Theirs is a friendship born out of tragedy but the bond between Jenny Dees and Laura Sugden is unbreakable.
For they both carry the pain of almost unimaginable loss.
Laura’s boyfriend Shane Gilmer died after being attacked by a crossbow maniac who also shot her in the head while five months pregnant. She was lucky to survive.
Jenny’s six-year-old son Stanley Metcalf was shot in the stomach by his great-grandfather who has never apologised for the youngster’s death.
But today the two women tell how they are helping each other through their sorrow – and how new baby daughters are helping them to heal.
After her son’s death Jenny longed to have a baby and the arrival of Tilly, now 11 months, has not only given her and partner Andy Metcalf hope but the future, but also helped Stanley’s twin sister Elsie, nine, come to terms with her sense of emptiness.
Jenny says: “When I went into labour I took Stanley’s bear to hospital which had his ashes in it so it felt like he was looking over me the whole time.
“As soon as Tilly arrived she came up onto my chest and turned her face towards me. It was a beautiful moment, like Stanley was there and watching over us.
“I was so sad because Stanley was gone but overjoyed that Tilly had been born. I turned to the bear and said ‘thank you, Stanley’”
For Laura, it was the birth of Shane’s daughter Ella, now two, that gave her the courage to carry on too.
Jenny and Laura, who live just nine miles apart, are now pouring their shared anguish into a crusade to make it illegal to own dangerous weapons without a licence.
Jenny’s football-mad son Stanley died in July 2018 after the curious youngster asked her grandfather Albert Grannon to show him a modified air rifle, which was unlicensed.
After the gun went off, fatally injured Stanley’s final words were: “Why have you shot me, grandad?”
The pellet left a hole the size of a 5p in his abdomen, but he suffered catastrophic internal bleeding.
Six months earlier, Laura, 30, was shot in the head by deranged neighbour Anthony Lawrence.
She watched Shane’s life slip away in front of her after a bolt embedded in his spine.
The women met after Jenny heard about Laura’s story on a regional TV news report following our exclusive interview with her last month.
Jenny, 43, of Hull, says: “I just felt I had to reach out.”
The pair want strict regulations to stop people owning weapons without a licence or checks on mental health.
In the UK crossbows can easily be bought online for around £150, while currently most air rifles do not require owners to hold any certification.
“We don’t want anyone to ever go through what we have,” says Jenny.
“Laura and I both know what it’s like to feel that pain of losing someone in such a horrible way and how it always stays with you. It’s there first thing in the morning and last thing at night.”
At a park near Laura’s home the two women talk of how much they have in common; how those first few months of loss “made it hard to do the simplest of things”, how they both suffer from anxiety and post-traumatic stress and are tormented by questions that may not be answered.
While they have much to share, it’s clear to see they are at different stages of grieving.
Laura is still angry that the love of her life was taken away in such a random act of brutality, while Jenny appears quieter, almost hollowed out by grief.
Laura is still scarred from the night she found Lawrence hiding in the bedroom of her home in Southburn, near Driffield, Yorks, that it took her two years for her to live alone with Ella and daughter Isabelle, now nine. Even now she has removed every door from her upstairs rooms.
“I know nothing like that is ever likely to happen again but I just need to be able to see inside every room from the top of the stairs. It helps me cope,” she explains.
“After Shane died I lived with family for months and months because I was too scared to live alone. I would have happily lived with them forever but I knew I had to get my own place eventually.”
Both tried counselling in the weeks after the killings but neither were able to cope.
Only now is Jenny getting help for the enormity of losing Stanley, made all the more difficult by the fact it was her own grandfather’s fault.
Police said retired ship worker Grannon, known as Sam, “showed no real remorse” for shooting the youngster, initially refusing to accept responsibility by insisting he had been wounded by a ricochet.
Ballistics tests later proved the pellet had been a direct hit.
Grannon, 79, was jailed three years after pleading guilty to manslaughter by gross negligence and the unauthorised possession of a gun in July 2019. He was released in January.
Jenny says: “I can’t believe he hasn’t apologised or shown any remorse after all this time.
“For the first few weeks I defended him, then I’d hear he was in the pub with his mates and I started to get angry.
"I’d know him all my life and would say I was his favourite granddaughter, yet he’d killed my son and didn’t have a word to say about it. Nothing.”
Laura’s twisted neighbour Lawrence, 55, killed himself in the days after the attack so there has been no court case and no answers as to why he went on his rampage.
Investigators believed he had spent a year listening to the couple through the walls of their semi-detached homes before breaking in through the loft and lying in wait for them.
Laura is still tortured by her belief that Shane, 30, would have survived had ambulance staff not been delayed getting into their home while waiting for clearance from firearms officers.
She says: “Shane died because he bled out. He was strong and stayed alive for almost three hours when he was shot. I keep asking myself what would have happened if he’d have reached hospital earlier.”
An inquest ruled the delays were sadly “inevitable”. A trauma specialist at the hearing also called his injuries “devastating”.
Both women say they will never get over their trauma, but they also agree the birth of their babies has helped them rebuild their lives slowly.
Laura confesses: “I didn’t know if I’d be able to cope with bringing up Ella without Shane but she’s a part of him I still have. I look at her and she’s so like her daddy.”
While Laura worried about bringing up her daughter alone, Jenny said despite having the support of Andy, he was “more reserved” about the idea of having another child because “he worried I wouldn’t be able to cope with any more loss if the IVF didn’t work out”.
Jenny explains: “In the end we decided to have just one round of IVF and see if it was meant to be and it was.
“Tilly isn’t a replacement for Stanley. I don’t want to replace him, but of course strange things go through your mind during pregnancy like ‘will the baby be Stanley reincarnated’.
“In some ways it’s easier Tilly is a girl because I don’t make any comparisons between her and Stanley. We feel so lucky to have her.”
And, as their daughters grow up, both women are determined that Shane and Stanley’s legacy will live on through a change in the law.
“What happened was so horrific, just indescribable really,” Jenny says. “But we are both determined to get the laws changed to protect others. Both our cases prove that new rules around weapons are needed and we are both determined to get there.”
