AS a young girl, Ann-Marie Pyle could not have wished for a better place to grow up than the North Yorkshire resort of Scarborough.

Her father and mother moved the family to the seaside in 1969 when they sold their home in Darlington to buy a modest guest-house.

Things went well, and three years later they moved up-market, buying a hotel and moving to the best part of town, close to Scarborough's South Cliff, overlooking one of the two bays.

As a youngster, Ann-Marie and her brothers, Michael and Jeffrey, spent many a happy hour among the gaudy amusement arcades and wandering the golden beaches.

But behind the happy facade the Pyles' marriage was in trouble. Ellen had started an extra-marital affair behind Bill's back. To make things worse, the hotel business was in trouble as well.

When the business folded in 1984, Ellen's affair came to an end. Unable to face the future alone, she opted to take her own life instead.

The death of her mother was a blow from which Ann-Marie - who was 24 at the time - never recovered.

She blamed her father for the tragedy. Increasingly moody and unable to reconcile his part in the break-up, she fled to America in a bid to escape the past.

But her attempt to start a new life only fostered a conviction that one day she would return to wreak revenge for her mother's death.

Anyone willing to listen inevitably heard how she believed her father to be the man responsible. Instead of dulling the pain, time only deepened her desire for retribution. Her threats took on a frightening intensity.

In 1996, she made a chilling prediction to her brother Michael's girlfriend that as her father had murdered their mother, one day she would kill him, too.

Mr Pyle, meanwhile, returned to his native County Durham and began to rebuild his life. He had lost a wife, a daughter, and a business, but was heartened when he returned "home" to a comfortable terraced house in Stanley Street, Close House, near Eldon.

His peaceful retirement was to be short-lived. When Ann-Marie returned from America she moved into a council house in Brooke Street, Eldon Lane, just around the corner from the father she loathed.

Neighbours spoke of his daughter's strange ways and the bullying rows she had with her father.

One said: "Bill never talked about his family much in Scarborough or about his late wife.

"But I got the feeling he never saw eye to eye with his daughter. Sometimes you could hear her screaming at him from inside the house.

"We never knew what the arguments were about and we always thought she was very strange. It didn't seem like a normal father-daughter relationship.

"Then, on other occasions, they seemed very close and they would walk along the street laughing and joking."

No one knows when Ann-Marie Pyle began using cannabis. The drug, which usually has a mild calming effect on people, proved to be a lethal addiction, fuelling her psychotic fantasies and increasing the hatred for her poor father.

Even a late conversion to Buddhism, which teaches spiritual purity and freedom from human concerns, failed to calm the anger building within.

In 1997, a year after confessing she planned to kill him, Mr Pyle begged police for help with his wayward daughter.

He blamed cannabis for her increasingly violent outbursts, but police were powerless to take meaningful action.

Ann-Marie made good her promise to kill her father on the 17th anniversary of Ellen Pyle's death - November 4 last year.

A few days earlier she called a friend, saying simply: "I've rung to say goodbye. I'm going to die."

Then she returned to her father's home, where the 77-year-old was waiting.

Neighbours, used to her violent outbursts, heard her father's cries for help but put the commotion down to another tantrum. In reality, the frail old man was being beaten and stabbed to death with knives, a poker and a walking stick.

When she was finished, Ann-Marie Pyle used a felt pen to scrawl "Bin Laden did this" above the fireplace, then set fire to the house.

Fire crews found her running naked in the garden with slash wounds to her stomach.

Ronnie and Carol Sowerby became friends with Mr Pyle when he moved back to the Bishop Auckland area.

Mrs Sowerby, 54, of Stanley Street, said: "Bill knew she smoked cannabis, you hardly ever saw her without a cigarette in her mouth.

"She was a horrible girl and was always very strange.

"But he was a gentleman. He would forgive anyone for anything, and I think he would even have forgiven Ann-Marie for what she did."

Sadly, he never got the chance