A HEARTBROKEN mother has visited the beauty spot where her husband killed their four sons.

Samantha Tolley, from Winsford, made the trip to the Horseshoe Pass above Llangollen on Saturday - one year on from the tragedy.

Killer Keith Young forced his four young boys to say goodbye to their mum over a mobile phone while she begged him to return them home safe.

He went on to gas them all in his vehicle.

Visiting the scene at the mountain was very difficult for Samantha, but she said it had in some way made her feel closer to her boys - Joshua, seven, Thomas, six, Callum, five, and Daniel, three.

Her pain and suffering is relentless and at the shrine she told how the boys were so full of life.

'Coming to this place helps me to be close to my boys,' she said. 'It's here that I try to find my pain and suffering.

'Since my boys have been taken from me I've lost all joy and happiness and sometimes feel that I have no reason to carry on.

'The last year has been very emotional - no two days are the same. In the mornings I don't want to get out of bed. Some days I lie in bed all day. The pain and memory never go away. Nothing has the same importance any more.'

But she says visiting the shrine in the hills of North Wales has helped her. One particularly poignant visit to Llangollen came on Christmas Eve, when she sat in the dark and lit a candle.

She said: 'I relived what happened to the boys and imagined what it must have been like. I felt lost and frightened. I wondered what must have been going through their minds. When I think of them I feel I am hitting a brick wall because I can't reach out to them and make sense of what happened.

'I think of the phone call that came through to me from Keith as he sat in the car. I think of Josh, the eldest, sat there in the pitch black night listening to his father telling his mother how the other children had died. That's my daily thought,' she explained.

The inquest last September heard how farm labourer Young, who was 38, drove his sons to the Horseshoe Pass during an access visit and gassed them by running a petrol lawnmower in the back of the family car.

As he did so, he rang his estranged wife Samantha back home in Mid Cheshire and she listened in horror as the boys succumbed to the lethal fumes.

North East Wales coroner John Hughes recorded a verdict of unlawful killing on the four boys, and said Mr Young had taken his own life.

The coroner said it was one of the most harrowing cases he had ever dealt with.

The inquest at Wrexham heard that Young and Ms Tolley had separated several months before the tragedy, following a long and stormy relationship.

Young had learned that Ms Tolley was pregnant with another man's baby just before the night of the deaths, on March 27 last year. She has since lost that baby.

The inquest heard how Samantha rang Young on his mobile that night, after a relative told her he had threatened to kill the children. She tried to convince him things could be sorted out if he returned home, but Young replied: 'It's too late, you would have me arrested.'

She listened in horror as Young told her their children were passing out. Young said he was feeling sleepy and she heard him snoring or breathing heavily. She then heard nothing for about 20 minutes as she screamed down the telephone in a desperate bid to wake her husband or the boys. She frantically called the police who traced the mobile phone call, and within hours the bodies were found in the fume-filled car at the Horseshoe Pass.

A post-mortem examination revealed the five died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The pathologist said the boys would not have suffered, as they would have become drowsy and fallen asleep.

But Samantha said that while the boys' suffering has ended, her torment continued on a daily basis and would do so for the rest of her life. A garden of remembrance was opened this month at Handley Hill Primary School where the boys were pupils.