Peter Chapman has been jailed for life after the kidnap, rape and murder of teenager Ashleigh Hall. 33 year old Chapman posed as a teenager on Facebook to lure 17 year old Ashleigh into meeting him.

Facebook has been strongly criticised over its lack of privacy and child safety. Today, the site issued a warning after Ashleigh’s case, urging members not to meet strangers they only know from the internet and exercise ‘extreme caution’. It made the rare public statement following Ashleigh’s appalling case, which demonstrates how easy it is for online predators to trap victims.

Facebook has been accused of a ‘glaring failure’ by not having a Child Exploitation Online Protection button on its site, which allows users report suspicious activity. Ashleigh’s case shows how easy it is for teenagers to be targeted by sex offenders who can easily fake their identities online and then arrange to meet them.

Astonishingly, dozens of other young women were prepared to send explicit photos of themselves to the teenager’s killer – despite never having met him.

The Daily Mail reports that Chapman had met Ashleigh through Facebook on September 21, 2009, using the bogus photograph of a handsome boy in his late teens and a new identity, Peter Cartwright.

Graham Reeds, QC, prosecuting, told Teesside Crown Court: ‘She was excited about meeting the person she thought was an attractive 19-year-old lad, who had a Facebook page showing his picture, and who had been sending her suggestive text messages.

‘However, what she did not know was that all of these text messages and the computer chat were from this defendant: A 32-year old man who at the time was living out of the back of his car.’

They arranged to meet – with Chapman pretending to be ‘Peter’s dad’ to explain why he looked nothing like the photo – on October 25 last year.

He drove her to a secluded area called Thorpe Larches near Sedgefield in County Durham. Once there Chapman forced her to perform a sex act before he bound and gagged her with duct tape, wrapping so much around her head that she suffocated to death. He dumped her body in a ditch and drove off.

After his arrest, Chapman was taken to Middlesbrough police station where he asked to see a detective and confessed: ‘I killed someone last night. I need to tell somebody from CID where the body is… It hasn’t been reported yet.’

Mrs Hall, 39, wept yesterday as horrific details of her daughter’s last few hours were revealed in court. She said later: ”Something more should have been done to stop him. He had someone else’s photo on his (Facebook) page. It’s an awful thought that there is a boy out there and this man was using his photo to prey on young girls. It is unimaginable what my family and I have been through.’

As Chapman began his sentence, her distraught mother Andrea begged: ‘Parents – ask your kids to tell you who they are talking to online.’