The mother of a 14-year-old girl found raped and murdered in a park has told of giving her daughter a last kiss goodnight before she disappeared.
Karolina Valantiniene said she hugged her daughter Viktorija Sokolova in bed at home on the evening of April 10, before heading off to sleep.
The following morning, she got up early to work as a packer in a factory but checked on her sleeping daughter before leaving. It was the last time she saw her alive.
Two days later, her 14-year-old daughter’s body was found partially-clothed by a dog walker at Wolverhampton’s West Park at about 7am. Her skull had been smashed with a “hammer-like weapon”, a court heard, and she had been sexually assaulted.
A 16-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is standing trial at the city’s Crown Court. He denies murder, rape and sexual penetration of a corpse.
This week jurors were told the teenager had used Facebook’s messaging service to arrange to meet Viktorija in the park.
Prosecutor Jonathan Rees QC told the jury that the dog-walker who found her body draped over the arm of a bench “saw what he initially thought was a blow-up doll”.
“At first, he dismissed it as some sort of prank and continued with his walk,” he said. “However, on returning to the same area, he realised, no doubt to his horror, that the figure was the body of a young girl.”
Giving evidence for the first time on Thursday, the victim’s mother told the court her daughter had been sent to live with her father after repeatedly running away from the family home in Mostyn Street.
On the Sunday before she was killed, the girl disappeared again, so Valantiniene went looking for and found her in a park. She found her, later that night, in a children’s play area with her a former “boyfriend” and another girl, smoking cannabis.
When she asked her daughter to come home, the teenager “started to shout and scratch” and “became violent”, she told the court.
She managed to escape her mother, but was picked up by the police the next day and placed in a children’s home overnight.
On Tuesday, April 10, she was brought back to the family home by a social worker, who advised Valantiniene and Viktorija’s stepfather to try and “communicate” with the girl.
The mother, describing the last contact she had with her daughter, said: “We were about to go to sleep.
“I came to her room, gave her a hug, and kissed her for the last time.”
As she left for work at 4am, on April 11, she added: “I came to see Viktorija before I left.”
There was no more contact between the pair, and after work that evening, when her daughter failed to come home, she called the police and reported her missing.
She and her husband, Saidas Valantinas, went to bed and the next morning checked their daughter’s bed to find she had not returned.
The trial continues.