Moving her hand slowly along a board of words Kara Hoyte pressed her finger against “yes”. From her intensive-care bed, the teenager had made the first step in identifying the attacker who had left her braindamaged and partially paralysed.

Yesterday Ms Hoyte was at the Old Bailey to see Mario Celaire receive two life sentences after her evidence proved that her former boyfriend, a professional footballer, had attempted to murder her. Her evidence also forced Celaire finally to admit the manslaughter of another former girlfriend seven years after he was found not guilty by a jury of killing her.

The Old Bailey was told of the courage that Ms Hoyte had shown in painstakingly piecing together the evidence that led to Celaire’s guilty pleas.

Ms Hoyte, 19, an aspiring model, had been found with severe head injuries caused by a hammer in her East London flat in February 2007. Police had no idea who carried out the attack and doctors feared that she would die.

While still in intensive care Ms Hoyte was given a board and pen and began scrawling “eo”. Her mother, Eunice Lander, then wrote on the board “yes”, “no” and “don’t know”. She asked her daughter if she knew who carried out the attack and the teenager’s hand pressed on the word “yes”. The man who left her daughter for dead was the childhood friend who had twice come to visit her in intensive care. During months of painstaking work Ms Hoyte not only recalled details of the attack but remembered how the former Maidstone United player had confessed he had killed his previous ex-girlfriend.

Nine months after the attack Ms Hoyte, of Leytonstone, East London, was able to tell detectives what had happened, despite continuing to be paralysed down her right side and suffering severe speech difficulties. She told also of how Celaire had admitted killing Cassandra McDermott. Ms Hoyte believes that he had tried to kill her to prevent her repeating his confession.

Celaire, of Sydenham, had been cleared at the Old Bailey of murdering Ms McDermott in 2002. The court was told that he had beaten her and left her to die at her mother’s house in Norbury, South London, after years of violence.

The double jeopardy rule that prevented anyone from being tried twice for the same crime was changed in 2005 for cases where “new and compelling evidence” could be produced. After Ms Hoyte’s evidence, prosecution lawyers applied to reopen the inquiry into Ms McDermott’s killing and successfully got the acquittal quashed in the Court of Appeal.

On the day that the trial was due to start last month, Celaire finally admitted the manslaughter of Ms McDermott and the attempted murder of Ms Hoyte. It emerged yesterday that aged 15 he had been jailed for four years for raping a 17-year-old girl with learning difficulties. Ms Hoyte sat quietly at the back of the court as Simon Denison, QC, read a poignant statement she had addressed to “Mario”:“I leave here today free with the whole world at my feet. You, on the other hand, have a long time to reflect and to understand you cannot control another person.”

After the sentencing, Miss Hoyte, who can talk again, spoke of her horror when Celaire visited her in intensive care before she could warn her family that he was the attacker. “I thought, this is not real, I wanted to scream, to push him to go away but I couldn’t because of the breathing tubes,” she said.

“I knew I had to tell my mum it was Mario.” She revealed the difficulties that she faces. “I’ve lost my independence. I can’t walk and I can’t talk properly. Every day I shower and dress myself and then I look in the mirror and it is disgusting,” she said.

But she must stare in the mirror for hours at a time while practising the word pronunciation and arm movements that, step by step, are helping rebuild her life.

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