LESLIE Andrew Stubbs was born and grew up in the Moorlands hilltop village of Ipstones.

His parents Roy and Pat were community stalwarts and ran a village store.

Many of his relatives still live in the village, and are highly respected.

He attended St Leonard's First School in Ipstones and Leek High School, where he was a member of the school's cricket and football teams.

Friends said he had a normal family upbringing with his younger sister Karen and, although, he was sent to a detention centre as a teenager he managed to straighten himself out.

They said there was nothing in his background to suggest that, three decades later, he would be arrested on a charge of murder.

Stubbs held a shopfloor job at JCB World Headquarters at Rocester from 1985 until 2007.

According to friends, he met his downfall when he started drinking heavily both in pubs and on the streets.

Neighbours regarded him as a drunken nuisance.

He had boasted to drinking pals that he followed Mrs Wilkes because she bore an uncanny resemblance to a former girlfriend.

His murder charge arrest had a devastating effect on his family. His father, died four months after Stubbs's arrest.

Stubbs himself was on 'suicide watch' while on remand.

Last night, Moorlands MP Karen Bradley said: "It is important in cases like this, which happen in prison, to establish whether anything went wrong, and if something went wrong, for steps to be put in place so it does not happen again.

"It is important for the sake of both families involved in this case who have both lost loved ones."