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