I'm so relieved my children didn't follow me into crime

Convicted murderer and armed robber Linda Calvey, dubbed the Black Widow, served 18 years in jail for killing her lover Ronnie Cook. Now a bestselling author, and great-grandmother of eight, she reveals why family has always been her number one priority

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with many of her extended family living close by. “My family are all respectable and law-abiding. The younger ones don’t know about my past,” she says. “I always told my two children not to follow in mine and their father’s footsteps. The price you pay isn’t worth it and they have seen that first hand.”

Their dad, Linda’s first husband, armed robber Mickey Calvey, was shot dead by a police marksman as he fled an armed raid.

Madly in love at 19, Linda would check out handy escape routes, and then, after his death, took part in robberies herself, both as a getaway driver and a shotgun-wielding robber alongside hardened male robbers. “We wanted more than we were born to, and yet we had no way of getting it... not legally, at least,” she wrote in her first memoir.

Now she believes she would never have been attracted to that world had she never met Mickey. In fact, she barely recognises the woman she once was.

“After he died, something changed in me and I felt like I had to carry on, to avenge his death in some way,” she says.

“I enjoyed the money and the power but I am so relieved neither of my children went down that road because they so easily could have. Now I wouldn’t so much as pinch a sweet.”

After Mickey died, her next partner Ron Cook was also violently despatched while on day release from jail.