TWENTY years after the murder of his wife ripped his world apart, Jeremy Howe has written a book on how his family survived.

In the summer of 1992 Dr Lizzie Howe travelled from the family home in Edith Road, South Oxford, to York University to lecture on the poetry of Stevie Smith.

She would never return. Her mutilated naked body was found in her blood-splattered room in York.

Three years later Robin Pask, a man with a history of mental illness, was sentenced to detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a prison hospital.

Two decades on, Mr Howe, now Radio 4’s commissioning editor for drama, has set out the family’s story in a book, describing how he learnt to be both daddy and mummy to his girls.

He shows how a man with a broken heart, clueless at cooking and “underskilled in the mother department,” managed to hold down a high pressure job and bring up a young family alone.

When he told his eldest daughter he was planning a book, she replied, “So, Daddy, you’re going to write a book about how you cooked us fish fingers every day for four years.”

But Mr Howe has quite a story to tell about grief, the judicial system and most of all family.

“My God, did I learn the meaning of love and friendship,” he says. “I felt as though I lived on a place called Planet Grief, a place where only the very bold and foolhardy would dare to venture. It is unlike anything else.

“The whole world is different.”

Remarkably, it is a book with a happy ending. Ten years ago Mr Howe fell in love and remarried, while his daughters are both grown up; Jessica, 25, is a radio producer for LBC, and Lucy, 23, is a fundraiser at London’s Bush Theatre.

But revisiting the story of the murder of his wife – a 34-year-old academic he met at Oxford University where they both studied English – forced him to return to a dark place. He recalls being woken up by police at 1 am at his mother’s home and being told his wife had been the victim of a random attack by an Open University student, tanked up on vodka and drugs.

“Lizzie was one of the most blameless people I’ve ever met. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He sums up the immediate impact. “I just didn’t know what to do and it felt as if our future had been smashed up in front of us.”

For him the family was saved by Dr Gillian Forrest, the head of the child psychiatry department at The Park Children’s Hospital in Oxford, who encouraged the girls to talk about their mummy.

The book’s upbeat ending is provided by Jennie, the film producer he fell in love with on the day before his 40th birthday.

“Lizzie lives on in my heart and in my memories,” he said.

mummydaddy by Jeremy Howe is published by Pan.