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Incomprehensive as it seems, the session continued for a further 30 minutes by which time Jeane, feeling rejected by the child's reaction, had been ordered out of the room.

She watched the remainder of the session on a TV monitor set up next door to assist Watkins in assessing the success of the treatment, and recoiled in horror when her daughter was finally unwrapped, 70 minutes after being first entombed in the blue sheet.

Candace's face was ghostly white and flecked with vomit, her skin clammy, her lips and fingers blue.

Jeane burst back into the room and performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the lifeless child.

An ambulance was called. At nine the next morning, Candace was pronounced brain-dead.

When these video-recorded scenes were played to a packed courtroom last week, they were greeted with stunned silence, followed by tears of anger, disbelief and crushing sadness.

Local newspaper reporter Bill Johnson said the video was the worst thing he had witnessed in 24 yers of journalism. He said: "It has scarred me. My heart is breaking and I am having trouble keeping it together."

The trial at which these harrowing scenes were played out is that of Connell Watkins and her assistant and fellow therapist Julie Ponder. Both women are charged with child abuse resulting in death.

Watkins also stands accused of criminal impersonation and unlawful practice of psychotherapy, for using fake credentials when she was in fact unlicensed. If found guilty, they could face up to 48 years in jail.

The other two assistants will face trial later in the year. For no one, it must be said, emerges from this tragic tale with their reputation intact.

Not the money-grabbing therapists who charged £4,600 to perform quack-like 'mumbo-jumbo' on a frightened little girl; not Jeane Newmaker who allowed herself to be seduced by such people.

Nor, for that matter, the Colorado authorities who allowed these therapists to practise, or the medics in Candace's home state of North Carolina who fed Jeane's belief that the youngster was disturbed.

We may never know what prompted a caring and respectable woman to subject her adopted daughter to such cruelty, or what motivated Watkins, herself a well-educated mother, to mete it out.

But what is clear is the tragic role played by modern American society; a society in which children can be adopted with extraordinary ease - and then, when they turn out not to be the 'perfect' accessory, subjected to appalling abuse with the help of so-called professionals.

A society in which Candace Newmaker's death was an accident waiting to happen.

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