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A troll in the family: Infamous McCann vilifier Brenda Leyland's son opens up about her life and tragic death

Brenda was confronted by a Sky News journalist in 2014 about why she was trolling Kate and Gerry McCann, four days before she killed herself

LONDON, ENGLAND: Brenda Leyland, a Twitter troll who ended her life after being exposed for relentlessly attacking the parents of missing British girl Madeleine McCann online, was remembered by her son as a "stylish, well-spoken and rather private woman" who lived in a quaint village in Leicestershire. Ben Leyland said his mother had a knack for telling stories, and that some of them may have been made up. He also knew she had been increasingly spending her time on the internet. However, he had no idea about the severity of her social media trolling.

Brenda was approached by a Sky News journalist in 2014 and asked why she was trolling Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter went missing in Portugal in 2017 and hasn't been seen since. She declined to comment, and the journalist then told her she had been reported to the authorities and that her tweets were being investigated as part of a larger campaign of abuse against the McCanns. “Well, that’s fair enough,” Brenda calmly responded, but the anxiety on her face was unmistakable. She would kill herself four days later, on October 4, 2014.

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'When she died, she took me out too'

Ben Leyland graduated from Oxford University with a degree in theology. He is a recovering drug addict who now works as a life coach in Los Angeles helping people with mental health and addiction issues, according to The Guardian. In a conversation with the newspaper, Ben said he didn't know much about his mother, but admitted they were painfully close to each other. “When she died, she took me out too,” he said. “It was a suicide bomb. I never had a separate identity from mum.” Following her demise, Ben gave up his job and went down a spiral of self-destruction. “I was in grief, but numbing myself with drugs and alcohol. I was like: I’m done, I’m just going to quit the world for a while, eat out for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and do enough cocaine to kill a small village," he recalled.

Brenda, who was 63 when she died, was raised by a military family in Albrighton, Shropshire. She reportedly attended convent school and worked in marketing briefly. Her son said she was famous in the family for her stories -- noting that they were so colorful that he wanted to believe them despite having his doubts. Ben recalled a tale she would tattle about her father. “She would have you believe he was involved in more missions than anybody else in the RAF. She had these stories about how he got shot down over Crete, and ended up crash-landing and living with the Crete resistance in a cave, subsisting on nothing more than Worcestershire sauce," he remembered. "She said he got the Victoria Cross, but he didn’t.” Ben laughed, adding, "She had a Lewis Carroll, Jabberwockian level of madness and eccentricity."

However, the family fell apart when Ben was 12. Brenda's husband left her for another woman, to whom he is reportedly still married. Ben's brother, then 19, had recently left home at the time, so Brenda and Ben moved into a rented property in Burton Overy, a village in Leicestershire. “It was a shit-show when we moved in, but she turned it into something special,” Ben reminisced, noting how his mother revamped the space into a classic English country cottage. "She found a good way of making cheap things look expensive, which has a certain metaphorical value because she always wanted you to think she was someone other than who she was. She was terrified that if you knew the real her, you wouldn’t like her," he added. Ben said his mother was wonderful in many ways. “She was beautiful, intelligent, funny. She had a good way with one-liners. I remember when hand soap got fancy with things like Molton Brown, and she’d be like, ‘Smell my hands, I’ve just been to the toilet.’ We knew what she was referring to, but there was this double entendre," he gushed. "She had an acerbic wit.”

Madeleine McCann goes missing

When Madeleine went missing in 2007, it became the hottest topic in the neighborhood. Brenda was living just 15 miles from the McCanns’ home in Rothley, Leicestershire. Ben recalled how his mother invariably updated him on the Maddie situation when they spoke on the phone, offering her own theories about the situation. The McCanns had admitted that they had left their three children alone in the holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, when their daughter went missing. In agreement with a number of internet sleuths, Brenda was convinced that they were responsible for Maddie's abduction - either through negligence or something more sinister. Ben wasn't too concerned about his mother's growing obsession with the case. He thought it kept her occupied at least.

However, Brenda sounded unusually panicked when she called her son up on September 30, 2014, he recalled. She revealed to him that she had been questioned by a TV journalist earlier in the day about the McCanns. Ben didn't understand the situation at first. “Mum said, ‘I’m in trouble.’ I was like, ‘What’s going on?’” He would subsequently learn that his mum had sent a barrage of nasty tweets and engaged with a community of conspiracy theorists on social media. At the time, many didn't understand the impact of the internet. “It was a different era,” he told The Guardian. “This idea that a single person could be completely canceled didn’t really exist at that time. So when I saw this stuff on Sky News I thought, ‘This is not good,’ but I didn’t have any awareness of the full extent of its impact.”

Ben eventually advised his mother not to invite the Sky News reporter Martin Brunt into the house and to say nothing further to him. At the inquest, however, he found out that she had already spoken to him for half an hour in her home, albeit off camera. “She was more helpless than I’d ever seen her before,” Ben recalled. “I think she’d had time to reflect that she’d gotten a little bit carried away. That’s what she said in her final email.” When asked if she had any sense of the pain her tweets may have caused the McCanns, he said, "It’s difficult to say. I think she lost sight of their humanity, and they were just the target of the ‘investigation.'"

A tragic end

Ben tried whatever he could to contain the situation, but his attempts were in vain. The story broke on Sky News a couple of days later. He called his mother but it just went to voicemail, making him really worried. He eventually called his estranged brother. “I said to my brother, ‘Do you think there’s a chance she might try to take her life?’ And he said, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be without precedent,’” Ben recalled, saying he had no idea she had attempted to kill herself before. Tragically, Brenda was found dead in a hotel room two days after the report was broadcast. Brunt told the inquest at Leicester town hall that he was "devastated" by Brenda's demise. “I recognize that my feelings are of little importance compared with those of Mrs Leyland’s family, but I wish to put on record that I was, and still am, devastated by Mrs Leyland’s death," he said.

While many might blame the Sky News exposé for Brenda Leyland's death, her son doesn't. According to him, it was inevitable she would be exposed for one thing or another at some point. Ben said there were several things his mother was ashamed of and never addressed, including her mental health problems, mythomania, anger, and lack of purpose. “That’s what killed my mum,” he insisted. “It was encrusted layers of shame over the years that made it impossible for her to do more than allude to stuff that she had to deal with. Her inability to say, ‘I need help’; her inability to say, ‘I am not OK.’”

'It destroyed me'

Ben has since turned his life around and is helping others to do the same. The life coach only wishes his mother could have done the same. “Our stories run in parallel in so many ways,” he said. “I’m glad there was a fork in the road, and that I didn’t end up doing what she did, because there were times when it could have very easily ended that way.” However, he clarified that he doesn't want to dishonor his mother. “Because at the end of the day, I f***ing love my mum. I miss her, and I’d pretty much do anything to bring her back. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me, and it damn near destroyed me. But if there is something positive to come out of this, it’s the experience I’ve had of completely unburdening myself of my shames and my secrets and my pain, and finding out that if you do that, not only are you going to be OK, but you can help other people get better, too," Ben added.