Salon killer's friendship with Carr

Beauty salon killer Rena Salmon today spoke for the first time about how she murdered her best friend - and about her prison friendship with Maxine Carr.

Salmon was jailed for life at the Old Bailey last May after she walked into Lorna Stewart's beauty salon in Chiswick and blasted her twice with a shotgun. But today she claimed she never meant to kill Ms Stewart who was having an affair with Salmon's husband Paul - and even said she missed her friendship.

In an interview with a women's campaigner in the Guardian Salmon said: "She was my best friend, and I miss her," she said. "Now, Lorna and I have a strange bond. We both loved Paul, and it has cost us our lives."

Salmon, 44 - a skilled marksman from her time in the Army - and her husband Paul used to be friends with Lorna Stewart and her husband Keith Rodrigues, who also lived in Great Shefford in Berkshire, where their children attended the same school.

By the time of the murder Paul Salmon and Lorna Stewart had been having an affair for a year. The Salmons were getting divorced and Paul had set up home with Lorna, who - according to Rena Salmon - taunted her by saying that they were trying for a baby.

On the morning of 10 September 2002 Salmon walked into her rival's office in Chiswick and shot her in the heart.

In the interview with Julie Bindel, founder of the pressure group Justice For Women, Salmon claims she went to the salon to kill herself in front of Stewart. "If I killed myself in a public way, the world would know what Lorna did to us all, and the bad publicity would wreck her business: the downside being I would miss my kids growing up."

Salmon - who pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility - said she deserved to be punished for what she did, but still maintained it was not murder. "The real tragedy of all this is the children, both Lorna's and mine. I should have been the one to die, not her."

The interview took place in the women's prison Bullwood Hall in Essex, where Salmon befriended Maxine Carr. Even nine months after her conviction she was still struggling to cope with her imprisonment. She

added: "I'm the woman the papers say is evil at the moment, although Max [ Maxine Carr] took the crown for a while."

She said that being a woman played against her in court. She said: "People are shocked when a woman commits a crime like mine. If I had killed Paul, maybe it would make more sense to them, in a horrible way, but I killed a woman, and that's anathema."

She also resented how she was portrayed in the media. "The press painted me as an avenging demon. They printed half-truths and lies."

During her marriage she often suspected her husband was having affairs. On Friday nights he would come home from drinking sessions and demand sex, but Salmon said he was unhygienic and would refuse. "He would say, 'Sod you, I'll get it from someone else.'"

At one point she was so depressed that her children had to implore her not to kill herself: instead she ended up making a suicide pact with them. "I know it's so terrible, so mad, to plan with your kids to take them to heaven with you, but I was off my head, I did not know what I was thinking of."