me'
Every move she made was monitored, and Jill claims the fact she took up the offer of counselling went against her.
She says: “When they suggested counselling, I thought, ‘That's really nice of them to offer that type of thing,’ and I started going to those sessions.
“Then in one session, the counsellor told me that professional standards, who were investigating me, asked her to reveal everything that I spoke about in counselling. So I stopped going.
“I didn’t have anything to hide, but I had nothing left, and it was like now they wanted my inner thoughts.
“It was awful, and that's what set me backwards.”
In 2008, after a lengthy private hearing which dredged up many private photos and messages, Jill was found guilty of professional misconduct and had to resign.
She claimed the verdict had “already been decided” before the trial.
“It did not matter that I had told the truth,” she says. “There was only going to be one verdict because that’s what suited them.”
Suddenly an unemployed single mum to three kids, Jill claimed benefits for the first time in her life and ended up working in retail soon after.
A few years later she and her team lodged an appeal against her hearing and won – coming to a compensatory agreement with a formal apology.
Her police federation representative, Peter, said her hearing outcome was "a travesty of justice; probably the worst I witnessed in my 10 years".
Jill says: “This small, moral victory was worth its weight in gold.”
'Travesty of justice'
She still doesn’t believe she’s had the closure she craves, adding: “It's like I've got a big box packed away inside me with a lid that stays down, but then every now and again, the lid rattles.
“I've been through it so many times in my head, as you can imagine. Did I miss anything? Was there anything I missed? And it's always the same answer.
“There was nothing that I missed, there was nothing I picked up on, and I beat myself up enough about that.”
Jill is now happily married to a new man, Ron, and has no contact with her parents, brother or two eldest daughters.
Dean was jailed for 17 years after admitting his involvement in the robbery. Jill continued to visit him in prison with Frankie, now 15, until he was old enough to go on his own.
"He will always be a part of my life because he’s Frankie’s dad, and I would never want to stand in the way of their relationship," she says.
“There will always be a feeling for him because of the enormity of what happened, and the huge thing we both went through together.
“When you do have something as emotional as that, you never ever forget that and it'll always be a scar.
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“But I would have gone through it all a million times to have Frankie.”
Brand new podcast Stolen Hearts from Wondery and Novel, is available on all podcast services. Jill’s book Two Cops and a Robber is available at Amazon and Waterstones.
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