A TEENAGE girl was locked in a flat with her uncle and forced to watch him kill himself.

Depressed Paul Hampson dragged 17-year-old Kelly Louise Cockerill to his flat at the top of a tower block, turned the key in the lock, beat her when she tried to flee, before saying: "Watch this.''

The 35-year-old unemployed waste collector then stepped out on to his balcony and hanged himself from a rope attached to the top of the patio window.

A tearful Miss Cockerill told the inquest: "I tried to stop him and he just hit me more and more. He just said: 'Watch this', went outside and pulled some rope down.

"He just grabbed hold of me and hit me. By the time I got back up, he was just hanging."

Hampson had slipped the keys to the flat into his back pocket, but she told the inquest: "I didn't dare go and get them.''

Her terrified screams alerted a neighbour who kicked the door down to free her.

Emergency service personnel said that the body, hanging outside the flat in Blacksail Close, Stockton, could be seen from the street below.

The Middlesbrough inquest heard how Mr Hampson had previously tried to hang himself and slash his wrists.

He wrote a letter to his mother, Marjorie Tilley, weeks earlier stating he could not continue with his life.

Hampson had been admitted to the University Hospital of North Tees in February last year and discharged after psychiatrists judged that he was not suicidal.

Doctors were aware that Hampson, who suffered from depression and a personality disorder, wrongly believed that he was disliked by his niece.

Miss Cockerill, who lives in Middlesbrough, caught a bus to Stockton, after receiving a telephone call from her uncle on the day he died - Sunday June 23, last year - saying that he wanted to see her.

Recording a verdict that Hampson killed himself, Teesside Coroner Michael Sheffield said Miss Cockerill had been through "a dreadful experience".