���˿���

A 14-year-old Dutch girl had already written a suicide note before she had started communicating with a man charged with encouraging her to take her own life, a trial jury has been told.

Christopher Ballard, 43, is said to have sent messages to Gina van Houten on an online chat forum between February and March 2018 outlining a "suicide pact" between them before her death on 28 March that year.

Sending out the jury at Bradford Crown Court on Monday, judge Mrs Justice Lambert told them they must decide whether the messages Mr Ballard sent to the teenager were capable of encouraging suicide.

Mr Ballard, of Clayton Road, Bradford, denies a charge of encouraging or assisting her suicide.

Summing up, Mrs Justice Lambert told the jury that if the messages sent by Mr Ballard were capable of encouraging suicide, they must then decide if he had intended them to do so.

The judge told the jury that Gina's suicide note was written on her laptop in January 2018.

She also stressed that the last communication between Mr Ballard and Gina was on 4 March - 24 days before she took her own life.

"We do not know how she was feeling, what made her feel that way, who she had communicated with," the judge said.

'Terrible times'

Mrs Justice Lambert told the court that Mr Ballard, who was originally from Halifax, had no previous convictions, lived with his parents and worked in a plastics factory.

He found face-to-face interactions "much more difficult" than those online, and he could spend as long as 28 hours straight playing an online game, she said.

The jury heard that Mr Ballard thought Gina was really an older man and that he thought she was not serious about taking her own life, the judge said.

"He described himself as someone rather younger. He told her he worked in a hospital and had access to drugs, which was not true," she added.

Mrs Justice Lambert said Mr Ballard had only learned of Gina's death when he was arrested in December 2020.

"When he found out, he said he felt terrible and felt sorry she must have been going through such terrible times," she said.

The judge told jurors that in a later police interview, Mr Ballard said he "never had any intention of encouraging her to do anything to herself, and from his perspective it was all role play".

Before sending jury members out to consider their verdict, Mrs Justice Lambert told them that Mr Ballard "did not accept that what he had written was capable of encouraging someone to commit suicide".

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on ���˿��� Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.