Sally Anne Bowman was getting ready for a fun night on the town. She took a bath and drank a glass of wine at her mother’s house, all the while glancing at herself in the bedroom mirror as she dressed. She never went out looking anything less than perfect.
She looked good, and she knew it: white, flowery gipsy skirt, white corset top, white crochet cardigan, white high heels, the fashionable ensemble topped off by a white Prada bag. She tied up her luxuriant long blonde hair in a pony tail and slipped on a silver ring and pink bracelet given to her as a birthday present by her boyfriend.
She was a headstrong eighteen-year-old, an aspiring model, sexy and toned and brimming with all the sassy self-confidence that came from her head-turning looks.
As she left for a popular bar in the centre of Croydon, Surrey – the birthplace of her supermodel heroine Kate Moss – hairdresser Sally Anne cuddled and kissed her mother Linda goodbye and promised to take care of herself. ‘I love you,’ she told Linda.
Linda watched her leave at 6.05 p.m., waving farewell. Although Sally Anne had moved away from the family home to share a house with a girlfriend and enjoy an independent life, she still spent much of her spare time with her mother, and Linda would never stop worrying about her. Sally Anne promised to text her to say she had got back safely.
By the time she arrived at the busy Lloyds Bar at 10 p.m., having taken a detour to her boyfriend’s house to borrow £25 to fund the evening’s entertainment, the fashion-conscious teen had changed her look again and was wearing a blue denim miniskirt and white belt.
Just over six hours later, she was dead – the victim of a foul knife murder at the hands of a psychopathic sexual predator who finished off his diabolical task by having frenzied, cocaine-fuelled sex with her dead, bloodsoaked body only feet from the safety of her front door in Blenheim Crescent, south Croydon.
The defilement of the corpse not only marked a new low in homicidal degradation but also led to controversial demands by police that the whole population of Britain be registered on a national DNA database to ensure those responsible for murder and other serious crimes could be quickly traced.
Had every adult been required to have a sample of their genetic make-up registered on computer, detectives argued, they would have arrested Sally’s depraved necrophiliac killer, pub chef Mark Dixie, within twenty-four hours. As it was, the thirty-seven-year-old Jekyll and Hyde fiend, suspected of other sex murders and with a long history of vicious offences against women, remained at large for another nine months after committing what was described by a pathologist as the most horrific murder he had seen in his twenty-year career.
The call for the all-embracing DNA database made by Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, the head of the murder inquiry, got the full backing of forty-five-year-old Linda Bowman, whose impact statement at the end of the trial reduced the courtroom to tears.
In the weeks after her daughter’s murder, she had urged all men in the area to voluntarily supply a DNA sample to police, even sitting in a church hall as those willing to prove their innocence lined up to have a mouth swab taken by police.
Now, with Sally Anne’s killer caged for life, she petitioned to extend a register already containing the genetic profiles of four million people to the entire country, creating arguably the greatest crime-fighting tool on earth.
Civil libertarians who immediately objected to the state intrusion upon innocent lives had not been forced to sit through the grisly evidence presented to the Old Bailey. The oak-panelled Court No 9 has for decades borne witness to the most repellent and shocking abominations. Seasoned observers, from case-hardened cops to hard-boiled prosecutors, were at one in agreeing that Sally Anne Bowman’s murder presented the most repulsive case ever laid before a jury in their lifetimes.
In the sombre words of the chief prosecutor, Brian Altman QC, the jurors would have to steel themselves to examine the sick-making details. ‘Because of the nature of Mark Dixie’s defence I cannot spare you the detail of the horrific attack, neither can I avoid presenting you with photographs and other material which graphically depict the grim reality of what happened to her,’ he stated.
‘It is not done to shock, but to inform. It is not done to distress you. This was not a motiveless attack. The killer murdered her for his own sexual gratification. The sexual activity was far from normal. The evidence demonstrates she had been sexually violated as she lay dead or dying from stab wounds she had suffered.’
Dixie, Mr Altman explained, would be presenting one of the most astonishing defence cases ever mounted – ‘a defence born of desperation.’
‘What his claim amounts to is that he just happened to be in Blenheim Crescent in the early hours of that morning under the influence of drink and drugs when he chanced upon Sally Anne’s body.
‘Taking advantage of the situation that presented itself to him, his claim is that he had sexual intercourse with Sally Anne when she was dead.
‘Thus his case has to be someone else stabbed her to death leaving her in a pool of blood, that someone else murdered her and Sally Anne having been left in that state, he had sexual intercourse with her.’
He went on: ‘The idea that in the early hours of the morning there was not only a homicidal maniac who stabbed a beautiful young woman to death but also a sexual deviant in exactly the same area and at the same time is a ludicrous claim of desperation. You only have to look at the state she was left in after she was murdered to realise that however intoxicated he was, that to have sexual intercourse with Sally Anne in those circumstances is simply so beyond the pale as to be pure fiction. His defence to the murder is quite fantastic, a smokescreen to fool you.’
The jurors were then taken back to that dreadful Saturday night and Sunday morning of September 24 and 25, 2005, which started with laughter and gossip when Sally Anne was joined at the bar by one of her three half-sisters, Nicole Chiddy, to celebrate a friend’s 25th birthday.
Over white wine spritzers, the girls chatted until 1.30 a.m. and an hour later Sally Anne was picked up in Croydon by her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend, plasterer Lewis Sprotson, who had been with another party of friends in a nightclub.
To get him to rush to her side, the girl described by her family as ‘opinionated’ and ‘single minded’ behaved like a typical drama-queen teenager and made a trick call to him, falsely claiming Nicole had been arrested for fighting and she was left stranded.
The young lovers had a turbulent, jealous relationship. They had met just after her 16th birthday and he had been her only steady boyfriend. Constantly suspicious that each was cheating on the other, they had explosive, physical rows. One of their many fights left Sally Anne with red marks on her arms and a torn cardigan.
That night was to be no different.
Arriving back outside the bedsit Sally Anne rented in the semi-detached house at 26 Blenheim Crescent at around 4 a.m., the couple sat inside Lewis’s VW Passat squabbling and arguing because he wanted to leave and rejoin his friends.
Fed up with the row, Lewis leaned over to open the passenger door and usher his infuriated girlfriend out. Feelings were running so high that at one stage they tussled in the street during which Sally Anne lunged at Lewis, breaking the jewellery chain around his neck. She also tried to block him from leaving by sitting on the bonnet of his car and then running round the back to try and stop him reversing.
He manoeuvred the car around her and angrily drove off. What neither of them could have known was that, lurking unseen deep in the shadows, Mark Dixie was watching the drama unfold. Intoxicated from a four-day long cocaine and booze binge to celebrate his 35th birthday, he had set out to stalk the streets to find a victim to slake his raging sexual urges.
An hour earlier, police believe he had mugged a thirty-six-year-old mother-of-three, slashing her across the face and hand with a knife and stealing her mobile phone just four hundred yards away from the scene of the murder, but had been scared off when her loud screams attracted a passing taxi driver.
As Sally Anne strode into the driveway of her home, Mark Dixie uncoiled all the power of his 6ft 3ins frame and struck with deadly force, leaping from the bushes like the black panther he had tattooed on his arm.
The defenceless girl was ruthlessly stabbed seven times, including three times in the neck, thrusting blows wielded with such ferocity the knife blade completely severed the carotid artery in her neck and went right through her stomach, penetrating her liver, kidney and spinal cord and exiting from her back.
While her blood pooled and streamed into the gutter, Dixie hiked up her denim skirt around her waist, straddled her lifeless corpse and started having violent intercourse, biting her cheeks and nipples in his sexual frenzy.
After he ejaculated, he committed a final, utterly revolting indignity. In a vain bid to destroy the tell-tale traces of DNA left behind by his semen and saliva, Dixie inserted pieces of concrete inside Sally Anne’s vagina and throat before covering her body in a shroud of concrete lumps and cement dust taken from a builder’s skip.
Then he took her skin-coloured thong underwear, white padded bra, Prada handbag, white cardigan and mobile phone as sick trophies and slunk away into the night.
Neighbours woken by piercing female screams at 4.20 a.m. looked out of their windows. Although they did not see the murder take place, one woman heard a ‘rummaging’ sound from the front of No 26 as though something was being pulled up a driveway. It was the beast that was Mark Dixie, hauling his prey into a darkened corner to feast on its flesh.
At 6.30 a.m. a woman neighbour, Ann Hardy, emerged in dressing gown and slippers to investigate after seeing a pair of legs near the skip, a stiletto shoe still on the left foot. She knew in her heart what she would find.
‘Oh poor darling,’ she exclaimed as she knelt by Sally Anne’s body, the drying blood caking the teen’s gaping wounds. Dixie had left her lying on her right side, her right leg bent at the knee at a 90 degree angle. Her navel ring, bracelet and earring were positioned at the side of her head.
Youthful dreams of catwalk fame and front-cover magazine exposure had ebbed away with her lifeblood. The youngest of Linda Bowman’s four daughters, she shone at music and drama in school and won a place at the BRIT School, a college of the performing arts where singing stars like Amy Winehouse and Katie Melua had studied, leaving with qualifications in English, theatre and drama.
To fund her ambitions to become a model, she took a hairstylist course and worked part-time in local salons while building a £300 portfolio of pictures with the locally-based Pulse agency. Six months before she was slain, she had made an appearance at the Swatch Alternative Fashion Week in London, excitedly winning the ‘Face of Swatch’ award, and making a big enough impression to garner interest from the top-ranked Premier model agency.
Her utmost desire was to appear on the front cover of Vogue. And after the show, she said she wanted nothing more than to be compared to her idol Kate Moss ‘because she is so amazing.’ Desperate for her talents to be recognised nationally, she planned to audition for the hugely popular TV talent show X Factor, and two days before her murder, recorded herself singing Celine Dion’s hit ‘My Heart Will Go On.’ The song was to be played at her funeral.
Photographer Simon Klyne, who had used Sally Anne in several photo sessions, praised her talents. ‘She had an easy, natural command of the catwalk and was a dream because you knew you would get good photos.’
Even to a country long hardened to the most terrible of crimes, the killing of Sally Anne uncorked universal feelings of horror and revulsion. To parents, she symbolised everyone’s wilful teenage daughter, on the cusp of adulthood, with that turbulent and emotional mixture of naivety and self-confidence. She was every beloved daughter who had never made it home.
A poll undertaken by a newspaper of its readers recorded that 99 per cent wanted a return to the death penalty, whether by the traditional method of hanging or by lethal injection. At the forefront of the demands for the restoration of the capital punishment was Linda Bowman, her heart dripping venom for Mark Dixie.
After his trial, she said he deserved nothing less than to be ‘put down like a dog’ in an execution chamber… and she would be present to watch him draw his last, gasping breath. ‘He doesn’t deserve to spend another day on this planet. I want him dead. I wish this was America and I could watch him getting a lethal injection,’ she raged.
Consumed with boiling hatred, Linda confessed she was ready to dispense with any legal niceties and kill Dixie herself.
‘From the moment I saw Sally Anne’s body on that cold mortuary slab with stab wounds so deep they’d passed clean through her body, I promised her I’d get him,’ she said in an interview.
‘I wanted to sever his carotid artery, just like he’d done to Sally Anne. I wanted to sever his vocal cords just the way he severed hers so that he’d die without being able to scream. I wanted to see the same terror in his eyes as I saw in hers on that ice-cold slab.
‘And while his heart was still pumping and his brain still functioning I wanted to stab him in the throat. No, it’s not pretty. But it’s just how I feel. I want him dead. It’s as simple as that.’
The truly shocking murder was to be the inescapable culmination of Mark Dixie’s twisted life and warped mind. Sally Anne Bowman had fallen into the clutches of a bestial pervert who had moved around the furthest reaches of the globe inflicting his own brand of gross violence and intimidation against women.
With his crown of tight, curly hair, pale blue eyes and fleshy lips, he vainly boasted of being the life and soul of the party who could down huge amounts of lager and snort cocaine ‘like a vacuum cleaner’.
But few knew that the happy-go-lucky charm he used to bed scores of women concealed a monster who, from the age of sixteen, had been behind a string of appalling sexual attacks. Lovers were to quickly discover the loathsome side of his sadistic character once he had bedded them.
Born in Streatham, south London on September 24 1970 to advertising manager Philip Dixie and his wife Lesley, Dixie was eighteen months old when his parents divorced and his father disappeared from his life.
Although his mother remarried ten years later and had two other sons, Dixie clashed constantly with his stepfather and when he was twelve, he was placed in a children’s care home. By fourteen, the troubled youth with a hair-trigger temper was a habitual cannabis user and becoming an adept street mugger to fund his drug habit.
Two years later, his burgeoning career of sexual criminality started in earnest. Under the alias of Mark McDonald, his stepfather’s surname, the sixteen-year old was charged with robbery and indecent assault after putting a knife to a woman’s throat and fondling her breasts.
In 1988, using the bogus name Mark Down, Dixie masturbated himself in front of a woman and ordered her to kiss his penis.
By now he was living with a girlfriend, Sandra Beckhouse, who fell pregnant but the baby was stillborn. The tragedy was to trigger another horrific attack by the trainee chef on a Jehovah’s Witness, a married mother of three, who had struck up a friendship with Sandra and had called round to their tower block flat on 21 June 1988 to console her over the loss of the infant.
Twenty years later, the woman, by now in her sixties, was to recall the horror of her ordeal during Dixie’s murder trial. Giving evidence from behind a screen so she could not face her attacker in the dock, she told how she had got no answer when she called at the flat and was leaving when he suddenly approached her and said his girlfriend was inside.
‘I remember asking “are you the boyfriend?” and he said “yes.” We got into the lift and went up to the 10th floor but I decided to hang back while he went into the flat. I felt I wasn’t doing something very wise. I just felt vulnerable.
‘He came out and said she must have gone out again. He said: “Would you like to come in and wait for her?” I said no. I pressed the lift to go down and the doors started to close but he came into the lift. He said: “You have got to help me, you have to help me.” He was fumbling with his trousers. I could see he was trying to get his penis out. He said: “I need it, I need it.” I definitely thought he was going to rape me.
‘I tried to get out and he held me back by my arms. I fought a lot and tried to make it to the door. It was then he hit me in the face. His fist smashed into my eye and jaw, smashing me against the side of the lift. I can remember seeing stars. He sent the lift back up and he was rubbing himself against me. When I struggled to my feet, he got hold of my throat with both hands. He was saying: “Please, I need this.”
She said he kept lifting up her skirt and rubbing against her leg. ‘He told me not to scream or he would kill me.’ Finally, she used a ruse to distract him and make her escape. Dixie had left her with a fractured jaw, damaged eye sockets and loose teeth.
After serving six months in jail for indecent assault, Dixie was again in trouble, exposing himself to two women. In 1993, having compiled a shameful record of five sexual offences and eight convictions for theft by the time he was twenty-three, Dixie and Sandra upped sticks for a new life in Australia, where he would continue his reign of terror.
While there he fathered two children with Sandra, but the couple eventually broke up. Adopting a new name of Shane Turner, the predator started travelling across western Australia picking up work as a chef in bars and diners. To prospective employers, he boasted of working in the kitchens of top European restaurants.
By January 1996, he had settled in Perth, lodging with a new girlfriend, twenty-eight-year-old Eleanor Jackson, and employed in a café. In the same month he landed in the coastal city, eighteen-year-old Jane Spiers went missing but her body was never found. Six months later, in June, twenty three-year-old Jane Rimmer was killed and in March 1997, Ciara Glennon, twenty-seven, was murdered and her body dumped in remote bushland.
The notorious sex crimes were dubbed the Claremont murders after the upscale suburb of Perth from where the victims disappeared. And they had all taken place within a fifteen-month period of Dixie drifting into the neighbourhood.
Sacked from the café for holding a knife to the throat of a waiter, he got a new job at a beachfront restaurant. One night in June 1998, high on drugs and driven by his uncontrollable urges for sexual sadism, he carried out a near-murderous attack that was to come back to haunt him in the aftermath of his arrest for Sally Anne Bowman’s murder.
The ferocious assault bore all the same wretched hallmarks. Disguised by a pair of stockings over his head, Dixie broke into a flat outside Perth, stabbed a twenty-year-old Thai economics student eight times and raped her as he thought she lay dying. By a miracle she survived and she was also to be brought to the Old Bailey ten years later to testify against Dixie to prove his long history as a sexual psychopath.
Hidden behind a screen like his other previous victim, the woman graphically described her night of terror at his hands.
‘The first thing he said was “Do you have any money?” He was quite excited, talking quite fast. I said “No, please don’t do anything.” He told me to take off my top.
‘I got scared at him because he was a bit angry. It was the look on his face. I started to scream and I kicked him. He stabbed me with the knife. I think he tried to turn me around and then started stabbing me. I had my back to him. I think he threw me on the floor as well before he stabbed me.’
The Asian woman hesitatingly recalled how she blacked out and came round to find her knickers around her knees. Dixie had by then vanished, taking as trophies her handbag containing cosmetics and house keys. As a result of her injuries, she spent five days in hospital with a collapsed lung. Semen stains found on her underwear were later to prove an exact match with those found on Sally Anne Bowman’s body when the attempted murder and rape was reopened by an Australian ‘cold case’ squad after Dixie’s arrest.
Although he evaded capture for the rape attack, Dixie’s time was running out in Australia as his depraved urges reached boiling point. Unable to contain his lust, he confronted a woman while she was out jogging on 1 January 1999, leaping naked from his car in front of her and demanding sexual favours. She screamed in terror and he drove off but she was able to note a full description of the vehicle.
Although he was tracked down and arrested for that offence, Australian detectives never questioned him about the murders of three women in Perth or the knifing that left the student near death. Instead, the authorities opted to wash its hands of a criminal parasite and Mark Dixie was deported back to Britain on 23 April 1999, ostensibly for overstaying his visa.
An opportunity to have stopped Sally Anne’s killer in his tracks was lost. And crucially, the Australian police were never to tip off British authorities about the offences he’d committed when he was thrown out of the country.
Back on home soil, Dixie drifted aimlessly from job to job in pub kitchens around London, splurging hundreds of pounds monthly on cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy and drink as his addictions spiralled out of control. To make ends meet he also dealt cocaine to fellow users. In June 2001, high on drugs, he went on another late-night rampage, indecently assaulting a woman in a telephone box.
Work colleagues and drinking mates described him as a cocky and confident, a ‘Jack the Lad’ character and wild-living party animal who turned moody and bad tempered as the drugs wore off. To friends and lovers, his past was a mystery, something he rarely talked about. He had a lot to hide.
Ever more enslaved to mind-bending quantities of drugs, and fearing he was ‘going potty’, Dixie contacted his GP who referred him to mental health experts. He told doctors he was suffering from severe depression, insomnia, violent temper tantrums and anxiety attacks.
Anti-depressants were prescribed but Dixie failed to follow up appointments with psychiatrists.
By June 2002, the itinerant washed up at the Earl of Eldon pub in south Croydon as head chef, where he started an affair with eighteen-year-old brunette barmaid Stacey Nivet. Eventually she moved in with him in a room above the pub. Both regularly snorted lines of cocaine together which always ended in rough sex sessions. She said: ‘He was a heavy cocaine user, taking it every day while he was working and I would too. Immediately after drugs, Mark was the life and soul of the party. The next day he would be angry and moody.
‘He must have been spending £300 a week on the stuff. When we had sex he would bite, as did I. He had a high sex drive but we were both young, so that seemed normal. He used to bite me on the stomach and neck.
‘The sheen of the relationship soon wore off. We’d row about petty things. Mark wasn’t there for me. He would get angry at the slightest thing.
‘He was always cagy about his past and told me he had returned from Australia after splitting up with the mother of his two children.’
A year later, Dixie was on the move again, persuading Stacey to give up her job and move with him to a Spanish holiday resort. Shortly after they arrived on the Costa del Sol, she fell pregnant. For the few months they were hanging out in Fuengirola, Spanish police believe he was responsible for robbing, battering and sexually assaulting three women.
By November 1993 Dixie and Stacey were back in Croydon, where she gave birth to their son Luke, now four and Dixie’s third child. They rented a flat in Blenheim Crescent – just ten doors away from where he would murder Sally Anne Bowman. By the time they moved again, to work as a hired couple in the Rose and Crown pub in Streatham, their relationship was at rock bottom.
Insanely jealous, his cocaine-taking out of control, Dixie beat up Stacey if he suspected her of being unfaithful – yet he brazenly hired prostitutes to service him inside the pub as she and their son slept upstairs. After one beating too many, Stacey and the child finally moved out on 1 September 2005 – just three weeks before Sally Anne met her end.
Being dumped by Stacey sucked Dixie into a deeper whirlpool of all-night drug sessions, climaxing in a orgy of cocaine, lager, vodka and Sambuca shots as he joined pals at the Windsor Castle pub to celebrate his 35th birthday. The group were ‘wired’ when they spilled out and went back to a flat owned by a friend, Victoria Chandler, to continue drinking. During the evening, Dixie’s mood had noticeably darkened when he took a call on his mobile from Stacey Nivet, who pointedly failed to wish him a happy birthday.
Around 2.20 am on Sunday 25 September, Victoria went to bed. Left alone and hungry for sex, Dixie slipped out of the flat at 87a Avondale Road to roam the streets and made his way the few hundred yards to his old haunt of Blenheim Crescent, where he watched from the shadows as the mini-skirted Sally Anne Bowman took her last steps.
Having killed and raped her, he slunk back to the flat and smoked a cannabis ‘spliff’ to calm his nerves.
By 10.30 that morning, Victoria emerged from the upstairs bedroom to find Dixie lying on the sofa in the same pair of trousers, unwashed and holding a book. She was to tell his trial he did not appear troubled by anything and they went to a local pub for a ‘hair of the dog’ lager hangover cure.
By the end of the day, news of Sally Anne’s murder was being broadcast to a sickened nation. Dixie showed no emotion but he exploded with anger when a mate suggested later he respond to the appeal by police for all males in the area to provide a DNA sample.
Recalled Victoria Chandler: ‘He got quite angry. He said “Why should I? I was in the flat all night. Are you calling me a fucking murderer?”
He was also back in Stacey Nivet’s bed. Unaware of the horrors he had inflicted on Sally Anne, she took pity on him and started having sex with him again. ‘I heard about the murder and was shocked because it happened in the street where we lived,’ she recounted.
‘Mark and I even discussed the murder. He said to me: “Look, you’ve got to be so careful, you don’t know who’s out there.” Within days of their reconciliation, though, the couple were fighting again and she kicked him out once more.
With the dragnet closing in, Dixie – who by then had been fired from the Rose and Crown for stealing – did what he always did when trouble loomed. He fled, this time to Amsterdam, renting a room in the city’s red light district, where ample sources of drugs were freely available, only returning to the UK in January 2006 when he felt it was safe.
Fearing it was too dangerous for him to remain in the Croydon area, he took a chef’s job at the Ye Olde Six Bells pub in Horley, Surrey, using the barn next door to store his belongings.
Drug-fuelled sex was never far from his mind. At the pub, he juggled affairs with two members of staff, dark-haired assistant manager Maya Ignatova, twenty-four, and twenty-year-old junior chef Katie McConaghie. The young women were soon to realise how dangerous he was. Katie found that Dixie liked to viciously bite her during sex sessions. Maya fell victim to his insanely jealous rage – left scarred for life when he held her arm against a red-hot griddle because he suspected she was seeing another man. And Mark Dixie had not finished heaping his stomach-churning indignities on the defiled memory of Sally Anne Bowman.
Six months after her murder, newspapers carried extensive background stories focusing on the unrelenting search for her killer, all of them featuring the now-familiar photo of the beautiful, slim blonde in her blue denim miniskirt and white corset top, her midriff and navel ring exposed.
Using a digital camera, Dixie video-filmed himself in front of a pornographic film playing on the TV – while masturbating over her image in the pages of the Daily Mail. The camera, with its damning and squalid evidence still logged on its memory stick, was to be found by detectives hidden in a suitcase.
‘This was not a simple act of sexual gratification,’ prosecutor Brian Altman was to relate to a sickened jury. ‘He was reliving not just the sexual acts and other indignities he had performed on her body but he was also reliving the killing.’
Incredibly, despite his two decades of attacks on women, DNA samples had never once been taken from Mark Dixie. The offences he had previously committed in Britain occurred before it became common to collect genetic markers from suspects to match them to crimes. During his rampages through Australia and Spain, he had also managed to evade the unchallengeable forensic tool.
His luck, however, was about to run out – and it was all over a game of football. It was the summer of 2006, and billions of fans across the globe were gripped by the World Cup, with its blanket TV screening of games. During the England clash with Trinidad and Tobago, as the drink flowed and the atmosphere got rowdy, Dixie was taunted by another pub-goer who shouted at him ‘Fuck your mother!’ A fight broke out, the police were called and both men were hauled into the local police station.
As a matter of routine, police took a DNA sample from Dixie, as they do now for even the most minor of infractions. The moment the cotton swab was inserted into his mouth to soak up his saliva, he knew it was only a matter of time before it was matched to the bodily fluids he’d left on Sally Anne’s corpse. Officers were surprised when he suddenly burst into tears. As he left the police station, he knew the game was up.
For some reason, he did not flee, as he usually did. It was as if, in the words of one colleague, ‘part of him wanted to be caught—it would be almost impossible to live with a secret like that.’
At the murder squad HQ, the atmosphere was electric when the police DNA database finally flagged up a match to Dixie. The saliva sample had shown the chances of someone else apart from Dixie being Sally Anne’s killer as 1 billion to one. Without the breakthrough, detectives feared it could have taken two years to track him down as they doggedly worked through a caseload of 22,500 local suspects.
Armed detectives swooped on Ye Olde Six Bells and arrested Dixie in his chef’s whites on 27 June. In an interview room, he was asked if he was mentally fit to be charged. Back came the chilling reply: ‘I must be mad to do something like that, eh?’
In February 2008, arguably one of the most loathsome of killers ever to stand trial at the Old Bailey took his place in the well of the glass-panelled dock. Even there, Dixie gave full rein to his sickening sexual fantasies. Despite the overwhelming evidence, he chose to plead not guilty and he did so, detectives believe, so that he could have one final chance to gloat over his appalling crime.
His trial allowed him, as the defendant, to paw over scene-of-crime photos showing the terrible carnage inflicted on Sally Anne’s body and gloatingly savour once more all the salacious details of how she died.
It also gave him the opportunity to reveal his outlandish defence, that he had simply stumbled by chance across the body and could not resist his carnal, necrophiliac urges.
Cross-examined in the witness box, Dixie said: ‘I discovered her lying there and did not notice any blood. All I saw was a pair of legs, naked genitalia, skirt up over her waist and I took advantage of her. I don’t know what went through my mind. I crouched down behind her back and I took full advantage of someone I shouldn’t have done.’
‘Do you mean you had sexual intercourse with her?’ asked his barrister, Anthony Glass QC.
‘Yes,’ replied Dixie, adding that he thought she had passed out from drink. ‘I was thinking she would just wake up not realising what had happened the night before.’ But, Dixie conceded, he did finally realise she was dead – but only after he’d finished having sex. Describing why he stuffed pieces of concrete in her vagina, he claimed: ‘I panicked. I knew I had to cover up my DNA.’
Dixie’s defence also hinged on accusing Sally Anne’s boyfriend, Lewis Sprotson, of being the real killer. In the initial stages of the inquiry, he was treated as a suspect until DNA tests ruled out his semen as being that found on his girlfriend’s corpse. Not-withstanding the perfect alibi, defence counsel Anthony Glass challenged Lewis to admit he was guilty.
‘Had you left her dead or dying?’ demanded Mr Glass.
‘No.’
‘Because the truth is that night you had a blazing row with her in the car, hadn’t you? You were both bitterly jealous of each other.’
‘We were jealous, yes,’ replied Lewis. The barrister then queried why Lewis, when questioned about Sally Anne’s murder, had asked police ‘is this about a row with my girlfriend?’
‘What ever made you say that?’ insisted Mr Glass.
Responded Lewis: ‘Me and Sally had had an argument before and the police were called, a little domestic argument.’
The smokescreen failed to blind the twelve jurors. All Dixie’s farcical lies aimed at saving his own miserable skin came to naught and on 22 February, as Linda Bowman linked arms with daughters Danielle, Nicole and Michelle in the courtroom, the jury returned after three hours of deliberation with a unanimous verdict of guilty. As the foreman pronounced the verdict, Sally Anne’s family shouted ‘Yes!’ in unison, and cheers and sobs erupted in the public gallery.
More tears were shed among jurors and court staff as Linda Bowman bravely stood in the Old Bailey a few feet from Mark Dixie to read her victim impact statement, a searing account of her bleak and unending desolation, of the grief and pain only a mother can experience.
On the 24th September 2005 at 18.05, I kissed and cuddled my little girl Sally Anne, we told each other we loved each other and then I waved her goodbye. I remember her infectious giggle and huge smile as her eldest sister Danielle drove her to Croydon. I never knew then that this would be the last time I saw her wonderful smile and the last time I ever heard her voice.
At 11.30 a.m. on Sunday 25th September 2005 three police officers knocked at my door, they came in and before I knew it I was screaming with immense pain in my heart, as I heard the Liaison Officer tell me that Sally Anne had been killed, stabbed to death. From that second on my life was over, all I wanted to do was to hold her in my arms and never let her go again.
At 8 p.m. that night I went to identify my baby girl in the mortuary only three minutes from my front door. I couldn’t even touch or kiss her; I could only look through a thick piece of glass at my Sally Anne lying in a body bag on a cold slab of metal. I saw the wounds on her beautiful face and stab marks on her tiny neck, her long blonde hair was still wet having had the blood washed from it and it was tied back off her face. She was so pale and so still. I pressed my hands on the glass wanting it to break so I could hold my little girl one more time. I fought my pain and tears and said to her ‘Mummy’s here darling, I love you so much.’
Due to the pain I was having trouble breathing, the pain in my chest was so strong I thought I was going to keel over. I remember Sally’s sister Michelle being beside me crying, saying to me, ‘Mum please wake her up,’ over and over again. I said: ‘Michelle, please stop, and remember no one can ever hurt her again. Please tell Sally she looks beautiful.’
You see Michelle and Sally Anne were only two years apart and were the closest of my four daughters. I remember being told we had to leave and Michelle held onto the door frame, her knuckles turning white and refused to leave her little sister on her own. With the help of my Liaison Officer we managed Michelle.
I had one more look at Sally Anne, kissed the glass and told her how much I loved her. I longed for her to move, or open her eyes so I could see again the biggest, brightest blue eyes in the world; she didn’t, it was so quiet, and I refused to believe she was dead.
As I looked back for the last time that night, I vowed to get the person who had taken her from us.
As I was driven back by the police, I knew my other daughters Danielle and Nicole were waiting for me. I knew they wanted me to tell them it was all a mistake and it wasn’t Sally Anne.
As we drove up to my house I felt a wave of sickness as I was going to have to tell the other two it wasn’t a mistake. My front door opened as I was walking up the path, I was looking at the two of them in the doorway and just nodded my head. One of them shrieked and said ‘No mum,’ Michelle joined them and all three huddled together.
I ran upstairs to the bathroom and was sick, my whole body started to shake violently; I crawled to my bedroom and lay on my bed. I grabbed a pillow and hugged it very tight and then sobbed uncontrollably into it.
My baby had gone, what am I going to do? I knew I had to be strong for the others; I was all they had in the world. I kept asking myself, ‘How do I do this?’
As the days went by Sally Anne’s dad Paul showed up and seeing his big blue eyes and touching his skin was like holding Sally Anne, they were the double of each other.
Paul then had to go and see Sally Anne for the first time at the mortuary. I was now on my own, I felt empty and life felt meaningless.
For the past five years Sally and I lived alone, as her sisters were older and had their own partners and homes. This made Sally and I inseparable at times and we were the best of friends, we had our ups and downs and arguments like all daughters and mums. We went on holidays together every year to Greece and we socialised and shopped together.
Sally Anne kept in contact over the years with the one and only man she truly loved with all her heart. That man is Sally’s dad Paul.
I can remember the first time Sally watched her dad on stage at Crystal Palace Park playing the drums in a band. She was so small yet stood so tall and proud and she never took her eyes off her daddy, not for one second. That is one memory that will stay in my heart forever. He was the king of her castle and she was his beautiful blue-eyed princess and his only child.
As the weeks went on Sally Anne’s funeral took place and her ashes were kept at home until she was laid to rest. She has now completed her final journey as her killer has now been caught. I am a great believer in life after death and this has given me a small modicum of comfort knowing that she is in a better place.
Taking my little girl’s ashes to the crematorium to lay her to rest was one of the most painful experiences I have had to endure. I for some reason always thought I would see Sally coming through my front door again; this to me was a real belief even though I knew she was dead. I hung on to this thought and it gave me strength.
However, a short drive from my house to her place of rest was as painful as seeing Sally in the mortuary. Danielle, Nicole and Michelle left my home 20 minutes before myself. I spent that time cradling Sally in my arms and telling her how much I loved her. I then walked out to my car with Sally in my arms. I placed her on the passenger seat of my car with the seatbelt on; still wanting to protect her and keep her safe until the end.
I put on a recording of Sally Anne singing Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’. It seemed strange as I felt her presence and heard her voice; it was just the two of us again. If only I could turn back the hands of time. I didn’t want my life to go on without her. It is difficult to explain; as I know I have three other daughters I love so very much. I may never be able to put into words what this means.
Nearing the part of Sally’s final journey, I wished time to go backwards as I wanted one more day with my little girl. There is so much I never got to tell her, I need to feel her soft youthful skin, smell her favourite perfume again and run my fingers through her beautiful long blonde hair. I found myself thinking about all the fairytales I had read as a child and wished for a real ‘genie in a bottle’ to grant me just one wish.
Every night I lay my head on Sally Anne’s pillow, as I can still smell her on it. I hug it tight and this allows me to sleep pretending it is Sally Anne I am cuddling. Even at eighteen years old she would still get into my bed at night and get me to tickle her arm and play with her hair until she fell asleep.
I will never accept that I won’t ever see her again. My heart will never mend, not even with time. I cannot ever see things getting easier; I lost the will to live when my baby girl was taken from me in such a brutal and depraved way.
I cannot understand why he killed her and why he did what he did after he had killed her. It was bad enough knowing that Sally had been stabbed to death, but then to be told after death he raped her and stole her belongings leaves me with the feeling that he took her last piece of dignity. Please can you ask him ‘Why did you kill her and why do these things?’
I wish you had known Sally Anne; she was so tiny and full of life. She exuded warmth and was always smiling and giggling. She had the singing voice of an angel, which is very fitting now.
Where do I go from here? How do I take care of my three other daughters? I am empty; there is nothing else for me to give.
The first birthday without Sally was almost as painful as being told she had been murdered. I found myself thinking what would she like for her birthday and where we would go to celebrate it. Before I realized, I had bought her a card and then reality dawned.
There was no celebration, instead Sally’s three sisters, Paul and I and many of Sally’s friends went to Sally Anne’s headstone and said a few words. I was crying uncontrollably all day and in my mind saying ‘Why, why?’
There are so many things a mother wants to say to her daughter and that chance has now gone forever. I wish for just one more day with Sally so I can tell her these things.
So we are now left with only memories of Sally Anne, even those will be taken but more gently over time. But the hurt and loss will never diminish.
So today is not just about justice being done, it is about us all finally letting go and beginning the worst, most lonely journey of all, life without Sally Anne.
But I have learnt that to try and put closure on Sally Anne’s life would be worse than us never knowing or loving Sally Anne at all.
Finally, Sally Anne’s killer may have taken her future and all our tomorrows, but he can never take her memories and our yesterdays.’
Jailing Dixie for life, with a recommendation he serve no fewer than thirty-four years, Judge Gerald Gordon told him: ‘No words of mine could remotely match those of Mrs. Bowman.
‘What you did that night was so awful and so repulsive I don’t propose to repeat. Your subsequent conduct shows that you had not the slightest remorse for what you have had done – quite the contrary.’
As he was led to the cells to start a prison sentence that will last until he is seventy-one years old, two men in the public gallery rained insults down on his head, shouting ‘Rot in hell!’ ‘Scum!’ and ‘Pervert!’ Glaring balefully at them, Dixie, defiant to the end, shouted back: ‘Come on, I’ll have you both.’
It was left to Sally Anne’s father Paul Bowman to pay a last tribute as the family left the court to try and piece together their lives. ‘Sally Anne, you may have been taken from us but rest assured you will never be missed and never forgotten.
‘In the words of the song, “Your heart will go on.”’