Crimes That Shocked The World - The Most Chilling True-Life Stories From the Last 40 Years. Danny Collins
arresting officers to take involuntary DNA swabs from suspects arrested in any circumstances.
Following Dixie’s conviction for the Bowman murder in February 2007, Detective Superintendent Clundy called publicly for the creation of a national DNA database, claiming that if such a directory had existed in September 2005, Sally Anne’s killer would have been in custody within days of her death.
At the time of Sally Anne’s murder, Dixie, an absentee father of three, was often seen in the clubs and bars of Croydon town centre. He had lodgings in Avondale Road, South Croydon, just a few miles from Sally’s family home and her apartment in Blenheim Crescent. Dixie was familiar with Blenheim Crescent, having lived there with a girlfriend, the mother of his third child, two years previously. It would later be discovered that Western Australian police in Perth also had the DNA profile of Mark Dixie collected in the unsolved case of the rape and attempted murder of a Thai student in 1998. In a scenario startlingly similar to the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, the student was stabbed several times by a masked man and raped while she was unconscious. The information was revealed after the Metropolitan Police asked their Australian counterparts to re-examine any unsolved murder cases involving rape that might be linked to Dixie. Other evidence came to light of a sexual assault upon a British woman in a lift in 1989.
It was becoming clear that DNA evidence had trapped a very dangerous serial sexual offender whose use of violence to gain control over his victims had finally resulted in murder. There was no doubt in the investigators’ minds that Mark Dixie was primed to kill again and would have done so if not detained due to a minor brawl that allowed arresting officers to mandatorily take a sample of his DNA.
At his trial in February 2008 at the Old Bailey, the cocky, smirking Dixie astounded the court by offering the defence that he did not kill Sally Anne but had stumbled across her body by chance while out walking after a drink and drugs session with friends Vicky Chandler and Diane Glassborow in Croydon to celebrate his 35th birthday. Dixie claimed he was wandering aimlessly when he noticed the half-naked corpse of the murdered girl lying in the drive of 26 Blenheim Crescent and, high on cocaine, he ‘took advantage of the situation’. Showing no emotion, Dixie continued: ‘When I realised she was dead I put bits of concrete from a nearby skip into her mouth and on her body because I hoped it would hide my DNA, then I ran to a friend’s flat a few streets away in South Croydon.’ Dixie had returned to Avondale Road, where he was lodging at the time.
Mark Dixie had failed to impress the jury, who took just three-and-a-half hours to find him guilty on all counts. Sentencing him to life imprisonment with a minimum of 34 years, Judge Gerald Gordon told him: ‘I shall only say what you did that night was so awful and repulsive that I do not propose to repeat it. Your consequent conduct shows you had not the slightest remorse for what you had done.’ A year later a panel of three Court of Appeal judges found an application to appeal lodged by Dixie’s solicitors MacLaverty Cooper Atkins of Kingston ‘entirely without merit’.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 1995
‘I do not know how Mr Krajišnik or Mr Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide’
– General Ratko Mladiç, on receiving his orders to eliminate the Muslim population.
When Slovenia and Croatia declared their sovereignty in 1991 it was clear to political observers that Yugoslavia was about to fall apart. Fighting began almost immediately as the new republics voiced their independence from Yugoslavia, where ethnic hatred had festered during the 46 years of enforced national republicanism under Marshal Tito. It was the beginning of the bloodiest war of attrition in Europe since World War II. The result was a bitter conflict between the main ethnic groups of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as the competing nationalisms found the territory too small to be divided between the three.
Hatreds that had festered since 1945 between the Croats and Serbs – when the fascist Usta?e sought to create an ethnically pure Croatian state entailing the elimination of all Serbian and Muslim minorities in Croatia – rapidly rose to the surface. They found a ready home in the minds of ethnic groups manipulated by those who sought to gain power and prominence as nationalist leaders, such as Serbian power-players Ante Pavić Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosević. The latter had risen to the presidency of Serbia and Yugoslavia and of the Social Republic of Serbia and Federal Serbia in 1987; Radovan Karadžić was a family doctor until he was elected to the presidency of the Republika Srpska in 1992.
The first to break away from the disintegrating Yugoslavia was Slovenia. Its departure occurred with little incident and the new republic was recognised as an independent state by the United Nations and European Community in 1992. Slovenia joined NATO and the European Union in 2004. Such a peaceful transition would not be the lot of Croatia where a non-communist government under Franjo Tudjman had been elected in 1990, a move prompted by the election of Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosević as Serbian Communist Party leader. Milosević harboured dreams of a ‘Greater Serbia’ and his rise to power within the powerful communist sector was seen by Croatia as a precursor of the implementation of a harsh communist rule over what remained of the Yugoslavian Republic under his presidency, with the result that Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991.
Fighting broke out immediately between Serbs living in the Krajina region of central and north-west Croatia, and Croatian forces and the Serbs declared the region as the Republic of Serbian Krajina. The territorial loss was a damaging blow to the Croat nationalists, not only because of its strategic value but also to their recently declared but long-nurtured national pride.
In 1992 the United Nations succeeded in brokering a peace between the warring factions and deployed its United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). Serb advances up to that time had taken 30 per cent of the former Yugoslav Republic of Croatia and the line was frozen by the UN, leaving many Croatians victims of Serbian ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region. The remaining 70 per cent of Croatia was recognised by the UN and the European Community as an independent state in January 1992.
In 1995, after nearly four years of smouldering resentment at the Serbian gains, Croatian forces launched an all-out offensive against the Serbs in Krajina, killing an estimated 14,000 Serbian civilians and creating more than 300,000 Serb refugees. Serb homes were burned, Serb property and businesses looted, and elderly Serbs dragged from their homes and shot where they stood. In retaliation, the Serbs launched a rocket attack on the Croatian capital of Zagreb, which caused a few deaths and injuries. But the most infamous of the spreading conflict was the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina where the sheer brutality and horrific campaigns of ethnic cleansing drew the attention of the world’s media.
Bosnia had always been a multi-ethnic state with a considerable portion of the region shared by Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims known as Bosniaks. There were no clear geographical divisions between the groups and no one ethnic group held a clear majority. This meant that in order to create Slobodan Milosević dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’ – his favourite line was: ‘Wherever there is a Serb, there is Serbia’ – would mean the removal of all other ethnic groups in the area. As General Ratko Mladić would warn both Milosević and Radovan Karadžić co-founder of the Serbian Democratic Party and president of the Republika Srpska during the Srebrenica massacres: ‘That is genocide’.
The Republika Srpska was created in 1992 with the aim of creating an ethnically pure Serbian enclave in northern and eastern Bosnia. The Croats meanwhile founded the Croatian Community of Herceg Bosna – Bosnia-Herzegovina – in much the same region. Fighting in the area occurred at first between Muslim forces and Bosnian Croat troops which were supported by the Croatian government in Zagreb. In 1994, Croatian forces were fighting in direct support of the Bosnian Croats until a ceasefire was agreed later that year with the foundation of the joint Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war with the Serbs continued and the new federation of Croats and Muslims now fought together