'My beautiful daughter is gone, but he's still strutting around, it's hard to take in.' In her first interview, the mother of Ashley Dale reveals the burning sense of injustice she still feels over her daughter's death By Kathryn Knight for the Daily Mail Published: 01:52, 19 August 2024 | Updated: 01:52, 19 August 2024 e-mail View comments Like any parent who worries about their child’s choice of romantic partner, Julie Dale heaved a sigh of relief when her daughter Ashley ended her relationship with her boyfriend, Lee Harrison. Penniless, jobless and with friends, everyone suspected, in rather low places, he couldn’t drive.
He didn’t even have a bank account. Neither Julie, nor her husband Robert, could understand what Ashley saw in him. Nevertheless, Ashley, a beautiful, charismatic, 28-year-old university graduate, with a good job as an environmental health officer for the local council, was determined to help him turn his life around.
‘She was striving so badly for him to become something that he was never going to be,’ Julie, 47, recalls. Then suddenly, three years ago, Ashley’s ‘lightbulb moment’ finally came. ‘She was heading for 30, she wanted to get married and have children, and she couldn’t do that with him.
So she ended it,’ says Julie. ‘We were delighted.’ Sadly, their jubilation was short-lived.
Within six months Ashley and Lee were back together, and eight months after that, Ashley was dead. Slaughtered, in cold blood, in a hail of .