An 'inspirational' young mother was found hanged in a hotel room after she became terrified of losing her three-year-old son when he went to live with his father.
Ellen Scott from Haworth, West Yorkshire, suffered panic attacks as she battled her son's father for custody of their child, and became 'stressed' by the possibility she might be pregnant again.
The 23-year-old - a keen blogger who was a studying for a degree in Event Management at Leeds Beckett University - was engaged to be married and set to fly out to visit friends in Toulouse, southern France on June 25 last year.
But Miss Scott was found in her room at the £100-a-night Hallmark Hotel near Manchester Airport where she had been staying overnight ahead of her flight. Two scraps of handwritten paper were found in the bin, which read 'suicide' and 'recovery.
Miss Scott has been described by her parents as an 'amazing inspirational young lady' and 'the kindest person on this earth.'
An inquest into Miss Scott's death heard she suffered from mood swings and was prescribed anti depressants after she became 'terrified' of losing her child when he temporarily went to live his father.
Although she got custody of the child following a court battle Miss Scott had also been to see her GP with anxiety and had become concerned about a pregnancy test. n a public blog written three weeks before her death Miss Scott wrote: 'The soul is so unbelievably confusing, we never stop learning about how our unconscious thought process affects our actions on an unwell mind - not that my mind is unwell, it just has its days.
'This mindset only creeps in to haunt when I become anxious of my Cub's return. I am learning to use my energies in a positive manner. I get paranoid and realize these feelings are only present because on occasion he hasn't returned home.
'I was emotionally tormented for such a period of time that it is only natural to go into defence and panic. Any mother would be exactly the same. It's a long game of driving somebody completely insane. Miss Scott's mother Anna, 49, told the inquest in Cheshire: 'Her mood swings were to the extreme. She could be so happy or she could be so down that she couldn't get out of bed.
'The Thursday before her birthday I sent her pictures of her son in the paddling pool and she replied 'is it nice outside?' which meant she was having a bad day. But being typically Ellen she was taken out by friends in the evening and had a really nice evening, she was very up and down all the time.
'On her birthday she was happy, and we had cake and her son was very excited to give it to her. She was excited to go France too. It is difficult because she was so changeable all the time. One of the biggest problems for her is that she was terrified of losing her son. The previous summer his dad had taken him and said he was living with him. We went through all the courts and we got him back into her custody. 'The court order states that he gets to have him one week at the end of the month and that was when her anxiety was sky high, when she was not with him. She tried to fill her week with things to take her mind off it - they were not amicable as is suggested.
'She got to the hotel around 4pm ish and she still seemed okay until later on that night. Then the messages I got became much more serious and she began talking about the pregnancy and asked if I could speak to her fiancé. I told her 'no he needs to talk to you' and 'you need to come home and talk to him' and not to go to France.
'She sent me a message that she wanted me to send to him and in the message she referred to having thought about hanging herself from the ceiling but that she chickened out. She did call me but I didn't answer. When I tried to call her back she didn't answer and said she didn't want to speak to me
'Sometimes with Ellen it was better to take a hard line with her to be able to pull her out of it, but it just didn't work that night. The last message I got from her didn't really make sense, she said 'I'm losing control of my life' and something else that didn't make sense.
'I rang the hotel because I was worried about her and I couldn't get through to anyone. I left a voicemail. I just wanted them to check the room.
It was the same situation that we had been thought a thousand times but this time there was no one there to talk her out of it.
'She probably didn't realise it would be so quick, that she would be unconscious so quickly and that no one was there to help her. I'm sure she didn't go to the hotel with the intention to do that.'
The inquest heard a taxi arrived for Ellen at 4.45am on the 25th of June but there was a do not disturb sign on her door and no answer when they called for her and the cab drove off. Staff found her body at 1.30pm when they used the master key to get entry.
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