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.
It was early on a warm summer evening that a popular little girl, nicknamed Miss Congeniality at school, slipped out of her comfortable suburban home to go cycling with a pal as her unsuspecting mother snatched a quick nap after an exhausting day.
Bright and friendly with blonde hair and wide blue eyes, chatty Megan