Murder of Hannah Williams

Hannah Williams
A photograph of Hannah Williams released to the public.
Born	May 1986 London, England
Disappeared	21 April 2001 (aged 14) South London, England
Body discovered	15 March 2002 Northfleet, Kent

The murder of Hannah Williams was an English case in which a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Hannah Williams (May 1986 – c. 21 April 2001), was murdered after going missing during a shopping trip on 21 April 2001. Robert Howard, a convicted sex offender suspected of other murders including in his native Ireland, was convicted in 2003 ans sentenced to life in prison for her murder.

The case has been cited (by British charity Missing People, formerly the National Missing Persons Helpline, among others) as an example of missing white woman syndrome. This is because Williams, a working-class girl with a history of running away from home, received far less press coverage than other missing girls of a similar age who disappeared around the same time, in particular Danielle Jones (who disappeared in June 2001 and whose body has never been found) and Milly Dowler, both of whom were middle-class schoolgirls from apparently stable families.

Disappearance

On 21 April 2001 Hannah Williams told her mother that she was going window shopping in Dartford, but never returned home. For a long time it was presumed that Williams had run away, and the search was not helped by the fact that a friend reported seeing her long after she had probably been killed.

Discovery of body and conviction of killer

Williams's body was discovered on 15 March 2002 at a cement works in an industrial area of Northfleet, Kent, beside the Thames estuary. Initially it was speculated that the body was that of Danielle Jones, who had been missing from East Tilbury in Essex since 18 June 2001, but Williams's clothing led to a correct identification. The discovery of Williams's body also overlapped with the investigation into the disappearance, and later murder, of Milly Dowler from Surrey, who vanished on 21 March 2002.

Robert Howard, a convicted sex offender who had known Williams since 1999, was arrested on 23 March 2002, eight days after her body was found. At his trial at Maidstone Crown Court in October 2003, Howard was found guilty of raping and murdering Williams, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. No minimum term was reported to have been recommended by the trial judge, and there have been no reports of a minimum term subsequently issued by the High Court.

Robert Howard

Robert Lesarian Howard, of Wolfhill, a village in County Laois, Republic of Ireland, was first convicted of burglary at the age of 13, and at 19 was convicted of attempted rape of a 6-year-old girl in London. He served prison terms for attempted rape and strangulation in London and for burglary and rape in Cork, and was a police suspect in several disappearances of women and girls, including that of Jo Jo Dullard of Callan and Annie McCarrick, a New York tourist in County Wicklow. In 1993, the same year as McCarrick's disappearance, Howard was convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under 17 in the case of a 16-year-old in Castlederg, County Tyrone, in Northern Ireland whom he had been accused of raping.

On 14 August 1994, while he was on bail, 15-year-old Arlene Arkison, who was also from Castlederg, went missing in Bundoran, County Donegal. She was last seen in a car that Howard was driving. Arkison is presumed dead, but her body has not been found. Howard was arrested six weeks after her disappearance and was tried in 2005 on charges of murdering her; he was acquitted by the jury, who had not been informed of his previous offences or his conviction for Williams's murder. (The jury in his trial for Williams's murder had heard evidemce regarding his grooming both Arkison and Williams after befriending family members.) An inquest into Arkison's death began in Belfast in February 2016 and included testimony that his earlier offences made him "extremely dangerous" to Arkison by the time she disappeared. A second inquest in 2021 found him responsible for Arkison's murder; the coroner also ruled that the police should have arrested him immediately given his known history.

Howard was born on 20 April 1944 and died in prison on 2 October 2015 at the age of 71.

Contrasts in news media coverage

Dowler and Jones were both middle-class and received much more media attention than Williams, a girl from a working-class single-parent home who had spent time in care and had a history of running away. Images of Dowler were prevalent on the front pages of national newspapers within days as her disappearance attracted national attention. Most of the coverage of Williams, a total of 62 articles in British newspapers, was at the time of the initial discovery of her body and resulted from the initial interest in the possibility that the body could be that of Danielle Jones. The only regular coverage was by the local newspapers, The Mercury and the South London Press, which covered the disappearance of Williams from two weeks after she first vanished to the day her body was found and beyond to the murder trial of her killer. In contrast, the media coverage of the two 10-year-old girls who were victims in the Soham murders in August 2002 generated 898 articles in under two weeks.

A police spokesperson described Williams's mother as "not really press conference material" and the National Missing Persons Helpline noted, in commenting upon the case, that news media often asked for cases where the missing person was female, within a particular age range and with a particular social background. An anonymous Kent police officer was quoted in The Guardian: "There are serious questions to be raised about the original missing persons investigation. This is very sensitive, but if Hannah Williams had been a Milly Dowler, she may not be dead now."

Milly Dowler's body was finally found in September 2002, six months after she disappeared, although it was almost a decade before Levi Bellfield was convicted of her murder. Danielle Jones's body has never been found, although enough evidence was found within five months to charge her uncle, Stuart Campbell, with her murder; he was convicted in December 2002.