David Gatt, the man who sold Rachel Bowdler a fatal dose of heroin, was yesterday sentenced to four years and three months in jail for involuntary homicide and fined €2,329, after admitting the charges.

The tragic case of Ms Bowdler, who died at the age of 18 when a fellow drug addict and his family failed to take her to hospital, came to a close yesterday with the final conviction in the legal saga.

Mr Gatt, 37, who also admitted drug trafficking, had earlier reached a plea bargain with the Attorney General before a trial by jury.

Until now, a family of three, Carmel Decelis and his wife Conċetta, both 64, and their son Jason, 36, had been jailed after they were found guilty of murder by omission by failing to take Ms Bowdler to hospital when she suffered an overdose.

Ms Decelis was jailed for 15 years, her son Jason for 25, and Mr Decelis was imprisoned for one-and-a-half years as he was cleared of murder but found guilty of involuntary homicide.

The case made legal history as the first conviction in Malta for what is known as murder by omission

The case made legal history as the first conviction in Malta for what is known as murder by omission and the only time an entire family had been convicted for almost two centuries.

Ms Bowdler’s lifeless body was found by a farmer in a field in an area known as Ras il-Ġebel, limits of Mġarr, on May 13, 2001.

At the trial of the Decelis family, the jury heard that Jason Decelis had met Ms Bowdler the day before she was found dead and the two of them went to his mother’s flat in Buġibba.

At about 6pm, the young woman lost consciousness and Jason Decelis panicked and phoned his father, who, after arriving at the flat, began wetting Ms Bowdler’s face in an attempt to revive her.

At around 10.30pm, his estranged wife arrived home and found him still trying to wake her up.

Since they were separated, Mr Decelis left the apartment for his Pietà flat, where he spent the night worrying about the young woman.

Ms Decelis stayed up all night tending to Ms Bowdler and the following morning, at about 6am, her husband phoned to check on the young woman and then went back to Buġibba where he heard Ms Bowdler was still in a bad shape.

As Ms Decelis realised that Ms Bowdler was no longer breathing, she decided that the young woman’s body had to be taken out of her apartment.

Carmel and Jason Decelis carried her down the stairs and on to the back seat of their car. Jason Decelis sat next to her and gave directions to his father at the wheel. Ms Decelis sat in the passenger’s seat.

When they arrived in a field in Mġarr they laid the young woman on the ground and drove back home.

Testifying during the compilation of evidence against Mr Gatt, Jason Decelis said Mr Gatt had sold her the heroin at the apartment the day before she died.

When Ms Bowdler started displaying the symptoms of an overdose, Jason Decelis, then 24, called Mr Gatt and was told not to take her to the hospital or to the health centre as they would be arrested.

The story of Ms Bowdler’s short and tragic life was exposed during the trial of the Decelis family in 2006 when her father John took the witness stand and gave a moving account of how his daughter’s life was turned upside down by her mother’s murder.

He told the court that Rachel had found the body of her mother, Marlene, who had just been brutally raped and killed. The family lived in Egypt at the time where he worked in the oil industry.

Three weeks after moving there, and when he was some 400 kilometres from home, a burglar broke into their house.

He killed her mother with a hammer and when Rachel returned home from school she discovered the body.

After that, Mr Bowdler returned to Malta and eventually he remarried, but his daughter did not have a good relationship with her stepmother even though she got on well with her two children. When her father eventually separated from his second wife, t was very upset as she had lost her “brother and sister”.

She eventually started taking drugs and her father took her to Mount Carmel Hospital for observation. When she was fit to leave, she settled in Gozo with him and found a boyfriend who was a teetotaller.

She started studying again and was due to sit for her O level exams.

Rachel had a full-time job at a restaurant and it seemed she had left her terrible childhood behind her.

But tragedy struck again. Her boyfriend, Michael Sacco, was killed in a traffic accident while on his way to university.

He died soon after he had disembarked from the Gozo ferry. Ms Bowdler saw her boyfriend’s accident on the news. A month later, she took the fatal overdose.