Ref. 30562-88In part two of our exclusive talk with the family of Amanda Edwards, her parents speak of the day their worst fears were confirmed. TINA CLARKE reports

THE look on the face of the family liaison officer was enough to tell Lee Edwards that the news was bad.

It was eight days since his daughter Amanda had gone missing after dropping off her fianc at his home.

She was a home-loving girl who always kept in close contact with her parents and as the week had gone on, the family's fierce grip on hope had begun to weaken.

While the police searched a building site on the outskirts of Malmesbury for any sign of the 21-year-old nursery nurse, her mother Beverley, left the house for a few minutes' fresh air and a chat with a friend in the garage down the road. Anything to break the tension.

The call came while she was out. The two family liaison officers Ellie Graham and Emilyrose Matthews then had the awful job of breaking the devastating news to Lee that Amanda's body had been found buried at the site.

Even before they had opened their mouths Lee knew. "You could see it in the girls' faces," he said.

Immediately he went to find Beverley and tell her what had happened.

From that moment everything was a blur. "Your whole world collapses," she explained. "I had to go through a 37-page police statement and account for everything I had done the day she went missing. I could talk for hours about what the girls did as children but everything about that night went blank."

Then came the appalling task of formally identifying their daughter's body in the mortuary at Southmead Hospital in Bristol.

"There is nothing you can do to prepare yourself for what you are going to see," said Beverley.

"I couldn't believe she had gone until I saw her. I was still thinking she was going to come walking in the door," said Lee.

Her fianc David Board, who was the last person to see her alive, wanted to see her but was persuaded not to go to the hospital by Beverley.

"It wasn't Amanda and I wanted him to remember her as she was when he last saw her."

The search for Amanda had now become a murder investigation. But the main suspect, plasterer Ian Cortis, who worked on the building site, had denied detectives and her parents the chance of justice by hanging himself at his father-in-law's house on the day she was found.

All that Beverley and Lee could do was wait for her body to be released by the Coroner. Only then could they take her back into the arms of her family before saying goodbye.

One day they went to The Knoll, where her body was found, to see all the flowers that had been placed at the gate. They decided to bring them home, tidy them up and distribute them among the local residential homes.

Five weeks later the whole village and a huge number of relatives and friends turned out for the funeral at St Mary's in Purton.

"We had no idea there were going to be so many. We had 70 family coming Lee is one of 13, but there were so many people in the church."

In recognition of her love of the colour pink, everyone managed to include it in their clothing somehow.

David had the idea of a pink coffin after seeing one in Devizes. Amanda was dressed in her favourite dress and family mementoes were put in the coffin with her. On top of it was a pair of her favourite crazy-coloured socks a fashion for which she was famous.

Lee's section at Tesco, where he works as an internet delivery driver, closed for the day to attend the funeral and other staff wore pink in memory of his daughter.

"They were wonderful," said Beverley. "They offered to help and they organised the wake after the funeral."

A deeply moving event, the funeral provided local people with a chance to show how much they cared for a young woman who had spent all her life among them and was so cruelly stolen from them.

Tina Clarke