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