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For 30 years, John Peel wrestled with a tragic and guilty secret. The broadcaster, who died last week, was mourned both for his championing of the musical underdog and his espousal of family values on the Radio 4 show Home Truths.
But, unknown to the legions of fans who enjoyed his homespun tales of life with wife Sheila and his four children, he had been married before. It was a relationship marked by deceit, violence and, ultimately, tragedy.
John Robert Parker Ravenscroft Peel's real name was 26 years old when he met 16-year-old Shirley Anne Milburn in Dallas, Texas. He had a successful local radio show, while she was a lonely, star struck teenager.
When both her parents died within a few months of each other, she turned to Peel for support but instead, her family say, he introduced her to the counterculture and drugs.
They eloped to Oklahoma in 1965 and their marriage lasted four turbulent years before they separated.
While Peel turned his back on the drugs and sex lifestyle, and eventually married former schoolteacher Sheila in 1974, Shirley Anne's life spiralled out of control.
By the time she was found dead in her own vomit in 1987, she'd lost her looks, was hooked on Valium and alcohol, and had been through a series of often violent and abusive relationships from which she had produced three children, all of whom were taken into care.
While Peel was reluctant to discuss Shirley Anne in public, he planned to include her in the autobiography he had been writing and for which he had received a Pounds 1.5 million advance.
Although an unhappy and unpleasant relationship, it was key in driving him to embrace a stable family life.
No one could blame Peel for her death, and he appears to have behaved honourably towards his ex-wife's children, secretly providing for them financially. Yet her family feel he has to take some responsibility for Shirley Anne's tragic life.
Her nephew, Rich Milburn, said: 'Shirley Anne was a vulnerable girl who just wanted to be popular and at the time she met John, he was living in a world where the way to be liked was to do drugs.
'He had this radio show about family values....