The family: An ordinary family enduring the most unimaginable and extraordinary circumstances, the Bigleys have found themselves thrust into the eye of a political and media hurricane that has brought them unrelenting horror and grief.
Members of the family were last night gathered around their mother, Elizabeth (86), known as Lil, to contemplate and cope with the news that her son Ken (62) had been murdered by the Islamist gang which kidnapped him from his house in Baghdad three weeks ago.
Their vigil, which had gone from despair to hope that Ken's life would be spared after he was shown alive in a video last week, ended with news of another film clip, this time of their loved one being beheaded by a man wielding a knife.
Mrs Bigley, who has a weak heart, was late yesterday in the care of a nurse who arrived at her red-brick, Victorian terrace home in Liverpool as the world waited for confirmation of her son's fate. She was hospitalised a number of times during her ordeal.
It was Mrs Bigley's Irish heritage that offered the last vestige of optimism for the family. As she was born in Ticknock, Co Dublin, near the Wicklow mountains, her offspring are entitled to be Irish.
Ken's reclassification from British to Irish citizen, with details of his new passport given just days ago to the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera, watched closely by Islamist fanatics, was another reason for the Bigleys to hold to the hope that they would see him alive again soon.
Mrs Bigley emigrated to Liverpool with her sister Peggy, from whom she has been inseparable all her life and who lives next door in Bedford Street, in the Walton district. The women worked for the local city council as home help for the elderly.
In 1937, she married Tom Bigley, a fitter at the Merseyside docks, and they had four sons, Stan (65), Ken (62), Paul (54) and Philip (49). Tom was known as a strict disciplinarian, and told Paul before he died that his toughness was born of a desire for his boys to be successful.
Paul, who lives in Holland, has said the family was very close.
"Beatlemania passed us by. We were just an ordinary working-class family. Ken was and is my best mate. He has a wild sense of humour. He would just tell some stories that would just have you walking to the toilets with your legs crossed," he told journalists last month.
Ken, an avid fan of Everton football club, left school at 16 and qualified with a local firm making surgical tools. He later joined an engineering firm, and after completing his National Service and marrying his first wife, Margaret, at age 21, he became a "ten pound pom" and emigrated in 1963, first to Australia and then New Zealand.
Family pulled him back to Liverpool, with two young sons, Paul and Craig in tow, a few years later and he soon left engineering to buy two supermarkets. Plans of becoming a successful businessman evaporated when Margaret was held up by an armed robber, and the couple sold up and moved to Somerset, where they bought a pub.
"He tried a few things and for various reasons they didn't work. But the pub was the thing he was really excited about. He really thought this was it, the place he could raise his kids and settle down. He thought it would be the life of Riley, pulling pints and chatting," Paul recalled.
This dream turned to tragedy when, 18 years ago, his son Paul was knocked from his bike and, never having recovered from a coma, died in hospital when Ken gave doctors permission to turn off life-support machinery.
His marriage crumbled soon after and he began the life of an expatriate, moving to the Middle East. He met his second wife, Sombat (42), in Dubai, and dreamed of settling into retirement in her native Thailand.
That dream was almost reality when he was kidnapped on September 16th.
With his contract nearing an end, he was counting on a big bonus that would fund retirement in a new and safer home.