Christopher Berry-Dee is the UK’s all-time bestselling true crime author. Is he also a violent abuser of women and children?

The British writer is known for his unique ability to get inside the heads of serial killers.

But a Guardian investigation reveals multiple accusations of assault and child sexual abuse.

What is the truth about the man described by his own daughter as ‘absolute evil’? Warning: this article contains descriptions of sexual abuse and violence From the outside, it looked like the sort of happy family home a child might draw.

Red brick, surrounded by rolling countryside, in Curdridge, near Winchester.

Here lived the true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee, with his second wife, Tracey Dee, and their two young daughters, Zoe and Sasha, in the early 1990s.

Inside, it was a house of horrors, full of murder memorabilia.

In a wardrobe were the clothes a nine-year-old girl had been murdered in.

One afternoon, Zoe was playing when she found them.

The now 38-year-old council worker from Romsey says she remembers “putting it all on … going downstairs and everyone being absolutely traumatised”.

Later, another gruesome memento was added to the collection: the Austin Metro that convicted murderer Michael Sams had used to transport a body in 1991.

Bloodied sections of the seatbelts had been cut out for forensic tests.

Berry-Dee was the serial killer man.

He wrote to convicted murderers in jail and befriended them.

They told him everything.