Five years after his daughter Laura was brutally murdered, Martin Kane is campaigning for a change in the law to make all child killers serve their full sentences. He tells SARAH FOSTER why he feels a strong sense of injustice.

THE little girl in the picture is grinning broadly, standing in her classroom at Penshaw school and holding up a model she's made. It's an ordinary moment captured on an ordinary day, and with her long brown hair and bright, knowing eyes, the little girl is showing signs of growing up.

But the child, whose name was Laura Kane, would never reach adulthood. In fact, she would live only weeks after the picture was taken. Now it, and others like it, are all her father Martin has to remember her by.

In late August 1999, nine-year-old Laura went missing from her home in Penshaw, near Sunderland. A search was launched the scale of which had not been seen since the Lockerbie disaster, but for ten agonising days nothing was found. The nation waited with bated breath, fearing the worst but still hoping for a miracle. Then on September 4, everyone's worst fears were realised. Laura's cold and lifeless body was found under the floorboards of Colin Bainbridge's home in Murton, County Durham. She had been raped and suffocated, then merely bundled out of sight.

Bainbridge, a friend of Laura's mother, received a life sentence for the crime, with a minimum jail term of 24 years. The trial judge described him as "evil" and "a serious danger to young girls" and said that what he had done was "truly heinous". Yet despite the damning evidence against him, Bainbridge maintained his innocence to the end, claiming Laura had died in a game that went tragically wrong. When he whispered "I'm sorry" as he was led away from the dock, it seemed to Laura's family that he was mocking them.

Mindful of the particular outrage caused by child murder and the public's vitriol for anyone who commits it, last year the Government changed the law to make child murderers serve their full prison term. But as the ruling was not retrospective, anyone convicted prior to it can still be released early. This is something that Martin Kane, 44, from Houghton-le-Spring, simply cannot accept.

"I keep reading in the papers and seeing in the news that people are getting out and killing again. You think when people have taken a life, they should spend the rest of their life in prison. The system is too soft - it's as if they don't care about the victims, they just think about the criminals," he says.

After being contacted by Liz Neailey and June Richardson, whose sons Wesley and Martin were also murdered, Martin decided to start a petition calling for a ban on any child killer being released early, regardless of their conviction date. The three, who have been joined by Sharon Henderson, the mother of victim Nicki Allen, chose the fifth anniversary of Laura's death - August 25 - to set up a stall promoting their cause in the centre of Newcastle. Martin says the response was overwhelming. "Within 15 minutes to half an hour we had over 100 signatures. People were just queuing up to sign," he says.

Martin and Liz plan to take the petition to London in February, by which time they hope to have collected up to 100,000 names. "Hopefully, we'll get to see the Home Secretary or Tony Blair," says Martin.

For him, the campaign is something into which he can channel his still-raw anger and grief. When the cameras stopped flashing and the media spotlight moved elsewhere, he and the rest of the family were left to pick up the pieces of their fragmented lives. It is something that Martin has still not been able to do.

Laura was the youngest of his four children, and his only little girl, to his ex-wife Carol. When in 1994, Carol told him she wanted a divorce, he was gutted, but agreed to it. Hoping for a reconciliation and keen to see his children, Martin was a regular visitor at his former wife's Penshaw home. It was there that he first met Colin Bainbridge, Carol's darts partner. "He came to the house in Penshaw in '95 or '96 and started doing odd jobs for her. I only knew Colin from him going there," says Martin.

He was struck by Bainbridge's tendency to distort the truth but passed it off as harmless boasting. "He lived in a fantasy world. He was a Walter Mitty-type person. But I didn't think he was dangerous," Martin says.

When Laura disappeared, no-one suspected Bainbridge, who went for a drink with Carol that same night. It is a night that will be forever etched in Martin's memory. "It was quarter to ten when Carol phoned me and asked if Laura was at mine. Then I had two police come at 11pm to search my home. I was up all night. It was a horrible feeling," he says.

For the next ten days, Martin and his family's lives were a living hell. In their pain and confusion, they turned to any source of comfort, and Bainbridge was only too willing to act the part of a caring friend. "He was going to the house and making out that nothing had happened and I think that makes him a cruel and callous person. I don't know how he composed himself to go on with the charade," says Martin.

When the devastating truth emerged, the family had to endure listening to Bainbridge's excuses and lies in court. Martin recalls it with a bitterness undiluted by the passing of time. "Going to court and seeing him face to face I felt like I wanted to kill him and torture him. You can't forgive someone for a crime like that. He didn't get long enough," he says.

The family has suffered further by Bainbridge attempting to appeal, although it now seems unlikely that he will. Martin says he will never have peace of mind while there's still a chance of him being released. "Every day I pray that he kills himself. If he killed himself, it would ease the pain because I would know he wasn't here any more and couldn't hurt any more kids. I would be a lot easier in my mind if I knew he was never going to get out," he says.

Meanwhile Martin says that, if anything, he's finding it harder to come to terms with Laura's death. He's currently on medication for depression and has recently started seeing a psychologist. "It's as though it happened yesterday. I thought I could handle it but as time goes on, it's just there. It's a lot worse. The pain never goes away," he says.

Although he tries to remember her as she was, a happy little girl who was the light of his life, Martin will always carry with him thoughts of Laura's last moments - of terror and violation. He is driven by the desire to stop other families from being robbed of their children in such a horrendous way, which he believes a change in the law would go some way to preventing. "This is not just about Laura, it's about other people's kids. It's to stop other people from suffering what we have suffered," he says.

l Copies of the petition are at Asda in Washington and at other local businesses.