Gemma Dowler - 29 Jun

MY SISTER MILLY

with Michelle Lovric

Contents

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, Millys name has gradually become one of those like Marilyns, like Dianas 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 youd ever meet. She was the noisiest, cheekiest, danciest girl. Milly would not have wanted a minutes silence to mark her passing. She would have wanted a whole rock concert, with moshing.

So, in this book, Im 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: Amlie, Marsha, Holly, Jessica, April and others. Milly didnt even get a year of being a teenager. She was doing brilliantly at it, but shed hardly got started. Other girls didnt 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 theyd 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. Im aware that, in writing this book, Im harnessing this power.

Its not girl power or commercial power.

Its 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 familys 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. Wed 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 didnt know. Each rite of passage will be one my sister cannot witness. We promised to be one anothers bridesmaids. I was denied the privilege of keeping that pledge. But now theres 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.

Its taken me fifteen years to find the voice to tell Millys story, and mine. Its 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 thats happened, the individual accounts will always vary.

Now is this books 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 hed done to her, we could not stay silent any more. Milly would have wanted him known for what he is.

Bellfields 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.

Its also time for the press to demonstrate how much they have learned. Weve always been grateful to the media for the way they helped us try to find Milly. And weve seen such a lovely change in the way we are treated by the newspapers. After Bellfields 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 Bellfields 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. Its 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 Bellfields 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. Millys 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 its 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 are letters from Milly herself as well as her artwork, her own essays and poetry. Millys distinctive, evolving handwriting and her even more distinctive spelling are here too.

As you will read, Milly was all about music. Thats 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 familys progress from our former riotous happiness to shock and grief at the loss of her.