"Crystal ball on the table, showing the future, the past..."

Within weeks of meeting the fortune teller Clappison started locking her children in their rooms, forced them to work for gypsies as slaves and assaulted them.

She took the lightbulbs, toys and all mattresses and bedding from their rooms and fed them only sandwiches.

Before this, it seems she'd been a relatively good mother. Her daughter was six and her son ten when it started.

Her daughter, who is now 13, said: "She has made our lives miserable. We were all happy until she met the gypsies.

"She would hit me across the head and pull my hair and said if I told anyone she would kill me.

"We always had to go to the gypsies instead of going to school."

And anyone wondering why the SS didn't pounce, well...

He said when social workers visited their home she put on a "show" and made them play "happy families" then punish them when they had left.

Shades of Baby Peter and smearing chocolate to hide the bruises? Are they so easily fooled? What about the missed school days?

Judge Mettyear ordered a pre-sentence report on Clappison before she is sentenced.

He said: "I am in two minds about whether to order a report as she is not going to co-operate. She is going to say the same thing again and again because she can't face up to it.

"But I am wondering whether there is something wrong with her. It does not seem natural to change from what was happening to what is happening now.

"I am going to order a report to see if the Probation Service can shed any light on it."

And is anyone looking to see if the fortune teller and those who took the children on as slave labour can be charged with anything?