The killer I loved

THREE months after Tim Franklin died, Kate Lock received a message from beyond the grave. She had been going through a few things her ex-lover had left her, and found two volumes of poetry by Philip Larkin. In one, a page had been deliberately turned down. It was, she says, Franklin's farewell to her:

"Love, we must part now: do not let it be/

Calamitous and bitter. In the past/

There has been too much moonlight and self-pity."

Almost 20 years on and sitting in the warm front room of El Piano in Grape Lane, this message from the grave sends a chill through me.

Franklin was a manipulative murderer and quite possibly a sociopath. He was also a man of frightening intelligence and charisma, who charmed virtually everyone he met.

In 1971, ten years before he met Kate, he made national headlines after being convicted at York Assizes for the murder of his mistress, society hostess Elizabeth 'Tina' Strauss.

He buried her in the garden of the home they shared in North Otterington: and for seven months calmly continued living in the house with her teenage daughter Claire Louise.

Kate knew none of this when she met him in 1981. She was a fresh-faced 20-year-old biology student at Exeter University.

Franklin was in his mid 50s - a mature postgraduate student who had been released from prison after serving eight years of a 15-year life sentence.

Kate, now the York-based author of a string of bestselling Eastenders novelisations, scarcely remembers the first time she met him. It was at a drink-fuelled party of which she has only a hazy recollection. He, however, remembered her.

"Like a shark scenting a drop of blood in a vast expanse of ocean, he sniffed out my vulnerability the first time he laid eyes on me," she writes in her new book, Carrion Kisses.

She met him again at a student pub. He was the life and soul of the party, charismatic, charming, plausible and tremendously intelligent. He was also, she discovered, a 'lifer' out of prison on licence: he told her so himself.

She says: "Everybody knew,"her face oddly vulnerable, "he enjoyed the notoriety."

The way he told it, however, it had all been a miscarriage of justice: there had been a row, a struggle, the woman had fallen and hit her head. "I believed it," Kate says. "We kind of all felt sorry for him."

Nothing happened between them at first. Kate had a fling with another student, found herself pregnant and had an abortion.

She says Franklin caught her when she was at a low ebb. She found herself telling him about her abortion, and bursting into tears. He played the older man: her protector. "That was his speciality, 'being there'," she says. He persuaded her to switch to the philosophy department, and invited her to his room for study sessions.

One night, she stayed so late he suggested she stay, putting a bolster in the middle of the bed so she wouldn't feel threatened. Before long, she was staying regularly. He never touched her: until one night, piqued that he hadn't made a move, she climbed over the bolster herself.

For the first few months, their relationship was "brilliant," she says. "I was just bowled over. He took me over completely. He was so much older, he was charismatic.

"One of his gifts was that he could make you the best you could be. He brought you out of yourself, stretched you intellectually. I really loved him."

One of the first hints of something darker came when, after about six weeks, Franklin invited her to Gran Canaria for a holiday.

He had always been teetotal - but on holiday he started drinking, heavily. He became almost a different person, argumentative, aggressive, with lightning mood changes.

On the last day but one, after yet another drinking binge and a row, he suddenly flipped and started raving at her in Spanish, which he spoke fluently but she didn't understand.

"Not only did he not recognise me, or appear to understand me, but he clearly regarded me as a threat," she writes. "He was red in the face, and spit was flying from his lips."

Terrified, she locked herself in the bathroom.

When she came out, he was face down on the bed, hallucinating about his war experiences. "He seemed to be in a shell-hole, watching a mate being blown up," says Kate. For her, it was terrifying. Incredibly, the relationship survived. Franklin promised never to drink again and, after an idyllic summer, they moved into a rented house together.

They were together for the next two years while Kate finished her course, and when she returned to her native Oxford and began to look for a job, Franklin went with her.

But the relationship steadily deteriorated. He became increasingly vindictive and emotionally abusive, playing mind-games until she scarcely knew who she was. As she became increasingly independent, landing a job with the Oxford Star, he became more needy, emotionally blackmailing her and threatening to kill himself.

Kate says eventually it became unbearable. She moved out and went to live with her parents. He came round the next day and became an almost daily visitor, charming her parents the way he had once charmed her.

When he realised he had lost control of Kate, he tried to pick up another young girl. He took her out for a meal, persuaded her into his car and took her home.

"She was frightened," says Kate. "He was 60 by then, she didn't know where she was, and he came on so strong."

Kate found out and rang him next day, accusing him of "practically abducting and terrorising her".

It was the wrong thing to say. Franklin, she learned later, had already been sent back to prison once since his release for allegedly abducting a young woman. Increasingly paranoid, he got it into his head Kate was trying to send him back again.

He demanded to see her and when she went round was completely "off the wall" - convinced she had the police with her and was going to get him packed off to prison. For the first time, it struck her he really was a killer.

"He spotted me sidling towards the door," she writes, "and moved to block my escape. 'Kate. Don't make me commit a terrible sin.' His words made my blood run cold. I stared at him. I did not recognise Tim behind those hollow eyes. He had the look of a man who had played this scene before.

"Suddenly, everything made sense. The woman he had killed had wanted to leave him too. I'd always believed it was an accident. Until now."

She got out by staying calm, and simply telling him deadpan she was leaving.

Fifteen months later, he committed suicide, leaving Kate a card saying: "Thank you for the happiest years of my life."

Despite everything, she was devastated. Every time she saw an older man wearing a hat like his, her heart would skip a beat.

Among the things he had left her, she found his washbag. "Snatching his flannel, I buried my face in it," she writes. "In the senseless moments that followed, I realised even the dead could live on..."

And then, a few months later, she began digging into his past, and found out the full horrific details of the 'Tina' Strauss' murder. What horrifies her most is one detail: the fact that as well has having her head crushed, she had been strangled with a clothes line.

It proved, she says, that the murder wasn't just a moment of rage: he had deliberately finished his victim off. "I felt sick to think about it," she says.

She talks as though writing the book has been an exorcism. But there is still an odd affection when she says his name, Tim - as she does frequently. She looks surprised when I mention it.

"I don't feel I love him any more," she says. "I think I was still in love for a long time. I'm ambivalent. To some extent, he made me the person I am today. He educated me, he opened my eyes."

But wasn't he an evil man?

"I wouldn't say he was evil. He did an evil thing, but I still find it hard to ascribe that word to him. For someone to do one really terrible thing - does that make them out and out evil?"

Somehow, you feel that even now, 17 years later, he's still exerting his influence from beyond the grave...

Carrion Kisses: A True Story Of Love And Murder is published by Ebury Press, price £10.99

Updated: 08:41 Wednesday, March 17, 2004