The eldest daughter of convicted murderer George Maben has said she has never loved her father, but yearns to ask him one question: “why?”.

Unemployed Mr Maben, 45, of Morden, was sentenced to life imprisonment last month for strangling Maureen Cosgrove, 65, in the kitchen of her £700,000 Carshalton Beeches home.

Speaking exclusively to the Sutton Guardian, his eldest daughter, who does not want to be named, said she was “devastated” by her father’s conviction.

But she said she still retained some respect for the man who left her when she was two years old, “because he is still my Dad”.

She also said she would like to meet her baby half-brother some day — the child Mr Maben fathered with Mrs Cosgrove’s daughter Lucy Rees, 34.

She said: “I would like to meet him one day, he’s family after all.

“Not for a few years though, I’ll wait until he is much older. I have a lot of patience.”

The woman said it had been “really hard” growing up without her father around.

She said: “I just wanted to have a relationship. I wanted him to love me. So I went to find him.”

At the age of 15 she travelled to Dungannon in Northern Ireland to find him, but her expectations were dashed when the pair failed to bond.

She said: “I didn’t know what he was going to look like, but he wasn’t what I expected him to be like at all.

“We argued quite a bit. He was already quite obsessive about making sure I wasn’t doing stuff and really protective.

“I only stayed for one month and then I left. It was quite a horrific, I didn’t quite get over it.”

The last time she heard from him was two years ago when she was doing a college course in Scotland. He rang her to say how proud he was and gave her money to go on holiday.

The next time she saw his face was when she watched his sentencing for the murder of Mrs Cosgrove on TV.

She said: “I’m shocked. I don’t know what to think any more. I just want to know why he did it.”

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