A GRIEVING father spoke yesterday of the dangers of heroin after the death of his daughter, whose life was destroyed by addiction at the start of a promising modelling career.

Jacqueline Stables was looking forward to a glamorous life in front of the camera until, at the age of 17, she was introduced to the drug by a boyfriend. When she died eight years later, a hopeless junkie, she had lost her son to adoption, her beauty had faded and her body had wasted away to 6st.

She had turned to crime to finance her habit and served a three-month jail term for shoplifting. Ms Stables collapsed and died at her home in Avenham, near Preston, Lancashire, days after giving birth to her second child, a girl.

The Lancashire Coroner is to hold an inquest to establish the precise cause of death but Ms Stables’s father is in no doubt that her addiction to heroin is to blame. Jeff Stables, 43, who has four other children, spoke out to warn other parents of the dangers.

He said: “I just hope Jackie’s death makes some of her friends think. If her death can save even one of them, then it won’t be just a complete waste.

“She was a beautiful girl in every sense and could have been a model. She could have been anything. Jacqueline went from being a normal healthy girl to being very poorly. Her weight plummeted to 6st. The veins in her arms were perished, her body wrecked by long-term heroin use.”

Mr Stables, of Ribbleton, in Preston, said that his daughter’s problems began while still at school. She started playing truant and fell in with the “wrong crowd”.

He said that the addiction destroyed her life. She was jailed by Preston Magistrates’ Court for stealing clothes in 2000. When she came home to stay, especially at Christmas, she was not allowed to go upstairs for fear that she would steal her siblings’ possessions for cash to feed her habit. “While she was staying with us we found heroin,” Mr Stables said. “I have other children and I could not risk them finding it.

“I do not want her dismissed just as a heroin addict. She was a beautiful girl with a big heart.”

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