The heartbreaking scene in which Wilma McCann's children posed for a photo was one of the most moving moments of episode one of ITV1 drama The Long Shadow.
But the image of the little ones clutching their favourite toys just hours after their mother had been murdered was especially moving because it was based on a real event as illustrated by the real photo above.
McCann - who is played by Gemma Laurie in the ITV1 drama - was the first victim of Peter Sutcliffe, who killed her October 1975 and left her for dead just yards from the house where her four children were sleeping.
When her eldest child Sonia McCann awoke to find her mum hadn't returned home, she woke her brother Richard and the pair went down to a nearby bus stop to wait for her to get home.
Yet Wilma never returned and after her body was discovered, her four children, Sonia, Richard, Donna and Angela, were taken into care by the police. In the show, DCS Dennis Hoban (Toby Jones) asks the children to pose with a photo of their favourite toy, hoping the picture would elicit a sympathetic response during a public appeal for information.
"That scene is based on a real photo," says the show's writer George Kay. "Dennis Hoban had it taken because he was very aware that if it was put out there that a prostitute had been murdered, it might not elicit as much help from the public as if it was framed that she was a mother. So he was he was a man ahead of his time in that respect."
In Richard McCann's book 'Just a Boy', he describes how a policeman came to collect them from the bus stop on that fateful morning and took them Beckett's Park Children's Home.
"As we came in with the policeman, the staff seemed to be expecting us. We were given cups of hot chocolate and taken to a room with a television. After a while, once we were settled in comfortably, the policeman came back in to see us. He felt more like a friend by now. He sat down and said he had something to tell us. 'Your mum has been taken to heaven', he said. 'You won't be seeing her any more'."
"She was described as a prostitute, but that wasn't the mum I knew," he explained. "So I tried to block out how she had really died. All of us did not talk about it. We were not encouraged to. When I went to live with my dad and his new girlfriend we were told to call her mum. We didn't go to my mother's grave until I was 16."
The Long Shadow continues on Monday 2 October on ITV1.
