SHERIDAN ON

HARROWING LAW FIGHT DRAMA

- BY JOSH WHITE

The primal cry of terror and grief sends shivers down the spine. Actress Sheridan Smith is slumped on the floor as Ann Ming, the mum who campaigned to change the double jeopardy law after her daughter Julie Hogg was murdered.

She has just opened the panelling of her missing daughter's bathroom and what she's discovered behind it doesn't bear thinking about.

The harrowing moment is captured in ITV's forthcoming four-part drama, I Fought The Law, which tells of Ann's 15-year journey for justice from Tees-side to Westminster and beyond.

Ann, the plainspoken but fiercely intelligent nurse played by Sheridan to a tee, rose to a tragic sort of national fame in the 2000s when her campaign to reform the centuries-old legislation from which killer Billy Dunlop had benefited was finally successful.

Violent alcoholic Dunlop killed Julie, 22, in 1989 and hid the pizza delivery girl's body in her bathroom in Stockton-on-Tees.

Policing blunders meant Julie's body was missed by forensics teams who searched the property, and it was Ann who made the horrifying discovery early the following year.

What followed was an astonishing legal and personal saga for her and her family. Acquitted of the killing twice at trial, lifelong criminal Dunlop later confessed and even bragged about the murder, knowing he could not be retried again for the same offence.

Ann launched a decades-long campaign to reform the double jeopardy rule and get justice for Julie but it was not until 2003 that the government agreed to the changes and only in 2006 did Dunlop plead guilty ahead of a retrial. It made him the first person in Britain to be convicted of the same crime for which they had previously been acquitted.

Dunlop was jailed for life and Ann was awarded an MBE. Her campaign to remove the perversities of double jeopardy gave hope to dozens more families in a similar situation to hers.