‘I love you,’ Nick Gazzard’s voice crackled through the phone.
He’d seen his daughter, Hollie, just the day before, smiling as she sat on the sofa in her pyjamas with her signature strawberry blonde hair, munching on a slice of pizza.
‘I love you too,’ she replied, before hanging up to head to the hair salon where she worked on Southgate Street in Gloucester. That was the last time Nick would ever hear Hollie’s voice.
Later that evening, just after 6pm on February 18, 2014, he returned home from work to pick something up before heading to his other daughter Chloe’s house for tea, only to find a car parked across his driveway.
Two plain-clothed police officers got out and told Nick that his daughter Hollie, 20, had been brutally attacked by her ex boyfriend in the hairdressers.
Immediately, he and the family were taken to the hospital where she was being treated and were met by a consultant. Visibly shaking, he told them: ‘I’m very sorry but Hollie has passed. The only crumb of comfort I can give you is that she probably didn’t feel anything after the first couple of stab wounds.’
Hollie had been fatally stabbed 14 times in the neck, chest and torso, by her former boyfriend 22-year-old Asher Maslin. They had broken up four days before due to his threatening and violent behaviour.
Among the things he’d put her through, Maslin had grabbed Hollie by the throat, hit and kicked her in separate incidents, and stole money from her bank account, while running up debts in her name.
‘I felt like I’d been hit like a train when they told me the news. I didn’t want it to be true,’ Nick, 60, tells Metro. ‘My life was turned inside out, back to front and upside down – I didn’t know where I was.’
Instead of being able to spend the night grieving in the comfort of his own home, he and his family were forced to go elsewhere because Asher had yet to be arrested and had threatened to hit Nick with a baseball bat.
This Is Not Right
On November 25, 2024 Metro launched This Is Not Right, a year-long campaign to address the relentless epidemic of violence against women.
With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
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‘We were taken to a safe house outside the village with armed police surrounding our car – it was very surreal,’ he recalls. ‘Then we got a call in the middle of the night saying that Asher was in custody.’
Hollie and her abuser’s relationship timeline
Hollie met Asher in February 2013 when she was 19. She’d taken a bar job at a local night club while waiting for the go-ahead to work on a cruise ship as a hair dresser.
A couple of weeks later she moved from her family home in Gloucester to London for her cruise ship training and Asher followed her there without a job or anywhere to stay.
Nick says: ‘He was stalking Hollie from that moment. He was infatuated and latched on to her.’
Although she began working on the cruise shop, Hollie’s dreams of travelling the world this way were short lived, says Nick. ‘We thought great, nine months away, doing the job that she always wanted to do – but within a week she phoned and said she wanted to come back,’ he remembers.
‘We never knew whether she was homesick or Asher put lots of pressure on her to return.’
When Hollie moved to Edgeware in April 2013, Asher soon followed and moved in with her.
‘He was in his element,’ Nick adds. ‘He’d isolated her away from her family and friends in London.’
In August of that year Hollie and Asher went to Notting Hill Carvinal where there was an altercation and it’s believed by her family that he physically assaulted her.
‘She called me the next day and asked me to pick her up and bring her home to Gloucester, so I did,’ Nick says. ‘She packed in her salon job at a moments notice and got a job in the Fringe Benefits & La Bella Beauty salon at home. Again, he followed her back.’
CCTV caught Asher with his hands around Hollie’s throat on a night out on two separate occasions in subsequent months but Hollie, like many abuse victims, didn’t want to prosecute. Nick says the police should have used evidence-led policing to prosecute it themselves but, at the time, he didn’t know this was an option.
The father-of-two met Asher a couple of times – one occasion he came to his Nick’s house drunk. ‘He made a nuisance of himself and I said to Hollie I didn’t want him at my house again,’ he recalls.
‘She began saying things like “I really want to get rid of this guy” and “I don’t want to be with him anymore” but there was nothing to suggest she couldn’t handle it. We didn’t know what had really been happening.’
Hollie got another job in a local pub in the evenings so Asher couldn’t see her and, when she broke up with him on February 14, 2014, in a public place for her own safety, he threw a drink in her face. Then he followed Hollie to her car and stole her debit card from her handbag in the footwell.
The next day Hollie confided in Nick that Asher had threatened to throw acid in her face and ‘spoil her looks’.
‘He said that his family would “get” her if she broke up with him and he also threatened to take his own life,’ Nick adds. ‘It made me feel sick and angry.’
The family called the police, but Nick was less than impressed by their reaction. ‘When the police came round that evening and they focused on the theft of the bank card, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,’ he remembers.
‘Hollie was reluctant to sign a statement because she was scared, but they told her if she didn’t they could do her for wasting police time. While they were there, she even got a text message from Asher saying “if you don’t call me I’ll come round and put a baseball bat around your dad’s head”, but they said there was nothing they could do about it.
Two days later she was murdered.
Then the reality of what happened finally sunk in. ‘I didn’t eat for days,’ Nick adds. ‘It was maybe a month before I started to get back to reality.
‘We had to deal with some of Hollie’s affairs quickly like her bank accounts and letters of debts that Asher had run up in her name. I always remember phoning the banks and saying, “Can you give me information on this account?” and they would want to speak to the policy holder. I had to say “you can’t, because she’s dead”.’
When Asher was sentenced to a minimum of 24 years in prison for his crime in July 2014 after pleading guilty, Nick was determined his daughter wouldn’t die in vain. If he could stop other women from experiencing what his daughter had gone through; ‘to help just one person it would be worth it,’ he says.
Hollie is saving lives with the Hollie Guard app
On April 24, just over a month after her murder, Nick founded Hollie Gazzard Trust – a charity aimed at raising awareness of violence against women and educating young people about the warning signs of abusive and violent behaviour.
Over a decade on, trust members continue to conduct workshops in schools and sit in on government talks regarding policy on violence against women.
They are also responsible for Hollie Guard, a free app designed to raise the alarm if the user comes into harm’s way or feels unsafe. If the alarm button in the app is pressed or the phone is shaken, a message and live location is sent to a selected emergency contact to say you’re in trouble.
Your phone will also begin to record live video and audio of what’s happening.
There’s also an add-on users can pay for, which offers a 24/7 monitoring service from a trained professional, who has the power to get the police dispatched to you from a police control room if they see you’re in danger.
And it has already proved to be a lifesaving app. One young woman, from North Lincolnshire, was attacked after telling her boyfriend, Jordan Naif she wanted to end the relationship the day before.
Little did she know that he had 10 prior violent offences on his record and had breached a court order, which required him to declare new romantic relationships to his probation officer.
Following the break up, Naif, 30, showed up in the early hours of November 19, 2023, and when he entered the bathroom, his victim pressed the alarm in the app triggering her phone to start recording.
In a sustained violent assault the young woman was picked up and thrown into the bathtub fully clothed, before her attacker held her head under water.
Adam Constable at Hollie Guard tells Metro: ‘This was all recorded and sent to the monitoring centre where they dispatched police who arrived at her door in under eight minutes.’
The video evidence was then used to secure a conviction in court and Naif was given a 22 month sentence for non-fatal suffocation and assault by beating.
As of mid-February 2024, data from Hollie Guard has already been submitted as evidence in 60 police investigations.
For Hollie’s father Nick, this app was the positive that came out of losing his daughter. ‘I couldn’t affect what happened to Hollie and I didn’t want to waste any energy on him – I wanted to be positive,’ he says.
‘Now we’re gathering momentum and what we’re doing is Hollie’s name is helping other people. I’m incredibly proud of her.’
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