“I WOULD expect people to say, ‘I wonder if he did it,’” says Peter Heron, the man who found his wife Ann slaughtered in his own living room almost exactly 25 years ago, that hot, terrible day of August 3, 1990.

“But my girls were verbally assaulted, sometimes by friends. ‘Your dad’s a murderer.’ They were still at the age they were going to nightclubs. One time Jacqui almost was into fisticuffs. She’s not the type who is going to put up with something like that.

“I had people shouting murderer in the street.”

Mr Heron shrugs as he describes that verbal abuse against himself. His point is to highlight the grief caused to his children, step-children and friends, not himself.

But his daughter, Debbie Simpson, tells a different story of her dad being badly shaken. He had been in the garden of Aeolian House, the large home he lived in with Ann, when a group of youths shouted that word that has followed him ever since: ‘murderer.’

It had begun to happen after Mr Heron’s affair had been exposed, an affair he had not initially told the police about. People started to make judgements.

Time passed, Mr Heron found a new love and married again to widow Freda Buddie , retired, moved to Scotland and then nursed Freda through cancer before she died in 2000. Freda’s family, naturally, had at first harboured very serious concerns, but, in the end, had become close to the man who had brought happiness in their mother’s life. For his children, step-children and grandchildren life, naturally, continued and 15 years went by.

But another bomb was about to be exploded in the lives of the Heron family, one that would tear apart them apart again. It began with that knock on Mr Heron’s door, early in the morning of November 9, 2005, and a team of policeman arresting him for the murder of Ann Heron 15 years before.

Mr Heron’s step-daughter, Ann Marie Cockburn, never spoke to him again. But the greatest impact of that arrest, apart from on Mr Heron himself, was on his three daughters, Debbie and twins Jacqui and Beverley.

“I will never forget the time I knew that he had been arrested,” says Mrs Simpson. “You talk about life changing moments. Moments of your life that change your direction in life altogether. Well, we had two. Before August 3, 1990 we were an ordinary family. An absolutely, 100 per cent ordinary family and we weren’t again. So that was one life changing moment. But then there was a second life changing moment, and we’ve wrestled with it ever since.

“It was my sister who rang and she said, ‘I’ve just been to the shop, and somebody said somebody had been arrested for Ann.’

"This was the news we’d been waiting for, at that point, for 15 years. You can imagine. Then she said, ‘oh, it’s a guy from Scotland.’ Obviously, when she said, Scotland, that was where dad was living...the phone rang again about a minute later.

"It was on digital display and it was my husband’s number and I just thought, ‘oh.’ I knew there was something wrong. He said, ‘you’re not going to want to hear this...and that was the start of a new nightmare.”

The suspicions from members of the public did not stop when the case against Mr Heron collapsed in February, 2006.

Listening to his daughter, Mr Heron’s anger rises to the surface and, with it, his demands for an apology from the police.

He says: “To see their father publicly charged with something he hadn’t done was almost unbearable for them (his daughters and step children) but they handled the situation with great dignity, as did I, strengthened by the knowledge that I was innocent and that, one day, this would be proven and the whole nightmare would end."