A mum whose two young sons were murdered by their father says there were red flags right from the beginning of their relationship.
Sanjeev Chada - who is now in jail - strangled his boys, Eoghan, ten and five-year-old Ruairi in Ireland in 2013.
The children's mother, and his then wife, Kathleen Chada, says her husband had wanted Eoghan aborted and didn't speak to her for a week when she fell pregnant with Ruairi.
"There were signs from the very beginning of the relationship," she said.
Kathleen, 51, told Irish Sunday Mirror : "I don’t doubt his feelings for the boys when they were born, but an unplanned pregnancy did overwhelm him.
“When I got pregnant with Eoghan... he wanted me to consider a termination. Four years later I got pregnant with Ruairi and he didn’t talk to me for almost a week.
“When I look back on it now it tells me a little of his personality that I didn’t necessarily see at the time.
“I’ve often described that I wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse, but I know domestic violence intimately, albeit that it all happened over one 24-hour period.
“There was no physical abuse, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some manipulation and control and narcissistic behaviour because there was, and I see it now.”
Kathleen who divorced Chada while he was in jail, advises people to “question everything” if a relationship feels wrong on a Virgin Media documentary about domestic violence, Until Death, which airs tomorrow at 9pm.
She revealed how her husband took the boys from their County Carlow home on the pretext of bringing them bowling then drove to County Mayo and killed them.
She said: “Eoghan had an awful lot of physical damage, so he obviously fought very, very hard. I can only hope that it happened quickly.
“By his own words he then took Ruairi on his knee to comfort him and proceeded to strangle him.”
And the grieving mum recalled her shock when she found an email sent 18 months earlier that showed Sanjeev had planned to kill her as well.
She said: “I lived with him, I lay next to him in bed at night, I loved him – and all the while these thoughts are in his mind that he wants to take our lives.
“I did ask the question after he killed Eoghan and Ruairi as to why he didn’t take me as well, and he said it was because I would have fought him, so he took the weakest.
“The way he did it was cowardly, but that he actually did it in the first place was evil.”
Earlier this year Kathleen made the difficult decision to leave the Co Carlow home she shared with her husband and boys and move to an apartment in Dublin.
She revealed: “It was hard but it was the right decision, I knew it was the right thing.
“I wasn’t leaving them behind me, the boys came with me in a way.
“Having to go through all their things and make a decision what to keep and what went, that was tough.
“But it was something that had to happen and I didn’t feel disloyal to them in any way.”
She counts a bedspread made by a friend using crests from her sports-mad boys’ GAA jerseys as her most treasured possession.
Kathleen said: “The significance of this is huge for me because it’s everything that the boys loved.
“For me having this and their teddy bears... that is all I ever want.
“I can go anywhere in the world basically and I know when I lie under this that I’m wrapping the boys around me.”
She added: “I think for any parent that loses a child or children it’s okay to have a happy Christmas, it’s never the same, but they are always with you.
“They’re still five and ten in my head, and they’ll always be five and 10, but there is also the part of me that goes 14 and 19, and what would they be like.
“I will never and don’t ever want to get over the loss of the boys or move on from it.
“But I do need to keep moving forward.”
