It was Thomas Griffiths, her ex-boyfriend, with whom she had broken up with the night before.
When Ellie's mother, Carole, returned home later that day, her daughter was dead. She had been strangled and stabbed 13 times in the face and neck. Griffiths, also 17 and a pupil at the same school, had arranged the scene to make it look like Ellie had inflicted the fatal wounds herself, placing the knife in her hand and reinserting it into her neck, but he would later be convicted of her murder and sent to prison.
Two women a week are killed by a current or former partner, according to domestic violence charity Refuge. In Ellie's case, it was her first boyfriend and she had been dating just three months. Griffiths had no criminal record and came from a seemingly normal middle-class background, but when Carole looks back, there were warning signs, she said, that she and Ellie missed.
"I wish I had known then what I know now," said Carole, 53, at a restaurant in Paddington, having taken the train from her Wiltshire home to relive the missed red flags of his coercive and controlling behaviour that she hoped other young girls and parents might learn from. "Ellie was a vivacious and self-assured girl who had lots of friends, but he was much less outgoing and confident," she began.
"Just days into the relationship, Ellie told me that Tom had boasted that his family had two-holiday homes, one in Majorca and another in Lyme Regis. He had showed her pictures of this villa in Spain with a pool, but Ellie doubted the story and it was all lies. A few days later, with her birthday approaching, Tom, who had a part-time job at Iceland, said he was going to spend 'loads' on her present, which made her feel uneasy, not least because she couldn't afford to do the same for him."
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