Farmer’s son faces teen murder charge

A FARMER’S son has been charged with the murder of a former schoolmate whose partially stripped body was found dumped in a field.

Matthew Mason, 18, was arrested hours after Alex Rodda, 15, was discovered dead on Friday morning.

Police refused to reveal exactly how Alex was killed, but Mason has also been charged with possession of a knife in a public place.

Alex’s mother Lisa, 50, said: ‘Everybody loved Alex. He was caring and kind. Alex was my beautiful son but he was naive.

‘He just trusted people when, perhaps, he shouldn’t have done. I am heartbroken.’

In a post on Facebook, his father, Adam, 58, said that Alex would ‘forever be in our hearts’. Mr Rodda, who is believed to run a pub in Audlem, Cheshire, wrote: ‘I will never get over losing you son. I love and miss you more than life itself.’

Alex, a pupil at Holmes Chapel Comprehensive School in Cheshire, was last seen at 6pm on Thursday. His body was found by a farmer off a country lane in Ashley, Cheshire, six miles from his home in Knutsford, shortly before 8am on Friday.

Mason was arrested four hours later around 50 miles away in Forton, Staffordshire. He was charged with Alex’s murder on Saturday, and was due to appear before magistrates in Crewe this morning.

Mason, who lives on a £1million farm near Knutsford, was also previously a pupil at Holmes Chapel Comprehensive, but was working at a machinery hire firm. Friends say Alex and Mason had met ‘six or seven times before’. ÷A 14-year-old boy is being held by police after an older teenager was stabbed to death. The 17-year-old died in hospital after being found injured in a Bristol street on Saturday. Police have begun a murder investigation.