SHE IS sitting at the furthest table from the door where visitors enter after being photographed, electronically finger-scanned and frisked.

Her back is turned to the room.

The fragile, blonde stillness of her erect, petite figure is in contradiction to her scandalous reputation.

Behind her, other prisoners are urgently talking and caressing the arms and faces of loved ones but she does not move until her visitor hoves into view.

"Hello, " she smiles with anxious eyes.

"Thank you for coming." She is as childlike pretty as her press pictures. Her hands are manicured and expressive, dancing a ballet to accompany the macabre tragedy she begins to narrate. So this, thinks her visitor incredulously, is Northern Ireland's sabretoothed 'Black Widow'.

A "shrewd, devious and quick-witted" seductress, concluded the North's lord chief justice in the appeal verdict last November, spinning a web of "lies, half-truths and truths" to wriggle out of her life sentence.

The three judges upheld her conviction for the murder of her husband, Gerry McGinley, in cahoots with her lover, Michael Monaghan, adding that it was possible she had murdered him herself as he lay sleeping in their marital bed. They refused her leave to appeal to the House of Lords.

She has been blamed for the closure of Northern Ireland's women's prison, Mourne House at Maghaberry, after lurid tabloid reports in October 2005 of sexual exploits with prison officers and fellow inmates. She denies these stories and one of her supporters postulates that her reputation was cynically exploited to politically engineer the transfer of women prisoners to Hydebank Wood outside Belfast. An official report on Mourne House, due to be published next week, will, however, neither confirm nor disprove the allegations, according to one who has read it.

Such notoriety seems irreconcilable with this polite 35-year-old mother of two schoolgirls, with her tasteful jewellery and prayerful allusions to God. In a unique gesture, 12 Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian chaplains attached to Maghaberry and Hydebank Wood prisons wrote collectively to the appeal court last May lauding her as an exemplary prisoner.

"The chaplains are amazed at her courage and composure under such pressure, " they wrote. "In good times and in very bad times, Julie is courteous and cultured, appreciative of the good in both the staff and her fellow prisoners. She is unfailingly supportive of the work of the chaplains and delivers pastoral care of a high quality to vulnerable prisoners.

Julie is also untiring in her work of fundraising for the prison's nominated charities."

With six years of her sentence done and at least nine more to go, a coterie of old and new friends is trying to launch a miscarriage of justice campaign on her behalf. "I believe Julie is innocent, " says Linda Weir, a witness at the murder trial. "She's sound. I always thought she was very truthful."

Despite her own admission that she lied consistently to the police after her husband died "as a result of blunt force trauma to the head" in the bedroom of their Enniskillen bungalow while their daughters, aged three and five, slept in another room, Julie McGinley continues to protest her innocence. She depicts herself as a victim of extreme domestic violence and sexual degradation at the hands of a husband who, before she met him, had served nearly seven years of a nine-year jail sentence in Arbour Hill, Dublin, for raping a garda's wife in Sligo when he was 18.

When his badly decomposed body was found in Aughnasheelin forest near Ballinamore, Co Leitrim, 10 months after his death, Gerry McGinley's remains were identified from his prison dental records. His widow claims that, in the six years they were married, he subjected her to beatings, rape, threats about IRA connections, and forced her into sexual couplings with other men which he videotaped. Two female witnesses swore statements to the police that, the Christmas before his death, Gerry McGinley played one of these tapes for them, showing Julie participating in a sexual act with a local businessman whom they recognised.

Two psychiatrists gave evidence that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and a condition known as dependent personality disorder. The latter is defined as "a pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of", typified by submissiveness, passive dependency and the urgent need to replace one relationship with another as a source of support. A third psychiatrist who interviewed Julie disagreed and testified that she was a manipulative woman who cleverly answered his colleagues' questions to create the impression of a personality disorder. This was the viewpoint accepted by the court.

The crown prosecution service's version of her sex life is that she willingly went with other men, that she was serially unfaithful to her husband, and that she conspired with Monaghan to murder Gerry, thus standing to benefit from his life insurance (its value had been increased the year before). She had two false passports when she was arrested, one British and one Irish, and had made enquiries about emigrating to Australia.

While some of Julie's allegations push the boundaries of belief, others have a ring of plausibility. Her repeated accusation that Gerry, a native of Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim, consorted with the IRA is inconsistent with the gratitude formally expressed by his Leitrim-based family to the PSNI at his inquest in Carrick-on-Shannon on 13 June last. Though he had a cousin in Belfast who had been suspected of IRA involvement in the mid-1990s, no Special Branch intelligence of IRA associations features in the Garda file on the dead man.

On the other hand, her account of physical and sexual violence by her husband is credible in light of his guilty plea to rape in Sligo in 1985. He had also been diagnosed as a psychopath.

"It's very believable, " agrees Geraldine Rowley of Ruhama, an outreach organisation for women engaged in prostitution. "We have worked with women who were pimped by their partners."

The problem for Julie McGinley is that neither she nor Michael Monaghan gave evidence at the murder trial. There were other puzzling absences from the witness box too. One was the man who featured in the video. Another was the supplier of drugs which Julie planted in Gerry McGinley's car in June 2000, two months before his death.

After a series of phone calls to the garda� from this man, Tony McNern from Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, Gerry McGinley was stopped at a Garda checkpoint in Blacklion, Co Cavan, and the drugs were seized. Yet McNern was not called as a witness and nobody was prosecuted for the attempt to "set up Gerry McGinley", as the Belfast court put it.

Most mysteriously, another man who was arrested and charged in connection with the murder and who, Julie McGinley claimed in her appeal case, was present when Gerry died (though he was not the killer) did not testify at the trial. Time and again, during this journalist's prison visit with her, Julie asserted that the man, PJ McPadden, could clear her name by corroborating her story.

When asked at his Sligo home last Tuesday either to confirm or deny her account of her husband's killing, McPadden, a native of Ballinamore, declined to comment. "I don't want to know anything about that, " he said.

"My life was destroyed. I've started over and I don't want to talk about it." Even off the record, he refused to say whether Julie McGinley was innocent or guilty.

"I"m not guilty of murdering my husband, " she declares. "I was found guilty of murder by a jury that was overawed with innuendo and a smear campaign, as opposed to evidence. I have always been an honest person, law-abiding, too trusting and na�ve."

She and Monaghan made four unsuccessful bail applications before the sensational murder trial, which lasted three months and inspired a television documentary. While Julie was in custody awaiting trial, a hoax bomb was found outside her father's house in Enniskillen. The book of evidence contained a statement from a Catholic priest that he had received a phoned death threat targeting Gerry McGinley from a caller using a recognised paramilitary code word. Julie claims the threat was for "anti-social behaviour" resulting from "rows Gerry had around the town". The prosecution argued that it was Julie McGinley who had arranged for the threat to be made.

Julie Bracken was her birth name. She grew up in a "respectable" Protestant family in Enniskillen, riding ponies and attending the Collegiate grammar school. But, at the age of 15, her perfect world fell asunder when her mother died of cardiac failure brought on by an asthma attack. A year later, on 8 November 1987, Julie was at the cenotaph in town with her younger brother on Poppy Day when the IRA bomb exploded, killing 11 people. The McGinley children became separated. Julie, who was later treated in hospital for superficial cuts, frantically searched for her brother, turning over prone bodies on the street in her quest for him.

A book about that seminal day, Enniskillen:

The Remembrance Sunday Bombing, records:

"Bandsman Freddie Millar's wife recalls seeing 'the wee girl (Julie) Bracken, her shoes blown off and her feet streaming with blood. She was hysterical looking for her brother. He was up in the hospital'." Page 96 of the book has a photograph of stricken people fleeing the bomb site. Running beside a man with a child tucked under each of his arms is Julie's brother. None of the injured received post-trauma counselling.

Within a period of six months in the following year, Julie was involved in two serious riding accidents. In the worst of the two, her horse, Ome, was killed beneath her on impact with a stone bridge after swerving to avoid an oncoming car. Again, she received no counselling for the trauma.

She went to live with a sister in Australia for a while and returned to Enniskillen, getting work in BT's call centre. Fate intervened one day in March 1994 when her work supervisor needed a new exhaust for her car and Julie went with her to the garage.

There she met an unremarkable-looking man, a Catholic from Manorhamilton and a former Irish champion boxer, standing five feet eight inches tall and weighing about 16 stone. Gerry McGinley had called to the garage for repairs to the lorry he was driving for a local haulage company. After his release from Arbour Hill in August 1992, he had moved to the North to start afresh and secured the driving job despite his employer being aware of his criminal record.

"He was a rough diamond. You could believe he had raped somebody alright, " recalls someone in Enniskillen who knew the couple. "What I knew of Julie growing up was that she was very definitely promiscuous. She went with a lot of soldiers and UDR men when she was around 17 to 19. Her father was heartbroken when she linked up with Gerry."

They were married seven months later, on Saturday 15 October 1994, with Julie wearing her sister-in-law's wedding dress. "Two days later, he did this, " she says, turning over her hands to display silvery rivulets of scarring on her inside wrists. "He beat me and slashed me with a knife." The couple cut short their honeymoon in Lisdoonvarna after a few days and returned to Enniskillen.

Three days after their third wedding anniversary, according to Julie, she was awakened in her bedroom by the lights of Gerry's jeep shining in the window. She got out of bed and looked out at the garden to see Gerry hanging from their daughter's swing. He had suspended himself with her dog's choke lead. She says she managed to cut the leather lead with a knife but that Gerry's "tongue was hanging out and he was black", having been deprived of oxygen for several minutes. He spent three days on life support in the Erne Hospital and preparations were being made to have him committed to Tyrone & Fermanagh Hospital in Omagh when, she says, she insisted on taking him home.

She claims that, after this, the domestic violence escalated and Gerry began coercing her to have sex with other men.

On 30 December 1999, she left him. Her departure from the family home with their two children was precipitated, she says, when Gerry stopped a taxi on their way back from town, took her into a field and beat her. She went to her GP who advised her to leave her husband. She and the girls stayed with Julie's father at first, and then in rented accommodation.

In the month they were apart, both Julie and Gerry McGinley were involved in other relationships. It was during this estrangement that Gerry showed the video to the two women witnesses. Julie began dating a local businessman. She says Gerry threatened to commit suicide if she did not return to him, that he poured yellow paint on the businessman's windows and head-butted the passenger window of his jeep. She claims it was when he threatened to show the sex video to her father that she agreed to go back to him at the end of January 2000.

At the end of February, the McGinleys set up a furniture business in Enniskillen with Michael Monaghan, a native of Fintona, Co Tyrone. He and his Sligo-born wife, whom he married in Rome in 1989, had run a furniture restoration business in Enniskillen, next door to the company run by the man Julie had been with at Christmas. She told Monaghan about Gerry's violence to her. They became lovers.

She claims that when she, Gerry and the children returned from a holiday in Gran Canaria in early June 2000, the plot was already hatched to frame Gerry with drugs.

Julie stashed a parcel under the driver's seat of the BMW Gerry would drive to Blacklion, where they kept their petrol account. Tony McNern, the supplier, rang the garda� repeatedly to tip them off and, on 6 June, Gerry was taken into custody south of the border and charged under section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act.

"If he had been convicted of smuggling heroin and cocaine from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland he would have faced a lengthy prison sentence because he had a criminal conviction for rape of a garda's wife, " surmised the appeal judges. Though Julie drove to the Garda station where he was being held and insisted that he had been set up, the court concluded that it was a tactic to stop her husband suspecting her of involvement in the plot.

Two months later, on 12 August 2000, Julie and Gerry went to the Fort Lodge Hotel in Enniskillen. It was a Saturday night and a babysitter was minding their daughters at home. Julie, who is the only witness who has testified to what happened, says that Monaghan (whose affair with Julie was unknown to Gerry) was in the hotel with PJ McPadden, a workmate and flatmate. She says Gerry was insistent she get Monaghan back to the house to have sex with her.

She and Gerry went home at 2.30am and he made her phone Monaghan to see if he was coming to the house. Sometime after 3.25am, Monaghan and McPadden arrived with cans of beer. Gerry was in the bedroom.

McPadden walked in and Julie heard her husband shout at him. "PJ then shouted in terror. There were crashing noises and the sounds of a commotion. Michael headed for the room and I went into the girls' bedroom. I was terrified by what was happening and was very concerned that the girls would be disturbed and distressed by the noise."

Finally, she says in her statement to the appeal court, McPadden emerged from the bedroom, went into the bathroom and threw up. Monaghan came out and said Gerry was dead. She claims that Monaghan then said she would have to cover for him or the IRA would be after them all. She redecorated the bedroom and, when she eventually reported Gerry missing, she told the police he had left with strange men in a blue Toyota, bearing either a Dublin or Donegal registration, at 7am on the Sunday morning.

Asked why anyone should believe the version of events she told the appeal court, she replies: "That's a very fair question, taking all the circumstances into consideration. However, the actual reality of the situation is my statement to the appeal court." She adds that she could not bring herself to reveal the details of physical and sexual violence she had suffered. "I was so consumed with shame and embarrassment about what had happened to me, in my own home, at the hands of my own husband."

Someone who was innocently and indirectly caught up in the events surrounding Gerry McGinley's death, says:

"Some of what Julie is saying doesn't sound true but it was terrible the way her name was blackened. If she did it, why would she insist that PJ McPadden can clear her if he tells what he knows? It doesn't make sense.

She's either innocent or deranged and guilty as hell."

As she waves goodbye through the barred steel door separating the prison from the visitors' room in a leafy corner of south Belfast, she strikes a vulnerable figure.

Could she the victim of a horrifying miscarriage of justice? Or is she the skilful liar condemned by two courts? There is no clear-cut answer. Three men knew the truth. One is in jail. One refuses to speak.

And the third lies in a grave in Belcoo on the Fermanagh/Cavan border.

THE MCGINLEY CASE IN QUOTES

We are satisfied that the evidence submitted as 'fresh evidence' should be rejected as incapable of belief
The three judges of the Appeal Court Mrs McGinley displayed remarkable nerve, imagination and skill in dealing with the questions which were put (in police interviews). . . most, if not all, of her answers to relevant questions were told deliberately to cover up the truth

The Appeal Court

At no time did I plan to kill my husband or conspire to have him killed Julie McGinley
At the time of the trial, as for my entire remand period for 18 months leading up to it and the seven months before my arrest, I was silenced by fear Julie McGinley