'My fiance Christopher Lane was exposed as a paedophile'

Jessica Lewis' world fell apart at the moment a man knocked at her door and told her her fiance had been contacting young girls for sex.

The man, who said he was a paedophile hunter, filmed her as he exposed the lie that Christopher Lane, the father of her child, had been living.

It was one week before her 21st birthday. She thought she had everything to look forward to.

But as the man on the doorstep gave her the details of the sexually explicit messages 24-year-old Lane had sent to what he thought were 13 and 14-year-old schoolgirls, she begged him to tell her it was a joke.

It was no joke. Lane had been sending text messages and intimate photographs in an attempt to groom and meet young girls.

But instead of the teenage girls he thought he was communicating with, he was in fact sending messages to a self-styled paedophile hunter group who were waiting in online chat rooms to catch predators.

Jessica, who lived with Lane and their daughter in his parents' house, stood in shock on the doorstep alongside Lane's father Michael as the so-called paedophile hunter presented them with the evidence.

They had no idea what Lane had been doing or that the encounter would be broadcast online.

The shocking footage saw Jessica break down, sobbing, as the full sordid details of his crimes emerged.

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"It felt like a nightmare," she told BBC Wales' Week In Week Out programme.

"Every page I looked through I was getting sicker by the minute, my stomach was turning and the fact he was he was doing it while being with me hurts even more like - he's done it behind my back."

Lane had arranged to meet what he thought was a 14-year-old girl at a bus station. But when she did not turn up - because she was a decoy set up by the so-called paedophile hunters - he went back home.

Unbeknown to his parents and Jessica, he went straight back online looking for another victim.

He thought he had one, a 13-year-old, but that too was a decoy.

When he was confronted on the doorstep, he initially denied any wrongdoing, but by the time the police arrived to arrest him, he had confessed.

'Kill myself'

Jessica said her world had fallen apart, not only because she discovered her fiance was a paedophile, but because of the way he was exposed - in a video which featured both her and Lane's father.

Lane's disabled mother, who has cancer, was in bed when Jessica was confronted, so she had to try and explain to her what was happening.

"I get what paedophile hunters do, but there are families who have to deal with the aftermath," she said.

"It could put his mother in early grave and that's just not right. I wanted to kill myself because of it.

"If I didn't have my daughter, I wouldn't have anything to live for because of what he's done to me - he's really destroyed my life right now."

Jessica immediately broke off her engagement to Lane and moved out of the house the same day.

Consequences

When the confrontation with Lane was broadcast, stones were thrown at his parents' house and they were forced move to a secret location for their safety.

Their home was daubed with graffiti and now stands boarded up and empty.

Jessica, who has left the area, has struggled with how to tell family and friends that the man she loved wanted to have sex with children.

And she feels anger towards Lane about how she will explain to their daughter about his crimes.

"The long term consequences that he's not going to deal with is the fact that when our daughter gets older and she finds out about this," she said.

"I will have to deal with all the questions she's going to give me, like 'why did my daddy do this? Why has my daddy not been around?'

"He didn't love her enough to be able to stop the urges that he had to go talk to underage children who are just as vulnerable as my baby girl is."

At Cardiff Crown Court, Lane admitted online grooming and attempting to meet a child and was jailed for two years and eight months and will be placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years.

As Jessica begins rebuilding her life with her daughter, she has a clear warning to predators like her ex-fiance.

"You are going to wreck your family's life, you are going to wreck everything, you're going to lose everything and there is no point in it, there really isn't."

• Week In Week Out, BBC One Wales, Wednesday at 22:40 BST. It will also be available on the iPlayer.