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Double Jeopardy Justice: At Last a Murderer is Tried Twice

In Britain in September 2006, a mother, Ann Ming, who helped change British law, finally won justice for her murdered daughter at the Old Bailey, as her daughter’s killer, William (Billy) Dunlop became the first person in almost 800 years to be tried twice for the same crime. With her husband Charlie, Mrs Ming had waged a tireless 17-year campaign after their daughter, Julie Hogg, was strangled and mutilated by the violent drunk Dunlop.

In 1989 Dunlop was charged with the murder of the 22-year-old mother of one, but was formally acquitted and freed after two juries failed to reach a verdict in 1991. Under the ‘double jeopardy’ laws of the time Dunlop could not be tried twice, even though he smugly later confessed to the killing in the belief that he could never be found guilty of her murder. The double jeopardy rule dated back to the Magna Carta, which was drawn up in 1215, and was meant to protect the public against malicious and vindictive prosecution. While supporters argued that the principle was an important democratic safeguard, others claimed it sometimes protected the guilty.

Julie’s tormented mother refused to let Dunlop get away with murder and doggedly fought for a change in the law. She lobbied successive Home Secretaries and argued her case before Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith. Changes to the law were proposed in 1993 and were backed by a committee of MPs in 2001. The principle was abolished in the Criminal Justice Act in 2003 and came into force in April 2005. Under the Act, the Court of Appeal has the power to quash an acquittal and order a retrial where there is ‘new and compelling evidence’. The new and compelling evidence in the Dunlop case was his blatant confession to Julie’s murder years later. The 43-year-old Dunlop became the first defendant to be tried under the new system.

Julie vanished from her home on 16 November 1989, and despite an extensive police hunt and week-long search of her home her body was not found. It was her mother who eventually discovered the decomposing remains in her daughter’s home 80 days later. Recalling the horrific discovery, Mrs Ming said:

I went to the bathroom. I was a theatre sister for years so I recognised the smell of death. I accidentally knocked the bath panel and it fell away. I looked down to find Julie’s naked body wrapped in a blanket. Even though it was badly decomposing, it was clear that she had been sexually assaulted and her body mutilated.

Police questioned 21 men who knew Julie but Dunlop was quickly identified as the chief suspect. His DNA profile matched that found in her home. Her keys, with his fingerprints, were found under floorboards at his nearby lodging house. Dunlop was charged with murder and his May 1991 trial at Teesside Crown Court was told he had murdered Julie in a frenzy after she spurned his sexual advances.

But the jury failed to reach a verdict and he was discharged. At a retrial in October of the same year, a second jury also failed to agree on a verdict. Mr Justice Ognall brought in a formal not guilty verdict and Dunlop, then 28, walked free. The main factor in the jury’s division – despite the seemingly overwhelming circumstantial evidence – was that the exact cause of Julie’s death could not be established because her body was so decomposed.

Afterwards, Dunlop protested that police should ‘find the real killer’ and even consulted a lawyer with a view to getting compensation for the 20 months he had spent in jail awaiting trial. Under the existing double jeopardy rule, Dunlop knew he could not be tried again. But he did not reckon on the iron will of Mrs Ming, who, with her husband Charlie, a retired Middlesbrough heavy goods fitter, campaigned relentlessly for the law to be changed.

In the meantime, Billy Dunlop’s violent ways continued. In one attack he bashed a former girlfriend with a baseball bat and in 1997 was jailed for six years for assault. Though it was unrelated to Julie’s case, the Mings made it their business to attend his every court appearance.

It was while in jail in 1999 that Dunlop slipped up, cynically boasting to a female prison officer he had indeed murdered Julie. His confession to Julie’s murder, and that he had lied on oath at his murder trial, led to him being charged with perjury, and in April 2000 he had six years added to his assault jail term. But under the double jeopardy rule it looked as though he could never be convicted of murder.

Mrs Ming was eventually awarded £20,000 ($A50,000) in an out-of-court settlement against the police over their handling of the case, but it was bringing her daughter’s killer to justice that preoccupied her most. After years of lobbying for the law to be changed, on 7 September 2006, Ann Ming finally saw her daughter’s killer brought to justice.

In a tense 10-minute hearing, the stocky, ponytailed Dunlop pleaded guilty to Julie’s murder. Mrs Ming clenched a fist, then wept as Dunlop uttered the word ‘guilty’. After Dunlop was found guilty, detectives released the extract of the transcript of his police interview in 1999 in which, for the first time, he gave the gruesome details of the night Julie died, in the belief that he couldn’t be tried again.

On 15 November 1989, Dunlop, a labourer who lived a few hundred yards from Julie and had had a brief relationship with her, called at her house in Billingham, near Stockton-on-Tees, at 2am, drunk and in a ‘sexual frenzy’. He became infuriated when Julie, a pizza delivery girl who was separated from her husband and lived with her three-year-old son, poked fun at an injury Dunlop had sustained in a rugby club fight.

‘I just lost it and got up and strangled her, with my hands,’ Dunlop told detectives. Panicking, he realised Julie was dead because she had ‘turned blue’ and was lying in the living room very still. Dunlop said he stripped them both naked, claiming he was trying to avoid police obtaining forensic evidence from their clothes, and tried to carry the lifeless Julie up into the loft. But she was too heavy and he dropped her so he opened a panel behind the bath in the bathroom and forced her body inside.

Outside court, flanked by police and her 81-year-old husband, Mrs Ming described Dunlop as ‘pure evil’ and said, ‘I knew Dunlop was responsible and Charlie and I were determined not to rest until he had been brought to justice.

‘We made a promise to ourselves that Julie’s killer would be punished. He has done everything he could to avoid justice, but his lying and scheming has eventually all been in vain.’

Billy Dunlop received an automatic life sentence and the judge set a 17-year non-parole period – which ironically, was exactly the same period it took to finally bring Julie’s killer to justice.