For 31 years, the heartbroken mum of murdered schoolgirl Nikki Allan never gave up her quest for justice.
Sharon Henderson, 56, turned detective in her desperate search for the seven-year-old's killer, begging the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police for help.
She told how the terrible mistakes made in the original 1992 investigation left Nikki's killer David Boyd at large for more than 25 years.
Today, he has been found guilty of little Nikki's murder.
As he faces a whole life term for the senseless, brutal murder of a defenceless little girl, her mum vividly recalled the last time she saw Nikki, "just 10 steps" from home.
They had been to visit Nikki's granddad, Sharon's dad, in Wear Garth, Sunderland, on the evening of October 7, 1992.
She would never see her daughter alive again. Even in her darkest hours, Sharon never gave up on her fight for justice. In 2017, she met then Chief Constable of Northumbria Steve Ashman, asking him to reopen the inquiry. He gave the go ahead for a wide ranging cold case review. It identified 1,221 profiles of potential suspects.
DNA was taken from a total of 839 men after a 2015 scientific breakthrough produced a partial DNA match of the killer on Nikki's clothing. In a groundbreaking probe, 641 DNA samples were taken from men in Sunderland, the rest across the UK.
There was only one match. The killer: David Boyd.
He had left Nikki's body, with 37 stab wounds, in a dark basement four minutes walk away from her home after a merciless attack. He got away with murder - using a series of different names to evade justice.
Lisa Theaker, star of the TV series 'Hunted' and the officer leading the cold case review, was out shopping near his Stockton-on-Tees home when she saw the No 1 suspect in a 'I am Unstoppable' T-shirt.
Boyd, whose girlfriend used to babysit Nikki, had used his familiarity with her family to trick her into going with him. In poignant, flickering CCTV images, Nikki was seen 'skipping' behind him as she followed him to her death.
The cold case review found a DNA link to Boyd. He finally faced justice 31 years after the murder. Bodycam footage taken on April 17, 2018, the day of his arrest, showed him asking: "What evidence have you got?" as he was being arrested on suspicion of Nikki's murder. Sharon said that she had asked officers to search for the partner of Caroline Branton - Boyd's former girlfriend - after George Heron was cleared of Nikki's murder in 1993.
She told the Mirror: "I had a list of the addresses and names of people who were living in Wear Garth. There was a mark next to Caroline's address. Her boyfriend was seen as a weirdo.
"My brother called him the beast. I told the police about my suspicions. I did not have his name and it took a long time to get it."
Boyd's former girlfriend Caroline texted Sharon before the cold case review. It said that the police should 'have a look' at Boyd, known to her as David Smith.
Sharon said: "I realise now that I may have got some of the timings wrong on the night that Nikki disappeared. But the police should have followed up what I told them."
Boyd kept on changing his name. But that is no excuse. He gave a statement to them in the investigation into Heron, and he was in the warehouse just days before the murder took place.
"The local kids told the police that and their statements were not followed up. They should have looked into it sooner."
Boyd was nicknamed 'Dave the Beast' back in the 1990s when he would watch young children playing in the Garth, a now demolished tower block where Nikki lived with her mum.
In 1993, Boyd's neighbour George Heron, who was 24 at the time, stood trial for Nikki's murder, but was cleared by a jury at Leeds Crown Court.
Sharon believes the investigation lost impetus as detectives said they were 'not looking for anyone else' for her daughter's murder. "I have always said, the press, police and public, if you are a poor family, you are automatically judged, the rumours start and the public read them," she said.
"I just decided that I had to stand up for myself. Three years after she died, with no liaison officer, I felt like she had been forgotten, and she was so young, that just did not feel right.
"After the Heron case, I started to go door to door on the Garth where we lived, to check the doors of houses nearby, I knocked on friends of Nikki, but I went out and asked myself.
"I had a map on the wall with all the doors on there, a newspaper clipping with different parts of the Garth. Every single person was under suspicion, so I went to try and rule them all in or out.
"Boyd was only three doors down from my dad, I kept saying to CID 'why did you not go door to door?' At the time, they did not have a clue who Boyd was. We used to call him creepy, our Alan, my brother, used to call him 'Dave the Beast'."
For Sharon, there have been so many false hopes; shortly after the murder, she twice tried to take her life, before she faced the ordeal of seeing George Heron cleared.
There was another cold case review in 2013; a Crimewatch appeal on the 21st anniversary of the murder; the arrest of Steven Grieveson, the serial killer of four teenage boys in Sunderland from 1993 to 1994. Crucial new scientific evidence emerged after her 2016 meeting with Mr Ashman.
A year later, there was a partial DNA match found on Nikki's clothing. Police took DNA samples from 839 men identified as having connections to Nikki, the Wear Garth flat block, Old Exchange building and general Hendon area. The conviction means Sharon can at last find some kind of peace.
She still has Nikki's Easter cup, her favourite little red and yellow dress and some treasured family photos. Sharon has spent the intervening years not only looking for justice for her daughter, but also campaigning for the families of murdered children. She visited the family of Moors Murder victim Lesley-Anne Downing, and recalled sitting in the living room of her home.
She recalled 'stepping back in time' with so many memories of the 10-year-old girl killed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. "I was thinking 'is this going to be me in a few years' time?'
"I did a lot of work with the Downings," said Sharon.
"I kept Nikki's easter dress, I got the same ones for her and her sister Stacey, and purple coats, from Adams.
"I still have the numbness which is hard to explain; I see her things daily, they are in the wardrobe with my clothes, and if it was gone, I would be in a right state, the same with her Easter Cup.
"I used to smell her things before just to remember her, the dress has not been washed even though she only wore it once.
"She wore it the last Easter before she died; she loved getting dressed up, she would have a bonnet and the little bags with the little eggs in, she loved Easter.
"At Christmas, on birthdays, family occasions, it is so hard. I have grandchildren now so I promised them that I would try, I cannot cope with Christmas, it is nonexistent to me."
She has four grandchildren by her surviving daughters, Niomi Waldron, 33, Zara Waldron, 34, and Stacey Allan, 39. Though she will 'try' to rebuild her life for them, she has endured a living nightmare for 30 years, haunted by her little girl's final hours.
