It was the summer of 1963, the boom of the civil rights movement in Chicago .

In the expanding industrial city on the edge of Lake Michigan , Roslyn Loveless, a 17-year-old clerk for the state’s railway company, went along to a house party where she was immediately struck by a “tall, handsome man”.

That man, Thomas Markle, then a 20-year-old television studio worker, swept the teenager off the ground and the pair’s romance quickly blossomed with the arrival of their first child, Samantha, just a year later.

Tom Jr, their second child, arrived soon after while the pair tied the knot and began married life in a one-bedroom apartment in the city - before the relationship appeared to turn sour.

Struggling to look after her two young children, little could Ms Loveless have known that six decades on her forlorn life she would become intertwined with the United Kingdom ’s royal family.

Ms Loveless gained fresh attention this weekend, when reports emerged she had written a letter to the Met Police in 2019…