My Sister Milly Read online

  Gemma Dowler

  * * *

  MY SISTER MILLY

  with Michelle Lovric

  Contents

   Introduction

  1. Before          1988 – March 2002

  2. The Disappearance     March – September 2002

  3. Discovery         September 2002 – March 2003

  4. The Waiting        March 2003 – 2010

  5. Trial and Punishment    January – June 2011

  6. Scandal          July 2011 – 2012

  7. Breakdown and Recovery  December 2012 – May 2015

  8. New Blows        May 2015 – March 2017

   Illustrations

   Appendix 1: Timeline

   Appendix 2: EMDR and Psychotherapy with Gemma

   Permissions and Credits

   Acknowledgements

   Follow Penguin

  Introduction

  My name is Gemma Dowler.

  On 21 March 2002, a serial killer named Levi Bellfield stole my sister and sent our family to Hell. From that day onwards, Milly became an endless source of stark and shocking headlines.

  My sister had a face that captured hearts. But her lovely image has been turned into a symbol of so many things gone terribly wrong. This is because what happened to Milly was not a simple murder. It was not just Bellfield who took her from us. My sister was also a victim of police incompetence, of criminality in the press and of cruelty in the so-called justice system, which puts victims on trial alongside killers.

  With so many headlines over the years, Milly’s name has gradually become one of those – like Marilyn’s, like Diana’s – that needs no surname or explanatory subtitle.

  Three words came to define my sister more than any others: MISSING, MURDERED, HACKED.

  Yet in her time with us, there was no such thing as ‘Tragic Milly Dowler’. My sister was the most vivid girl you’d ever meet. She was the noisiest, cheekiest, danciest girl. Milly would not have wanted a minute’s silence to mark her passing. She would have wanted a whole rock concert, with moshing.

  So, in this book, I’m going to ask you to trade the one-dimensional Milly Dowler you think you know for the true girl: my funny, talented, eccentric, loving and much-loved sister.

  This is also a book about putting things right. You can put something right only if you first acknowledge that it is wrong.

  Bellfield is not the only one of his kind. Think of the women and children murdered since Milly was taken, some of them by Bellfield: Amélie, Marsha, Holly, Jessica, April and others. Milly didn’t even get a year of being a teenager. She was doing brilliantly at it, but she’d hardly got started. Other girls didn’t get to be one at all.

  Think of how the families of those victims have been exposed and often judged: all the grieving fathers treated as if they’d harmed their own daughters; the mothers accused of neglect, just because their daughter, like Milly, was in the wrong place at the wrong time; the young girls labelled wilful runaways by the police, even while they were suffering and dying at the hands of violent paedophiles; the victims of press intrusion, tactless headlines, painful revelations at a time when families were in the grip of trauma and loss.

  As the emblem she became, Milly has an immense power: the power to close newspapers as well as to sell them. I’m aware that, in writing this book, I’m harnessing this power.

  It’s not ‘girl power’ or commercial power.

  It’s moral power, the power that comes the hard way, out of tragedy survived, lessons learned.

  I use it in the hope that telling our story will help stop other families suffering what happened to us.

  Ever since Milly disappeared, our family’s been besieged by publishers as well as reporters. We turned down every book offer – until now. It was not that we lacked material. As well as a room full of photographs, statements and documents, Mum and I have been scribbling our thoughts and feelings in mounting piles of notebooks for years.

  Our family had and has plenty to say. The problem with publishing our story was one of trust. We’d been too often betrayed, mis-portrayed, made to feel like collateral damage. We shrank away from offering ourselves up for more of the same.

  So why publish this book now?

  I have just turned thirty-one and am acutely conscious of starting to age. Each wrinkle I have will be a privilege Milly didn’t know. Each rite of passage will be one my sister cannot witness. We promised to be one another’s bridesmaids. I was denied the privilege of keeping that pledge. But now there’s something else I can do. I cannot bring her back, my laughing, willowy, sassy sister. Instead, it is time for me to show who she really was.

  It’s taken me fifteen years to find the voice to tell Milly’s story, and mine. It’s fair to say that over those years, some of my memories may have been blurred or distorted by the traumas that arrived one after another. Details of my recollections have sometimes differed slightly from those of Mum, Dad and other people. But I think if you ask any group of people to describe something that’s happened, the individual accounts will always vary.

  Now is this book’s time, because previously our family could not bear to talk about what we still did not truly know. Milly would have hated for us to live so many years in such pain, wondering what had really happened to her. She would have hated Bellfield to hang on to the power of his withheld disclosures for so long. After he admitted in 2015 what he’d done to her, we could not stay silent any more. Milly would have wanted him known for what he is.

  Bellfield’s admissions made this project more urgent. Yet they also took many months away from it as we struggled to come to terms with the heart-breaking details and the, frankly, cruel way in which they were drip-fed to us.

  It’s also time for the press to demonstrate how much they have learned. We’ve always been grateful to the media for the way they helped us try to find Milly. And we’ve seen such a lovely change in the way we are treated by the newspapers. After Bellfield’s trial, we felt that our ordeal had not been wasted on the press. We were right to trust them with our passionate statements in front of the Old Bailey. We were right again in 2016 when we decided to trust the media – and the public – with Bellfield’s disclosures about what he did to Milly. We were rewarded with respect, compassion, insight and a well-judged amount of outrage, some very eloquent. For that reason, too, it feels safe to publish this book now.

  Finally, after intensive and innovative therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, we have at last been able to rebuild ourselves, not just as victims but as a family that was blessed with the gift of Milly. It’s time for me to publish this book because, after years of being afraid of the memory of her, I have found my way back to Milly. That love is stronger than Bellfield’s evil.

  We hold Milly in our memories the way a child refuses to give up a fragment of its little crib blanket. She keeps us warm, dancing and laughing with us. Milly’s like a hologram playing in our hearts, singing, sashaying, sassing – a little Milly, almost like one of the fairies she loved, disappearing in and out of the darkness, like the flicker of an old film.

  The only book that our family can be a part of is one that will allow us to explain ourselves without sensationalizing or dumbing down, without objectifying Milly and without flinching at telling of the damage that was done to all of us. Milly would also have wanted me to take the horror out and put the music back into her short life and her memory.

  Milly acquired so much personality in her thirteen years that it’s survived all this time after her death, intact. She also left many lovely traces on this earth. Our family will share here for the first time photographs of Milly from our albums. There a
re letters from Milly herself as well as her artwork, her own essays and poetry. Milly’s distinctive, evolving handwriting – and her even more distinctive spelling – are here too.

  As you will read, Milly was all about music. That’s why this book has playlists of the songs she loved to perform on her saxophone or sing, as well as the music that accompanied our family’s progress from our former riotous happiness to shock and grief at the loss of her.

  Writing is not necessarily healing. Sometimes working on this book forced me to position myself in an old familiar torture chamber and describing what it felt like. So there have been times when it has been almost too difficult to write. Sometimes I’ve had to drag Mum and Dad and Lovely Granny into the torture chamber too, to help me remember the things I’ve recorded here. There’s no doubt that this book has stirred up old pain, refreshed it, made it sharp again. There have been times when it hasn’t seemed fair that we should put ourselves through this, just for the sake of a book.

  Then I reminded myself that some things must not be allowed to stand. So I kept writing, even when it felt like Hell.

  At a certain point, I became the girl whose sister disappeared, then the girl whose sister was murdered, the girl who believed the murderer was coming after her, the girl who screamed at the trial, the girl who advised David Cameron to ‘man up’, the girl who told Rupert Murdoch to sort out his empire. Now I am Milly’s sister again. My children will be Milly’s nieces and nephews. And they won’t have to read about their aunt in the press or on the internet. They’ll have this instead.

  Our family has pieced itself back together while working on this story. Because of that process, this book comes from a place of love.

  It’s time to both own and end this story. But I want to start this book with joy.

  I want to start with Milly.

  And, of course, the music.

  Gemma Dowler, June 2017

  1.

  * * *

  BEFORE

  1988 – March 2002

  PLAYLIST

  Abba Dancing Queen

  Donovan Mellow Yellow

  Louise Stuck In The Middle With You

  Elvis Presley Fever

  Britney Spears Hit Me Baby One More Time

  All Saints Never Ever

  Sarah McLachlan Angel

  Mariah Carey Wind Beneath My Wings

  Eva Cassidy Fields Of Gold

  Shania Twain Man! I Feel Like a Woman!

  Shania Twain That Don’t Impress Me Much

  S Club 7 Don’t Stop Movin’

  Spice Girls Spice Up Your Life

  BBC TV 999 theme

  Russell Watson Volare

  Jamie O’Neal All By Myself

  Mark Knopfler Going Home: Theme of The Local Hero

  Michael Ball, from Les Misérables original cast recording Empty Chairs At Empty Tables

  Josh Groban You’ll Never Walk Alone

  The Beach Boys Surfin’ USA

  Henry Mancini Pink Panther theme

  Shirley Bassey Goldfinger

  Carly Simon Nobody Does It Better

  John Barry James Bond theme

  Petula Clark Downtown

  Jason Donovan Any Dream Will Do

  Barenaked Ladies If I Had A Million Dollars

  James Taylor You’ve Got A Friend

  James Taylor Mexico

  Janine Maunder Neighbours theme

  Cher The Shoop Shoop Song

  Susan Maughan Bobby’s Girl

  Note: the playlists in this book show the particular recordings that formed our family soundtrack.

  1.

  Dear Milly, this is actually the bit that hurts the worst because this is what we lost when we lost you.

  xxxx Gemsie

  The Christmas before Milly was murdered, Mum started using a video-camera. We got so fed up with that camera, always poking its little black snout into our lives. Now we’re grateful for it. Thanks to those videos, we still have a three-dimensional portrait of our family just as we were in those last months. They show confidence, happiness, and confidence in our happiness. We were so happy together that we didn’t even know how happy we were. Yes, we’d recently lost dear family members to old age. We had lost a beloved dog. We had mourned, Milly especially, as she was never afraid of feelings. So we knew what sadness was.

  It’s just that we never suspected anything truly evil would come our way and that it would take Milly from us.

  The video-cam gradually became another member of our family. In the videos, Mum visited all our little clan and was treated to the full spectrum of our behaviours. The camera recorded our pleasures, our sulks, our eccentricities, our uproarious sense of humour. Our family was into extreme teasing. We were rarely embarrassed about ourselves. We were so tightly knit, so sure of our family-ness that we could wind one another up without mercy. We were rude the way you can be only when you know that no one will take you seriously. Or that they will always forgive you.

  Those videos now exist as CDs with the Surrey Police crest on the label. They were confiscated during the house search after Milly disappeared. We did not get them back until ten years later, after the trial of her murderer. You may have seen the extracts that were screened on television newscasts again and again, first when Milly went missing, then when her body was found, again during Bellfield’s trial and the hacking scandal. Every time we had to live her murder all over again. So you will probably have seen Milly ironing her jeans, playing the sax. You will have seen that willowy frame, that delicate profile, the scrunched-up hair, those dancing eyes, that attitude.

  But the video footage released by the police was silent, or muted.

  What you cannot know is the happy soundtrack of those videos. There’s me giggling, Mum coaxing, Milly back-chatting, Dad asserting mock authority (and real resignation) in his house of sassy women. Our home was a kind of musical comedy show with well-loved characters playing their parts. In the videos, you see us being ourselves, in our classic poses: me clearing up or sorting things out; Milly sashaying about; Dad looking mock-heroic and long-suffering. Mum had recently lost a lot of weight so everyone was entitled to joke about her ‘suck-in knickers’ and her sleek new silhouette.

  Mum was always known as ‘Mumazino’. That was her name in our mobile phones. It still is in mine. Sometimes we called her ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’, after the kindly Beatrix Potter hedgehog who took in other creatures’ washing. ‘Lovely Mummy’ was Milly’s favourite, especially when she was wriggling out of trouble. ‘Lovely’ was a big word in our family. Our grandmother was always ‘Lovely Granny’. Being Gemma, I was sometimes ‘Jemima Puddleduck’. Milly was called ‘Sausage’ or ‘Sausage Pot’. Or ‘Milly Munchpot’, ‘Milly Molly’, ‘Mill Moll’ or ‘Herbert’. As for Dad, I’m afraid we called him a number of things that were sadly politically incorrect. He took it like a man.

  Our family has always been all about music. Dad was once a part-time mobile DJ and plays the double bass. Mum has a beautiful singing voice. I’m a pretty good singer myself. Milly was both singer and instrumentalist, a thirteen-year-old with a passion for the saxophone and a talent to match. So in those family videos, there’s always, always music. Uncle Pete’s a proper baritone and knows how to use his voice. Milly and I warble and shimmy without even being aware of it. Mum is humming. Our little cousins sing Britney Spears songs. Even Lovely Granny’s doing creditable karaoke to ‘Dancing Queen’. Dad’s soundtracks constantly play in the background. That’s the music of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Milly and I liked the current groups. We loved the ‘old’ music too. We have our own jukebox in the house. In the months before she disappeared, Milly’s favourite songs were ‘Mellow Yellow’ and ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’.

  Milly’s voice is still there for us to hear whenever we play those family videos. Even if she’s off-camera, you can hear her heckling, wise-cracking, laughing. Her voice was deeper and huskier than mine. The cheeky, breathy sax music was like an extension of Milly’s
tongue. I’m very sensitive to sound. Milly was a bag of noise. She never stopped. Even asleep, she drove me mad by breathing through her nose. As we shared a room – through choice – my strongest memories of her are the endless chuckling and chatting until late into the night.

  In one video, Mum comes into the spare room. Milly’s lying full-length on the bed. She’s watching a film, way too close to the screen as usual. The camera pans in on her luminous face.

  It goes like this:

  Milly (catching sight of Mum and the video-cam): ‘You’re a sad woman.’

  Mum (in her coaxing bedtime-story voice): ‘Have you got anything you’d like to say?’

  Milly (growling): ‘Go away.’ (She has her deadpan face on, but her eyes are sparkling.)

  Mum (cooing): ‘Would you like to say something else?’

  Milly: ‘Yes. Go away.’

  Mum (sweeter than sugar): ‘Oh, you look lovely in the video.’

  Milly: ‘You look better with the camera in front of your face.’

  And so on.

  Mum filmed our pre-Christmas family party. Milly had stuck an embarrassing photo of Dad on our front door, just under the Christmas wreath. That was when the worst thing that could happen to Dad was embarrassment. He groaned when he saw it. But he’s always known when he’s beaten. He didn’t even try to make Milly take it down.

  The video-cam enters our house, all decorated for Christmas. Milly’s wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt. It’s mine, yet it fits her much better. Everything does. Part of her hair is roughly bunched in a scruffy knot at the back of her head. A few tendrils escape, as they always do. This style of Milly’s is officially known as ‘messy bun’.