AN INQUEST into the death of chess champion Jessie Gilbert has recorded an open verdict.

Jessie, 19, from Reigate, died in the early hours of July 26, 2006, after falling 65 feet from the eighth-storey window of her hotel in the Czech Republic following a tournament.

Surrey coroner Michael Burgess told the hearing at Epsom that it was possible the teenager, who had been drinking, jumped deliberately but it was also possible she had fallen by accident.

The inquest heard that on the night Jessie died she had been drinking rum and coke with a friend, a fellow chess competitor, with whom she was sharing a room.

In a statement read to the court her friend said she went to the bathroom feeling ill but when she returned some time later Jessie was missing. After a brief search Jessie was discovered below the bedroom window.

Her body was brought back to England on August 3, 2006, following a post mortem by the Czech authorities.

Consultant forensic pathologist Dr Fegan-Earl said the most significant injury was to the aorta, the principal blood vessel in the body, which caused extensive bleeding in the chest. "She would not have suffered," he said.

Traces of Sertraline, an antidepressant, were present in her blood, in line with her prescribed dose of 100mg a day, along with 205mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, equivalent to two and a half times the legal limit for driving.

The court heard how Jessie appeared to be a normal, happy child until the age of eight when she began complaining of physical symptoms such as leg pains which had no medical explanation.

A year later her GP, Dr Jonathan Lewis, referred her to a child psychiatrist. He said: "Looking back I think her symptoms were depression."

She was also prone to sleepwalking and was once discovered by her mother, Dr Angela Gilbert, at the chalk pit in Woldingham having walked barefoot in her pyjamas for two and a half miles.

In her evidence Dr Gilbert also revealed that Jessie had previously taken an overdose of 200 Paracetamol tablets and once threatened to throw herself off a clock tower after a night drinking with friends.

Witnesses told how Jessie had spoken enthusiastically about the future. She left school in the summer and had earned a place at Oxford University which she deferred for a year so she could travel and concentrate on her chess career.

Dr Gilbert said she last saw her daughter at Heathrow airport on July 20. She said: "She just put her arms around me, smiled and said she loved me and that everything would be all right. She was smiling and relaxed and serene and she looked like she'd got to where she wanted to be somehow."

The hearing was attended by Jessie's father, Ian Gilbert, who was cleared last December of raping her. She had been due to testify against him. In a written statement handed to reporters after the hearing he said: "I loved my daughter. She was intelligent, gifted and talented and I miss her enormously."

Dr Gilbert and two of her daughters were accompanied to the hearing by Esther Rantzen, chair and founder of the charity Childline.

In a statement after the hearing Dr Gilbert said: "She has been robbed of a happy and fulfilling future and the world has been deprived of a very special young woman with so much to give.

"We believe that Jessie's very public death is her legacy to many other children and that she will achieve in death what she hoped to do in life, to save others' lives. We pray that her soul is in peace."