A loveless, lonely fight to survive

Northampton Crown Court was told that her parents Anne and Alex Greig, who later died in a suicide pact, rejected her when she was two-and-a-half.

Neave spent her first period in social services care before she was two and was taken in permanent foster care by the age of four. She grew up with foster parents and in children's homes - mainly in Wisbech and March, Cambridgeshire.

Her problems continued as she grew up in the Fens. By her mid-teens, she had been sent to Salters, an assessment centre for problem girls in Peterborough.

She met Trevor Harvey at around that time and they eventually set up home in March. Rikki was born on March 4, 1988, when Neave was 19.

Mr Harvey says the Ruth Greig he knew was relatively normal.

``When we were together, she was OK. I wouldn't say normal exactly but she certainly wasn't into drugs and didn't knock Rikki about,'' said Mr Harvey, now 35 and a pipe layer for British Gas. The couple split up in 1991.

She married Dean Neave, now 33, in November 1991, and moved to Redmile Walk on the Welland Estate, Peterborough, in 1992.

Neighbours on the Welland, a bleak and notorious housing estate, remember her as foul-mouthed, violent to Rikki, and addicted to drugs. By her own admission, she had only a couple of friends on the estate.

However, she did have an abiding interest in murder and forensic science. She was even writing a book about a serial killer before her arrest.

Neave handed copies of her writings to social workers. Police seized them after Rikki's death.

One manuscript, the trial jury was told, featured a character called Richard, who talked of being ``shoved aside'' throughout his life. Richard talked of killing a woman after having a bad night's sleep.

``The most awful thing of all was that I never felt an ounce of guilt,'' Richard said. ``The evil came out then. I wish to God I could have controlled it.''

Neave believed she could do a better job of finding her son's killer than police. The court heard that she told police she had a theory that a woman had pushed Rikki's body to the woods in a buggy, because no-one would think twice about a woman pushing a buggy.

She had also told police she had a dream, in which a man kept saying to her: ``A woman is involved, a woman is involved.''

She said her heart had ``gone boom'' between 8pm and 10pm on the Monday of Rikki's disappearance.

Police found books about murderers, including Ian Brady and The Krays, in Neave's house. They also found many crime and murder magazines.

Neave also had an interest in mysticism and the occult - and that too pointed the finger of suspicion at her.

Rikki's body was found naked and laid out in star or pentagram shape - and Mr James Hunt QC, prosecuting, told the trial it was possible that the youngster may have been laid out in some form of sacrificial manner.

Pathologist Nat Cary told the court Rikki's body was laid out so symmetrically that if a mirror had been put along a mid-line you would have seen the same pattern on either side.

The lay-out appeared to be a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's drawing Vitruvian Man - the graphic seen at the start of ITV's World in Action programme - Mr Hunt told the jury.

Police found, in a black suitcase at her home, copies of a magazine called The Unexplained Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time - one of which contained a copy of the drawing.

They also found, on top of Neave's video player, an occult book called Magick in Theory and Practice by eccentric Aleister Crowley - one of his four-part series entitled Magick, about magic, mysticism, and meditation.

Neave's neighbours told the court she had claimed to have knowledge of the occult.

Neighbour Amanda Eaton said: ``Ruth told me she was a high priestess of the occult, she was into black magic.''

Neave told the jury she had an interest in mysticism and the occult and admitted she had used Tarot cards and an ouija board.

She also said she had never been involved in black magic rituals and said the book had nothing to do with Rikki's death.