A FORMER beauty queen convicted of blackmailing an international football celebrity was mentally ill and psychotic, an inquest has heard.

Carolyn Pick, 36, who was found hanging in a bathroom at St Luke's Hospital, in Middlesbrough, while awaiting sentencing, suffered from a condition known as erotomania.

Pick was left with the deluded belief that a man, usually older, of higher status and wealth, was in love with her, even though the pair had never met.

Her bizarre behaviour extended to her stay at the secure unit, where she was undergoing treatment and therapy while reports on her mental state were prepared.

This included:

* being found in a room with a plastic bag over her head;

* flirtatious and "sexually inappropriate" contact with male patients;

* sending a Christmas card to male patients which contained her address and telephone number.

The inquest at Teesside Magistrates' Court also heard how Pick, of Washington, Wearside, had argued with other patients at St Luke's over control of a television remote control.

Pick was found guilty of two counts of blackmail at Newcastle Crown Court in October 2000, after previously being issued with a caution for a number of phonecalls, letters and tape recordings she sent to the footballer of an insulting and obscene nature.

But the harassment continued, leading police to take further action and more obscene phonecalls and tape recordings were received by the footballer - who cannot be named for legal reasons - and his agent.

Reading from a statement, Detective Inspector John Cox, of Northumbria Police, said the recordings were menacing.

Following her trial, Pick was remanded to Low Newton women's prison in Durham, but following assessment in November 2000, which found she was suffering from a probable psychotic illness, she was made the subject of an order under the Mental Health Act and required to receive treatment at St Luke's.

Dr Stephen Barlow, a consultant forensic psychiatrist in mental health, responsible for the treatment of Pick while she was in St Luke's Hutton unit, said she had expressed a number of anxieties about her mother, who was ill with cancer, and about the outcome of her court case.

There had been a number of delays in sentencing her case while a second opinion was awaited on psychiatric reports, but he had recommended that it should be eventually disposed of with a further hospital treatment order under the Mental Health Act.

He said he would have been "astounded" if she had received a custodial sentence, even though it had been referred to as a threat by the crown court judge in the case.

Pick, an unemployed secretary, was found dead on April 19, 2001, having hanged herself with a ligature. A post-mortem examination found no evidence of drugs being involved in her death.

A former Miss England contestant, who had lived alone in her Wearside flat, she had undergone a number of assessments at St Luke's.

The inquest into her death continues today.