So high she died

In the squalid and dangerous world that Teresa Tuppen inhabited, only one thing mattered - the next fix. Drugs - heroin, cocaine, crack, even Valium - were the defining elements of her life and, indeed, her appalling death.

Her body was found on the back seat of a black BMW being driven through the streets of London as her friend Jane Shea, the former wife of legendary footballer Tony Adams, sat in the front. It seemed astonishing that the once-dazzling Shea, the Posh Spice of her generation and a worthy prototype for Footballers' Wives, could have been involved in such a macabre scene.

But was it so surprising? Not according to Keith Tuppen, 46, Teresa's husband. In an exclusive interview with the Evening Standard he reveals, for the first time, the sordid background that led to his wife's death last April.

His wife died alone in the back of the car after being left there by Shea and her boyfriend, Jason Gaubert, to sleep as they went into Shea's £500,000 apartment in Putney and took some drugs, before returning to the car. When the police stopped them later, they said they were driving her home.

"She was unconscious in the car for hours," says Tuppen. "Their excuse was, they thought she was sleeping. If they had realised she wasn't, and they had done something, Teresa might still be alive." This week an inquest into the 44-year-old's death recorded a verdict of death due to a mixed drug intoxication.

Her husband says Teresa met Jane Shea, 38, two years ago at a drug dealer's house in Fulham. "If you're a user and you regularly go to all the dealers' houses," says Tuppen, "you'll end up bumping into Shea eventually,"

The two women hadn't become friends exactly, but saw each other regularly; their whole relationship, he claims, involved drugs. Shea and Gaubert had been round to the Tuppens' flat in a terrace house in Fulham several times.

Keith Tuppen took an instant dislike to Gaubert but Jane Shea, he says, wasn't as bad as some of the addicts he came across.

"I thought there was something decent about her. That scum [Gaubert] came round to my house three days after my wife died - he didn't even mention Teresa. I got a friend to answer the door; if I'd have seen him, well, I don't know what I would have done."

According to Gaubert, he had gone with Shea to a London park to buy drugs. He claims Teresa Tuppen was there with a woman friend who sold them Valium. Teresa had "already taken so much of it, she couldn't speak or walk" said Gaubert yesterday. "The other woman was begging us to help her and, because we had a car, to give her a lift home, but we had to go back to Jane's house to collect some money. While Teresa was snoring in the back of the car, we went in to take some drugs. The time just flew past."

When they came out, believing Teresa Tuppen was still asleep, Gaubert claims, they drove her home; during that journey, they were stopped by the police. Shea was arrested on suspicion of murder but released without charge after tests showed Teresa had died of an overdose; toxicology reports confirmed she had taken a mixture of six drugs, including cocaine and methadone.

Shea is now at a drugs rehabilitation centre in South Africa, and it is more than likely that her ex-husband, former Arsenal and England defender Tony Adams, will pick up the bill. Even though they have been divorced for seven years, Adams, who has beaten his own alcohol addiction, is patient with his former wife.

When they were married, Shea enjoyed all the luxuries of a footballer's wife - - a large house in Essex, designer clothes, exotic holidays and plenty of money to lavish on their three children. But their relationship was volatile, hardly surprising given that he was an alcoholic and she was a drug addict.

Shea, who grew up in the East End, has had links to the criminal underworld since birth. Her aunt, Frances, married Reggie Kray, but she left him three months after their wedding and moved into the Shea family home in Bethnal Green.

When Shea was a toddler, her aunt, who was addicted to amphetamines, committed suicide. After her death, the family moved to Muswell Hill. As a teenager, Shea was very attractive and rebellious. When she was 17, a boyfriend introduced her to heroin but when they split up, she managed to get herself off it.

But when she got a job as a barmaid at Ra Ra's nightclub in Islington, she started dabbling with cocaine. It was there she met Tony Adams in 1991. He was already a football star whose regular drinking binges took him there, and they started dating.

They married in July 1992 at a grand country house. But the couple were soon both battling their own addictions. Less than four years after the wedding, Shea checked into a rehabilitation clinic, but while she appeared to have overcome her addiction, Adams's drinking was spiralling out of control. They divorced in 1997.

Shea subsequently bought a £500,000 five-bedroom apartment in a luxury block in Putney and she took their three children to live there. Neighbours have told of "strange visitors" - who would come throughout the night, often just jumping in through broken windows.

The once-beautiful Shea was now gaunt and drawn. Eighteen months ago, Adams arrived one evening and packed the children into the car and took them away. They now live with him and his new partner, Poppy Teacher, an Oxford graduate and great-great-granddaughter of the founder of the whisky dynasty, with whom he has a baby son.

Shea had met Gaubert eight years ago at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, but their relationship grew two years ago. Shea's latest decline is thought to have been triggered by the death of her mother two years ago, who always supported her daughter.

"We met each other waiting for a dealer and stayed with each other until all this happened," said Gaubert yesterday. "It was a drug-induced relationship, she was very generous, caring and considerate but very sick due to the addiction. I am not sure if we are still together, I haven't really spoken to her since she left for South Africa."

Both knew Teresa and her husband, who have been drug addicts for 20 years. Despite attempts to come off drugs six times, when Teresa died she was addicted to crack cocaine. Her husband says she never dealt drugs.

"She was so timid, she couldn't have done it. Nobody had a bad word to say about her. She was extremely quiet, very loyal and would have done anything for anyone. She was so beautiful, I never thought someone like her would be interested in me. Everyone said how lovely she was."

His voice breaks and he looks as though he is about to cry but stops himself and apologises. "I'd been with her for 29 years, I don't know being an adult without her. I just don't know what I'm going to do. I wish I'd had another 29 years with her and another 29 after that."

Keith and Teresa met as teenagers in their home town, Coventry; she was 15, he was 17. On their first date, at a nightclub in the city, Tuppen says it was as if they were the only two people there.

"We were together all night, I don't think I even took my eyes off her for one minute," he says. Keith, whose father was a manager at a water company and mother a housewife, was smitten.

Teresa, then still at secondary school, left as soon as she could and the two of them spent several years travelling around Europe, working on farms in the south of France and picking grapes in Spain. When she was 18, her mother died, and a year later, her father, who worked in a car factory, also passed away but, by then, her whole life revolved around Tuppen; the couple were inseparable.

On their return to the UK, they moved to London and Keith Tuppen worked as an electrician for a while. Both smoked cannabis and dabbled with amphetamines, but neither tried heavier drugs until they were in their mid-twenties.

The crowd they were hanging around with introduced them to heroin. "We used to all smoke dope together," says Tuppen. "One day I came back and my friends were all out of their faces, but I could see they hadn't been smoking cannabis. They'd been on heroin."

At first, they began to smoke heroin occasionally. Keith Tuppen says they weren't addicted to it until they had been using it for three years. Eventually-they both started taking crack, a habit they financed with their benefit money (Keith insists he has never stolen to get money for drugs).

Teresa was 29 when she found out she was pregnant. "She went to the doctor and started coming off drugs," says her husband. "She went into rehab for two weeks because they thought I might be enticing her to use drugs. But when we were having a baby? No way. She was off them completely by the time she was four months gone and I was off a month later." Keith and Teresa married at Fulham register office the week before their daughter, Lucy, was born.

The Tuppens managed to stay clean for 18 months but Teresa, suffering post-natal depression, started taking small amounts of heroin. Before long, they were both hooked again.

They tried to come off drugs and were in and out of rehabilitation clinics several times. When Lucy was three, Princess Diana visited one of the clinics and the family met her.

"We'd done really well, so they wanted us to meet Diana. She was fantastic. Lucy went up to her and asked if she was a princess and Diana said yes. Then Lucy asked where her crown was. Diana said: 'I must have left it at home, I'm not a very good princess, am I?' Lucy said no, jumped off her lap and ran back to me."

As Lucy grew up, her parents tried to hide their addiction, and for years they were successful, but it became impossible when other addicts and their children were often in the flat.

As we talk, Lucy, now 15, comes home, bouncing into the room, asking her dad for money for a bus fare. It could be a scene in any normal home and it's obvious she's extremely fond of her father. Wearing tracksuit bottoms and humming a pop tune, she gives her dad a kiss and shouts "I love you!" as she bounds down the stairs. She still has a room at her dad's flat but spends a lot of time with her boyfriend.

"I'd crack up if I hadn't got her. I have to be strong for her, but if it was just me, forget it," he says when she's gone. Keith Tuppen, who would smoke crack five or six times a day when his wife was alive, says he has hardly touched drugs since her death. Instead, he has turned to alcohol to help him cope - in the weeks after her death he was drinking nearly a bottle of vodka a day - but he's aware that he can't carry on like this, for his daughter's sake.

"It's so difficult, but I always wanted to stop taking drugs," says Tuppen. "We both did. We tried so many times and if we'd moved away we might have had a chance." Does he blame himself ? "Yes," he says. "If I'd got her away from that crowd, she'd still be here today."