Lauren Bolton is a Rovers Return barmaid whose apparent death in 2024 led to Roy Cropper being charged with murder.
Lauren was groomed by her father Reece Bolton to join Griff Reynolds's far-right extremist group. When Reece and his associates went to prison for trying to detonate a bomb at the peace festival in Victoria Street, Lauren went to stay with her mother in Devon. She later returned to Weatherfield and pursued Max Turner, also a victim of Griff's, but found to her disappointment that he was more interested in Sabrina Adetiba.
Gaining employment at Roy's Rolls, Lauren moved into Flat 4, Weatherfield Precinct. Joel Deering, the duty solicitor assigned to Lauren when she was arrested for criminal damage, helped her pay her bills in exchange for sex. However, when she broke it off and threatened to tell his girlfriend Dee-Dee Bailey about his infidelity, Joel beat Lauren mercilessly and left her for dead. Lauren managed to run away and spent five months in hiding, resulting in her being presumed dead back in Weatherfield.
She returned out of concern for her former employer Roy Cropper, and revealed to Joel that she was pregnant with his child. In exchange for a flat in Ireland, Lauren agreed not to report Joel to the police, but the premature birth of her son Frankie prevented her departure. Lauren's feud with Joel took a deadly turn when it led her to kill him in defence of Max Turner. She was charged with murder, but was found not guilty.
Biography[]
Lauren Bolton is the daughter of Reece Bolton. She was born on 1st December 2005.
Lauren's father was a part of Griff Reynolds' gang of political extremists, and she grew up believing their far-right lies. In September 2022, Reece set her up with 16-year-old Max Turner in the hope of enmeshing the lad in the gang. Lauren liked Max but disapproved of his friendship with refugee Daryan Zahawi; when Daryan tried to talk to her while waiting for Max to finish his shift at Speed Daal, Lauren told Max that he was creeping on her, helping to sow division between the workmates.
The following January, Griff's gang executed a bomb attack during a peace festival within the Victoria Street Christmas market. The bomb was moved to a safe distance after Max found out about Griff's plan and warned the participants, and the police arrested most of the gang members, including Reece. As Lauren still had influence over Max, Griff used her to let him into 8 Coronation Street so that he could get Max to claim the attack was all Reece's idea, but he was caught and arrested by Spider Nugent. With Reece going to prison, Lauren went to live with her mum in Devon.
Lauren re-appeared in Weatherfield in June. Homeless and desperate, she turned to Max, recently released from Greenford Secure Training Centre for encouraging terrorism. Despite disavowing Griff's group, Max was willing to help Lauren, viewing her as a victim of grooming just like him, and let her stay overnight at Audrey's salon. Lauren used their renewed friendship to lure Max into visiting Reece on remand in Highfield Prison so that he could be persuaded to give a false statement to help him out at his sentencing, but Max refused their entreaties and Reece was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Lauren remained in the area, moving into No.8 when Max persuaded the Platts that she deserved a second chance. In August, Roy Cropper gave her a trial shift at Roy's Rolls which initially had mixed results though she acquitted herself well when dealing with a complaining Beth Sutherland. She was jealous when she saw Max with his new girlfriend Sabrina Adetiba but was pleased when she discovered that he had refused to cut her out of his life while she needed help. Misreading the situation, she tried to kiss Max who pulled away from her. Gutted, she decided to leave the area but when Roy persuaded her to stay, once more Lauren mistook kind motives for something more and thought Roy wanted sex in exchange for a roof over her head. Thoroughly embarrassed she decided to leave both her job and No.8 though she changed her mind about the cafe and stole the keys to the salon before departing the Platts' house.
Lauren continued to disrupt Max's new romance wherever possible; in September, she lied to Sabrina that she was thrown out of No.8 when David Platt caught them in bed together. After Gav Adetiba confronted Max for messing his sister around, Max convinced Sabrina of the truth, leading Lauren to trash the salon in a drunken rage and David to report her to the police, though she was let off with a caution with the help of duty solicitor Joel Deering. After spending a couple of nights at a B&B, an arrangement was reached whereby Lauren moved into Flat 4, Weatherfield Precinct, subletting from Evelyn Plummer. She intended for her wages from a second job at a call centre to pay the rent, but when the job fell through, she accepted money from a sympathetic Joel. Ryan Connor also moved in as a flatmate when Lauren lied that she was twenty.
Joel would continue helping Lauren out financially. Lauren disliked being beholden to him, but had no way to repay the money. When she worked out that Ryan had had a fling with engaged Daisy Midgeley, Lauren blackmailed him for £1,000 in order to be debt-free. Daisy warned her to keep away but instead she got Daisy's fiancé Daniel Osbourne to give her one-to-one tutoring, wanting to re-sit her GCSEs, in order to put pressure on her. Daniel was oblivious to the fact that he was being used, and supported Lauren's efforts to improve herself by paying her exam fee. Ryan later found out that Lauren was making pornographic videos on Ovidz for extra money, despite being only seventeen. He reported her for being underage, resulting in her account being shut down. Realising that Lauren was desperate rather than conniving, Daisy persuaded the girl to back down on her blackmailing.
With Ryan moving back in with Carla Barlow, Lauren had no hope of paying the bills. With no other option, she accepted Joel's offer to settle her outstanding debts, and had sex with him as a thank-you. They continued to see each other in secret, with Joel using Lauren for sexual favours and rewarding her with expensive gifts. In November, seeking to build bridges with Max, Lauren gave him a watch, and was accused by Shona Platt of stealing from the cafe till in order to buy the gift. Although she was exonerated when Shona found the missing money stuffed under the till drawer, she refused to work somewhere she wasn't trusted and resigned. A month later, with unpaid bills mounting, she swallowed her pride and went back to the cafe. She continued to receive gifts, telling Max and Sabrina that they were from her rich new boyfriend. The pair began to suspect that Lauren had made the boyfriend up when she kept making out that he was too busy to meet them. Hurt by their insinuations, Lauren told Joel that she was ending their relationship.
Now that she was eighteen, Lauren created a new Ovidz account to supplement her income, but her monetary problems continued. When Bethany Platt pumped her for information about Daisy catfishing Ryan for an article for Chit-Chat magazine, Lauren tried to sell her story about how she was brainwashed by a far-right group, but cooled on the idea when she found out that her cut would only be £30. In desperation, she went into Bethany's left-behind bag at the cafe, however she was caught doing so leaving Roy with no choice but to sack her.
Joel was difficult for Lauren to shake off. He continued to expect her to be at his beck and call, and on occasion would be physically abusive when she refused to acquiece. Lauren hid the bruises as best she could and tried to carry on with her life. In January 2024, she and Bobby Crawford bonded when they discovered that both of their fathers were in prison, and Lauren was touched when Bobby obtained expensive textbooks for her. However, he was concerned that her rich ex-boyfriend was still in her life and, seeing a bruise on her shoulder, possibly abusing her. When Roy dropped off Lauren's last wage packet, she told him that she was going to leave Weatherfield for a new life. However, before she could get away she had a final showdown with Joel at the flat. When she tried to scare him off by threatening threatend to expose him to his girlfriend Dee-Dee Bailey, Joel saw red and beat Lauren with a chair leg. Lauren survived the assault, but fearing for her life she played dead until Joel had left, and fled once the coast was clear. She left Weatherfield by coach, taking nothing with her.
In order to ensure Joel couldn't trace her, Lauren didn't contact any of her friends back in Weatherfield to tell them what had happened. This caused many to wrongly assume that she had simply flitted. When Roy cleaned the flat as a favour to Evelyn, he unknowingly contaminated the crime scene, leading to his eventual arrest and charging with murder. The charges were dropped in May when one of Lauren's hairs was found in Nathan Curtis's van - planted by DC Kit Green - and Nathan was charged with the crime instead.
Lauren lived off the grid, surviving by using Bethany's stolen company credit card. She eventually discovered that she was pregnant with Joel's baby, but decided to keep it. In July, she came out of hiding to visit Roy in hospital after he was accosted by yobs who still believed he was responsible for her murder, causing his stent to fail. Roy was barely conscious when Lauren appeared by his bed, but lucid enough to report what he'd seen leading the police to carry out a CCTV check and confirm that Lauren was still living. Joel, also at the hospital, saw Lauren and learned that she was pregnant with his child, but she was able to flee. She was traced to a squat in Warrington by Dee-Dee and Bethany using Bethany's credit card statement, and persuaded to return to Weatherfield. However, she still desired a fresh start with her baby, and accepted a bribe from Joel to implicate Nathan in her assault in return for him paying for her to move to Belfast and providing a roof over her head in the meantime.
Before Lauren was due to leave for Belfast, she went into premature labour and was saved by Max when he found her locked in her flat. She was taken to hospital where she gave birth to a boy who she named Frankie. Dee-Dee, increasingly suspicious of Joel, worked out that he was the father of Lauren's baby and together they worked out that he had drugged her with labour-inducing pills and trapped her in the flat so that her baby died. Dee-Dee reported her fiancé to the police, but Joel was released after implicating Lauren in producing an illegal abortion. However, Lisa Swain, the lead detective on the case, believed Lauren and Dee-Dee's allegations and continued to investigate off-the-books. He was finally charged when Lisa's daughter Betsy confessed to ordering the labour-inducing drugs on Joel's behalf, putting Lauren in the clear but not until after social services had ordered that Lauren and Frankie had to live in a foster home while they were monitored.
In September, Joel missed his plea hearing and decided to make a run for it. With Dee-Dee having installed a tracker on Joel's phone, Max saw the signal on Lauren's phone and went off to confront him. Lauren, finding Joel trying to strangle Max in an altercation on a bridge, fatally hit Joel on the head with a rock in order to save Max. The pair then tipped Joel's body into a river, where it was found a few days later. As the police searched for his killer, Lauren and Max kept what had happened to themselves. Bobby, finding out that they had feelings for each other, matchmade them and they agreed to give their relationship another go. On an extended search of the viaduct area, the police found the rock with Joel’s blood on it, and the teens were put in the frame when Carla remembered seeing them with Joel's suitcase on the night he died and told the police. To protect Lauren, Max handed himself in and made out that he was alone on the bridge with Joel and killed him in self-defence. However, when Shona pushed Lauren into revealing Max's plan, she informed the police and Lauren was charged with murder instead.
Lauren applied to be moved into Norcross Prison's mother and baby unit with Frankie and was delighted when her request was granted. However, Gus and Anthea Deering were horrified to discover that their grandson was being brought up in a prison and applied for custody. Bruises were found on Frankie's body and Lauren was suspected of harming him, but she was cleared when tests showed that the baby had severe aplastic anaemia and would possibly need a bone marrow transplant.
At her plea hearing, Lauren pleaded not guilty to murder but was warned by Dee-Dee that she faced the toughest of prosecution barristers. The trial took place in January 2025, which Lauren expected to go against her due to the pathologist who examined Joel's body testifying that he was struck with the rock twice, contracting her own statement. Brie Benson, another prisoner, goaded Lauren into threatening her on the eve of her own release, and then attended court with her arm in a sling claiming from the public gallery that Lauren attacked her. However, Dee-Dee investigated and found out that Gus paid for Brie to stay in a flat he owned and informed the court. By a majority verdict, Lauren was found not guilty. However, with Frankie hospitalised with an infection, she remained stressed.
After the trial, Lauren and Frankie returned to the foster home. In April, she received a present of baby things from Reece and visited him in prison to tell him never to contact him again. His parting shot was to tell her that he was probably not her dad anyway. Later, she caught Betsy destroying a flower display from Preston's Petals and drove off in the flower shop van with Betsy in the passenger seat in order to avoid being caught by the owner, Tracy McDonald. After crashing the vehicle at the precinct, Lauren let Betsy take the blame at the girl's suggestion, but started to receive threatening anonymous texts saying that the sender knew she took the van. When the blackmailer demanded £500 for their silence, Lauren and Betsy filled an envelope with newspaper and watched as young Jake Windass picked it up. Confronting the eleven-year-old, they deleted the photos on his phone and sent the boy on his way.
With her foster placement up, Lauren used £500 cash Bobby had given her to pay off the blackmailer as a deposit on a flat - at the cost of her friendship with Bobby - and Roy persuaded Carla to give her a trial shift at the Rovers. In June, Lauren attended Aadi Alahan's midsummer party at 7 Coronation Street where she unwittingly took his share of LSD left by Brody Michaelis. She was hospitalised after a terrible psychotic episode where she saw Joel and passed out the next morning, injuring herself. A guilt-ridden Aadi fussed over Lauren who, mistaking his intentions, started to see him in a new light. He eventually confessed to the spiking, and a furious Lauren reported him to the police though they let him off with a caution.
Personality[]
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Background information[]
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First and last lines[]
"Hey" (First line, to Max Turner)
Appendices[]
List of addresses[]
| Address | Duration |
|---|---|
| Weatherfield | Until January 2023 |
| Devon | January to mid-2023 |
| Audrey's | 28th June to 14th July 2023 |
| 8 Coronation Street | 14th July to 14th August 2023 |
| Audrey's | 14th August to 7th September 2023 |
| Flat 4, Weatherfield Precinct | 11th September 2023 to 21st February 2024 |
Employment history[]
| Role | Institution | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Waitress | Roy's Rolls | 11th August 2023 to 1st December 2023 |
| Waitress | Roy's Rolls | 1st January to 19th February 2024 |
| Barmaid | Rovers Return Inn | 14th May 2025 onwards |