Our daughter Leah Croucher went missing on 15 February 2019, walking to work. Her body was found three and a half years later, in the loft of a house half a mile from our family home.

The man who killed her, Neil Maxwell, was a convicted sex offender with a history of serious offending going back to 1998. Months before Leah disappeared, he pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a woman and was sentenced to a Community Order, not prison. The Probation Service wrongly classified him as medium risk instead of high risk. He then missed a number of Probation appointments, and a police officer raised concerns about his lack of communication just weeks before Leah went missing. He evaded arrest for six months. During that time, he murdered Leah and took his own life.

The Coroner ruled that Leah was unlawfully killed, and that failures by the Police and Probation Service in monitoring Maxwell "may have played a part" in her death.

That's why we, Leah's parents, are calling for Leah's Law: a mandatory minimum prison sentence for anyone convicted of a third sexual offence. 

Mandatory minimums already exist for domestic burglary and Class A drug trafficking. There's no justifiable reason sexual offending should be treated more leniently. By a third conviction, it is self-evident that the offender has not been sufficiently deterred from further offending.

Where a case falls below that threshold, we are calling for a District Judge to oversee sentencing in all repeat sexual offence cases, so a decision like the one that let Maxwell walk free can never be made again.

This would have ensured he had no opportunity to kill Leah, and that the risk he presented on his release would have been vastly reduced.

Sign for Leah, and for every family this could still protect.