She's now set up a much-needed family support group in Sheffield. She wants to remain anonymous to allow the healing process to continue but spoke to Jane Cartledge.

"Where can I begin? Only to say in a million years I would never have believed that my only son would end up in prison on a life sentence and that I would become a mother of a lifer."

One ordinary morning two plain-clothes police officers came to my house and woke me. I was confused as to why they were visiting me, what had I done?

They explained that they were looking for my son who had been involved in a serious incident. I was shocked but somehow felt this had nothing to do with him.

They wanted to know the last time I had spoken to him, when had I seen him, etc?

I hadn't spoken to him for a few days but I knew he was fine. He had recently left home and was setting up home in his new flat.

They left making sure I understood to contact them if he got in touch and they left with a recent photo for identification. I began to ring around family and friends to let them know what had happened. I tried to ring his phone. There was no reply.

I was getting worried when days passed and I still had no word from him. I was convinced the police were looking for the wrong person.

A few days later the police came back and said that because he was missing they would have to put his photo in the media. I can't describe how upset and distraught I felt when the next day my beautiful son appeared on the local news 'Missing – wanted in connection with a murder'.

The calls to my house poured in and we gathered as a family and tried to shut out the world.

Days passed. I couldn't understand why he had not been in contact with me of all people, his mum. We had always been close.

I had a call from a police station in Leeds saying that he had been found.

I was so relieved, so happy but little did I know what was yet to come.

The next day I rushed to see my son. I bought him food but we were not allowed to see him. We all wrote a note to him telling him we loved and supported him. Eventually the next day we got to see him behind a glass screen at the police station.

It was so good to see him although he was under a great deal of stress.

I gathered myself up and went to court to hear my son being charged. I tried to stay strong for him and when they remanded him in custody to prison I called out, 'I'll see you soon'.

I just wanted him to know that we would visit him no matter where he was.

The first time I went to prison to visit him it was a total shock. I had never visited prison in my life and knowing my son was inside was heart breaking,

All I could see on the outside of the prison were tall sandstone perimeter walls with razor wire on the top.

We went to the visitors' centre to be processed. It was grubby and crowded and the prison officers looked austere.

It all felt alien. It felt like we had done something wrong because we had to be fingerprinted, photographed and searched. Sniffer dogs patrolled. We walked though a maze of locked gates and corridors. Eventually I got to see my son in a large visitors' hall. He was at a small table wearing prison uniform.

I couldn't understand what my young trendy son was doing in these strange ugly clothes.
It was so good to hold him after so long and have him close to me.

We talked quickly, we didn't have much time. He had only been in prison a few days and was finding it such a shock to his system. He was so young and I knew it would be hard for him. He quickly had to adapt to prison life – he had to survive. We held him tight and said we would be back.

I felt like I had let him down because I said I would get him out of prison but I couldn't. We knew from that moment on that life would never be the same."


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