alexthekidd
23rd April 2007, 00:41
Long Read but soooooo funnny!
What REALLY happened at the Myspace party from hell
by NICK CRAVEN - More by this author » Last updated at 10:32am on 21st April 2007
Comments Comments (2)
Remember that advertisement for Yellow Pages from the 1990s in which a brutally hung-over young man wakes up on the sofa to recall the wild house party he threw the night before?
All he had to do was let his fingers do the walking and call in a French polisher to put the damage right before his parents' return.
But 17-year-old Rachael Bell was not so fortunate. She would have needed an army to even begin to tackle the £25,000 orgy of destruction visited upon her parents' home in just a few hours.
An open invitation was placed on Rachael's MySpace page for revellers to attend a 'Skins Party' (based on a riotous episode of the controversial C4 teen drama). The invitation was headed: "Let's all trash the average, family-sized house disco party."
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Gatecrashed and trashed: Elaine Bell's £;230,000 home, and her daughter Rachael
And they did. More than 200 young people from as far afield as London and Liverpool, converged on the £230,000 detached house in a respectable culdesac in Houghton-le-Spring and destroyed it after seven hours of drink and drug-fuelled mayhem.
As Rachael's mother Elaine, 48, so aptly put it: "The house has been raped. Every carpet's burned where they've stomped out cigarettes. They've urinated in wardrobes, pulled my clothes out and stubbed cigarettes on them. The beds have burns, food has been smeared everywhere and messages scrawled all over the walls."
Add to that the vomit-strewn clothing and condoms littering the bedrooms of Rachael's three younger siblings, stolen money and jewellery and furniture damaged beyond repair.
Now, primary school teacher Mrs Bell's trust in her eldest daughter has been catastrophically shaken, as Rachael for the moment stays with a friend, too ashamed to return home. Rachael has been arrested and released on police bail as a criminal damage inquiry is under way.
Mrs Bell and her three other children are being put up in a hotel at her insurers' expense. Worse, she fears that she may not be able to return to the house at all, following its violation.
Though she is separated from her husband Alan, both parents are united in their condemnation of their daughter and the teenage hoodlums she allowed in to destroy the family home.
A-level student Rachael has insisted that - despite her mother's strict instructions not to have anyone over while she looked after the house on Easter Monday - she invited only 40 or so friends.
Then, she has told her mother, someone "hacked into" her MySpace page and suggested the 'Skins' theme with its invitation. From that moment on, Rachael was powerless to stop it.
Rachael, according to her account, hid in a bathroom having a "panic attack" as the uninvited mob swelled her house to breaking point.
All this would seem to exonerate Rachael as a hapless, if disobedient, victim of circumstance. But inquiries by the Mail suggest the truth may be more complex, and that Rachael's story may amount to little more than the timeworn teenager's excuse of "it wasn't me".
So what did happen before, during and after the party that so many of its attendees can barely remember, but which the residents of Chipchase Court will never forget?
Elaine Bell decided at short notice to capitalise on the glorious Bank Holiday weather by taking her three younger children to a caravan site about 15 miles away at Whitburn, a pretty coastal spot.
Rachael, who ostensibly wanted to revise for her A-levels, didn't join the family group.
"I left her with firm instructions not to have any friends round while I was away," said Mrs Bell.
When and by whom the 'Skins' party invitation was added to Rachael's MySpace entry, no one can say for sure. Her version is that an innocent announcement was sent to her friends, inviting them over that night, presumably within minutes of her mother's car disappearing round the corner.
So, we are asked to believe that all of a sudden, someone else 'hacked' into her account and changed the nature of the invitation.
Just how likely is it that someone who knew Rachael had the wherewithal to obtain her password and change the entry in a matter of hours?
According to internet security sources consulted by the Mail, it's virtually impossible.
"Hacking into an account without the password is very, very difficult and time-consuming, unless you've somehow found the password out," said one expert who did not want to be named.
"On the other hand, what we call 'social hacking' is far more likely, where the person has been careless with their password or has told a friend without thinking much of it."
If that were the case, would someone Rachael trusted with her password betray her so completely? If so, the list of suspects can't be very long.
Mrs Bell, while still fuming at her daughter for having the party in the first place, believes her about the webspace tampering.
She said: "Rachael has never done anything like this before, and there was nothing to suggest she would. She may have had the odd friend round, but that's all.
"I'm 99.9per cent sure she's telling the truth when she says that she was not responsible for what happened.
"No one knew I was going away until the Saturday, which was just two days before the party - Rachael wouldn't have had time to arrange a party on such a big scale. Someone else is behind it.
"She only planned to have a few friends round, I'm sure of that."
Naturally, Mrs Bell may want to believe her daughter, but the fact is that someone did organise the party in a short space of time.
Another reason she chooses to believe her daughter is that Rachael removed all the knives in the kitchen drawer and took the television and china from the living room and put them away.
Curiously, she even taped over the clothes drawers to deter anyone from opening them. Mrs Bell draws a comforting conclusion from this: "To my mind those are not the actions of someone who was planning to let the house be smashed up."
Sceptics might wonder why, if Rachael were only expecting her 'good' friends, did she feel the need to hide the kitchen knives and tape shut the drawers?
Whatever her reasons, with those last-minute preparations made, the young hostess was by all accounts delighted to see the first revellers begin arriving in fleets of cars, taxis and minibuses shortly after 9pm.
And they just kept coming. One 17-year-old guest - who knows Rachael and definitely was invited, told the Mail he got to the house around 10pm, by which time there were around 150 people spilling out into the road.
"I could hardly get in the door for people, and I soon realised a lot of them didn't know Rachael at all," said the young man, who declined to be named. "I heard people asking whose party it was.
What REALLY happened at the Myspace party from hell
by NICK CRAVEN - More by this author » Last updated at 10:32am on 21st April 2007
Comments Comments (2)
Remember that advertisement for Yellow Pages from the 1990s in which a brutally hung-over young man wakes up on the sofa to recall the wild house party he threw the night before?
All he had to do was let his fingers do the walking and call in a French polisher to put the damage right before his parents' return.
But 17-year-old Rachael Bell was not so fortunate. She would have needed an army to even begin to tackle the £25,000 orgy of destruction visited upon her parents' home in just a few hours.
An open invitation was placed on Rachael's MySpace page for revellers to attend a 'Skins Party' (based on a riotous episode of the controversial C4 teen drama). The invitation was headed: "Let's all trash the average, family-sized house disco party."
Scroll down for more
Gatecrashed and trashed: Elaine Bell's £;230,000 home, and her daughter Rachael
And they did. More than 200 young people from as far afield as London and Liverpool, converged on the £230,000 detached house in a respectable culdesac in Houghton-le-Spring and destroyed it after seven hours of drink and drug-fuelled mayhem.
As Rachael's mother Elaine, 48, so aptly put it: "The house has been raped. Every carpet's burned where they've stomped out cigarettes. They've urinated in wardrobes, pulled my clothes out and stubbed cigarettes on them. The beds have burns, food has been smeared everywhere and messages scrawled all over the walls."
Add to that the vomit-strewn clothing and condoms littering the bedrooms of Rachael's three younger siblings, stolen money and jewellery and furniture damaged beyond repair.
Now, primary school teacher Mrs Bell's trust in her eldest daughter has been catastrophically shaken, as Rachael for the moment stays with a friend, too ashamed to return home. Rachael has been arrested and released on police bail as a criminal damage inquiry is under way.
Mrs Bell and her three other children are being put up in a hotel at her insurers' expense. Worse, she fears that she may not be able to return to the house at all, following its violation.
Though she is separated from her husband Alan, both parents are united in their condemnation of their daughter and the teenage hoodlums she allowed in to destroy the family home.
A-level student Rachael has insisted that - despite her mother's strict instructions not to have anyone over while she looked after the house on Easter Monday - she invited only 40 or so friends.
Then, she has told her mother, someone "hacked into" her MySpace page and suggested the 'Skins' theme with its invitation. From that moment on, Rachael was powerless to stop it.
Rachael, according to her account, hid in a bathroom having a "panic attack" as the uninvited mob swelled her house to breaking point.
All this would seem to exonerate Rachael as a hapless, if disobedient, victim of circumstance. But inquiries by the Mail suggest the truth may be more complex, and that Rachael's story may amount to little more than the timeworn teenager's excuse of "it wasn't me".
So what did happen before, during and after the party that so many of its attendees can barely remember, but which the residents of Chipchase Court will never forget?
Elaine Bell decided at short notice to capitalise on the glorious Bank Holiday weather by taking her three younger children to a caravan site about 15 miles away at Whitburn, a pretty coastal spot.
Rachael, who ostensibly wanted to revise for her A-levels, didn't join the family group.
"I left her with firm instructions not to have any friends round while I was away," said Mrs Bell.
When and by whom the 'Skins' party invitation was added to Rachael's MySpace entry, no one can say for sure. Her version is that an innocent announcement was sent to her friends, inviting them over that night, presumably within minutes of her mother's car disappearing round the corner.
So, we are asked to believe that all of a sudden, someone else 'hacked' into her account and changed the nature of the invitation.
Just how likely is it that someone who knew Rachael had the wherewithal to obtain her password and change the entry in a matter of hours?
According to internet security sources consulted by the Mail, it's virtually impossible.
"Hacking into an account without the password is very, very difficult and time-consuming, unless you've somehow found the password out," said one expert who did not want to be named.
"On the other hand, what we call 'social hacking' is far more likely, where the person has been careless with their password or has told a friend without thinking much of it."
If that were the case, would someone Rachael trusted with her password betray her so completely? If so, the list of suspects can't be very long.
Mrs Bell, while still fuming at her daughter for having the party in the first place, believes her about the webspace tampering.
She said: "Rachael has never done anything like this before, and there was nothing to suggest she would. She may have had the odd friend round, but that's all.
"I'm 99.9per cent sure she's telling the truth when she says that she was not responsible for what happened.
"No one knew I was going away until the Saturday, which was just two days before the party - Rachael wouldn't have had time to arrange a party on such a big scale. Someone else is behind it.
"She only planned to have a few friends round, I'm sure of that."
Naturally, Mrs Bell may want to believe her daughter, but the fact is that someone did organise the party in a short space of time.
Another reason she chooses to believe her daughter is that Rachael removed all the knives in the kitchen drawer and took the television and china from the living room and put them away.
Curiously, she even taped over the clothes drawers to deter anyone from opening them. Mrs Bell draws a comforting conclusion from this: "To my mind those are not the actions of someone who was planning to let the house be smashed up."
Sceptics might wonder why, if Rachael were only expecting her 'good' friends, did she feel the need to hide the kitchen knives and tape shut the drawers?
Whatever her reasons, with those last-minute preparations made, the young hostess was by all accounts delighted to see the first revellers begin arriving in fleets of cars, taxis and minibuses shortly after 9pm.
And they just kept coming. One 17-year-old guest - who knows Rachael and definitely was invited, told the Mail he got to the house around 10pm, by which time there were around 150 people spilling out into the road.
"I could hardly get in the door for people, and I soon realised a lot of them didn't know Rachael at all," said the young man, who declined to be named. "I heard people asking whose party it was.