Torn Apart. The Most Horrific True Murder Stories You'll Ever Read

225 Pages·2009·1.16 MB·English

by  Tim Miles

To my wife Wendy, without whom…
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
1 ‘I’ve Done Everything I Could for You’
2 Fleeing from the Shadows
3 Candle in the Wind
4 In the Lair of the Beast
5 ‘I Miss Us’
6 They Died Taking a Stand
7 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’
8 ‘Burn in Hell!’
9 Where It All Began
10 Death Before Dishonour
11 ‘Your Heart Will Go On’
12 Lamb to the Slaugher
13 ‘Be a Good Little Slut’
14 The Ultimate Betrayal
Copyright
PREFACE
The glorification of the criminal is a multimillion-pound industry. TV series,
movies, books and newspapers feed the obsession with predators whose
grotesque acts have earned them a lucrative notoriety. A quick trawl through the
murkiest corners of the internet reveals literally thousands of websites dedicated
to charting in intimate detail the twisted and brutal lives of the infamous.
For decades in which the rights of the criminal have taken precedence over
those whose lives they destroyed, new laws in Britain – based on the experience
of the American courts – allow the families and partners of crime victims to tell
judges and juries of the devastating impact wreaked by acts of evil.
The repercussions of impassioned victim impact statements are being felt
across all sections of society.
As a crime reporter and a former US correspondent for national newspapers, I
covered a number of notable trials in Britain and America over thirty-five years,
ranging from the most savage of murders to terrorist atrocities, abductions and
rapes.
One clear recollection is that of a sexual psychopath accused of raping,
mutilating and murdering a young girl in south London. For over a month within
the confines of the Old Bailey, I got to know her father well over cups of tea in
the courthouse canteen.
He was in despair at how the killer’s defence counsel had muddied the waters,
using every legal manoeuvre and exploiting every loophole in a bid to secure an
acquittal for his client.
What caused the father added anguish was how his daughter had become a
mere sideshow in the trial, a victim with a crime reference number but no voice.
To the prosecution and the defence, she was the subject of dry, unemotional legal
dissection. Nothing of her character emerged from the trial. Moreover, the
searing loss felt by her family was never explored.
Justice was dispensed, the police closed their files, and the day’s dramatic
headlines quickly faded from public memory.
After the verdict, the father told me, with tears in his eyes, ‘No one in that
courtroom learned what she was like, the person she was, her very essence, her
spirit. The whole clinical process in a way dehumanised her further. She was just
another faceless victim. I wanted to tell everyone what we had lost – a loving,
generous, talented, beautiful daughter, someone who would have made a vital
contribution to society, someone whom we deeply loved. I wanted them all to
understand what had been taken from us.’
It would have taken a hard heart not to share his sense of rage and despair at
the inequalities of the system.
During the 1980s and 1990s I watched with great interest as the US
government effected nationwide legislation allowing victims’ relatives to have
their say during the sentencing phase of the trial.
The system there has its vocal critics. Defence lawyers and jurists have
argued that an emotional victim impact statement to the jury prior to sentencing
can make all the difference between a criminal’s incarceration for life or his
execution. The sight of a weeping relative burning with retribution is, say some
detractors, enough to persuade a jury to hand down a death sentence.
Yet, as the voices of the bereaved echo across a courtroom, their raw passion
has struck a resounding chord. From Britain and abroad, I have focused on those
victim impact statements whose acute poignancy and soaring, narrative power
bring to life those they have lost. In many cases, their notable campaigns for
justice have made the world a safer and better place for their fellow citizens,
often at a high personal price.
Lying at the heart of this new approach to victims is the ability to personalise
them so that we are left not only believing we did share part of their lives but
also that their stories, their hopes and their dreams left a lasting legacy. That the
deaths of loved ones created lightness out of the dark. That out of evil came a
force for good.
CHAPTER ONE
‘I’VE DONE EVERYTHING I COULD FOR
YOU’
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