Woman identified on television as being an online troll found dead

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last updated 10 January 2015

An English woman accused of posting thousands of abusive messages online about the parents of a missing girl was found dead in a hotel room Saturday.

On Thursday, Brenda Leyland, a 63-year-old housewife from the village of Burton Overy, Leicestershire, was confronted by a reporter from Sky News, who asked her if she was one of the trolls on Twitter harassing the parents of Madeleine McCann, the young girl who disappeared in 2007 while on a family vacation in Portugal. "I'm entitled to do that," she said.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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