Shortly after 6am on Sunday, May 3, Stuart Blanchard was woken by angry voices drifting through his bedroom window. At first, he thought the commotion was caused by a habitually troublesome neighbour.

Listening more closely he realised it was coming from a nearby family home, where peace and harmony usually reigned.

One of the voices – that of a man – was unfamiliar to Mr Blanchard, a retired building site manager. 

But he recognised the other as that of Joanne Shaw, 35, the mother of a five-year-old son, much liked in the community for her kindly and usually gentle nature.

'I heard Jo shouting "Get out! Get out! You shouldn't be here!" and her voice was getting louder,' Mr Blanchard, 59, told us.

'Then there was a massive bang – so big that my front door shook, about 50 yards away. It was a weird noise, more muffled than the crack of the explosions you hear on TV, and it was followed by this long, eerie silence. My first thought was that a gas canister had gone up.'

The grimmer truth began to emerge moments later. Alerted by a caller inside the Shaws' house – perhaps Joanne's father, Anthony, or mother, Tracey – and also by a dog-walker, who phoned 999 after hearing the row, police officers, some armed, descended on the red-brick estate, which surrounds a grassy square in Stapleton, on the outskirts of Bristol.

Arriving at the semi at 6.34am – two minutes after the blast, but a full 17 minutes after the first emergency call – they found smoke billowing from the blown-out living room window, and the front garden strewn with glass and brick.

Somewhere amid the debris were the bodies of Joanne and the man whose voice Mr Blanchard had heard: her former partner, and by all accounts the father of her son, Ryan Kelly, 41, a dangerous drug-gang henchman first jailed at the age of 19 for firebombing a nightclub.

Having reportedly stalked and menaced Joanne for years after their relationship ended – forcing her to move to the safety of her parents' house – Kelly had seemingly decided to end both their lives in a chillingly brutal and attention-grabbing manner.

When he broke into the house he was carrying a hand grenade. How on earth he got hold of it is a matter of conjecture. Some say it could have been bought from the dark web, while others claim it came via Army contacts.

As Joanne implored him to leave, it seems, he detonated it.

In due course, her parents will doubtless reveal precisely what happened in the house, as they waited for the police.

However, the dog-walker says Joanne's young son was bouncing on a trampoline in the back garden during the confrontation, leading neighbours to believe that she had deliberately ushered him out of harm's way just before the blast.

And friend Jamileh Ravaan exclusively told the Daily Mail how Joanne also managed to 'protect her mother in a selfless last act'.

'She put herself in between the ones she loved and the danger. She's a hero.'

A family statement, released on Thursday, strongly suggests that this admirable young woman sacrificed herself to save her little boy, and her parents.

'Joanne's actions were nothing short of heroic,' the Shaws say. 

'She showed extraordinary strength, selflessness, and love in the face of unimaginable fear, placing herself between danger and those she loved.

'She will always be remembered, not for the violence inflicted on her, but for her bravery, her protective instinct, and the ultimate sacrifice she made for others.'

The family's poignant words, which also pay tribute to Joanne's warm, generous character ('Her infectious laugh could fill a room and light up everyone's world') bring an uplifting glimmer to a story that otherwise plumbs the depths of humanity. 

Yet they leave many hard questions unanswered, some of them directed at Avon and Somerset Police.

For several of Joanne's friends and neighbours have told the Daily Mail that she had alerted the police force to the danger posed by Kelly many times and claim she was given insufficient protection

'If you want my opinion, she has been let down,' says a 79-year-old neighbour, who Joanne confided in after offering to regularly walk her two dogs.  

'She told me she'd been having problems [with Kelly] for months, but nobody did anything. 'She would still be here if somebody had cared for her. This should never have happened.'

Was she referring to the police? 'Take from that what you want,' she replied.

After leaving bouquets outside the Shaws' boarded-up house, where abandoned garden toys are the only remnants of a destroyed family, two young women who worked with Joanne in a tanning salon, and knew of her harassment, also revealed how they felt the police had let her down.

Mr Blanchard, for his part, went further, describing it as 'yet another red flag situation where nothing has been done'.

In time, we will learn whether this criticism is justified, for the force has referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct 'due to the deaths occurring following previous police contact over domestic incidents'.

Meanwhile, another pressing question is left hanging: how did a fine young woman such as Joanne meet, and fall for, the deranged criminal Ryan Kelly?

This becomes even more perplexing when we examine their respective backgrounds.

She was educated at one of the West Country's most prestigious independent schools, Colston's Collegiate (which has since dropped 17th-century slave-trader Edward Colston's name from its title). What is now called the Collegiate School charges annual fees for senior students of more than £22,000.

Her father was its head groundsman and her family lived in a cottage on a private road within the grounds. Expressing shock and sadness at her death, this week, headmaster Jeremy McCullough told the Daily Mail that teachers would remember her as 'friendly, enthusiastic' and 'caring and kind to the young ones'.

She was also 'hugely creative', he said, excelling in art and design.

A striking young woman with raven hair and a grungy dress style, Joanne later studied law, graphics and photography at St Brendan's Sixth Form College in Bristol. Her working life took on various jobs in recruitment, IT, office management, the beauty industry – including that stint at a tanning salon – and, most recently, working for a relative's high-end watch sales business.

However, a friend says, by her mid-twenties she yearned for a baby, and when her long-term boyfriend insisted he was too young to be a father she broke off the relationship, deciding to look for someone who shared her ambitions. It was a fateful decision.

So how did she cross paths with Kelly? According to this same male friend, they probably met in one of the Bristol nightclubs Joanne frequented. 

'She used to go clubbing downtown,' he told us. 'But not taking drugs and stuff. She used to like having a drink, and partying with the girls, but I've never seen her do drugs. That's what I don't get: they [Joanne and Kelly] were complete opposites. It's crazy.'

The friend says he and his partner lost touch with Joanne several years ago, after she started going out with Kelly. Like others among her circle, he is left wondering what she saw in him – and whether she knew of his sinister past.

Photographs Kelly posted on Facebook portray him as a taciturn man with a fondness for horses. They are deceptive. The son of a jobbing roofer, well known in Bristol's building trade, his hair-trigger temper and ruthlessness first emerged when he was 19. 

When he got drunk and vomited in Centurys, a Bristol club, a doorman managed to eject him as he lashed out 'manically'.

However, he returned to hurl a petrol bomb at the building, starting fires that forced 200 people inside to be evacuated. 

Though his mother blamed herself for not dealing with his 'drug and alcohol abuse', he was jailed for three years for arson.

When Kelly came before the courts again, aged 30, in 2015, he had graduated to serious organised crime after being recruited as a henchman by George Rogers, 77, a jailed career criminal seeking to run a major county lines drug-dealing network from his prison cell.

Since Rogers was old, had cancer, and planned to manufacture the American street drug crystal meth, the prosecution likened his scheme to the plot of the TV series Breaking Bad, in which a terminally ill chemistry teacher uses his lab knowledge to make the drug.

But while the fictitious Mr Big, Walter White, outsmarted the law and made a fortune, Rogers' plans were quickly rumbled. 

Police were tipped off and bugged the gang's cars, arresting them before the drug factory was set up.

Kelly's first task had been to acquire £60,000 worth of cocaine, to be sold to fund the manufacturing equipment.

But he was arrested with the stash as he drove down the M5 from Birmingham to Bristol and subsequently jailed, along with nine other gang members, this time for five years.

It was soon after his release, it is believed, that he took up with Joanne – by then approaching her 30s, and probably more desperate than ever to become a mother.

In the late summer of 2020, her dream was fulfilled.

A Facebook photo she posted shows her recently born son – whom we are not naming – sleeping serenely in his bouncy chair. He is wearing a white babygrow with a smiley face and the slogan: 'I love my Daddy.'

How tragically ironic that picture appears now.

There has been no official recognition this week that the 'daddy' the boy purportedly loved was Kelly (and the family statement pointedly avoids referring to him, stating only that the little boy has 'suffered the loss of his mummy').

However, the many sources we spoke to assume him to be the father, though a 'very bad' one, said one of Joanne's friends.

Ms Ravaan, 45, who first met Ms Shaw 20 years ago, described how the relationship went sour.

She told how just last week, Kelly had confronted Joanne near her home.

'On the way to see me one morning last week she was late because she said he had cornered her on her road', Ms Ravaan said. 

'There was something (with him) all week. She had been breaking up with him – trying to get rid of him for years. That's been ongoing.

'He wouldn't give her up.'

Manipulatively, Kelly would beg Joanne for another chance and would promise to be better.

'He was abusive in all ways', she said. 'He was a well-known criminal and abuser of women.

'I don't know about what contact she had with the authorities [in the days leading up to her death] but she said he had been following her, monitoring her movements,' she added.

'She said that just the thought of having to report him again was pointless because she had been ignored in the past. It wasn't good enough.

'The police didn't do well enough. They failed her and the system continues to fail women.'

But Ms Ravaan added: 'I don't want to concentrate on him [Kelly]. I want to concentrate on the fact that Joey's a hero who saved her mum and son.'

And there is little doubt Joanne was a totally devoted mother.

She enrolled her son in a mixed martial arts class, ferried him to pre-school every morning before work, filled the garden with play-things, including a large den, a plastic slide, and the trampoline that he was so blithely bouncing on just before the grenade exploded.

A key part of the police investigation will be identifying Kelly's motive.

Did he kill Joanne and himself because he couldn't share in their happiness?

Was he a man eaten up with jealousy, acting out the ultimate form of evil vindictiveness?

Certainly, there are indications that he planned the attack with some care.

For the Daily Mail has seen CCTV footage, taken by a neighbour's security camera, which shows a grey estate car circling the grassy square at 5.24am, just over an hour before the blast. 

This is believed to have been Kelly conducting a recce before breaking into the house.

The car was later found abandoned on a nearby estate and apparently towed away by the police.

But if Kelly did plan to die that Sunday, and take Joanne with him, why had he signed up to play in a friend's charity football match, in memory of a local man who died by suicide, the next Saturday?

As his older brother, 43-year-old Lee Kelly told us, before abruptly putting the phone down: 'None of us knows why this happened. It's totally incomprehensible.' For now, indeed, it is.

Yet when a maniac can sneak into his former partner's home and detonate a grenade, despite her repeated pleas for protection, questions cry out to be answered.

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