The sister of the murdered British backpacker Hannah Witheridge died in hospital after leading the fight for justice for her sibling and travelling to Thailand despite being seriously ill, an inquest heard. Laura Daniels, a paediatric nurse, died in 2019 aged 30 after years of complications following surgery, five years after her 23-year-old sister was killed. Their mother, Susan Witheridge, wept as she told the hearing: “You lose one daughter and you just don’t expect to lose another. I just loved her so much and I just want her back.” She said Daniels was so ill that when she travelled to Thailand for the court case of her sister’s killers she had fluid “leaking from her nose”. Witheridge told Portsmouth coroner’s court: “There was no way Laura would not be in that court for her sister.” The inquest heard Daniels had surgery in 2011 for the condition trigeminal neuralgia, which causes severe facial pain. She subsequently underwent more than 50 other procedures and suffered complications including meningitis, spinal fluid leakage, sepsis and a build-up of fluid in the brain. She died at Southampton general hospital in September 2019. She was pregnant at the time and medical experts have been unable to establish the exact cause of death. The coroner, Rosamund Rhodes-Kemp, recorded an open conclusion. Her husband, Lewis Daniels, told the inquest the sisters were best friends as well as siblings and his wife had spearheaded the campaign for justice for Witheridge despite her health problems. In a statement read to the inquest, he said: “In the middle of [her health troubles] Laura’s sister and best friend had her life stolen in the cruellest way when she was murdered whilst on holiday. “Our lives changed when we received the tragic news of what happened to Hannah. I could not really describe the pain I felt so I cannot imagine what the pain was like for a mother, father or sister. “She [Laura] spearheaded the fight for justice for her sister, going to Thailand to have meetings with Thai officials and giving statements about Hannah to the media.” Daniels added: “It is unbelievable she kept herself mentally in a strong position; she just wanted to do it. She never complained, she never moaned, she just got on with what she had to do every single day – that was Laura.” Witheridge, a student from Hemsby, Norfolk, and fellow traveller David Miller, 24, a civil and structural engineering graduate from Jersey, were bludgeoned to death on a beach on the island of Koh Tao, southern Thailand, on 15 September 2014. A postmortem examination showed Witheridge had been raped. Two Burmese workers, Lin and Phyo (also known as Win Zaw Htun), were sentenced to death for the murders but last year were told they would spend their lives in prison instead.