Few can claim they overturned an 800-year-old law enshrined in the Magna Carta – but Ann Ming can. Driven by love, grief and unwavering determination, Ming’s 17 year battle with the British legal system came after the harrowing murder of her daughter, Julie Hogg, in 1989. After the justice system failed to prosecute Hogg’s murderer not once but twice, Ming quite literally fought the law, challenging the Crown Prosecution Service, the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney General, and two Home Secretaries – and her story is now the subject of a new ITV drama. 

The four-part series, I Fought the Law, stars Sheridan Smith as Ming and is based on her 2008 memoir, For the Love of Julie. It opens with mother-of-three Ming – who worked as a theatre nurse in Billingham, Durham – visiting her 22-year-old daughter Julie at her home to pick up her grandson, Kevin, while Julie went to work as a pizza delivery driver. Julie told her she was filing for legal separation from her then husband, Andrew Hogg, and went to work in the evening as normal. On the morning of 16 November 1989, Ming could not get hold of her daughter despite countless phone calls. She visited Julie’s home to discover her missing, with all of the windows and doors locked – and she instantly knew something was wrong. 

Ming reported Julie as a missing person to Cleveland Police immediately, but it was days before detectives investigated further. Ming and her husband Charlie, who were looking after Kevin at the time, were told the most probable explanation was that Julie moved to London in search of a better life. Ming knew this wasn’t true and pushed for the police to take the case seriously. Officers searched Julie’s home for five days but failed to find any evidence, clues or leads and eventually the case went cold. 

Sheridan Smith as Ann Ming

Nearly three months later, Julie’s husband Andrew Hogg moved back into their home with Kevin. He complained to Ming about a foul smell upstairs and, upon visiting, Ming narrowed it down to the bathroom. Leaning on the wall to figure out where exactly the odour was coming from, Ming’s knee knocked a panel which uncovered Julie’s naked body wrapped in a blanket underneath the bath. Despite a week’s worth of police searches months earlier, a nightmarish twist of fate meant it was Ming who made the horrific discovery of her daughter’s decaying body. 

The Mings, naturally furious with the police failings, soon found out that an arrest had been made. William ‘Billy’ Dunlop, a notoriously unsavoury character and labourer who was known to the police, was charged with Julie’s murder after her house keys were found under his floorboards. He had been visiting a friend who lived directly next door to Julie on the night she was murdered, after brutally assaulting a man at the local rugby club which earned him a black eye. Evidence suggested Dunlop, who had had previous relations with Julie, stopped by her house in the hope of having sex. After she rejected his advances, he turned violent, sexually assaulting her and strangling her to death. 

Despite what seemed to be an incredible amount of evidence against Dunlop – the aforementioned keys found at his home, and his DNA discovered on the blanket Julie was wrapped in – the jury failed to reach a majority verdict in 1991. This horrific ordeal was repeated a year later when the same prosecution couldn’t convince a majority jury. As a result, Dunlop was acquitted and released without charge. 

Dunlop, who had a history of violence, likely thought he had got away with it until 1997 when he was convicted of another crime: stabbing his pregnant girlfriend with a fork and beating up her lover. He was sentenced to seven years in jail and confessed to prison officers how he had got away with Julie’s murder – and did so believing he was protected by the double jeopardy law: legislation which prevented anyone from being tried for the same offence twice. In a taped police interview, he said: “She just started taking the mickey out of me and ridiculing me because I had a black eye and my eye was split open. I just lost it and got up and strangled her.”

Jack James Ryan as William Dunlop in ITV’s I Fought The Law

As a result of his confession, Dunlop was arrested for perjury in October 1999 because he lied at two court hearings. In an interview with ITV, Ming recounted the events: “The man who killed Julie confessed to her murder, but he could only be sentenced to perjury because of an 800-year old law – that just did not seem right. If there’s a proven wrongful conviction, I’d be the first to say that person should be freed, but when there has been a proven wrongful acquittal such as ours, surely the same principles should apply. If you think about it logically, it’s just common sense.

“The second thing that inspired me was when he was sentenced to two counts of perjury because he’d lied at two trials, and he was only given a six-year sentence, that was terrible. At the time I’d looked into the maximum sentence for perjury and it was seven years, so in our ignorance we thought that would be 14 years total sentence. It was horrible – he was bragging in pubs about committing the perfect murder, but he only got six years in prison, I was absolutely incensed.”

What followed was Ming’s ferocious fight to overturn the age-old law that would mean Dunlop would be put behind bars for Julie's murder. “We went straight to our MP and I said I was going to look into this law change. My solicitor said I was wasting my time and that no matter what the government told me, they would never, ever change this law retrospectively. My husband told me to listen to the solicitor, but I didn’t care what anyone said. I said: ‘I can’t rest until I get justice for Julie and if there’s an 800-year old law standing in my way then so be it’. 

“That’s what I said out loud, but inside I was thinking I couldn’t carry on, especially when people in government were opposing the change – these were official people and lawyers, and I was just a retired nurse. A lot of people think there was a team of lawyers behind me and that wasn’t the case, I was a one-man band, it was just me. But I’m glad I carried on and stuck it out.”

After relentless campaigning, Ming’s MP put her in touch with the then Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw. “Our MP said to us just before we went in that he would do all the talking, and I said to my husband, ‘No he won’t’. I walked into the office and I had a picture of Julie and a picture of her killer from one of the papers, and I said: ‘That’s our daughter, that’s the man who has killed her. I’m not happy with the perjury sentence, what are you going to do about it?’. I don’t think Jack Straw knew what to say. He said that retrospective law is a very grey area and I said I didn’t care what colour it was, it needed to be changed.” 

And it was – eventually. After an impassioned speech at the House of Lords and years of campaigning, Ming’s work led to the 2003 Criminal Justice Act which meant serious crimes – including rape, murder, armed robbery and more – could be retrialled at any date regardless of when they were committed. In 2006, Dunlop pleaded guilty to murdering Julie at a new trial at the Old Bailey – 17 years after he committed the crime. 

According to The Northern Echo, Ming said at the time: “It has been a long and difficult journey to see him standing in the dock at court today. He has done everything he could to avoid justice, but his lying and scheming have eventually all been in vain. We made a promise to ourselves that Julie's killer would be punished.”

In 2007, Ming was awarded an MBE for her services to the criminal justice system. She told ITV: “I went to the Palace to receive it from Prince Charles, as he was then. I’d have given anything to have my daughter instead of getting a badge. After the drama is out I’d love ITV to send Trump a copy of the DVD and a letter, and ask him to change the law in America, because double jeopardy still stands there.

Now in her 80^th year, and having helped produce the ITV series, Ming was overjoyed that Smith took on the role of playing her. She says: “I’d love to sit and watch it again with Sheridan, just so she knows how much she has affected me with her performance. It was a different feeling to doing the book, it was more emotional somehow. The drama portrays my journey and what it’s like behind the scenes when you’re fighting a law. People might think it was easy, but it wasn’t.

“I’m living a full life sentence, it’s the same for anyone whose loved one has been murdered, you’re forever haunted by what happened. I’ll be 80 this year, so I’m not campaigning anymore. The thing that has changed for me is that I’m not frightened to die now, because I know Julie will be there waiting for me.”

I Fought the Law is available to stream on ITVX now. Visit itv.com

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