DANCE teacher Edwin ‘Teddy Eddie’ Dillon was jailed yesterday for sexual activity with five under-age girls. It was the child sexual exploitation specialist unit Engage’s biggest ever investigation.

“She knew it was coming to an end, but she wanted every last minute with him.

“He’d done such a good job on her that she felt like she was utterly betraying him, even though she knew everything he had done to her was wrong.”

The mother of one of Dillon’s five teenage victims says the hold he had over the girls turned her daughter against her.

Her misgivings at the ‘relationship’ turned to deep distrust when she saw her daughter and ‘Eddie’ holding hands in Blackburn town centre.

But the mum’s legitimate concerns fell on stubborn teenage ears and only helped Dillon seize an emotional stranglehold over the 14-year-old.

He even taunted her parents over the internet, telling them he was the only family their daughter needed.

The mother said: “Before, she was absolutely lovely, she did as she was told, went to school, really caring, open, she was the kind of daughter you’d want.

“After he came on the scene she became very secretive, really argumentative, very angry, aggressive, would always say she didn’t like me, a few times that she hated me.

"But I knew it wasn’t her talking, it was coming through from him.“ After that, she started truanting from school, he was writing notes to the school signing them from me.

“She then decided she couldn’t live at home anymore, that it was unbearable and she started to go missing.

"This was when we started having to ring the police and put in missing reports.”

That led to the Engage team becoming involved.They are an award-winning partnership between specially trained Blackburn with Darwen Council staff, police and other agencies including the charity Banardo’s, which deals with child sexual exploitation.

While Dillon was revelling in his ‘puppet-master’ status, playing the girls off against each other, one of his victims was gradually realising that she was a victim of a manipulative groomer and not simply a young girl in love.

Her mother said: “He was using my daughter like that, not just sleeping with her but taking her money and everything he could off her.

"It was always under the pretence that he was going to have a relationship with her.

“What kept her bound to him all this time was that she was convinced when she turned 16 he was going to have a proper relationship with her, out in the open.

“Engage opened her eyes and she started to think, ‘Hang on, if he loved me, he shouldn’t be treating me like this. Love shouldn’t hurt like this’.

“She saw Engage as someone she could talk to. She couldn’t talk to me at that point because I was so dead against him, didn’t have a good word to say about him.

"Perhaps I handled it all the wrong way.

"She still really loved him and didn’t want to put in a statement to police to say what was going on, but she knew it was the right thing to do and that she had been used."

Now her daughter’s life is back on track, but the mother warned: “I think parents should keep a look out for their children’s characters changing, the secrecy, truancy from school, behaving differently.

"They should keep an eye out on who their children are friends with and maybe ask more questions.

“If it wasn’t for Engage and the police he’d still be out there now and my daughter would still be lost to me.”

Engage leader Nick McPartlin said groomers looked to identify ‘chinks in the armour’ of their victims and a change in behaviour was often a ‘significant’ indication.

Detective Sergeant Mark Whelan, who runs the Engage team, said: “Dillon was plausible.

"What makes a groomer is a manipulative, plausible person because without those two character traits the children don’t fall for them.”