Ashleigh Hall was a regular teenage girl, her
mobile phone and the internet featured in her everyday life, she
was well liked by her friends and had around 400 friends on
Facebook, all of whom she knew.
However, in September Ashleigh added a good
looking bare-chested 17-year-old boy going by the name of Peter
Cartwright. Ashleigh was one of 173 people to accept him as a
friend on the networking site, almost all of whom were young
women.
After speaking to ‘Cartwright’ on Facebook she
added him on other popular social networking sites and began to
chat online with him regularly on MSN and tagged.com.
One month later ‘Cartwright’ enticed Ashleigh
to meet him in person; she packed her bags and told her mother she
was “going to stay at her friends”.
‘Cartwright’ then text Ashleigh to tell her
that his dad was going to pick her up and bring her to his house,
this was followed up by a text from the ‘father’ from another
phone.
Within hours she had been raped and killed
with her body being dumped in a field.
Peter Cartwright and his father never existed;
the Facebook profile was a fake created by convicted sex offender
Peter Chapman.
Peter Chapman, 33, spent months creating fake
profiles on various social networking sites hoping to eventually
lure a victim like Ashleigh. He used the internet to make contact
with 2,981 girls aged between 13 and 31. They posted 854 comments
on his Facebook page.
Days before he murdered Ashleigh, Chapman
tried to tempt a girl of 15 into his car in Hartlepool after using
the same Facebook trick. Fortunately she ran away as soon as she
saw his car in a lay-by.
Chapman was arrested and sentenced to 35 years
by Judge Peter Fox who said Chapman was a significant danger to
young woman.
Ashleigh Hall’s one mistake in adding a
stranger cost her her life and cost a mother a beloved daughter and
‘best friend’.
Ashleigh’s friends have launched a campaign
highlighting the potential dangers of the internet by creating a
set of rules in the hope that they will keep young people safe in
the future.