Dumfries, Scotland: A middle-aged woman led a triple life with three trusting "husbands' in different homes at the same time.

For five years Patricia Penrose, 51, used lies, charm and deception to prevent any of them finding out about each other.

The red-haired mother of three became involved with two men living 40 miles apart and married both of them within seven months in ceremonies in the Scottish town of Gretna Green to ensure none of her friends or relatives found out.

To explain her long absences she said she was working nights as a nurse or was having treatment in hospital for cancer and forbidding them from visiting her.

Her astonishing deception was revealed when she admitted two counts of bigamy and was given 220 hours community service at Dumfries Sheriff's Court.

The court heard that she snared her victims through lonely hearts advertisements after her long-term marriage to 54-year-old Edmund Penrose hit trouble.

She spent about half the week in Sheffield with husband number two, delivery driver Jim Bell, 49. He later discovered she opened store accounts in his name and left him £4,000 in debt.

Witness

Husband number three, joiner Martin Wright, 54, took out a mortgage to buy a £52,000 home for them. They went on trips together, but astonishingly she spent only two nights over four years at their house in Kirkby in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. All along she was also periodically living in her legal marital home in Maltby, Rotherham.

Police were called in when Penrose reported his wife as missing in April 2009 and found her other two marriage certificates.

The court heard that the couple married in 1977. She met divorced father-of-two Bell through an internet dating site in 2002. Their first date was at Sheffield's Meadowhall shopping centre and they ended up in bed.

Penrose showed him photographs of her three children and said her marriage had ended in divorce because her husband cheated on her. She told him she worked nights at the hospital and "would disappear for days" before turning up again at his house, once in a nurse's uniform.

They married in November 2004 at the Gretna Green Register Office, dragging two strangers off the street to act as witnesses.

Bell said she moved into his two-bedroom Sheffield council house and then claimed to be suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of blood cancer, even producing literature to explain the condition.

"I once went to visit her at Rotherham Hospital and they told me they had never heard of her. When she came back she told me she had been to Nottingham for treatment. I decided to trust her and let it carry on. We had a fantastic sex life perhaps that is what she used me for.

"I was curious about her movements especially as I never saw her at Christmas but she said she was stuck at the hospital and I believed her."

He said she left him without warning following her arrest. A similar tale of woe came from Wright, a divorced father of two.

He responded to a newspaper ad in the spring of 2004 from an "outgoing, bubbly, country-loving redhead".