Set under blue skies in the very heart of Palm Beach, it began like the script of a Hollywood love story. But The Countess And The Bodyguard rapidly turned into a film noir with all the essential ingredients of celebrity, sex, money, and murder. 

The two principal characters first laid eyes on each other at the Colony Hotel, an elegant hangout for the rich and famous in Florida's most exclusive resort. This was where their romance began. A year later they were in prison. 

The Countess, Valentina Artsrunik, a petite Bulgarian brunette with a penchant for red lipstick and theatrical dresses, was spending a week's holiday inside its pale yellow portals. The Bodyguard, Dorian Lester, a tanned, 6 ft 2in-tall Virginian, was taking a break from his duties as minder to Patricia Kluge, ex-wife of US billionaire John W. Kluge.

One Sunday afternoon - December 22, 1996 - Valentina was relaxing between parties when Lester wandered into the hotel bar.

 

The two began talking and, within hours, embarked on a relationship together that was to grow into a conspiratorial closeness. 

"I have a devastating passion for Dorian Lester. We were fated to meet," says Valentina, now 41. "We were made for each other," says 49-year-old Lester. 

Valentina Djelebova-Joulebine was born of White Russian parents in Yambol, Bulgaria, in June 1957. Her family were Russian aristocrats but had been stripped of their wealth by the communists after the Second World War. 

Valentina escaped to the West, aged 19, by marrying an elderly Frenchman. She divorced him after acquiring a French passport, and, in quick succession, married an Englishman and then a London based Armenian count, Edward Ahajot Artsrunik. She had her first child with the count but divorced him after meeting David Conway, a US shipping heir, in 1990. She had two more children by Conway.