Laura Bower-McKnight was an attractive, intelligent, creative young woman with a great future ahead of her. The talented violinist had done well at The Holt Primary School in Skellingthorpe and Robert Pattinson Secondary School in North Hykeham. She went on to secure a sought-after place at the Royal Welsh College of Music in Cardiff - a career in performing arts beckoned. But although active and in possession of a sharp intellect, she was no stranger to the debilitation of depression. As a teenager she had battled with anorexia, with her weight yo-yoing between periods of self-loathing. Despite this, Laura fought her way back to health and looked forward to university. But her mum Carol McKnight said it was there that her downfall really began - she started smoking cannabis with her friends. Laura's brittle mental state, weakened by her teenage anorexia, did not hold out and she dropped out of university, returning to the family home. Already deeply unhappy, one night she tried some 'skunk' - an extremely strong type of cannabis. "It tipped her into psychosis. We lost our wonderful girl for a while. Her behaviour became completely erratic - she was doing very odd things," said Mrs. McKnight, This behaviour didn't go unnoticed by the local community and Laura soon became a figure of ridicule. "Some of the locals in a pub put up a copy of a newspaper article with the headline 'Troubled Britney Spears' and writing her name all over it," said Mrs. McKnight. "She was ill - she had a mental illness. It wasn't the real Laura, the always-on-the-go, lovely young woman, the musician, the passionate writer, the artist. But people are ignorant of mental illness and they labelled her as a looney." She was found dead, hanged in her bedroom.