The grieving mother of murdered mum Lisa Pearce to

The grieving mother of murdered mum Lisa Pearce told a jury how panic set in
on the very first morning that her daughter failed to turn up.

Mrs Rose Peters (corr) said she knew something was wrong straight away because Miss Pearce would never stay out all night ‘because of the children.

‘

But the grandmother told the Old Bailey how Terry Hall, 29, came round to her home on the morning of July 12 last year asking if she knew where Miss Pearce was.

The Crown say Hall’s behaviour was a charade as it was in fact he who strangled common-law wife Miss Pearce to death with a dressing gown chord.

Hall is then said to have dumped the body in a lay-by in Chelsham, Surrey.

The cab driver then helped look for the 26-year-old and even made a television appeal for information.

A day later he was seen in a passionate clutch with his lover Debbie White.

But the amateur racing driver, last living in Burford Way, New Addington, denies murder.

Giving evidence Mrs Peters began her evidence by saying she could think of no circumstances in which her daughter would have walked out on Hall and ‘abandoned’ her children.

And questioned by Sir John Nutting, prosecuting, she agreed that Miss Pearce was ‘not the sort of person who would have accepted a lift from a stranger.

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Mrs Peters said Hall and her daughter lived ‘as man and wife’ from about 1991.

But she told how in 1993 Hall left Miss Pearce for another woman, Tina Plummer, only to return after about six weeks.

The court was told that Hall’s subsequent affair with Miss White was ‘more serious.

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But Mrs Peters recalled that at a party in October 1998 Hall announced that he was getting back with Miss Pearce.

But in March last year she said her daughter called her after a flare-up with Miss White:

‘She phoned me up and said she had had a fight with Debbie.

She was crying.

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Mrs Peters told the jury how her daughter seemed ‘quite happy’ in June last year after returning from a holiday in Spain with Hall and her children.

‘The last time I saw Lisa was on July 10,’ she said.

The next morning just after 9am Mrs Peters told the jury there was a knock on the door.

‘I opened the door thinking it was Lisa.

I was expecting her to turn up for a cup of coffee after dropping her children off at school.

‘I said to him: ‘Where’s Lisa?’

‘He said: ‘That’s what I would like you to tell me.

‘

‘He came in and I asked him what he meant.

He said Lisa had not been home all night.

He fell asleep on the settee and took a cup of tea up that morning.

‘

Asked what her state of mind at that stage Mrs Peters replied: ‘I was in panic because it was not something she would have done.

She would not stay out all night because of the children.

‘

Opening the case Sir John had told the jury Hall ‘was the last person to see his wife alive because he murdered her, secreted her body for three days then stealthily, and under cover of darkness, dumped it three miles or so from her home.

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The trial continues.

ends

cop.