Horror of embracing evil in the heart of your family

When we heard about the death of Louella FletcherMichie from an accidental drugs overdose at a music festival on the eve of her 25th birthday in 2017, our initial thoughts were of the tragic, senseless waste of a young life.

For the parents of free- spirited youngsters, sadness would have been tinged with apprehension about the folly of youth and casual drug taking. But the conviction for manslaughter this week of Louella’s rapper boyfriend Ceon Broughton made clear in brutal detail that, for all parents, this tragic story was darkly complex. It’s also about the nightmare of unwittingly welcoming evil into the heart of your family.

Louella was devoted to Broughton. They’d been an on- off couple for 15 months when he supplied her with the drugs that killed her at a Dorset music festival. even as she lay hallucinating and convulsing, he callously filmed her panic, decline and eventual death on his phone.

not only that, he refused to seek help from medics just 400 yards away because he was scared of being jailed for violating a suspended sentence for two charges of carrying a knife.

Yet this was the man Louella’s parents — holby City actor John Michie and former hot Gossip dancer Carol Fletcher — invited for Christmas into their £1.2 m north London home, and to John’s 60th birthday dinner.

Immediately after Louella’s death, they defended Broughton, saying it was a tragic accident and there was no malice in him. Why wouldn’t they have embraced him? We all want our children to find their own way, to meet their soul mates, discover ‘the one’. They trusted Louella, believed she was sensible and knew nothing of Broughton’s predeliction for feeding drugs to girls before filming them, or his obsession with death.

They just saw their daughter’s happiness with him. And the simple fact is loving parents will do their utmost to ensure their children’s happiness, to give them succour and support.

It was only as the horrific details of Broughton’s monstrous character emerged during the court case that the scales finally fell from Louella’s mum and dad’s eyes.

That is why the tragedy is doubly heart- breaking. For I fear this patently decent couple, who did their very best for their daughter, will forever now wrongly blame themselves — and all because parental love is eternally blind.