Children played in paddling pool before spending night in tent Jury had to steel themselves to look at pictures of dead body

THROUGHOUT the trial, the members of the jury at Chester crown court had to refer frequently to a black ring binder full of photographs.

One was a snap of seven-year-old Sophie Hook wearing a blue and white hat and smiling broadly. It was taken in her uncle's garden on July 29 last year, the day she went to Llandudno to celebrate her cousin Luke's ninth birthday.

Within hours she was being photographed again. Not this time by her parents but by a police scenes-of-crime officer who had the gruesome task of taking pictures of her battered body as it lay naked and face down on a stony beach.

The jury had to steel themselves to look at those pictures and many others taken later at a mortuary.

The photographs, laid out before prosecuting counsel Gerard Elias QC, were clearly visible to reporters perched in a narrow gallery above the witness box. But it was that of Sophie in her hat that lingered in the memory; it was the saddest of the lot, a constant reminder of a life cut short, an echo of mourning epitaphs remembered from small graves in a thousand churchyards.

Sophie had travelled from her home in Great Budworth, Cheshire, to North Wales with her parents Julie...