COME BACK KATHERINE; Parents' plea as lovesick girl, 15, goes on run

THE parents of a 15-year-old girl on the run with a teacher at her school pleaded last night for her to come home.

Maths master Paul Tramontini, 33, skipped bail and disappeared with Katherine Baillie after being arrested and charged with abducting her.

As police stepped up the hunt for the teacher last night, Katherine's distraught mother Margery told of the torment her family was suffering.

"We're hoping she'll come to her senses, wake up one morning and think, 'God Almighty, what am I doing with an old man?'" she said.

Tramontini, recently divorced from a history student he wed nine years ago, has resigned from his job at Mayfield comprehensive school in Portsmouth where he first met Katherine.

Worried staff at the school had alerted social services chiefs to secret meetings between the teacher and his pupil, then only 14.

Tramontini resigned and told Katherine's parents: "I love her. Can't we talk about this as a family?"

Margery, who adopted Katherine as a month-old baby, told him: "You'll never be part of our family after what you've put us through."

And her husband Tom angrily threw him out of their house and ordered him to leave their daughter alone.

Margery said: "She is still a child. It is not as if she enticed him. He did all the running.

"He pursued her, turning up at song and dance classes. I thought naively that he was showing a healthy interest in her out-of-school development.

"I remember thinking how nice it was of him to be so supportive of her.

"But no matter how he felt about our daughter he should have stood back.

"She didn't even have a proper boyfriend before she came into contact with Tramontini."

The teacher and pupil defied pleas to wait until Katherine's 16th birthday before making a decision about their future and ran away together for the first time.

When they returned to her home in Portsmouth five days later Katherine defiantly told her mother: "Paul cares for me and he'll go to prison to prove his love."

Tramontini was put on police bail accused of abducting her. But six weeks ago the couple vanished for a second time - and have not been seen since.

Detective Sergeant Ken Littlewood, of Hampshire police, said: "Katherine is vulnerable and Tramontini has taken advantage of her."

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