My mother, the troll: ‘I think she lost sight of the McCanns’ humanity’

When Ben Leyland’s mum said she was in trouble, he had no idea she was about to be exposed for sending hundreds of abusive tweets about Madeleine McCann’s parents – or of the tragic end to her story

“There was this entire part of Mum that I never knew about,” Ben Leyland says. Brenda Leyland was a stylish, well-spoken and rather private woman who lived in a picturesque village in Leicestershire. He knew she told stories, and that some of them may have been on the tall side. He also knew that she spent a lot of time on her laptop and was increasingly living online. What he didn’t know was that his mother had become a Twitter troll who spent the final years of her life relentlessly attacking the parents of Madeleine McCann, the girl who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 at the age of three and hasn’t been seen since.

In 2014, Brenda was approached by a Sky News journalist who asked her why she was trolling the McCanns on Twitter. She was about to get into a car with her friend to visit a garden centre, and declined to comment. The journalist then told her that she had been reported to Scotland Yard and her tweets were being investigated as part of a larger campaign of abuse against the McCanns. “Well, that’s fair enough,” she said calmly. But Brenda’s face gave her away. Her eyes blinked and her cheek twitched anxiously. Four days later, on 4 October 2014, Brenda killed herself.