ENQUIRER SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: When NICK and AARON CARTER’s sister LESLIE, 25, was found dead of a drug overdose, insiders say she was battling “mental illness and depression” and the Carter family curse.
“All I can say is she was really misunderstood,” Leslie’s distraught husband, Mike Ashton, told The ENQUIRER. “I love her more than life itself…This has been so hard for me. But I’m trying to hold it together for the sake of our baby.”
The couple’s daughter, Alyssa, is just 10 months old and was in the house when her mom died.
Leslie’s untimely death is just the latest sad chapter in the Carter family history – and some pals say it’s like a curse has loomed over the clan since Nick and the Backstreet Boys first burst onto the national stage in the 1990s.
“Leslie and the other Carters have known no peace since the millions started flowing in,” a close source told The ENQUIRER. “It’s been a true family curse.”
The curse has included their parents’ volatile marriage and bitter bustup, drug woes and arrests.
But the curse struck its most shattering blow when young mother Leslie was found unresponsive in her father’s rural Mayville, N.Y., home.
Tragically, friends and close family members say the beautiful blonde was just getting her life together when she overdosed on a deadly cocktail of prescription drugs.
According to a police report obtained by The ENQUIRER, three powerful drugs were found near Leslie’s lifeless body: cyclobenzaprine, a muscle relaxant, olanzapine, used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and alprazolam, the trade name for Xanax, for anxiety and panic attacks.
Leslie had been staying with her father in a desperate bid to beat her demons. But her crippling depression still haunted her, say her family.
On the morning of her death, Leslie sat and drank coffee with her stepmother, Ginger, on her father’s front porch. She complained that she wasn’t feeling well and asked Ginger to look after baby Alyssa. Hours later, Leslie slipped and fell in the shower and Ginger helped her to bed.
When Ginger went to check on Leslie at 4 p.m., she was unresponsive and not breathing. Ginger frantically dialed 911 and Leslie’s father Bob began CPR, but it wasn’t enough to save Leslie and she was pronounced dead at Westfield Memorial Hospital at 4:59 p.m.
The tragedy capped a tough, short life. Along with the rest of the Carter children, Leslie grew up seeing their parents, Bob and Jane, drunk and fighting – and the kids were used as pawns in the battles even after the couple finally divorced in 2004, say insiders.
“When my parents divorced, I went with my mom because I didn’t want her to be alone,” Leslie once said.
But Bob went on to seek custody of Aaron, his twin sister Angel and then 17-year-old Leslie – and the already tense situation quickly escalated to violence.
In 2003, Bob ended up in jail for shoving Jane, and in 2004 Jane was arrested for allegedly using a rock to smash through a glass door of the family’s home in Marathon, Fla., and attacking Ginger, then Bob’s girlfriend, as she slept by his side.
The battle raged until a shaken Aaron, 17 at the time, desperately called 911.
The “Curse of the Carters” continued to plague other members of the family. In October 2004, Leslie’s sister Angel was arrested for shoplifting. Then, in March 2005, The ENQUIRER published exclusive pictures of Aaron smoking pot and revealed that he spent thousands of dollars a month on drugs. And in a sensational interview, Leslie revealed that Aaron told her he’d smoked marijuana with Michael Jackson during a party at Jackson’s Neverland ranch.
In 2006, mom Jane was arrested for DUI. And two years later, Aaron was busted in Junction, Texas, for possession of pot after a cop stopped him for speeding.
Meanwhile, Backstreet Boys heartthrob Nick battled booze and drugs for 10 years. He was arrested in 2002 after a nightclub fight and again in 2005 for drunk driving. He only managed to get sober after he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a weakening of the heart muscle, in 2008.
Now the family curse has taken the life of their beloved sister. Devastated by the loss, Aaron took an immediate leave from his role in the off-Broadway production of “The Fantasticks.”
Leslie was laid to rest on Feb. 4 in a Chautauqua County cemetery in front of nearly 100 friends and family.
“It was a peaceful service,” funeral director David Freay told The ENQUIRER. “Six or eight people talked about her, and there was a lot of crying.”
Sadly, Nick couldn’t attend, but at a concert two days after her death, he introduced the ballad “Falling Down” by saying: “I never thought I’d ever have to, but I’d like to dedicate this song to my sister.”
