There are some things Sonia Exelby’s family would doubtless rather not know. Among them, precisely what terror the gentle 32-year-old music tutor from Portsmouth experienced in the final minutes before she was allegedly murdered by a sadist who worshipped an Egyptian god of death.

It is painful enough to know that Sonia was fully aware her end was imminent. Locked in a cabin in a Florida forest thousands of miles from her English seaside home, she managed to send a disturbing final message to a friend while her captor was taking a shower.

She said: ‘I thought he’d do it quick and not give my mind time to stew.’ There’s a sense of resignation about her hastily typed words. ‘My time’s up,’ she concludes.

She was stabbed to death soon afterwards. Days later her body was found in a shallow grave near dense woodland.

Former pizza deliveryman Dwain Hall, 53, who met Sonia on a fetish website, will stand trial for her kidnapping and murder later this year and, if convicted, will likely face the death penalty. He has denied the charges.

In an age where TV dramas and documentaries explore the darker sides of humanity, leaving few taboos unbroken, the harrowing story of Sonia’s brutal death still has the power to shock.

For Sonia willingly travelled across the Atlantic and paid her abuser to torture and kill her.

While her family remain plagued with questions about how Sonia came to meet her death, there are many disturbing details they’d rather be shielded from.

Sonia Exelby, a 32-year-old music tutor from Portsmouth, was found dead in Florida last year

Some of how she ended up in her captor’s hands is outlined in a Florida police report. It is delivered in the flat prose of officialdom, though is no less distressing for it.

One passage stands out like a beacon. Sonia, says the report, wanted to meet ‘online individuals who would be willing to kill her violently’. Evidence left on her computer, it added, indicated that ‘she was travelling to the United States to be possibly sexually abused, tortured and murdered by unknown individuals’.

It is one thing to be suicidal – and Sonia had long struggled with mental illness – but it is her apparent willingness to submit to violent degradation and being killed that her family find unfathomable. They still await answers.

For now, though, when images of Sonia’s desperation at the end of her life crowd her loved ones’ thoughts, they counter them with those summoned from a vast portfolio of happy childhood memories.

There were the summer days she spent on her family’s yacht, sailing to the Isle of Wight with her siblings. Then there is Sonia, the chorister, with the voice of an angel. And Sonia the musician who effortlessly mastered the piano, flute and guitar. And not least how her almost ethereal calm – her family knew her as ‘Lamby’ because of her sweet nature – put everyone she met at ease.

This is how they strive to remember her. To this end, Sonia’s family have now released a tribute to a ‘truly beautiful person, inside and out’ who ‘was softly spoken and always gave the best hugs. She was the baby out of us that kept us bound together.

‘She had the gentlest soul – so gentle that she chose to become vegan, because she couldn’t bear the thought of any animal suffering just so she could eat.

‘That was who she was: kind, compassionate, and full of love…Being around her felt special – she brought a calmness and warmth that made everything feel a little lighter… she never judged, never criticised – she simply accepted people as they were and loved them for it.

‘That is something so many of us will carry with us forever.’

With so much still unexplained, what is undeniable is that Sonia’s childhood was a loving one. One family member went so far as to call it ‘beautiful’.

Through a fetish website online, she met roadside mechanic Dwain Chadwick Hall, a self-confessed sadist who lived in a small bungalow in central Florida with his chronically sick wife

Along with her four-year-old sister, Sara, she was adopted aged one by a civil servant and his wife in Portchester, Hampshire. Later she was reunited with her birth mother and four older siblings. One of them called it ‘the most incredible thing to have them [Sonia and Sara] back in our lives’.

Schoolfriends recall Sonia as someone quiet and kind who loved performing in the choir.

At sixth-form college she had a boyfriend with whom she shared her love of video games and animals. Outwardly all seemed well, but depression loomed, just as it had done with her ‘vulnerable’ biological mother.

Sonia had destructive thoughts about her body image and dropped out of university when her mental health problems became ‘overwhelming’. Throughout her 20s she grew increasingly withdrawn and sought solace in video games and strangers she met online. Her life was spiralling.

By 2023, Sonia became a recluse, rarely venturing from her Portsmouth flat. To the dismay of her family, she confessed to browsing online suicide forums.

Then, through a hardcore fetish pornography website, she met someone with the username ‘alphasadist’. It turned out to be roadside mechanic Dwain Chadwick Hall, a self-confessed sadist who lived in a small bungalow in central Florida with his chronically sick wife.

Hall liked Sonia’s ‘pretty British accent’ and they shared sexual and suicidal fantasies.

Styling himself as her mentor, though they had not yet met, his hold over her grew intense. He issued her with daily routines to follow. Her family said Sonia became disengaged and determined to push them away.

In August 2024, Sonia used the encrypted messaging app Telegram to arrange to fly to the US and meet men who had allegedly promised to help fulfil her fantasy of being violently killed. But a close friend raised the alarm and Hampshire Police intervened, removing her phone and laptop for her own safety. Nevertheless, the following spring Sonia made plans to fly to Florida to meet Hall. But he cancelled, citing his wife’s deteriorating health.

In a phone call with Sonia, Hall said he owed $10,000 (£7,500) to the Internal Revenue Service. Sonia offered to help pay $4,000 (£3,000) of his debt in exchange for Hall helping her, as he put it, remove the ‘trappings of humanity’. In other words, she would give him money to pay the taxman and in return he would fulfil her fantasy of being abused and killed.

On Friday, October 10 last year, Sonia flew from Heathrow to Gainesville, 110 miles north of Orlando. Significantly, she booked a return flight for the following Monday afternoon. It might have been a cover story for immigration officials but it also suggests perhaps that she wasn’t entirely sure how the trip would end.

When she failed to return on Monday, her boyfriend posted an emotional plea for help on Instagram. ‘We believe she has arranged to meet someone... and has got herself into an extremely vulnerable situation.’ Her family were, he added, ‘terrified for her safety’. Sonia and Hall, who picked her up from the airport, arranged to spend a weekend in an isolated two-bed cottage just outside the small town of Reddick in Marion County, 15 miles north of Ocala. As she flew across the Atlantic, Hall bought a shovel, a 50ft length of rope, gun cleaner, a parachute cord and deodorant spray.

It emerged that, in the hours after Sonia arrived, seven attempts were made to use her Lloyds bank cards but all failed, until an eighth went through on her Tesco debit card for $1,200 (£900). The charge was for services to Solver Wolf Roadside Assistance – Hall’s recovery firm. His van was spotted outside the Airbnb by a neighbour.

On Friday, October 10 last year, Sonia travelled from Heathrow to Gainesville, 110 miles north of Orlando. When she failed to return on Monday, her boyfriend posted an emotional plea for help

Sonia’s harrowing, typo-filled message to an online friend via Discord (an instant messaging app popular with gamers), appears in a report by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.

At times it appears garbled: ‘I’m sorry he keeps taking my phone he doesn’t trust me with it. He made it clear there was no way out unless I shoot him. I was questioning it last night. I can’t kill anyone. [I] realise this is the last thing I’ll ever day [say] to anyone if I don’t take his offer of shooting him. He showed me about [how] to use it and where to aim it. I’m so so scared I’m so broken and in so much pain all I can do is lay here and doing what gee [he] wants makes him respect me enough not to do the things I really hate. Everything but some are.’

The message ends: ‘I’m sorry I don’t even know what I’m saying and I’m trying to be quick and My times up.’

That night, before he went to sleep, Hall phoned his wife to tell her that he loved her. The next day, he recorded a four-minute ‘consent’ video of Sonia, an apparent strategy to exculpate him from blame if arrested. Terrified and withdrawn, Sonia looks dishevelled and is wearing the same floral dress she wore when she boarded her flight at Heathrow. There are bruises and abrasions on her face, neck and torso.

Hall commands Sonia to admit that she has travelled here to die and that no one is forcing her to be here. She is only able to nod and shake her head in response. On the recording she says she is an ‘awful person’ and that she deserves to ‘suffer’. Hall deleted the video three seconds after filming it but police were later able to retrieve it from his phone.

Later, when questioned by police Hall – sitting cross-legged, his arm thrown over the back of a sofa, at times appearing nonchalant – offered a twisted explanation for Sonia’s subdued demeanour. He claimed it was because she was ‘disappointed’ by his reluctance to abuse her.

On October 12, Hall left the cottage and drove 30 minutes south towards Ocala to buy a plastic tarpaulin from a DIY shop before driving a further 13 minutes and pulling into a quiet road next to dense woodland. GPS data retrieved from Hall’s phone by police revealed he stayed at the site for about an hour. This was the same spot where police sniffer dogs found Sonia’s body five days later in a shallow grave.

She had been stabbed four times. Her blood was later found on Hall’s 7in customised steel knife. The blade is engraved with the words ‘Dorkworfy point end goes into the other guy’ – a reference to another of Hall’s online monikers, ‘Darkwolf’.

Hall was charged with kidnapping and first degree murder in November last year.

The Daily Mail has obtained unseen transcripts of Hall speaking to his wife of 28 years, Ginger Stein, from Marion County Jail in Ocala as he awaits trial.

In them, he appears resigned to his fate, admitting: ‘I don’t think I’m ever coming home.

‘It’s a lot to deal with, I’m sorry,’ he tells Ms Stein, 44.

In what appears to be a reference to the $4,000 he told police that Ms Exelby had agreed to pay him he goes on: ‘We needed money but we didn’t need it this bad.’

Elsewhere, Hall seems furious at being portrayed as a ‘monster’. He refuses to accept he has done anything wrong, instead blaming Sonia for her brutal demise. ‘You don’t know how worried I am about losing you because when all the s about this case starts coming out it is going to look so f*** bad,’ he tells his wife. ‘I was trying to help somebody and humans have a tendency to screw you over and that is basically what happened. I am not the monster that they are painting me out to be.

‘But we all know what the end result was – it was just compassion and love – I tried to give Sonia what she wanted. I tried to do it in a sense that was compassionate and not being a freaking monster and just picking a victim and seducing them to do whatever and taking advantage of them in any way shape or form.’

Hall accepts that ‘in simple terms there is no defence’, but he adds: ‘I don’t believe I did anything wrong.’

It is not a sentiment shared by Sonia’s family. Not that they have any wish to dwell on details of the case. ‘We know that life wasn’t always easy for you, but your life was so much more than the struggles you faced,’ they said in their tribute. ‘It is so important to us that the life you lived is what you are remembered for.

‘You were deeply loved, and you will always be deeply loved.

‘We miss you more than words can ever say. We love you so much, always, and forever.’