Teen acid attacker faked poison pen letter

● Fake note ‘urged her to take her own life’ after ‘wicked’ incident at school

A teenager who attacked a love rival with acid faked a poison pen letter from the victim after she had been scarred for life.

Emily Bowen, 18, wrote a note to herself demanding that she take her own life and signed it with her victim’s name.

The letter was written six weeks after Bowen filled Molly Young’s viola case with sulphuric acid that poured on to her legs.

A sheriff said the note, combined with her actions cast a “very disturbing light” on Bowen’s thinking.

Bowen, who is the daughter of a QC, was jailed for 21 months earlier this week. A friend said she had been accepted by Aberdeen University to study law.

A teenage acid attacker wrote a fake letter demanding she take her own life and pretended the note came from her victim.

Emily Bowen, who was jailed this week for an acid attack on love rival Molly Young, prepared the note and signed it with Molly’s name.

The move by Bowen took place six weeks after she had poured One Shot drain cleaner – containing 91 per cent sulphuric acid – into her victim’s viola case.

The acidic liquid then poured out of the case and on to the 18-year-old’s legs as she took the instrument down from a shelf in the music room at Knox Academy, in Haddington, East Lothian.

Bowen was jailed for 21 months for the “wicked” incident which took place in September last year. The sentence was handed down by Sheriff Michael O’grady at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Monday. When Bowen pleaded guilty during a hearing on 26 June the court was told the 18-yearold had written the letter to herself and signed it with her victim’s name.

Fiscal depute Aidan Higgins said: “On 10 November last year Emily Bowen prepared a letter which appeared to come from Molly Young in which she talked of [urging] Emily Bowen to kill herself.

“Subsequently Emily Bowen admitted it was she who was the author of the letter.”

And on Monday Sheriff O’grady referred to the fake letter during his sentencing, saying her “careful and premeditated actions” combined with the penning of the note “casts a very disturbing light on your thinking”.

A friend, who did not want to identified, said: “What Emily did to poor Molly was really bad and she deserves everything she gets.

“But to make it all the worse she wrote that letter saying she could kill herself and then pretended it came from Molly. I mean, how sick is that?

“Some folk in the town had sympathy for her after the acid incident as they thought it was

0 Emily Bowen used acid to attack Molly Young, right a spur of the moment thing, but after finding out about the letter they soon changed their minds.”

Bowen, from Haddington, is the daughter of Andrew Bowen QC and the family friend also revealed the teenager wanted to follow in her father’s legal footsteps as she was due to study law at Aberdeen University.

The friend said: “Emily had been accepted to Aberdeen University to take a law degree.

“She is a very intelligent girl and she would have sailed through any degree she wanted to do.

“She has always looked up to her father Andy and I think it was a dream of hers to follow him in his profession.”

Mr Bowen sat beside his daughter in the dock when she pleaded guilty to recklessly and culpably pouring sulphuric acid into Molly Young’s viola case during a court hearing in June.