Australian police let us down, says mother of Sally Anne
THE mother of Sally Anne Bowman, the 18-year-old raped and murdered by Mark Dixie in 2005, has said her daughter would still be alive if Australian police had “done their job properly”.
She made the comments amid calls for a fresh investigation to be launched into the serial sexual offender’s time in Western Australia in the 1990s, when he was arrested three times but only charged for a minor offence.
Dixie, now 50, was sentenced to life in prison in 2009 for attacking and killing the aspiring model in Croydon, south London.
Now an investigation by The West Australian newspaper has revealed Dixie was arrested and questioned by police after a woman was assaulted in a Perth park in 1997. He was not charged due to a lack of evidence. Dixie has also previously been linked to the stabbing and rape of a 19-year-old Thai university student, who survived the attack, in Perth in 1998. Dixie’s DNA matched a sample taken from that attack but he was not charged.
He was, however, charged for exposing himself to a woman jogger. However, he was not added to any kind of offenders register.
The police “didn’t do their job properly and that’s the reason my daughter’s dead”, Linda Bowman told The Mirror yesterday. “We now know he was arrested at least three times in Australia but he was deported without any warnings being issued by the authorities,” said Mrs Bowman.
“He was a known sex attacker when he was deported from Australia but he wasn’t put on any register. We could have had his DNA at that time, which would have meant he would have been caught before he killed Sally Anne.”
Dr David Keatley, a criminologist at Murdoch University in Perth, has called for a full investigation to be launched.
Dixie fits “a pattern of somebody with continued repeated assaults escalating in violence… we would not be surprised if there were others”, he told The Daily Telegraph.