AFTER FIEND CHOKED LAD TO DEATH My son was murdered after posting a stupid joke on Facebook

boys.” During the trial she saw Carl’s final moments over and over again on CCTV recordings.

She said: “John Dickson caught Carl in a headlock and dragged him to the ground but Carl got free.

“Then John grabbed him in a choke hold again and this time he did not let go. It takes at least 60 to 90 seconds to suffocate someone so he held him like that for more than a minute.

“He held him as he felt the life slipping out of him. He had his life in his hands and he let it go.

“After he walked away calmly before he turned, lifted his foot and stamped down on his head as he lay motionless on the ground.

“That broke me. Carl was no threat at that stage. But he just stepped on him like he was a fly.

“Dickson had scratches on his face after. I hope they were from Carl as he fought for his life in those final seconds and I hope they scar him for ever.”

Helen remembers the moment police knocked on her door that night to tell her Carl was dead. She said: “From that point on the world just ceased to exist.

“I spent a long time staring out the window wondering why everyone was still moving.”

Helen was so shocked that she had trouble talking for a week.

She said: “We went to formally identify him three or four days after his body was found. It looked like he was asleep. He looked so perfect.

“He only had one bruise on his head where he fell. I told him, ‘It’s OK, you can wake up now,’ but I knew he wasn’t going to.” Carl, diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at four and Asperger’s at seven, lacked social awareness. Helen believes his autism may have prompted him to post the Facebook picture.

Supermarket worker Carl and Chloe had lived with Helen and her family for six months during their one-year relationship.

Helen said: “It’s difficult maintaining a friendship with your ex and we warned him to be careful and not to get his heart broken again. But we had no idea it could end so catastrophically. I think he was hurt when he put that picture up on Facebook. And maybe he thought it would be payback.

“When Chloe saw it she was annoyed and upset, which I understand. And Carl has to be responsible for his part.

“But how it can go so quickly from a picture on Facebook to murder is crazy. It just snowballed.”

Helen thinks no sentence British justice could deliver will ever be sufficient. Yet, astonishingly, the grieving mother often thinks about the impact her son’s murderer’s actions have had on his own family.

She said: “Eighteen years is a long time but even if it had been 25 years, I am still not going to have Carl at the end of it.

“He may be in jail for what he did but he is still living a life.

“If I think about John Dickson there is no emotion. I am neither angry or sad. He is in prison.

“I do feel for his family. People can blame backgrounds, a broken home or whatever, no one brings up a child to kill another child.

“I think at Christmas, even though I was sitting there and I haven’t got my son, that she hasn’t got her son either.

“He’s alive she can see him, she is a lot better off than I am, she still hasn’t got him there Christmas morning.

“I don’t know them or what their feelings are. I’d like to think in some way they feel justice has been served but I do feel sad for them.”