‘I don’t know how I live with what she’s done’

On Boxing Day last year Steven Ford’s estranged wife drowned their twins in a bathtub. Now, in the wake of a failed bid to appeal her jail sentence and delays to the inquest into his children’s deaths, he tells how he believes their killer has literally g

Abeaming smile appears on Jake Ford’s face as he tears the wrapping paper off a new toy dinosaur on Christmas Day.

His twin sister, Chloe, is asleep in a bouncer next to the tree, tired out by the festivities and the previous night of excitement.

Like any proud parent, dad Steven Ford captures the treasured moments, not knowing that just a day later his beautiful babies would be dead, taken from him at the hands of the person they trusted most - their own mother.

Cruel Samantha Ford - in what has been described as a twisted act of vengeance - drowned the 23-month-old twins in the bath at her Margate home on Boxing Day.

After dressing them and placing their bodies in their cots, she ploughed her car into the back of a lorry on the A299 Thanet Way in a failed attempt to kill herself.

Just hours later, at 8.30am on December 27, her estranged husband Steven - excited to get his children back - received a knock on his door from police officers to deliver the devastating news.

He had only allowed Ford to have the twins, despite her fragile mental state, because he believed a mother should see her children over the festive period.

But he would never see them again.

It’s been nine months since the tragedy, but he says it feels like two weeks.

“I don’t know how I live with it,” he admits.

“How I feel changes every day. Trying to come to terms with something like this - there’s not a book, there’s not any advice, there’s nothing that anyone can say or do that will make me feel any better.

“It’s me that’s got to make this right, it’s me that’s got to deal with this, and me that’s got to get through it.”

When the twins were born after four attempts at IVF, Steven and his wife were living in Qatar, where he was club captain at Doha Golf Club and managing director of an infrastructure support company.

Against Ford’s wishes, they moved back to the UK in February last year and bought a house in Charing.

Their marriage began to crumble as Ford became obsessed with losing her “perfect life” in Qatar, and in November she kicked her husband out, before days later demanding he returned.

After he refused, she became fixated on trying to win him back, chillingly warning him in one message: “If this continues it’s going to lead down a horrible path.”

Ford even Googled how to drown someone in the weeks before she killed the twins.

But she escaped a double murder conviction after the Crown Prosecution Service accepted her guilty pleas to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

She was jailed for 10 years, but is currently in a psychiatric hospital until she is deemed fit enough to be moved to a prison.

Steven, who is in the process of divorcing Ford after being married for 10 years, says he feels like she has got away with murder.

The 36-year-old is now preparing to push for a change in the law.

“Even when the hard facts point to premeditated murder, the laws surrounding diminished responsibility have prevented justice from being served,” he says.

“It’s too broad, it’s too vague - this needs to change.”

Steven says he still struggles to comprehend what Ford did to his children, and every day is haunted thinking about the moments before they died and what happened in the bathtub.

“I’ve known her better than anyone on this planet has ever known her, but I didn’t see this coming,” he says.

“She was a very practical mother, everything was regimented, there wasn’t much emotion - that’s what I brought.

‘Trying to come to terms with something like this - there’s not a book, there’s not any advice, there’s nothing that anyone can say or do that will make me feel any better’