They were valorous stories, full of bravado and death, meant to make a lady swoon. And when he turned up to take her to breakfast in his white navy uniform, his chest bedecked with three tiers of medals, it was more than Katherine Bradbury could bear. “I went weak at the knees the first time I saw him,” she says.

Captain Roger Edwards, 45, was a naval officer with limpid brown eyes, a neatly trimmed moustache and a brazen self-confidence that could soften the most sceptical of souls. Katherine, 29, was a young, attractive blonde with a cheerful disposition, working as a cardiac nurse at St Anthony’s Catholic hospital in Florida. “All the girls on my unit thought he was quite the catch,” she remembers. “I was the only one who was single, so they were always trying to hook me up with someone. He was perfect.”