Two days before her murder, on her 65th birthday, Karen Carter posed for what is believed to be her last ever photograph while out for lunch with friends.
Smiling at the camera and cuddling her new puppy, Haku, the mother-of-four was on the brink of a new life having decided to divorce her South African husband and set up home permanently in this charming corner of south-west France.
As we now know, the Gallic idyll she longed for was tragically never to be.
Karen was stabbed to death on April 29 in a frenzied attack outside the 250-year-old holiday property she owned with her estranged husband.
The former teacher had just arrived home from a wine-tasting event at the hilltop farmhouse of a ‘charming’ Frenchman to whom she had grown close as she negotiated her divorce.
