'I shouted I love you as I killed my husband'

The street is quiet - eerily so - but otherwise unremarkable. No grim-faced policemen are standing guard and the red striped tape that must have been here is now gone. I stand and stare at the plain facade of the house in question - the house where, just hours ago, a man lost his life. The facts are sketchy: a brutal stabbing, the wife arrested, a child asleep upstairs, yet they're enough to make me uneasy.

I knock on a few doors - they're either out or not answering - then try the local shop. The staff and customers are polite but can't help me. They say the couple hadn't lived there long and no-one knew them. A sense of numbness hangs in the air, as if people can't quite believe what's happened. The violent death in the darkened house has cast a shadow over all of them.

It's six years on and I'm standing outside a different house, on a different street in Guisborough. I'm about to come face to face with Gina French, the woman who killed her husband, and I honestly don't know how I'll feel. She opens the door and my first reaction is surprise - she looks much younger than I'm expecting. Dressed in jeans and a fitted T-shirt, and about a size six, she could almost be in her teens. She's also beautiful. With long black hair and doll-like features, she's the stereotypical Far Eastern bride. She smiles winningly and ushers me in, and I know already that I won't allude to my prior experience.

At 32, Gina has lived through more than most of us ever will. By the time she killed her husband, she'd already had her eyes opened, enduring poverty and exploitation in the fleshpots of her native Philippines. In her autobiography, For A House Made Of Stone, co-written with Andrew Crofts, she recounts her story from early childhood. It makes both grim and fascinating reading.

Gina was born one of nine children to poor parents in the mountains of Luzon. Knowing the struggle to make ends meet, at the age of 11, she went to Manila to work as a maid. Her dreams of helping to support the family seemed bound to fail when she found employment with a cruel aunt, who paid her the equivalent of £1 a month for intensive labour. Gina remembers this as a very hard time. "It was one of the most difficult jobs I ever did," she says. "I really felt like giving up, like I couldn't do it. My body seemed like it couldn't cope but I had to be strong."

While working for her aunt, Gina met and fell in love with Jun, a handsome Filipino seven years her senior. They were married before she turned 18, and soon afterwards, Gina fell pregnant. But her joy at giving birth to her daughter Dailyn was marred by the onset of depression, which quickly spiralled into serious illness. In fits of madness, Gina stabbed Jun in the stomach and attacked her mother and brother. For 18 long months, until she recovered, her family kept her chained inside a box only just big enough for her to lie down in.

Looking back on this dark time, she can barely believe it happened. "I can't explain it because I can't remember a thing," says Gina. "People who came to see me said they would rather see me dead. I lost my husband and my daughter. It was one of the most painful things I've gone through."

Rejected by Jun, whose parents took Dailyn, and, despite their cruelty, keener than ever to help her family, she returned to Manila, where she started working as a nightclub dancer. When foreign customers, struck by her beauty, asked her out, she crossed the line into prostitution. Although, at first, she found this difficult, what kept her going was her one true ambition - to build a stone house for her parents to live in. Through working at the club she achieved this, and is defiant about her means. "This dream would never have happened by me working as a helper," says Gina frankly.

She was doing her nightly shift when a tall, middle-aged Englishman called Paul Donald walked in. The memory of meeting him is etched on her mind. "He was very sweet," Gina recalls. "I felt so relaxed with him. It was just his smile and the way he talked. He was very charming." Romance blossomed and Paul took Gina to Brunei, where he worked as an electrical engineer. They lived in luxury, in an unreal world of affluent foreigners, and when Paul proposed, Gina couldn't wait to become his wife. She discovered she was pregnant, and after a low-key wedding, the couple travelled to the UK, where Gina gave birth to her son Michael.

When they returned to Brunei, although she was happy, she became troubled by Paul's temper - something that had only surfaced since their child was born. She also suspected that he was having an affair. He started beating her and Michael and as the weeks and months passed, she found herself living in constant terror. After many arguments, with Gina leaving him several times, Paul finally admitted to being unfaithful.

While in retrospect, she can see how much things had unravelled, she says at the time, she only wanted the marriage to work. "Although you're in a violent relationship, you think, 'this is it. He will change'," says Gina. "You kind of hope it will be like that because when you love someone, you think you have to stick by them."

When Paul suggested they move to England, Gina reluctantly agreed, still hoping that things would improve. Yet despite her best efforts, the violence continued, and as she sank deeper into despair, she found emails to another woman alluding to an affair. By this time, Paul's work had taken the family to Guisborough, where the last chapter of their ill-fated marriage was played out.

On the day they moved into their rented house at The Charltons, Gina finally reached her limit. Lying on a mattress on their first night, Paul asked her to make love. When she refused, he forced himself on her, kicking her in the stomach when he had finished. She lay awake as he slept beside her then in the small hours of the morning, picked up the knife he had used to peel an apple. With a cry of "Mahal kita", which means "I love you", she stabbed her husband in the chest. When he woke and tried to grab the knife, Gina stabbed him again, fleeing with her son as her husband breathed his last breaths.

Relating this, the most painful part of her story, she seems distant, her almond-shaped eyes staring straight ahead. When I ask what was going through her mind, she struggles to answer. "I still ask myself," she admits. "At that moment I just felt so empty. I wasn't even angry towards him."

When she talks about Paul, she sounds nostalgic and I get the sense that despite the abuse, she truly loved him. "I don't think he was a bad person," says Gina. "Yeah, he was bad to us, but he also had a good personality. I think he was sorry and I know that he did love me. I think he just didn't know the meaning of love and being a father figure."

Following her capture and arrest, Gina went to prison for seven months, but when the case came to court, she was dealt with leniently. Pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, she was sentenced to three years probation. Now she has remarried, and is rebuilding her life with her third husband Nick.

Gina leaves me in no doubt of her remorse. "If it wasn't for Michael, I would have committed suicide after what I did," she says. "I can only say that it came to the point that I had had enough, but I still feel sad and I will always regret it."

Predictably enough, she's faced derision in the small town where she's known as a killer, although many have been kind. In writing the book, she hopes to silence her detractors, evoke their sympathy and understanding. Whether she succeeds in this or not, I leave convinced that she won't lie down - her current happiness, so dearly bought, is something she is desperate to hang onto.

l Some of the names in this article have been changed.

l For A House Made Of Stone by Gina French with Andrew Crofts (Vision, 16.99). Gina will be signing copies of the book at The Guisborough Bookshop on Saturday from 12-2pm.