GORDON BOON

A passing couple stumbled upon the body when they pulled their car over to check a discarded tyre dumped in a remote area of rural Norfolk.

Gordon Boon's body had been stripped of its shoes, socks, trousers and jacket, and then shoved under some wooden fencing panels on the grassy verge of Rabbit Lane, 13 miles west of Norwich.

Detectives quickly realised it was murder, and a particularly violent one.

The 73-year-old retired cider factory worker, a father of five, had not only been strangled: he had two black eyes, bruising to his lip and forehead, and an arm and a leg had been bound with a ligature.

Boon, it turned out, was known to the police.

In 2001, he was jailed for six years and placed on the sex offenders' register for life after admitting serious sexual offences against three young girls; he had sexually assaulted one 13-year-old after plying her with alcohol, playing games of strip poker and taking pornographic photographs with a Polaroid camera.

There were plenty of people with a reason to hate the pensioner, and few with much sympathy for him.

Two months after his death in October 2008, police admitted they were struggling to make headway in a challenging investigation.

In fact, they had received just two telephone calls from the public about the murder.

Speaking anonymously, Boon's eldest son, Philip, then made an emotional plea via the media: "Even if you can't forgive him, please remember what we are going through," he said.

"We can't ignore what he's done, but nobody deserves to be murdered." Eighteen months on, the family of Gordon Boon have one answer: the man who killed him was not a vigilante, nor one of his victims, but a friend.

Royston Jackson, a 43-year-old turkey catcher, was found guilty of murder at Norwich crown court on 23 March.

Like Boon, he had been released from prison to start a new life, with plenty of making up to do for his past crimes.

Boon's father was in the army.

His mother was unreliable and promiscuous, according to family members, and Boon and his brothers and sisters were put into care.

Two brothers were later sent to Australia; Boon was packed off to live with an aunt in Bedfordshire.

It was there that he met his future wife, Andrea Spink.

One day early in the 1960s, Andrea's two brothers struck her a deal: if she cooked them dinner, they would take her to the Territorial Army social club in Luton.

She bumped into Boon at the club.

"When I first met him, I didn't like him.

He asked me out and I nearly didn't go, but then I thought, 'I wouldn't like to be stood up,'" she says now.

She went away to the US for two years to be a nanny and when she came back, Boon was still to be found at the TA club.

He wooed her and they married.

Boon was not a big man, but he was domineering.

"If he'd say jump, I'd say, how high?" says Andrea, a plain-speaking woman who struggles with her health and periodically reaches for an oxygen mask by her armchair.

Andrea now lives in a homely council house in rural Norfolk with her youngest daughter, Katie, and her husband, some miles from the home she shared with Boon.

Alongside a dresser with a mug commemorating the marriage of Charles and Diana are dozens of pictures of family gatherings and children growing up.

One person is missing from all the photos, however: Gordon Boon.

Boon and Andrea began their family with a son, Philip, and then had twin daughters, Andrea and Ruth.

"They were fine after they were born, but as I brought them home something went wrong and they all ended up in hospital," says Andrea.

Ruth died aged 18 months; Andrea Jnr was placed in a nursing home aged two, where she lives to this day.

Severely autistic, she has not spoken since she was five.

Andrea says that when she was with her sick daughters in hospital in London, Boon never visited them.

Andrea went on to have two healthy children with Boon, Katie and Christopher, and, she says, she became more assertive.

One day, when Boon was "really snotty", she upped and left to join her parents, who had moved to Norfolk.

He followed.

"When he realised he couldn't put me under his finger all the while, things changed and he changed – for a bit," says Andrea.

In the late 60s, they moved to the Norfolk town of Attleborough, Boon got a job at the cider factory, and "things went along OK".

Boon continued to rule the household, however, and he did so with a curious mix of authority, paranoia and helplessness.

His family remembers him asleep in his chair in the living room in front of the TV, having chosen what they would all watch.

But he was a grafter, always bringing in a weekly wage, but also making sure he controlled the finances.

When Philip joined the army, his dad would contradict everything he said.

"It didn't matter what Philip said about what gun he used, his dad used to say he didn't use that type.

He always put him down and he was always right," says Andrea.

Boon would blame their youngest, Christopher, for everything, particularly if something went missing.

Boon was not violent towards his wife, she says, although Katie, who is now 43 and as honest, blunt and unsentimental as her mother, remembers getting beaten.

"Now I come to think about it," says Andrea, "he was sex mad.

Whereas I'm not.

He just thought it was his right because we were married.

If I said, 'Forget it,' he'd get really stroppy." Boon went out to the pub and played darts and dominos.

He would come home drunk.

"That's when he would tell me my faults.

The longer I kept quiet, because he's ranting and raving, that made him worse.

The kids used to say, 'For God's sake, mum, answer him,' and I'd say, 'What's the point?'"