Mother-of-three Kimberley MacKenzie was reported missing by her father when she did not turn up to pick up her bank card.
As a child, she moved around the country with her farm worker father Terance and mother Helen, before settling in Aberdeenshire.
She went to school in Huntly and left at the age of 16, before the family moved to Leuchars.
Miss MacKenzie moved around Fife, before setting up home in Montrose in 2005.
Her father last saw her on October 28 last year, after he dropped her off at the pharmacy in Montrose High Street.
He later saw her walking along the street, and she give him a “wave and a smile” as he went by.
But he raised the alarm with police when she did not meet him as arranged.
Days later, police visited the flat on Market Street as part of their missing person investigation and noticed a “smell of death” next to the bins in the communal close.
Mr MacKenzie, who separated from wife Helen in 2004, was aware of his daughter’s drugs habit and that she “kind of” had a relationship with Steven Jackson.
“I had met him, but I had never spoken to him face to face,” he said. “I met him at his house, a couple of months before she died.
“I told her for the sake of the children, she better give it (the drugs) up,” he said. “But she never listened.”
Jackson had been going out with Miss MacKenzie — in an on-off relationship — for several months, but they split in the summer of 2015.
Although the relationship ended with Miss MacKenzie’s belongings being tipped out into the street by Jackson’s flat, friends who knew them said it was amicable and the pair stayed in touch.
Shortly afterwards, he began a relationship with Michelle Higgins – who described him as “violent” and “controlling” during the trial.
Just days after Miss MacKenzie’s death, Higgins posted on Facebook that she was “in a relationship” – telling a pal she was referring to Jackson.
And when Jackson was taken into custody for an outstanding warrant she sent him a comforting text message, saying how much she misses him. She tells him she’s going to settle down to watch Family Guy – while the bagged remains of Miss MacKenzie are just feet away in the kitchen, hidden behind the tumble dryer.
But with Jackson behind bars, Higgins took the chance to leave Market Street and move in with David Melville.
The pair celebrated their new relationship with a trip to Aberdeen. They caught a bus out of Montrose on the morning of November 5 – the day that police began recovering body parts from wheelie bins around the town centre.
