When 22-year-old Julie vanished, police insisted she'd simply left town. Her mother knew better.

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Julie Hogg was the kind of daughter who called her mum every day. The 22-year-old pizza delivery driver and mother to three-year-old Kevin was particularly close to her mother, Ann, a theatre nurse from County Durham. So when Julie failed to show up for work and didn't collect her son from Ann's house in November 1989, Ann knew something was terribly wrong.

After three agonising months of searching without answers, Ann made a horrific discovery. She found Julie's body hidden beneath a panel in her bathroom. And what followed was a 17-year long battle to bring her daughter's killer to justice.

Stan exclusive series I Fought The Law follows the extraordinary true story of Ann Ming, a determined mother who refused to let her daughter's murderer walk free after she was assaulted and murdered. 

Watch the trailer for I Fought The Law. Article continues after video.

When Ann reported Julie missing on 16 November, police dismissed her concerns. They insisted Julie had simply decided to leave town after separating from her husband, abandoning her young son without a word. Despite Ann's protests that this was completely out of character, officers treated it as a routine missing person case.

For three months, Ann fought to get the police to take Julie's disappearance seriously. Twenty-nine officers eventually searched Julie's house over five days, but found nothing to indicate foul play. The case seemed to be going nowhere.

Then one day in February 1990, Ann was in Julie's bathroom when she noticed something that made her blood run cold. There was a smell getting stronger near the bathtub. Following her instincts, Ann lifted the bath panel.

Image: ITV1.

What she found would haunt her forever: Julie's partially decomposed and violently mutilated body, hidden beneath the floorboards for three months.

"I had nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, sleeplessness, paranoia," Ann told Saga. "I've had treatment, but I will never recover from PTSD."

But discovering her daughter's body was only the beginning of Ann's ordeal. Despite knowing who killed Julie, despite having evidence, despite even having a confession, Ann would spend the next 17 years fighting an ancient law that protected her daughter's killer from justice.

Julie had been violently sexually assaulted and strangled to death by her neighbour, William 'Billy' Dunlop — a local labourer with a history of violence who had concealed her body beneath the bath panel in her own home.

Evidence linked Dunlop to the murder — his fingerprints were found on Julie's keys, discovered under floorboards at a house where he'd been living. But when he went to trial in the early 1990s, the jury delivered an inconclusive verdict, and Dunlop walked free.

Following the trial, Dunlop was heard bragging about the murder in local pubs, safe in the knowledge that he couldn't be tried again. That changed in 1998 when, whilst serving time for assaulting a former girlfriend, he confessed to a prison officer about killing Julie, providing full details of how he concealed the body.

Image: ITV1.

Police obtained a taped confession, but there was a devastating catch — an 800-year-old law called 'double jeopardy' meant Dunlop couldn't be retried for murder, only charged with perjury for lying in court.

The double jeopardy law, dating back to medieval times, prevented anyone who had been acquitted of a crime from being tried again for the same offence. For Ann, this ancient legislation was standing between her daughter's killer and justice.

"Never mind that the law was 800 years old. That didn't matter to me," Ann told The Telegraph. "When there's been a proven wrongful acquittal, such as our case, when the man confessed he had murdered our daughter, and because of an 800-year-old law, he could only be charged with perjury. That was not right."

What followed was an extraordinary campaign that would see a grieving mother take on the British establishment. Ann wrote letters, sought publicity with local papers, and lobbied MPs.

Image: ITV1

Her relentless campaigning contributed to the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, which allowed serious crimes including murder to be retried under specific conditions: approval from the Director of Public Prosecutions and agreement from the Court of Appeal based on "new and compelling evidence."

In 2006, Dunlop became the first person convicted of murder following a prior acquittal for the same crime. He pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey and was sentenced to a minimum of 17 years — though he was recently recommended for transfer to an open prison in March 2025.

Even now, 36 years later, Ann's legacy speaks for itself — a mother whose love for her daughter literally changed British law.

Feature Image: Stan.