A mother whose husband killed their young son and daughters before leaping off a cliff has spoken for the first time to say society 'failed' her family and that the tragic deaths were a 'wake-up call'.

Ruth Fuller, from Milkwall in Gloucestershire, felt 'enough rage to rip worlds apart' when her runaway husband Ceri murdered Samuel, 12, Rebecca, 8, and 7-year-old Charlotte in July 2012.

The children suffered severe neck wounds thought to have been inflicted with a hunting knife.

Mrs Fuller said her husband, 35, was 'very, very ill' and did not seek help because society encourages 'maladjusted' people to hide their problems instead of seeking support.

After six years of soul-searching, she said she had come to the conclusion that the deaths were a sign of wider problems in society. She said;

If their brutal murder at the hands of their deeply troubled father isn't the wake up call to us all that it really needs to be, we didn't deserve their beautiful souls in this world.

Mrs Fuller does not defend her estranged husband, who left their home with the children shortly after the couple agreed to split up.

Alarm bells started ringing when Fuller failed to turn up for work as a production supervisor at a paper mill and the children missed school.

Police launched an appeal to find his red Land Rover Freelander on the Friday afternoon and the following Monday their bodies were found 75 miles away in a disused quarry at Poles Coppice in Pontesbury Hill, Shropshire.

Mrs Fuller, who was admitted to hospital shortly after realising the children were missing, is still not well enough to be interviewed about the most harrowing ordeal a mother could face.

But she has put her thoughts into her own words to be shared on social media because she fears such tragedies will continue to happen unless something changes.

She admitted to being scared of being misunderstood but has finally built up the courage to speak out on behalf of her three children and those youngsters still suffering. She wrote;

Society did not encourage Ceri Fuller to be honest about what was going on with him and reach out for help, it encouraged him to feel fear and shame and hide his problems rather than risk persecution for them.

'He was very, very ill and society was sending a clear message that he would be hated and punished for that, not helped.'

An inquest into the four deaths heard that Mr Fuller appeared to be a reserved, mild-mannered, and softly-spoken family man and university graduate who went walking in the country with colleagues.

But the inquest also heard he could be possessive with Mrs Fuller, a childhood friend who became his partner when they were 21 and who had recently started an Open University course.

Mrs Fuller said in the dark days after her children died she could have been driven to do something drastic if she had not received mental health support to stop her rage spilling out.

'I became a very dark thing indeed after what he did to my children,' she wrote. 'I couldn't take my rage out on him and it wouldn't have been enough if I could.

It felt like rage enough to rip worlds apart and the truth is that I wanted to. I was honest about all the darkness inside of me and I was helped.'

The artist said she was helped because people understood that she was going through the worst kind of hell imaginable, but believes society 'failed' Fuller and those around him.

'I'm not writing this in Ceri's defence [he has no loyalty from me] but in defence of those we have not yet failed and don't have to because we have all the tools to help,' she wrote.

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