A former police sergeant who was forced to resign after falling in love with an armed robber is about to be made mayor of her home town.

Jill Owens was a highly respected officer with a rural Welsh police force when she went in search of romance on an online dating site in the early 2000s.

The two-time divorcee connected with Dean Jenkins – a charming, seemingly self-made businessman from Kent who had his own range of male grooming products.

After a whirlwind romance, Ms Owens was four months pregnant when she was told Jenkins had been arrested as the getaway driver of a robbery gang, who stole £339,000 in raids on building societies.

Jenkins’ crimes in November 2006 ended Ms Owens’ career with Dyfed-Powys Police, which she joined in 1990, and caused her alienation from friends, family and colleagues.

Now 54, the mother-of-three’s ordeal has been made into a six-part podcast series called Stolen Hearts.

Reflecting fifteen years later, she said: ‘I was a police sergeant. I did not think I’d ever start talking with an armed robber. What are the chances of that?

‘When it happened it was like a bomb went off, destroying everything I’d ever known.

‘I lost my two daughters for a number of years, my parents, I no longer speak to my brother. I was very much on my own.’

‘Talking about it still brings tears to my eyes because I will never be able to fully shake the devastation it caused to my life,’ she added.

Ms Owens says she was totally unaware of Jenkins’ double life, but was tainted by the belief that people thought she had known.

She said: ‘Everything seemed to add up to what he said he was, a successful businessman.’

Detectives interviewed her about her knowledge of Jenkins’ crimes and she was put under investigation by professional standards.

She said: ‘It was a huge shock, I was 16 weeks pregnant, and my whole life had been turned upside down. There was no consideration at all for that.

‘Every time I was interviewed by Dyfed-Powys it would be by men, often two or three senior officers at the same time. It was like a gang approach, and I was vulnerable.

‘They told me I should have known because the names of two of his shower gels were Beat the Filth and It’s a Stick Up. I mean I just thought it was clever marketing.’

In late 2008 she was ‘required to resign’. Ms Owens said she visited Jenkins in prison but never got the answers she wanted from him.

Alongside writing and running her own property management company, she is deputy mayor of Haverfordwest and is due to become mayor in April.

She said: ‘It’s been a long road to recovery, but I don’t blame myself any more.

‘The police said I was lacking in honesty and integrity – and that really cut deep because it’s not true at all.

‘Now I’m going to be mayor of the town and that feels like a small victory.’

She now lives with her son Frankie and her husband Rod, who she met in 2012 on the day Wales won the rugby Six Nations Grand Slam.

‘I could have turned around and said that’s it, I’m not getting involved with men ever again. I don’t trust them. But that’s not me,’ she said.

‘There are nice men, women, whatever gender, out there looking for love and it’s so easy to listen to bad stories as opposed to the positive and the good ones.’

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