A BULLIED teenage girl killed herself in a suicide pact because she could not bear to be parted from her best friend.

Laura Rhodes, 13, of Neath, South Wales, died from an overdose of painkillers in a pact with a 14-year-old girl whom she had met on the internet.

David Osborne, the Neath Coroner, said that Laura had killed herself because she felt that life was not worth living without her friend, who survived an overdose but remains in a psychiatric unit.

The girls professed to be lesbians and the homophobic bullying that Laura suffered at Cefn Saeson Comprehensive School in Neath, combined with taunts about her weight, contributed to her misery.

Dr Osborne said that the school had tried unsuccessfully to stop the bullying and after a year Laura was sent to a pupil referral unit.

Peter Davies, a solicitor for Michael and Yvonne Rhodes, Laura’s parents, said after the verdict: “They do not accept that Cefn Saeson school did all it could to deal with the bullying. The family hope that lessons will be learnt from their tragic loss so that others do not have to suffer as they have.”

Alun Griffiths, the head teacher at the school, told the inquest that he and his colleagues had done everything that they could to stop Laura being bullied.

“We’ve searched our consciences and I have to say our consciences are clear,” he said. “We couldn’t have done more to support Laura and her family.” The parents released the second half of a letter that Laura wrote about her experiences at the hands of bullies before her death on September 4 last year.

She described how she tried to commit suicide at a school disco, how she slashed herself with scissors and how let down she felt by the authorities.

Bitter at being sent to the referral unit, she wrote: “See, that’s what you get when you ask for help.”

After months of taunts and loneliness, Laura thought that she had found true love with the 14-year-old, who cannot be named. They chatted almost every day by telephone and e-mail. Shortly before their suicide pact, they went away on holiday to Crete with Laura’s parents. Within hours of returning to Britain they ran away, only to be found by police two days later at an hotel in Bath.

While being driven home by officers, the court was told, Laura hatched a plan for the two of them to end their lives.

Laura told her: “We should kill ourselves. There’s a song, Joining Me in Death. We should do that.”

When the girls reached Laura’s home they went upstairs to bed. They talked, played music, watched a video and wrote goodbye letters to each other and their families.

They had a last embrace after 3am, took pills and cuddled on Laura’s bed to die.

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