All they were trying to do was to warn the police that they were in danger.
But nine women in Wales died before police could do anything - all at the hands of the men they knew. Often, it was men the loved.
Figures from a Freedom of Information request to South Wales Police and North Wales Police from the website Broadly has revealed that nine women died despite reporting an abusive partner, ex-partner, or stalker for threatening behaviour and went on to be killed by that individual. That's just in the last three years.
It breaks down as five women in the region covered by North Wales Police and four women in the region covered by South Wales Police.
Gwent or Dyfed-Powys Police each had figures of zero.
In total, 60 women have died across the UK in the same period of time despite flagging concerns about their killers to police.
It means across the 43 police forces in England and Wales, figures for North Wales Police and South Wales Police are three times higher than the average.
Laura Richards, founder of anti-stalking charity Paladin, said: "South Wales has one of the highest rates of killings of women by men of any force in the country.
"When women leave their controlling, abusive partner, the risk of serious harm and homicide increases significantly.
"It's when the stalking begins, and coercive control and stalking correlate positively with murder.
"It's high time South Wales Police trained their staff to take these cases seriously and they should proactively identify serial abusers. These are the most dangerous of cases and too many women are paying with their lives.
"The current situation is unacceptable."
North Wales Police said that one case was referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) where one officer received "management action" and no action in relation to five officers and one police staff member.
Two cases from North Wales Police are currently being investigated by the IOPC, with the other two cases were not referred to the IOPC.
South Wales Police declined to say if their cases had been referred to the IOPC as it might prejudice ongoing investigations.
The names of the nine women were not confirmed by police to WalesOnline.
But two stories match the description.
Terrie-Ann Jones
Terrie-Ann Jones, known as Tan, was a 33-year-old mother-of-two from Cimla in Neath Port Talbot.
But on January 5, 2018, she was found dead in the bloodied kitchen of her home, having suffered 26 separate stab wounds to her body.
She had been stabbed by her partner, John Paul Lewis, with a kitchen knife and left to die in a pool of blood. They had been dating for eight months.
Lewis then cleaned the weapon, stole money from his partner's purse as she lay dying nearby, and went to the pub where he bought a round of drinks for his friends.
But there were warning signs about Lewis' behaviour.
Two weeks after the couple started their relationship, Miss Jones had gone to work with a swollen lip.
She told colleagues Lewis was sorry about it.
During his trial at Swansea Crown Court, a phone call was played, where Lewis had threatened to kill her and her two children, and said he would blow up her house.
Lewis also told Miss Jones in the recording: “I am ******* clever. I did this once a long time ago.
“You are playing a dangerous game. I will blow you all up.
“I will ******* kill you. I will shoot you.”
The court heard he was an abusive and controlling partner, and friends of Miss Jones, as well as colleagues from Neath's Castle Hotel where she worked as a barmaid, told how they would see her with bruises and other signs of having been assaulted.
On one occasion, Lewis pinned her against a wall and throttled her until she turned blue in the face.
Lewis denied murdering 33-year-old Miss Jones, claiming he was acting in self-defence.
But a jury of seven women and five men took 90 minutes to unanimously convict him.
Lewis, of Church Street, Briton Ferry, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Miss Jones and must serve a minimum of 19 years before he can be considered for parole.
Laura Stuart
On August 12, 2017, Laura Stuart was brutally stabbed and kicked after a night out by her abusive ex as she lay dying in the street.
Manipulative Jason Cooper, 31, stalked, harassed and finally stabbed his ex-partner to death on Love Lane in Denbigh, as he was unable to accept that she had finally ended their abusive relationship, North Wales live reported.
The pair had been together for two years, but Cooper was described as "controlling, possessive and jealous".
In the days before the murder, Cooper sent text messages and social media messages which included horrible insults aimed at her and her family.
They ended with direct threats to her life.
On August 5, he wrote: "Did u honestly think u could f*** me over 6 weeks ago and walk away happy."
That day, Cooper messaged another man and accused him of seeing Laura behind his back.
He wrote: “I’m ready to kill mate that’s how I feel. I invested 3 years plus of my life into her, and she f***ed me over.”
And to Laura he wrote: “Im gonna ruin u Laura. Ruin u get out of Denbigh.”
On August 7, he sent Laura a message accusing her of seeing another man and telling her he would kill her.
“Made u a promise 3 years ago? F*** me over wat happens.”
“The amount of s*** u causing Laura Im putting end to it I want u out this town.”
“U have pushed me as far as I will go now. My advice to u Laura is run.”
That Saturday night, Cooper had been out drinking but was ejected from a pub.
He went home and took a kitchen knife out of the drawer, and went back out into Denbigh in search of his former partner.
He continued to send messages to her and threatened to kill her.
Ms Stuart, who had been on a night out, was stabbed to death on the street as she was making her way home, just before 4am.
While Ms Stuart was on the ground bleeding, Cooper kicked her to her face and stomach with enough force to cause fractures to her nose and cheekbone.
Cooper was seen to be smiling.
Her friend, David Roberts, had tried to protect her, but was stabbed three times.
Luckily, he survived the ordeal.
Shortly after 4am, he sent texts to friends: “I just murdered Laura”, and “Sorry mate couldn’t handle it I murdered Laura.”
Cooper tried to claim that alcohol addiction had affected his mental state, and claimed it was Laura who had been abusive to him.
But he was found guilty at his trial and jailed for a minimum of 31 years .
A survivor who reported her partner to police
Although Rachel Williams is not one of the women from the Freedom of Information figures, she has a powerful story to tell.
Her husband would go on to try and kill her while she was working one day in Newport.
It was a day that would change her life.
When Darren Williams first moved in with Rachel Williams, he brought some odd items with him.
"Some of the possessions Darren brought with him when he moved into my house were books on gangsters, hunting knives and the heads of a dead fox and a badger," she said.
"What the bloody hell are they?’ I asked as he pulled the heads out of a cardboard box.
"‘Trophies,’ he said proudly. ‘I thought we could put them up here, on this wall.’”
It would be the start of a turn of events that would nearly end Rachel's life.
On a trip to Prague with pals, Darren spotted a weapons shop just before they were due to fly home.
He could not get in fast enough.
“I wanna see what they got here,” he told Rachel.
He came out with a stun gun and CS gas. Rachel asked if he would be able to take it on their flight.
"We’ll have to see, won’t we?” he said.
“When it was time to catch the plane home all I could think about was what was in Darren’s suitcase,” she said.
"By some miracle, he never got stopped and was able to bring the items home.”
They joined the hunting knives in a drawer at the side of their bed.
Then one day in August 2011, six years after the pair wed, Williams burst into Carol Ann's hair salon in Newport where Rachel worked and shot her with a double-barrelled shotgun.
He opened fire, shooting Rachel, and shouting: 'Rachel, I love you' as he shot her in the leg, before peppering the owner and customers with lead shot.
“As he came through the door he was pulling the gun out of a bag,” Rachel said.
“I ran toward him and tried to grab the gun.
“Then he hit me with the butt of the gun on the forehead.
“I landed on the floor and grabbed at the reception desk which he later kicked away.
“As he was leaning over me I pulled my legs up.”
She screamed at him: 'Darren, no!'
"With that I could hear a blast and I could smell the gun," she added.
“There was no pain whatsoever. I looked down and saw a big hole in my jeans.”
Rachel was not meant to be in work that day but cops told her if she had been at home she would almost certainly have been killed.
Williams then fled the scene of the shooting - and hung himself in woodland near the couple's home.
The couple’s son, Jack, struggled to come to terms with the events and weeks later was found hanged near the spot where his father died.
Now she campaigns to help other women, and has written a book about her experience.
"Victims need to know that they should not put up with abuse," she said.
“I want them to know that there is light and a new life at the end of the tunnel."
The mum of a woman who died at the hands of her partner
Although Cathy Broomfield's daughter who was murdered is not one of the women from the data figures, she believes her daughter could have been saved by police before she died.
Even now, the 63-year-old finds it hard to look at suitcases.
Her daughter, Kirsty Grabham, died in one of the worst ways imagineable.
Battered and bruised, her mutilated body was put in a suitcase and thrown out of a car by a man she had married just months earlier.
Aged just 23, Kirsty who met her husband Paul in a massage parlour where they both worked as prostitutes, disappeared after visiting a nightclub with friends.
She was eventually found in a suitcase in woodland alongside the M4 close to Laleston, near Bridgend, on April 6, 2009, where Grabham had thrown her from his car.
Her violent and bullying husband Paul Grabham had tried to cut her in half before stuffing her still warm body into a suitcase.
The thought of how she died still keeps Cathy, from North Cornelly, awake at night.
"The thing that gets me the most is when they found Kirsty, ten days after she had gone missing, her body was still warm, her rigor mortis hadn’t even set in," she said.
"I’m thinking was she still alive in that suitcase, and that’s the thing that does go through my head all the time when I go to sleep and wake up that’s what’s in my mind, was she screaming for her mum?"
"You never come to terms with what happened, you just can’t, I don’t give myself time to stop and think about it, I’m either playing games on the laptop or writing or reading," Cathy added.
"My mind has got to be active at all times, I’ve got to be thinking about something else, I can’t be dwelling on it all the time.
"When it first happened to Kirsty I had my hair dyed jet black and I had piercings. I was trying to change my identity, I didn’t want to be that person who lost their daughter, I was trying to be someone else.
"I can go months without leaving the house, I have a fear of going outside, you think everyone is talking about you. Sometimes if you’re in a supermarket and you go up an aisle and all of a sudden you see a black suitcase, like the one Kirsty was in, you're not expecting to see it, it’s a shock.
"Or sometimes I’ll see a blonde girl, someone who looked like Kirsty and you think that’s her, my heart jumps for a minute and your stomach turns, but they turn around and you realise it’s not her."
But it was not the end of Cathy's ordeal.
Five years after Kirsty was killed, Cathy's older daughter Hayley Wilkinson drank herself to death after struggling to cope with the loss of her little sister.
Looking back, Cathy says there were warning signs, and Kirsty had contacted the police.
"Kirsty phoned the police several times on Grabham," she said.
"They always said it was just a domestic and Kirsty was hesitant then to phone them as she felt like a nuisance.
"She tried phoning them the night he brutally murdered her, but the call was stopped probably by him.
"Officers of the law need to be trained to a higher level when dealing with domestic abuse.
"When they went to see Kirsty's so-called husband after she was supposedly missing, they never noticed the signs that were there - fresh paint on the ceiling where blood had splattered, blood spots on the TV, wardrobe, and loads on walls and pictures.
"There was a paint roller in a tray in the kitchen.
"Surely they could see he was trying to cover something up? Why would you paint if your partner was supposedly missing.
"The police who spoke to him in the house about Kirsty's disappearance said to me that he was very helpful and cooperative."
"I'm heartbroken and just wish there was more help out there for these victims," she added.
"I don't want any other family to go through what we have."
What do the police say?
South Wales Police said that tackling violence against women was a "priority" for the force.
"Protecting the most vulnerable in our communities and tackling violence against women and girls are key priorities within our joint Police & Crime Reduction Plan here in South Wales," a spokesman said.
"Only by working together can we tackle this issue – reporting is the first and most critical step, once the police are aware we can and will take action. Together with our trusted partners we have the ability to provide effective support to victims to ensure their voices are being heard and perpetrators are brought to justice.
"Stalking or harassment can present itself in many different ways and at face value may not appear intimidating to someone else.
"However, if you are receiving any form of contact or communication that is clearly unwanted, causing you fear, distress or anxiety then it is harassment and you do not have to put up with it.
"South Wales Police held its first Stalking conference in October 2018 which included expert speakers such as Dr Clive Ruggles, Suzy Lamplugh Trust, SEEdS survivor and Dr Monkton-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Criminology from University of Gloucester."
North Wales Police recently launched a new strategy aimed at protecting the most vulnerable in the community.
Operation Aegis focuses efforts into four key strands to prevent incidents, crime and abuse and includes enforcement, safeguarding, education and diversion – offering the alternative to abuse.
They are also taking part in National Stalking Awareness Week by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust to try and highlight the issue.
Detective Chief Inspector Jonathan Salisbury-Jones of North Wales Police said: “We recognise and understand that stalking and harassment can have a significant effect on victims and their families.
“Becoming a victim of stalking can happen to anyone, at any time. It can be an isolating experience so if you are being stalked or harassed please take that brave step and come forward.
“Working with our partners we will robustly investigate every report of stalking that we receive and are committed to working with our partner agencies across the region, using all of the tools at our disposal, to protect victims from stalkers.”
CI Salisbury-Jones added: “Operation Aegis is a simple and effective way of getting our messages out, both inside the police and to our own communities.
“We do lots of good work to keep people safe and work closely with partners to safeguard and divert those who are victims. We are involved in preventative and informative work, visiting schools, local community groups, multi-agency events, home visits and making use of social media.
“Some of the work we undertake is about having clarity of purpose and how to achieve it; how we can create and raise public confidence in our work and demonstrate that we will always deal professionally with sensitive issues and serious offences.
“Meanwhile the message to perpetrators is clear; we will pursue you until you stop offending. If you want help in making that change, then we can point you in the right direction. If you choose not to change then we will pursue you through the courts to prevent you committing further offences.”
