Mother of murdered Ashleigh Hall urges action on websites

Oct 31 2009 By Tom Wilkinson, The Journal

THE mother of a teenager allegedly killed by a man she met on a social networking site said yesterday her daughter had "made one mistake and has paid for it with her life".

Andrea Hall said she felt like her "heart had been ripped out" when uniformed officers arrived at the family home in Darlington to inform her that her 17-year-old daughter Ashleigh Hall’s body had been found in a field in Sedgefield, County Durham, on Monday evening.

"My whole world fell apart in those two seconds," she said.

In her tearful first interview since Ashleigh’s death, she said: "She was so well loved. We have been inundated with cards and flowers. Her friends have never been off the phone."

The single mother urged social networking sites to bring in tighter controls on people creating profiles.

"The people who run Facebook and other social networking sites do have some responsibility for bringing in these controls," she said.

"Everybody knows that the internet can be a dangerous place. We trusted Facebook and she was always told never to add a stranger as a friend.

"I brought her up not to talk to strangers and that applied to the internet as well. She said she would never add a stranger as a friend on Facebook.

"She had about 400 friends on Facebook but she knew every single one of them. We can’t imagine how she got to be friends with someone she didn’t know."

Ashleigh, who was studying to become a nursery nurse, was a much-loved sister to Olivia, six, Ellie, four, and Evie, one.

She went missing after a pleasant family day at their Darlington home last Sunday. Her mother said: "On Sunday morning Ashleigh asked me ‘are you making my breakfast?’ I said ‘No’ so she said ‘I will make yours then’.

"She made sausage sandwiches which was really nice because that was the first time she had made breakfast in ages. Sunday was a good day and Ashleigh was in a great mood. On Sunday evening she was on the computer chatting to friends on MSN. At about 7.30pm she asked if she could sleep at a friend’s house.

"It was a bit last-minute but I said ‘Yes, OK, as long as you are home by 10.30 the next day’. She threw some clothes in a bag and went downstairs.

"I was upstairs putting the young ones to bed. Ashleigh opened the door and shouted: ‘See you tomorrow, mum’. I shouted to her to make sure she was home by 10.30. She said ‘I will’ and that was it. I never saw her again."