KOMPAS.com - She was a young girl who lacked confidence and simply wanted a boyfriend. Then Ashleigh Hall clicked on to Peter Chapman's Facebook profile and saw a bare-chested teenager who was muscular, good looking and - crucially - interested in her.
Tragically for the 17-year-old trainee nursery nurse, the image of her young suitor was bogus. In fact, he was a shaven-headed 33-year-old serial rapist who would lure her to her death and dump her in a ditch.
The appalling case has highlighted the astonishing ease with which potential predators can lure in their victims via social networking sites such as Facebook. Last night, Ashleigh's mother Andrea pleaded: 'Parents - ask your kids to tell you who they are talking to online.'
As 'calculated and wicked' Chapman began a minimum jail term of 35 years for Ashleigh's kidnap, rape and murder, it emerged that despite being a registered sex offender he had vanished off the police 'radar' for over a year after his risk level was downgraded.
Mrs Hall, 39, wept as horrific details of her daughter's last few hours were revealed in court. She said later: 'Ashleigh wasn't a bad kid. She wasn't naughty. She made one mistake and has paid for it with her life.
'Something more should have been done to stop him. He had someone else's photo on his (Facebook) page.
'It's an awful thought that there is a boy out there and this man was using his photo to prey on young girls. It is unimaginable what my family and I have been through.'
Chapman had previously been jailed for raping and robbing two prostitutes at knifepoint - including a 17-year-old - but a series of failings allowed him to roam free.
Even on the day he was arrested for the murder, he was on his way to meet yet another 'Facebook friend'.
He was stopped by police over a suspected arson attack in Newbury, Berkshire, a month earlier. The case shows how easy it is for teenagers to be targeted for sex or worse by convicted sex offenders who can easily fake their identities online and then arrange to meet them.
Astonishingly, dozens of other young women were prepared to send explicit photos of themselves to the teenager's killer - despite never having met him. Chapman had met Ashleigh through Facebook on September 21, 2009, using the bogus photograph of a handsome boy in his late teens and a new identity, Peter Cartwright.
Graham Reeds, QC, prosecuting, told Teesside Crown Court: 'She was excited about meeting the person she thought was an attractive 19-year-old lad, who had a Facebook page showing his picture, and who had been sending her suggestive text messages.
'However, what she did not know was that all of these text messages and the computer chat were from this defendant: A 32-year-old man who at the time was living out of the back of his car.'
They arranged to meet - with Chapman pretending to be 'Peter's dad' to explain why he looked nothing like the photo - on October 25 last year.
He drove her to a secluded area called Thorpe Larches near Sedgefield in County Durham. Once there Chapman forced her to perform a sex act before he bound and gagged her with duct tape, wrapping so much around her head that she suffocated to death. He dumped her body in a ditch and drove off.
After his arrest, Chapman was taken to Middlesbrough police station where he asked to see a detective and confessed: 'I killed someone last night. I need to tell somebody from CID where the body is... It hasn't been reported yet.'
Chapman had been in trouble since the age of 15. He was taking drugs, stealing and had been arrested for sex offences, although never convicted.
In 1996, aged 19, he was accused of raping a girl he had befriended. The allegations were later dropped. In that same year, he was jailed for seven years for raping and robbing two prostitutes at knifepoint.
He was released in November 2000 and supervised by the police and the probation service under Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA). He moved to Liverpool where he was monitored-every three months as a high risk offender. In 2002 he was arrested by Cheshire Police for the rape and kidnap of a prostitute in Ellesmere Port but the case was dropped.
By June he had moved to Bristol where he was arrested for deception offences. In February 2003 he was arrested in Liverpool for the rape and kidnap of a prostitute. Again the case was dropped.
Incredibly, because he kept out of trouble for the next three years, he was downgraded to medium-risk in 2007. By early 2008 he no longer needed to report to his probation worker but was still being monitored by police under MAPPA every six months.
Later that year, in September, when police visited his Liverpool home, they discovered he was no longer there. They tried to find him locally but failed.
It was only a year later that they circulated his details nationally as a missing sex offender. They are the ones that got away. Of Peter Chapman's 127 designated Facebook friends, all were girls and each one a potential victim. They varied in ages but all had one thing in common: They believed he was a good-looking teenager with a body to match.
Indeed, on the day he was arrested for Ashleigh's murder, he was driving to meet yet another of the young women he had lured into his online lair. Incredibly, dozens of girls swapped sexually explicit comments and sent photographs of themselves posing in underwear or pyjamas with a man they had never met. They also replied to scores of intimate questionnaires.
By the time he murdered Ashleigh Hall, sex-obsessed Chapman was trawling the internet on a daily basis and was logged on to at least ten social networking sites looking for girls - young girls in particular. Each of his profiles was bogus and was complemented by fake photos.
He called himself Peter Cartwright, or DJPete, and said he was a 19-year-old from Stockton. It worked.
On one site, Faces.com, Chapman had 3,919 visitors. He described himself as single, 5ft 10in, with blue eyes and a 'slim, toned' body, a window maker whose interests were 'cars, girls hehe'.
Other social networking sites he joined as 'Peter Cartwright' included Netlog - on which alone he had 421 'friends' - Holabox, Profileheaven and Kazoba.
Each one could be a paedophile's paradise. Netlog - formerly known as Facebox - has been implicated before in cases of children groomed by paedophiles.
On one site, more than 14,600 visitors had clicked on his profile since the account was opened on New Year's Day in 2007 and by now he had amassed a total of 2,981 friends.
Again, all of them were girls. Their ages ranged from 13 to 31, and they had nicknames such as 'Baby Blonde' and 'Lil Minx'. After making contact with them he redirected them to private chatrooms.
'Wanna have sex with me?' began one quiz he wrote one lunchtime in May 2007. 'Post this and see just how many people comment you saying that they wanna have sex with you.'
He had clearly done it before and with some success. This time 16 girls replied. To Ashleigh Hall and plenty of others like her nothing seemed out of place. After all they weren't the only ones; he had thousands of friends.
But Peter Cartwright was not a 19-year-old labourer and he was not living in Stockton. His real name was Peter Chapman and he was a shaven-headed, bespectacled 33-year-old pervert and loner who was painfully thin, had 'dreadful' personal hygiene, had lost most of his teeth and was living in his car.
Last night, an extraordinary succession of victims came forward to tell their stories of how Chapman trapped them and those who knew him well and feared what he was capable of doing.
Victoria Routledge, 20, said Chapman - who was the live-in partner of her then close friend Dyanne Littler - may have targeted many more women. She told the Daily Mail how she once found sickening images on his laptop of women being raped.
'Dyanne was using their laptop,' she said. 'So I used his PC. He had told us all that only he was allowed to use it but he wasn't there so I figured, "Why not? It's not like he's going to kill me". I wanted to go on to Facebook but I clicked on a plain folder instead and inside it were pictures which were absolutely sick. My mouth went dry and I looked across at Dyanne who was busy on the net as well.
'The pictures showed people being forced to have sex and were thoroughly revolting. I quickly closed the folder and left.'
He soon turned his attentions to Miss Routledge. She and two other women even posed for a photo with Chapman.
Smiling blissfully for the camera, Miss Routledge had no idea that the man taking her picture was just weeks away from murdering Ashleigh Hall. She said Chapman often borrowed her car for hours at a time, never revealing where he had gone or who he had seen.
She said she had first met Chapman when Miss Littler invited her round for tea. 'To say that I found him creepy was an understatement,' she said.
'But Dyanne was with him so I couldn't speak my mind. They seemed to have a volatile relationship, always arguing, but they lived together so I figured there had to be some sort of connection. Dyanne had also had his baby.
'In no time at all he started coming around my house. I think the first time that it happened something had gone wrong with my car. I mentioned it in passing to Dyanne and he was round there in a flash.
'After a couple of weeks of meeting Peter he would come round and announce that he had to borrow my car. I felt slightly obligated to him because he had helped out with one or two mechanical problems. He would go off for a couple of hours and then come back without saying where he had been. It was always at night and if you asked him what he had been up to he would simply change the subject.'
By then Chapman's violent urges were already beginning to show. 'Dyanne started coming into work with marks on her face and arms,' said Victoria.
'When I asked her what it was she wouldn't respond.'
She also found herself having an increasing number of uncomfortably personal conversations with Chapman - in particular about his relationship with Miss Littler.
She said: 'He was always asking me if I had a boyfriend and when I had last had sex.'
Months before Chapman killed Ashleigh, the homeless drifter had begun talking to lonely single mother, Elise Anderson, 22. Like Ashleigh, she chatted with him for hours online after meeting him on a social networking site.
He was crude, but she was just glad to talk to somebody. Believing him to be a harmless 17-year-old, the pair exchanged hundreds of messages before he finally asked if she was interested in meeting up. But, unlike Ashleigh, she refused.
'I can't help thinking what might have happened if I had gone through with it and met up with him,' she said yesterday. 'Conversations with him on MSN were always crude.
'I can remember asking where he lived but I can't remember getting any replies. He would never reveal the specifics. He would just say he didn't live that far from me so we could meet up. He then asked if I would consider it.'
In reality, Chapman was in Liverpool while Miss Anderson was in Evesham, Worcestershire.
Miss Anderson, a part-time student, said she first met Chapman on the networking site Netlog. Among other girls who also made contact with his alter ego was Alvina Betts, 20, of Whitehaven, Cumbria.
She said: 'He was nice looking and there didn't seem to be anything dodgy about him. It makes me shudder to think of it.'
He also pestered and tried to seduce another woman who was the spitting image of his victim and former fiancee. He became obsessed with single mother Catherine Carty, 30, after meeting her on the internet. He bombarded her with sleazy messages through Facebook and MSN - and visited her house 100 times.
Miss Carty, of Warrington, Cheshire, said: 'I collapsed when I found out Chapman had been arrested. The girl looks like me and so does his ex-fiancee.'
For Chapman, a computer literate, it was an all too easy way of meeting young girls.
Peter Bradley, deputy director of children's charity Kidscape, said: 'This case highlights the absolute danger of assuming people's identities on social networking sites.
'It is very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. There are people who will be prepared to assault or even commit murder.'
The Belgium-based Netlog claims to have 56 million users across Europe and to be the market leader in countries including Italy and Switzerland.
A spokesman said: 'We work with authorities across Europe to prevent people abusing our site, and we have moderators working around the clock who respond to reports of abuse.
'But unfortunately there's currently no way of 100 per cent confirming someone's identity online.'
