Jury deliberates in trial of man accused of ‘suicide pact’ with teenager

A trial jury has been informed that a 14-year-old Dutch girl had already composed a suicide note before she began communicating with a man charged with encouraging her to take her own life. Christopher Ballard, 43, is alleged to have exchanged messages with Gina van Houten on an online chat forum between February and March 2018. These communications reportedly outlined a “suicide pact” between them, preceding her death on 28 March of that year. On Monday, as the jury was dispatched at Bradford Crown Court, Mrs Justice Lambert, the presiding judge, instructed them to determine if the messages Mr Ballard sent to the teenager were capable of encouraging suicide. Mr Ballard, of Clayton Road, Bradford, denies a charge of encouraging or assisting her suicide. In her summary, Mrs Justice Lambert told the jury that if the messages sent by Mr Ballard were capable of encouraging suicide, they must then decide if he had intended them to do so. The judge further informed the jury that Gina’s suicide note had been written on her laptop in January 2018. She also emphasized that the last communication between Mr Ballard and Gina occurred on 4 March – 24 days before she took her own life. “We do not know how she was feeling, what made her feel that way, who she had communicated with,” the judge stated. Mrs Justice Lambert informed the court that Mr Ballard, who was originally from Halifax, had no previous convictions, resided with his parents, and was employed at a plastics factory. She noted that he considered face-to-face interactions “much more difficult” than those online, and was capable of spending as long as 28 hours straight playing an online game. The judge conveyed that the jury heard Mr Ballard believed Gina was actually an older man and that he thought she was not serious about taking her own life. “He described himself as someone rather younger. He told her he worked in a hospital and had access to drugs, which was not true,” she further added. Mrs Justice Lambert said Mr Ballard only learned of Gina’s death when he was arrested in December 2020. “When he found out, he said he felt terrible and felt sorry she must have been going through such terrible times,” she reported. The judge told jurors that in a later police interview, Mr Ballard said he “never had any intention of encouraging her to do anything to herself, and from his perspective it was all role play”. Prior to dismissing the jury members to deliberate their verdict, Mrs Justice Lambert told them that Mr Ballard “did not accept that what he had written was capable of encouraging someone to commit suicide”.