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‘I want to be the next Kate Moss’

– aspiring teenage model Sally Anne Bowman in 2003.

The murder of Sally Anne Bowman in the London suburb of Croydon on September 2005 shocked a nation which was becoming increasingly blasé about horrific street slayings. Young men died bleeding from savage knife wounds after a pointless argument; children at play were snatched off the street to be sexually used and abused until their young lives were choked out of them by a pervert’s hand; street muggings were frequent and almost not to be remarked on; old age pensioners were beaten in their homes and died for the meagre content of their purses; football matches ended in a welter of missiles and café tables.

Yet the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, a young and aspiring model, was so horrific in its execution and the indignities committed on her body so repellent that everyone who heard of it sat up and took notice. And ironically and dramatically, for all the perpetrated horror and violence of that night it was a minor brawl about soccer that brought her killer to justice.

Those who knew Sally Anne during her short life would describe her as an enigmatic 18-year-old, in varying degrees opinionated, warm, argumentative, and naïve. The latter quality was possibly that which cost Sally Anne her life, although her refusal to be intimidated by the actions of a man whom she dismissed to her friends and employer as a ‘wacko’ would also be a contributory factor.

Sally Anne Bowman was born in South Croydon – at the time a part of the county of Surrey but now classified as a suburb of London’s sprawl – on 11 September 1987, the youngest of four sisters. Her early school years were spent at Cheam Fields Primary School in nearby Sutton, she moved on to Cheam High and later attended the British Record Industry Trust School of Performing Arts and Technology in Croydon. Pursuing her dream to follow another Croydon girl, the model Kate Moss, onto the cover of Vogue, at the age of 16 she joined the local Pulse Model Management Agency and worked on the London catwalks, including the Café de Paris on Piccadilly and the Swatch Alternative Fashion Week. Tall, willowy, with long blonde hair and large blue eyes, the budding model, although hardly out of school, was fiercely ambitious and could not wait to break into the big time.

Unfortunately for Sally Anne, she had also attracted the attention of Mark Dixie, a 36-year-old pub chef, who was into both drug and alcohol abuse, and who frequented many of the dance clubs and pubs in Croydon town centre where Sally Anne often went with her sisters. Dixie began to stalk his victim, showing up at karaoke nights where Sally Anne, a proficient singer, liked to perform her favourite songs – Bette Midler’s ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ and Celine Dion’s ‘Love Goes On’, the theme from Titanic.

On one occasion he even turned up at the hairdressing salon where she worked and insisted that ‘the tall blonde one’ washed and cut his hair. It’s possible that Dixie’s obsession had given Sally Anne cause for unease, since her relatives told police that three or four days before her murder she seemed worried and unsettled.

The night of Saturday 24 September 2005 was to evolve into a blood bath of horror but it started innocently enough when Sally Anne and her 22-year-old sister Nicole went into Croydon to visit a club. Nicole decided to go home early while Sally Anne stayed for a drink with friends at a nearby bar before telephoning her on/off boyfriend, 22-year-old plasterer Lewis Sproston, to ask him to give her a lift to her newly-rented apartment in Blenheim Crescent.

It was the first time in 30 days that Sally Anne had returned to the apartment, having spent most of this time back home with her mother, Linda, and sisters during a bout of homesickness and worry over grocery bills – common enough in young women who leave home to demonstrate their newfound independence.

Lewis arrived reluctantly, annoyed because Sally Anne had chosen to go out without him that evening but was now treating him as a taxi driver. He found himself in the quandary that can affect all young men in a state of unrequited love towards offhand young women they have known since schooldays and who go on to seemingly glamorous careers in modelling or show business. Sally Anne, meanwhile, while being aware of the dismissive way she often treated him, was nonetheless jealous at the thought of him seeing other women, and the couple’s relationship was in a continuous state of flux.

As usual they argued at length and it wasn’t until 4.10 am that Sally Anne climbed out of the car and Lewis drove away in a temper, neglecting to escort Sally Anne to her door, less than 50 metres away. It was an action, he would later recall, that he would regret and that would stay with him for the rest of his life. As the sound of the car faded into the night and as Sally Anne reached the drive of 26 Blenheim Crescent, a figure lurched out at her from behind a skip.

Sally Anne Bowman’s semi-nude body was found by a neighbour walking her dog just over two hours later. Some residents of Blenheim Crescent would later recall hearing a young woman’s screams at around 4.15 am but, as reluctant as neighbours always are to leave their beds in the middle of the night, apart from a glance out of the window into the darkness, no one investigated further.

The dog-walker noticed the bare legs of a woman protruding from behind a skip and a cluster of wheelie bins on the drive of number 26. Lying face up behind the skip in a pool of blood was the body of Sally Anne, dead from loss of blood caused by seven savage knife wounds to the neck, abdomen, and lower body. Forensic pathologists summoned to the scene would discover that three of the wounds had been inflicted with such force that the knife blade had passed clean through the body.

They would also register that her lower undergarments had been removed and her short denim skirt had been bunched up around her waist. Sally’s sleeved white crop top had been pulled up to her waist and bite marks to the neck, stomach, and right breast suggested a frenzied sexual attack, either before or during death. The body had been partially covered with dust and cement from the skip and the presence of other body fluids indicated a savage resentment on the part of the perpetrator against the victim. Whoever had committed those atrocities on the young model had boiled with hatred and madness during their execution.

The first senior police officer on the scene was Detective Superintendent Stuart Clundy who, as a father of two young daughters, was shocked and repulsed by what he saw. Such savagery was so unusual in a rape, and the veteran detective knew instinctively that he was searching for an obsessed character who had offended before. Such bestiality could only be rooted in a deranged personality.

Sally Anne’s mother, Linda, recalled hearing of her daughter’s death from DC Steve Martin who arrived at the Bowman home with two women PCs. Linda’s screams brought her daughter Nicole running down from upstairs to hear the detective’s solemn words. With a whimper, Nicole crumpled to the floor. She had last seen her younger sibling fit and well in Croydon town centre at around 2.00 am when she left to come home alone. Now her baby sister was dead. Sally Anne had died of massive exsanguination, a rapid loss of blood clinically termed as hypervolemia. So rapid was the blood loss that she had died within minutes of the attack.

Missing from the crime scene were Sally Anne’s mobile phone and white Prada handbag containing her purse, make-up, and passport. A chain and pendant had been wrenched from her neck and the killer had cut off a hank of blonde hair as the girl lay dead or dying. An earring had also been torn from her right ear. But in his haste and fury of lust the killer had left many clues before he fled. Sally Anne’s body and the crime scene yielded bite casts, saliva, semen, hairs – each a telling clue for the investigators who would now work to track down the killer.

The first and most obvious suspect was her ex-boyfriend, Lewis Sproston. As in any murder investigation the prime suspect is always the person known to have been the last person to see the victim alive. At first sight, things did not look good for Sproston. He admitted being with Sally Anne up to 4.10 am, just before the time when neighbours in Blenheim Crescent had heard a young woman screaming, and there were many witnesses to the fact that the couple were prone to argue forcibly, on more than one occasion so noisily that police had been called to intervene. In a statement to police he also admitted sending Sally Anne a text message before he left to pick her up in Croydon to the effect that if he saw her with another man when he arrived he would ‘spit on her’ in public. Marks on his neck also showed where, during an argument in the car, Sally Anne had grabbed him around the neck so violently that a silver chain had been broken and pulled from his throat.

So certain was Sproston that the argument had been loud enough to wake neighbours that he asked police who came to question him on the morning of the murder and before he was told of her death: ‘Is this about the row with Sally Anne last night?’ Sproston’s only recollection of another person in Blenheim Crescent that Sunday morning was of a man who had approached the car while he sat talking with Sally Anne and who had glared aggressively at the couple through the windscreen. He had made to get out of the car to confront the man but Sally Anne had stopped him, probably fearing that in his current ill temper he and the Peeping Tom might come to blows. The man had then turned and walked away and they had thought no more about it. Sproston was held for 72 hours while the interrogation continued but, as Superintendent Stuart Clundy admitted in a later interview with the press, ‘It was obvious the lad was telling the truth and we would have to look elsewhere.’

Armed with such a battery of DNA evidence taken from the scene and gathered at autopsy, police began a search of DNA databases in the hope of trapping the killer. Investigators were convinced that they were hunting a serial rapist who, once having stepped into the dark shadow of death would not hesitate to kill again. Criminal profilers brought in to the case were also convinced that Sally Anne Bowman’s murder was an escalation in violence on behalf of a mentally unstable, sex-obsessed individual who probably acted under the influence of drink and/or drugs. Unbeknown to them, the man they were seeking fitted the profile perfectly.

A report had already arrived on Superintendent Clundy’s desk of a knife attack on a woman in Sanderstead Road at around 3.00 am on 25 September, a mere mile away, and an hour before Sally Anne’s screams were heard in Blenheim Crescent. The woman described a squat man of medium build brandishing a knife, who had asked her for money and oddly apologised before slashing her across the face. He had run off when surprised by an approaching taxi. No DNA was gathered from the scene but a surprise hit linked the Blenheim Crescent DNA with that of a serious sexual assault that had occurred in nearby Purley Cross when an unidentified man masturbated and ejaculated over a woman in a telephone kiosk in 2001.

Investigators now knew their quarry was local and immediately launched a DNA screening of 4000 men in the area where Sally Anne had died and 1700 local men also responded to a call to attend a DNA screening centre in South Croydon. But police were aware that thousands of males in South Croydon’s estimated 250,000 population were still unchecked.

An e-fit of the 2001 Purley sex attacker, whose DNA linked the perpetrator to Sally Anne’s murder, was released and police reported that 350 potential suspects had been questioned during their enquiries, with a special emphasis put on the search for a former customer of the Blast Hair Designs hairdressing salon in Kenley, Surrey, where Sally Anne had worked. The man had spoken with an Australian accent.

As months went by more details emerged about the case – it now appeared that the killer had felt confident enough to return to Sally Anne’s body after the stabbing to take photographs of her corpse with a mobile phone. Then a major breakthrough came when police in Crawley, Sussex, were called to a brawl following a World Cup match. One man in particular had become extremely distressed when told he must give a DNA sample. Once compared with other DNA samples on the police database it became clear why: the sample was an exact match to those left at the Blenheim Crescent crime scene. The man was 35-year-old Mark Dixie and he spoke with an Australian accent. The date was 27 June 2006, almost nine months to the day that Sally Anne Bowman was murdered and raped in South Croydon.

At the time of his arrest Mark Phillip Dixie, born in Streatham, London, on 25 September 1970, worked at Ye Old Six Bells pub in Horley, Surrey, close to Gatwick Airport. His acquired Australian accent came from his time working as a pub cook in Australia between 1993 and 1999. He was deported back to the UK on visa offences after being found guilty of exposing himself and making sexual demands to a female jogger. A criminal records check revealed that Mark Dixie had a violent criminal history with 16 recorded sex attacks on women in both Australia and the UK. However, only since 2004 does the law in the UK allow arresting officers to take involuntary DNA swabs from suspects arrested in any circumstances.

Following Dixie’s conviction for the Bowman murder in February 2007, Detective Superintendent Clundy called publicly for the creation of a national DNA database, claiming that if such a directory had existed in September 2005, Sally Anne’s killer would have been in custody within days of her death.

At the time of Sally Anne’s murder, Dixie, an absentee father of three, was often seen in the clubs and bars of Croydon town centre. He had lodgings in Avondale Road, South Croydon, just a few miles from Sally’s family home and her apartment in Blenheim Crescent. Dixie was familiar with Blenheim Crescent, having lived there with a girlfriend, the mother of his third child, two years previously. It would later be discovered that Western Australian police in Perth also had the DNA profile of Mark Dixie collected in the unsolved case of the rape and attempted murder of a Thai student in 1998. In a scenario startlingly similar to the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, the student was stabbed several times by a masked man and raped while she was unconscious. The information was revealed after the Metropolitan Police asked their Australian counterparts to re-examine any unsolved murder cases involving rape that might be linked to Dixie. Other evidence came to light of a sexual assault upon a British woman in a lift in 1989.

It was becoming clear that DNA evidence had trapped a very dangerous serial sexual offender whose use of violence to gain control over his victims had finally resulted in murder. There was no doubt in the investigators’ minds that Mark Dixie was primed to kill again and would have done so if not detained due to a minor brawl that allowed arresting officers to mandatorily take a sample of his DNA.

At his trial in February 2008 at the Old Bailey, the cocky, smirking Dixie astounded the court by offering the defence that he did not kill Sally Anne but had stumbled across her body by chance while out walking after a drink and drugs session with friends Vicky Chandler and Diane Glassborow in Croydon to celebrate his 35^th birthday. Dixie claimed he was wandering aimlessly when he noticed the half-naked corpse of the murdered girl lying in the drive of 26 Blenheim Crescent and, high on cocaine, he ‘took advantage of the situation’. Showing no emotion, Dixie continued: ‘When I realised she was dead I put bits of concrete from a nearby skip into her mouth and on her body because I hoped it would hide my DNA, then I ran to a friend’s flat a few streets away in South Croydon.’ Dixie had returned to Avondale Road, where he was lodging at the time.

Mark Dixie had failed to impress the jury, who took just three-and-a-half hours to find him guilty on all counts. Sentencing him to life imprisonment with a minimum of 34 years, Judge Gerald Gordon told him: ‘I shall only say what you did that night was so awful and repulsive that I do not propose to repeat it. Your consequent conduct shows you had not the slightest remorse for what you had done.’ A year later a panel of three Court of Appeal judges found an application to appeal lodged by Dixie’s solicitors MacLaverty Cooper Atkins of Kingston ‘entirely without merit’.