Читать книгу Torn Apart - The Most Horrific True Murder Stories You'll Ever Read - Tim Miles - Страница 7

Weary from her night shift delivering pizzas, Julie Hogg slumped down on the sofa and kicked off her shoes. Twenty-two years old, she was a pretty dark-haired girl and a popular figure in Billingham, a gritty industrial town in England’s northeast, where she had grown up in a landscape dominated by a giant chemical ammonia plant and petrol refineries snaking along the River Tees.

Julie was typical of the area’s 35,000 residents, prepared to put in unsocial hours to make enough money to get by, a hardscrabble existence that forged in her a desire to better her life. Despite her looks, she was tough and capable. Her job took her down some mean streets but she always managed to defuse trouble with a cheeky smile and warm laugh. Julie, said her friends, was a down-to-earth lass with an independent, defiant streak.

At 1.25 a.m. on 16 November 1989, a workmate dropped her off at her Grange Avenue home at the end of the long night at the nearby Mr Macaroni’s pizzeria. Julie waved goodbye and let herself through the door, and then vanished from the face of the earth.

But what started that day as a routine missing-person enquiry was eventually to culminate in one of most radical changes in British law for over 800 years. The name of Julie’s indomitable mother, Ann Ming, was for ever to become a symbol of finally achieving justice in the face of overwhelming odds.

Ann, a nurse for twenty years, had telephoned Julie that day at 7.30 a.m. A close-knit family, they would speak on the phone up to twenty times a day and, as was often the case, Ann and her husband Charlie, a heavy-goods fitter, looked after their daughter’s three-year-old son Kevin while she was at work.

Ann wanted to make sure that her daughter was up and ready to attend an important county court hearing. Julie’s marriage to Andrew Hogg had fallen apart amid acrimony and she was seeking a legal separation from him.

The phone kept ringing unanswered. ‘I knew almost straightaway something was wrong,’ recalls Ann. ‘I was going to pick her up at 9 a.m. and take her to the court. However tired she felt, she would have answered the phone. It wouldn’t be like her to miss an important appointment. I knew she’d been working late and I knew she wouldn’t have gone out or stayed somewhere else after work.’

With her heart in her mouth, Ann drove round to the house with her grandson in tow. She banged on the door and frantically shouted through the letterbox before racing to a public phone box and calling her again. When she again got no answer, she banged on the door of a neighbour, only to be told she hadn’t seen Julie. Still unable to get a response, she fearfully persuaded her son Gary to leave work to force his way into the house by breaking through a window panel in the back door. The silence was ominous. Little Kevin, sensing the air of panic, burst into tears, crying for his mum.

Ann remembers: ‘The house was tidy and the curtains closed. Gary said to me, “There’s something wrong in here, Mum. Julie’s messy and the house looks really tidy. Her bed is made and all the washing is put away.”

‘We couldn’t find Julie’s keys. I felt sick inside. My gut feeling told me something was desperately wrong. I asked the police if there had been any traffic accidents. Nothing had been reported. They just suggested I went home and waited to hear from her.’

Yet Ann could not rest until she knew her daughter was safe. ‘I went to the pizza place where Julie worked. They told me she’d been dropped off at home at 1.30 a.m. I felt rising panic and fear. I felt even worse then.’

At first the police were dismissive of Ann’s fears, suggesting that given the rocky marital background, Julie had probably left home to start a new life. One woman officer even hinted that Julie might have got drunk in a nightclub and didn’t get home, implying she might be asleep with a stranger after a one-night stand.

Ann knew better, knew that could never be the case, and angrily said so. ‘Julie was a loving daughter. And she wouldn’t walk off, disappear and leave her son. That was unthinkable. I said she wouldn’t do that. I am telling you, as her mother, something has happened,’ Ann pleadingly told the front-desk officer at the police station.

With rising hysteria, she demanded and finally got action from sceptical officers. Forensic scientists and police began a five-day search of Julie’s home. They came up empty-handed. If the silent house on Grange Avenue held a grim secret, they did not discover it. As the scene-of-crime teams left the house, Detective Inspector Geoff Lee, the lead investigator, tried to reassure an increasingly disbelieving Ann that Julie was still alive and they were convinced she had not returned to her home that night.

On the last day of the search, the police asked Ann and her other daughter to check the house to see if any of her clothes had been taken. The only items missing were the clothes Julie had been wearing the night she disappeared. Her shoes and makeup bag were still in the house.

Days ran into weeks and months, with no trace of the missing young woman. Fearful and frustrated at the indifference being shown, Ann continued to badger the police, only to be told her there was nothing else they could do.

Life had to go on. Her son-in-law, Andrew Hogg, decided he would move back into the empty house so his little boy, who cried himself to sleep every night over his missing mum, could at least stay in the familiar home that he had shared with her.

Deciding the house needed smartening up after being empty for so long, Andrew set about painting and retiling the bathroom. The weather had been bitterly cold and Andrew switched the heating on while he worked.

As he busied himself with the renovations, there was no escaping the putrid smell which seeped into every room of the house as it slowly warmed up – a gagging, nauseating stench that clung to Andrew’s hair and clothes and left a fetid film over the furniture.

He contacted Ann for advice. Put some bleach down the toilet, she shrugged.

‘I have,’ he told her, ‘but the smell’s getting worse.’ Once again doubts began to creep into Ann’s mind, but were quickly dispelled. After all, the police had assured her they had searched every crevice of Julie’s house. There’s no way she could be there. There must be a simple explanation for the odour – probably backed-up drains, or mould.

Eighty days after Julie Hogg disappeared, on the raw, freezing morning of 1 February 1990, Ann agreed to help her son-in-law deal with the smell that continued to seep into the air, a malodorous fog which caught the back of the throat.

The minute she walked through the door, Ann knew with a sinking heart what she was dealing with. All her experience as a hospital theatre nurse told her immediately the smell was one of decomposing flesh.

‘Inside I was screaming “Don’t let it be Julie,” she recalls, that dreadful morning seared into her memory.

‘I leaned over the bath to smell the walls, praying it was just where the tiles had been taken off. As I leaned over towards the wall, my knees went into the bath panel. It was loose at one end. It had always been loose because it was an old hardwood panel. The smell came out stronger.’

Crouching down, Ann peered into the dank, dark space beneath the bath to be faced with the desiccated body of her beloved daughter, wrapped in a rotting blanket, the rictus grin of a skull bent towards her. She recoiled in horror and bolted downstairs.

‘I started to scream hysterically, “She’s under the bath! She’s under the bath!” Then everything went into slow motion. It was as if I was watching myself. Andrew ran up with a screwdriver to take off the panel. I heard him say, “Oh, Jesus Christ, no!” and I ran screaming into the street.

‘Suddenly, the place seemed full of police cars, and the inspector who had been in charge of the search arrived. I was screaming at him, “I told you she was there! You wouldn’t listen!” I just ran at him punching and screaming, “I told you she hadn’t just taken off.” He said to me, “You don’t know what you’ve found” as I tried to drag him into the house.’ But she did – and she had.

The missing-person enquiry had turned into a case of murder. Acutely embarrassed by the fiasco of their initial search – a massive blunder that was to cost Cleveland police £10,000 in negligence damages to Ann – detectives quickly started to pick apart Julie’s background, concentrating on local men she had associated with. She was known to have had boyfriends after her marriage crumbled and one of her casual relationships had been with William ‘Billy’ Dunlop, a former schoolboy boxing champion and a man with a history of violence stretching back to the tender age of twelve.

Dunlop was lodging at a house with a friend a few hundred yards from Julie’s address. Then twenty-six-years old, he was feared locally in the pubs and clubs for his hair-trigger temper which exploded into two-fisted violence when he drank. Within a week of the body being found, detectives targeted him as the prime suspect and a warrant was executed to search his room as Julie’s grief-shattered family prepared for her funeral on 21 April at St Mary’s Church, the very place she’d been baptised.

At 7.42 p.m. on 13 February 1990, Dunlop was arrested for Julie Hogg’s murder and, three days later, he was charged. What did the hard man do when he was charged with murder? Lash out at his accusers? Spew obscenities and tell them to do their worst? Put on a show of swaggering bravado? No, he fainted. In local parlance, the brawny bruiser turned into a ‘big Jessy’.

Beneath the nailed-down floorboards of his room, police discovered Julie’s brass key fob, which bore Dunlop’s fingerprints. Forensic evidence placed his hairs and fibres from his jumper on the blanket used to wrap Julie’s violated corpse. For Ann and her husband Charlie, the case against Dunlop was cut and dried. Police and prosecutors were equally confident that despite his protestations of innocence they would get a murder conviction when Dunlop was first brought to the dock at Newcastle Crown Court in May 1991.

Even though the prosecution was unable to say exactly how Julie met her end – the advanced state of her body’s decomposition meant a post-mortem examination could not pinpoint the exact cause of death – the sure belief was that the jury would be satisfied with the scene-of-crime evidence.

But three members of the jury were seen to nod off during the proceedings and the judge, Mr Justice Swindon Thomas, ordered a retrial after they failed to reach a verdict. To stunned disbelief, Dunlop was allowed to walk free from the court.

Ann and Charlie felt as though they had been punched in the stomach. The anguish of a botched police enquiry that failed to locate Julie’s body under their very noses had been compounded by the wrenching despair of seeing the man they were convinced had murdered their daughter escape justice.

The Director of Public Prosecutions decided to retry Dunlop and, in October 1991, he again stood trial. Unbelievably, for a second time a jury could not reach a verdict because of the failure of the autopsy to pinpoint the exact cause of death. The judge, Mr Justice Henry Agnall, reluctantly ordered Dunlop’s acquittal, asserting he was not guilty.

Ann collapsed and had to be carried from the court by Charlie and the police family liaison officer, Sergeant Mark Braithwaite, who later recounted, ‘I was in a car with other detectives heading back to Cleveland and not a word was spoken. We knew that was the end of the road – at that time.’

Cook-a-hoop, Dunlop swaggered from court in the sure belief that he had got away with murder.

Under Britain’s ancient 800-year-old double-jeopardy law, drafted in the reign of King Henry II, he could not be retried for the crime of murder after being acquitted. The statute had originally been drafted on the urgings of Thomas Becket, the ‘turbulent priest’ later to become the twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. He wanted to prevent the clergy being subjected to further punishment by civil judges if they were already convicted by church judges. Over the course of time, the safeguard was extended to the general public, preventing defendants from further prosecution after being cleared of serious crimes. Now, eight centuries later, the law introduced to protect medieval priests was allowing a vicious killer to get away with murder.

Dunlop could now crow about his guilt from the rooftops with impunity, and he did just that. Neighbourhood gossip got back to Ann and Charlie that he was going around the local pubs bragging he’d killed Julie.

‘We felt helpless,’ Ann said. ‘I was receiving calls saying Dunlop was boasting of having committed the perfect murder. We went to the police and they said there was nothing they could do because a person couldn’t be tried for the same crime twice – the double-jeopardy rule.’

Ann’s sickening feeling of betrayal was tempered only by her unswerving determination to see justice done. She cared nothing for laws that protected the guilty, however sacred they were. Laws, she thought, were enshrined to protect the innocent. She believed that, with enough commitment, enough lobbying, enough passion, she could single-handedly overturn the law of double jeopardy and return Dunlop to the dock.

It would be her daughter’s enduring legacy.

Lawyers read of her fledgling campaign with unfeigned amusement. What hope could a forty-five-year-old grandmother and simple nurse from Stockton-on-Tees with no legal training have in overturning one of the central planks of British law?

Eventually, Ann would just go away, they surmised. Once the grief for her murdered daughter eased, she would return to her anonymous little life out of the public spotlight. How many times had relatives declared outside the courtroom their determination to right a wrong, only to have their fury and thirst for justice eroded by time and public lack of interest?

Billy Dunlop, meanwhile, continued his feckless life of drunken brutishness. His freedom did nothing to modify his thuggish behaviour, and his long career of violence continued. His police record stretched back to when he was eighteen and had horribly injured a man by brutally kicking him in the face. He then split the cheek of a fifteen-year-old girl with a flurry of savage punches after breaking into her home armed with a knife. In 1988, on the eve of his learning that he was about to become a father, he turned up drunk at a snooker club in Newcastle and, after being told to stop shouting, viciously beat up a member of staff.

Bloody violence was his trademark, bullying and intimidation his stock in trade. Yet nothing would prepare Julie’s grieving parents for the terrible details of their daughter’s death that would eventually spill out.

In August 1997, six years after being freed for Julie Hogg’s murder, Dunlop launched a terrifying attack on his pregnant girlfriend and her lover. He battered Shaun Fairweather with a baseball bat – leaving him with severe facial injuries – and, grabbing a toasting fork, stabbed Donna Williams with such force her lung collapsed.

For that vicious assault, he was finally sent to jail for seven years. And it was while he was behind bars that Dunlop triggered an extraordinary chain of events that were to reach the highest levels of jurisprudence, the House of Lords. Ironically, his arrogance and boastfulness were to fire up Ann’s crusade to get justice for Julie.

In a string of confessions to a woman prison officer, to a doctor at a psychiatric prison hospital and in a letter to his ex-girlfriend Donna Williams, Billy Dunlop time and time again confessed to killing Julie. He finally revealed the gruesome details of her untimely death. He admitted he’d been drinking heavily and had been injured when he got into a fight. In a murderous mood, he made his way to Julie’s house. When she had made fun of his cuts and bruises, he went berserk, strangling her with his bare hands. But even now, at the very moment of his supposedly candid confession, Dunlop was still lying through his teeth about his motives and didn’t reveal the worst secret he had kept all to himself all these years.

However, Dunlop did admit he had lied again and again about his involvement in Julie’s death. Yet it took another seven months before Dunlop was taken under escort from the Hull jail to Stockton-on-Tees police station. In a bare interview room in the presence of a lawyer, he was questioned by Detective Inspector Dave Duffey and Detective Constable Peter McPhillips about Julie Hogg’s murder, together with his subsequent perjury on oath during his two trials.

Duffey glanced at his watch, which registered 3.35 p.m. on 15 October 1999. When historians come to review how the double-jeopardy law was overturned, and with it eight centuries of legal precedent, this was the exact moment the axis of justice started to tilt in favour of the victim.

In his taped statement, Dunlop revisited that dreadful night. In a heavy and at times almost incomprehensible accent, the terrible words tumbled out at a furious pace. Having kept the grisly details secret for ten years, he suddenly couldn’t wait to unburden himself.

Q: Will you tell me what happened that night in connection with the killing of Julie Hogg?

A: What I can remember of it. It’s hard to bring this back up. I’ve buried it away for eight year, nine year, no, ten year. There was trouble at the rugby club on the night in question, November 16, November 15. I had a fight outside the rugby club with a lad and I severely injured him, and I had to go to hospital as well about my injuries and he was there in the hospital, but he was in a far worse condition. After that I returned from hospital and I needed somebody to talk to and Don Patton wasn’t there, well he was in bed ’cos I was staying at Don Patton’s, and so I thought about going round to Mark Ward’s. So I went round there and there was no lights on at his house and I needed somebody to talk to, so I seen the lights in Julie’s and so I knew, I’ve known her a few years anyway, so I went round and knocked on the door. She answered the door and I went in and we had a cup of tea or coffee, I can’t remember which, and we were just sat talking. I was worried about what I had done to the lad because I knew I’d hurt him and I just needed somebody to talk to, to sort me head out, and I’d had a good skinful and that, and she just started taking the mickey out of us and like ridiculing me ’cos I had a black eye and me eye was split open like that. I had stitches in me eye, me teeth was missing and so I just, I just lost it and got up and strangled her.

Q: Could you just describe to me how you strangled her? Was it with your hands?

A: Yeah, with me hands.

Q: Having strangled her, can you describe what went on, what happened exactly?

A: Panic.

Q: Why, why panic?

A: For what I’d done.

(At this point Dunlop said that he went outside into the back garden to clear his head and then returned to hide the body, determined not to get caught.)

Q: So what did you do?

A: Thought, What can I do? I just thought, I don’t want to get caught for this. I knew I had been in trouble with the police, as you know, loads of times, and so I know about forensic evidence and things like that, and so I threw a blanket on the floor and then stripped her off. I don’t know how long this was after because I didn’t have a theory of what time it was or anything. I wasn’t looking at the time. I was thinking where could I go, what could I do? Thought I had to hide her so I carried her upstairs, wrapped in the blanket. At first I was gonna hide her in the loft, put her in the loft, but I couldn’t get her up, couldn’t lift her up… I had her over me shoulder, tried to climb on a set of cupboards, set of drawers, but it was too awkward to lift her in and she actually fell off us on the floor.

I don’t know what made me think of the bath panel, I really don’t. I didn’t think of the bath, but anyway I did and I went downstairs, got a screwdriver, undone the bath panel and tried pushing her behind with me feet against her, with me back against the sink, pushing her under with me feet. I went downstairs, picked her clothes up and put them in a bag and I’d stripped off as well when I was downstairs. I was wrapped in the blanket so I couldn’t get none of my clothes on the blanket, my fibres. I went back to Patton’s. It was getting light by this time. I didn’t know what time it was. Went back to Patton’s, put the black bag outside with the clothes… for the bin men to pick up… went inside and went to bed.

Q: Did you ever go back to that house?

A: No.

Q: Did you ever move the body?

A: No.

Q: Just remained there until it was found?

A: Yeah, that’s why I couldn’t understand the council workers and all that not finding her.

Q: OK, because of your injuries you say that you’ve got that night, and other injuries, she starts taking the mickey out of you? Do you remember what she was saying?

A: Just laughing and saying it looked like I was the one who’d been filled in and there’d be nothing wrong with the other lad.

Q: Did that upset you?

A: Yeah, because I was concerned about the other lad. I was more concerned that I was going to get arrested for it, for what I’d done.

Q: How long did this go on, her taking the mickey out of you before you snapped?

A: Just a couple of minutes.

Q: You put up with it for a couple of minutes, then you just lost it?

A: Yeah.

Q: You strangled her in the living room?

A: Yeah.

(Asked what he had done with Julie’s door keys once he’d locked the house behind him, Dunlop said that he separated them from the key fob and put them under the floorboards. He then recalled two detectives, Detective Inspector John Tough and Detective Sergeant John Matthews, arriving at the house he shared.)

Q: Did you think you would get caught?

A: Yeah, yeah. It was the first time I’d spoke to the police and if something hadn’t have happened, I honestly think I would have confessed at that time, if they’d took us in at that time. The thing that stopped me when they come to interview us and asked us if I wanted interviewing at home or down the police station is the fact that me eldest son was there, four at the time, four and a half, maybe five, called Richard. He seen me going out with the policemen and he started screaming and crying and went under the stairs and said, ‘You’re not coming back, are you, Dad? You’re not coming back.’ And screaming and that’s when I decided there was no way could I admit to it because of me son. I would have admitted it if they’d got me down the police station but as soon as he said that to me, I couldn’t for me kids.’

However candid the confession, it was tempered with Dunlop’s confidence that he could not be charged with Julie’s murder. Behind the charade of overwhelming guilt lay a cynical, calculating, evil mind. Ever the manipulator, he claimed the reason he didn’t confess in the first place was that he wanted to protect his innocent children from the truth about their father.

Here was the moment that Ann and Charlie had waited for so long. Ten years of desolation and bitterness, of hopes raised and hopes dashed, a roller coaster of conflicting emotions. And ten years during which Ann could not get the stench of her daughter’s violated corpse from her nostrils.

Whatever toll it took on her physical and mental health, and whatever obstacles were cast in her way, Ann pledged that one day she would sit in court and see Billy Dunlop caged for her daughter’s murder. For once and for all, she would get the law of double jeopardy overturned.

Backed by her local Labour MP, Frank Cook, together with a vociferous ‘Justice for Julie’ campaign supported by her local newspaper, the Northern Echo, Ann turned to Parliament to help her in her fight.

As Billy Dunlop returned to jail in 2000 for another six years, convicted of two counts of perjury over the false evidence he had given in the Julie Hogg murder trial, she bombarded politicians, peers and legal experts with demands for a radical redrafting of the law she saw as a charter for justice-dodging criminals.

It didn’t matter a jot to her that she stood four-square against the forces of history, an entrenched legal establishment, an elite milieu of men and women with law degrees from the country’s top universities, or politicians schooled in slippery evasions.

First, she badgered the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who promised to give his full backing to her campaign at a meeting.

‘Dunlop had just been sentenced for perjury,’ Ann said. ‘I took along a photo of Julie and one of Dunlop. I showed them to Jack Straw and said, “This is my daughter. This is the man who killed her. I’m not happy with the law. What are you going to do about it?”

‘He answered, “Retrospective law is a very grey area,” and he reached for a volume on criminal law. I said to him, “Don’t bother looking at that. There are no precedents. Nobody who has already been acquitted has confessed to murder in a court of law before. This is a test case.”’

Ann then wrote a forceful letter to the Law Commission, the body charged with reviewing the laws of the land. Back in the post came an encouraging reply, which confirmed her emotional campaign was gathering strength. The Commission stated that hers was the most compelling case in the country because of Dunlop’s confession. They asked to meet her.

Despite being in the presence of some of the nation’s finest legal brains, Ann was not overawed. ‘I didn’t feel nervous,’ she stated. ‘I told myself, “They are all parents, like me.” They asked if they could use my letter as evidence to take to the government. I said, “No, you can use me.” I wanted to put the human side across, to appeal to the mother and father in these people who had the power to change the law.’

The government’s most senior law officer, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, promised her he too would do all in his power the bring Dunlop back before the judge. On a visit to the northeast, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, also gave his wholehearted support during a conference speech to the victims of crime.

‘During the lunch break, I got hold of Lord Falconer’s hand, pulled him into the seat next to mine and said, “Can you help me?” I asked if I could speak to the House of Lords committee debating the double-jeopardy law. Lord Falconer said, “Would you do that?” I replied, “I’ll give you a week to organise it.”’

‘So I went to the House of Lords. I took along a seven-page statement but, in the end, I threw it away and just spoke from the heart. In front of me were lords, ladies and baronesses, but I looked across the table and said to myself, “They’re also parents and grandparents.” And that gave me strength.

‘I thought too, if I can do this for Julie, I will be opening the door for other families to obtain justice.’

At the meeting in Westminster, the battling mum swept away reservations raised by the group of peers, who warned her that even if the law was changed, it might not be backdated to nail Julie’s murderer.

‘Make it retrospective,’ she demanded. Her MP, Frank Cook, who was at her side and had been there from the moment she walked into his local constituency office, told the Lords it was only down to Ann’s relentless determination that new evidence was being put before the House of Commons ready to debate key changes to the Criminal Justice Act.

In May 2003, Ann’s sheer force of will finally bore fruit. In an extraordinary testament to one woman’s refusal to be cowed, MPs voted to change the double-jeopardy rules. It meant that, if there was ‘compelling new evidence’ of guilt in major crimes such as murder and rape, the Appeal Court could quash an acquittal and order a new trial ‘in the interests of justice.’

Protests from the Bar Association, the barristers’ trade body, that a fundamental safeguard had been swept away were ignored and six months later the new Bill was signed into law.

Ann had stormed the battlements. In doing so, had struck a blow for victims everywhere. Yet the wheels were grinding slowly. It was to take another two and a half years before Appeal Court judges, armed with their new powers, threw out Billy Dunlop’s 1991 acquittal and ordered he should again stand trial. Now, finally, the last terrible secret of Julie’s ordeal was about to come out.

The eleventh of September 2006, started hot, a perfect Indian-summer day. Ann walked hand in hand with her husband through the bright London sunshine. Julie’s son Kevin, now only two years younger than his mother had been when she met her fate, walked alongside them. Together they entered the recess of the panelled courtroom of Britain’s premier criminal court, the Old Bailey. Ann’s head was held high, her face flushed with a feeling of triumph.

This was the day she thought she would never see. At 2 p.m., hard-faced Dunlop, wearing an open-necked check shirt, his greasy hair tied back in a ponytail, trudged up the stairs from the cells and entered the dock of Court No. 1, where so many of history’s infamous villains had gone before.

Hanging over him were the ghosts of homicidal monsters who had sat where he now sat – the 10 Rillington Place mass murderer John Christie, the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, homosexual serial slayer Dennis Nilsen and John Haigh, who disposed of his six victims in baths of acid.

Ann craned her neck from the front seat of the public gallery, watching his every move, her eyes never leaving his face. The hand of history lay on her shoulder.

She felt herself shaking. The tension, the suspense, was palpable.

‘William Vincent Dunlop,’ intoned the court clerk, ‘you have been charged with a count of murder. Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’

‘Guilty,’ he replied. A cry echoed around the courtroom as Ann hung her head, the tears of anguish mixed with tears of relief running down her cheeks. Then a fleeting smile crept across her lips. After seventeen years in which the face of the man before her had haunted her every waking moment, finally – finally – justice had caught up with Dunlop in a brief, twenty-minute hearing.

Stony-faced and impassive, displaying not a shred of remorse, Dunlop was told he would be sentenced the following month.

Her hands clasped in front of her, Ann walked down the court steps into a throng of TV cameras and newspaper reporters. What was she feeling, they demanded.

‘I’m just so relieved. I never thought this day would come. It’s been a long and difficult journey to see him standing in the dock. He’s done everything he could do to avoid justice, but his lying and his scheming have eventually all been in vain.

‘We made a promise to ourselves that Julie’s killer would be punished and everyone we have approached over the years has helped me in some way to reach that goal.

‘No one can know what it’s like to lose a daughter in such horrific circumstances. Our family will live with her death for ever.’

This was not to be a time for a champagne celebration, though. There was another, equally tough, ordeal to face that day. Driven to a police station, she was allowed to sit down and listen to the tape-recorded statement made by Billy Dunlop, something she had never heard before. She wanted to hear it for herself, every horrific word.

His harsh voice emerged, laced with cruelty, evoking all those terrible images of choking the life out of Julie and then crudely using his feet to wedge her body under the bath, as if she had been nothing more than a sack of potatoes. The pain was too much to bear and Ann cried uncontrollably.

Comforting her was Dave Duffey, now a detective superintendent and the officer who taped Dunlop’s confession. ‘History has been made today,’ he said, ‘but, more importantly, justice finally achieved for Mr and Mrs Ming.

‘There is no doubt that Billy Dunlop is an evil and dangerous man who, for seventeen years, quite literally got away with murder. But what his scheming and lies did not take account of was the dogged perseverance of a loving family.’

Tributes poured in for this mother’s courage, none more glowing than that from Martin Goldman, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service on Teesside, who had overseen the renewed investigation to bring Dunlop to book.

Goldman said: ‘The fact that Dunlop is now convicted of murder is testament to her success in changing the law and with it legal history. Mrs Ming has been an absolutely significant factor in the change in the law. The family have conducted themselves with great dignity and are a credit to their daughter’s memory.

‘William Dunlop has tried to escape responsibility for nearly twenty years and has put Julie Hogg’s family through great suffering. Today we have finally seen him accept that he, and he alone, was responsible for killing Julie and hiding her body behind a bath panel, where it was discovered by her mother.’

The long journey of retribution finally culminated on 6 October, when Ann again left her home to travel to the Old Bailey to hear the sentence meted out to Dunlop.

Yet further horrors were to unfold before Dunlop was caged. Ann choked on hearing the even more appalling details of Julie’s injuries delivered to the court. While her beloved daughter lay dying, Dunlop had mutilated Julie’s vagina in an outburst of sexual rage, probably with the screwdriver he used to loosen the bath panel.

Sentencing Dunlop to a minimum of seventeen years in prison – a year for every year Julie’s murder had lain unavenged – the judge, Mr Justice Calvert Smith, said Dunlop and Julie had previously been lovers but, when she rejected his clumsy and drunken advances that night, he erupted in a murderous rage.

‘There is absolutely no doubt in my mind Dunlop intended to have sex with Julie Hogg. What exactly happened then is known only to Dunlop. The Crown accepts that he strangled her to death and then, while still alive or more likely when she was dead, inflicted dreadful injuries to her vagina.

‘It is impossible to comprehend the shock and horror of her mother as she pulled away the panel and discovered her remains. That shock and horror will remain with her for the rest of her life.

‘The aggravating features of this case were the brutal sexual degradation of the body and its concealment. In my judgment, the killing was no doubt motivated by the frustration of the deceased not being willing to have sex with him.’

Before the sentence was handed down, victim impact statements were read to the court from Ann and from Julie’s son, Kevin Hogg. Not only did Ann’s account testify to the power of a mother’s love, but, with all the passion she had brought to her crusade, she also graphically described the physical and mental toll wreaked on her family by Dunlop’s lust-crazed barbarity.

Justice in this gruelling case had demanded a high toll.

I am Ann Ming and make this victim personal statement on behalf of myself, my husband Charles Ming and our family to describe the aftermath of the murder of my eldest daughter, Julie Elizabeth Hogg.

At the time of Julie’s murder we had three children named Gary, Julie and Angela and Julie had one child, Kevin, who was only three years old at the time.

Julie mysteriously disappeared on 16th November 1989 and her body was not discovered until I found her decomposing remains hidden behind the bath panel in her home some eighty days later and after the police failed to find her in the first instance when they carried out a search there.

The post-traumatic stress that I have suffered since verges on the indescribable – horrific flashbacks, nightmares and intrusive thoughts. To this day I can still smell the putrid smell that was our daughter.

My husband suffered a heart attack the night after Julie’s inquest and throughout the two previous trials was receiving treatment as an inpatient in a psychiatric unit after suffering a mental breakdown. This itself put enormous strain on our marriage and we separated for a while unable to cope with the grief.

Our son Gary attempted suicide, blaming himself for not finding Julie’s body as he was the one who first broke in to Julie’s home the day we reported her missing. Furthermore, our surviving daughter Angela still finds Julie’s death too painful to talk about. I received counselling from the day I found my daughter’s body, which continued for several years and during which I had to be admitted as an in-patient at a specialist post-traumatic stress disorder hospital in Sussex.

All of our treatment was a direct result of having to come to terms with Julie’s death.

As a family we are damaged beyond repair and will never feel complete again as Julie will never come home.

Julie’s son Kevin is now twenty years old. As a three-year-old he was downstairs in the house when I found his dead mother, so he knew something was wrong in the bathroom. He too has been traumatised for many years and we had to explain to him that his mum had slipped in the bath and hit her head and died in order to protect him.

We’ve all had a major role to play in Kevin’s upbringing and had to cope with his crying for his mother not understanding why she could not come down from heaven to be with him. Questions were always being asked throughout his childhood as other children suggested his mother had been murdered, and, painfully, we finally told him the truth when Dunlop made his confession in 1999, when Kevin was thirteen.

From that point on Kevin also had to have trauma counselling, none of us ever understanding the reasons why Julie’s killer should have ever walked free.

I am aware that Dunlop appears to suggest he is remorseful for what he has done. In this regard I would make just this observation – he put me and my family through eighty days and nights of not knowing where our beloved daughter was, through months of uncertainty and anxiety before two not-guilty trials and through years of stress and grief of not knowing who was responsible for the brutal killing of our beautiful girl.

If Dunlop had been truly remorseful then surely he would have confessed within those first eighty days or even pleaded guilty at one of two previous trials. Being aware of his boasts about killing Julie greatly added to our stress.

We will always be devastated by Julie’s death, but now hope, as a family, we can finally have some sort of closure. The love we felt for Julie has meant that we’re the ones who are serving a life sentence – one that will continue for the rest of our lives.

Kevin was not in court to hear the sentence, or his own victim impact statement delivered by a barrister, in which he told how he started having ‘horrible nightmares’, and of the awful taunts he suffered at school about his murdered mother. ‘My only wish now is that I could remember more of what my mother was like. All I have left are a few old photographs and a few distant memories.’

News of the sentence was excitedly relayed in a text from his grandmother as he visited Acklam cemetery in Middlesbrough, where Julie Hogg was cremated.

‘I just wanted to be near her,’ Kevin said, sitting on the memorial bench dedicated to his mother bearing a plaque with the inscription,

Julie Hogg née Ming. November 16, 1989, age 22. Cherished Mammy of Kevin. A treasured wife, daughter and sister. Always in our thoughts.

‘Losing my mam has been like having my right arm cut off,’ Kevin explained. ‘There was never a mam to be there for me at school like the other kids and it was weird always being known as Julie Hogg’s son. Every day I grew up, there were tears and I felt the sadness. I suppose I knew the truth in my heart all along, but until I was thirteen I never wanted to admit it.

‘Then I had a bit of a breakdown and my dad sat me down and told me. My dad cried and I’d never seen him do that before. It was something which brought us even closer together. I have her photograph on my bedside cabinet and she’s with me all the time. This is the end of the tunnel. We’ve been living with this shadow over our lives but now we’re out in the light. This fight has not just brought my mam’s killer to justice: it’s changed the law for everybody else.’

Exhausted yet elated, Ann and Charlie left the Old Bailey and returned to the sanctity of their own home, their job done. Surrounded by family photographs – Julie on her wedding day, Julie cradling her baby son – Ann did not feel the need to celebrate her remarkable victory. She preferred to stay with her memories, and says there is not a day that goes by when she does not reflect on her loss and all the happy times they spent together. In her quietest moment, she talks to her daughter.

‘After the trial I stood in the bedroom and told her, “I’ve done everything I could for you and I hope you can now rest in peace.”’

Interviewed by the author a year after Dunlop was caged, Ann forcefully backed the power of victim impact statements to underscore to judges the depths of devastation visited on families.

‘It felt to me that the person who was going to pass sentence was going to take on board the effect it had on all of us. Judges can be out of touch with human feelings. They look at the case number, look at the evidence but don’t think of the aftermath. The last thing judges want is to speak to an emotionally traumatised family. They can be so removed from reality,’ she told me.

‘By us speaking for the dead, there’s no way they can now ignore what we’ve been through and have to face the rest our lives. We do the life sentence as much as the prisoner. It makes them think hard about if they had lost a son or daughter, how you are ripped apart by the anger, the hatred, the stress. Nine out of ten couples divorce or separate after they’ve had a child murdered because they can’t handle the grief. Rather than bringing them closer together, it drives them apart.

‘This is what judges have to know – we never truly recover. We never put back all the pieces of our lives.

‘And so what if they are influenced when they come to pass sentence? I hope it does influence them. Our feelings should be taken into account. If a killer gets a longer sentence because a judge has seen the terrible impact he’s had on everyone who knew the victim, that’s a good thing. People who’ve been murdered can’t speak for themselves yet the murderer gets top QCs, legal aid, all his rights. Our rights should be more important.’

Her voice laced with weariness, Ann added, ‘You never get over losing a daughter. It’s part of you gone. You think every day, What would she have been like now? What would she be doing with her life? Would there have been more grandchildren? I draw comfort from my daughter Angela’s twelve-year-old daughter. She looks more and more like Julie every day, it’s uncanny. So in some way, Julie lives on.’

Yet Julie’s name will live on in another even more significant way. Prosecutor Andrew Robertson QC had revealed in court that in a letter written from prison, which was intercepted, Dunlop had said, ‘It is common knowledge that I have admitted Julie’s murder but there is nothing that can be done about it because I have been cleared of it.’

‘As regard to that observation made by him that nothing can be done, he was as far as he was concerned right,’ thundered Mr Robertson. ‘However, the law has changed and it changed in large part due to the long and persistent campaign by Mr and Mrs Ming, who felt they and their daughter were being denied justice.’

Never again will a cold-blooded killer feel free to boast about his evil deeds in the certainty that he has got away with murder. In truth, that is Julie Hogg’s real legacy.