The murder of Hannah Williams was an English case in which a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Hannah Williams, was murdered after going missing during a shopping trip on 21 April 2001. The case has been cited 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 comparatively far less press coverage than other missing girls of a similar age who disappeared around the same time. Namely, Danielle Jones and Milly Dowler, both of whom fit a supposedly more wholesome image of the middle-class schoolgirl from a stable family.
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 the body and conviction of the killer
Williams's body was discovered on 15 March 2002 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 it was soon firmly identified by Williams's distinctive clothing. The discovery of Williams's body overlapped with the investigation into the disappearance, and later murder, of Milly Dowler from Surrey, who vanished on 21 March 2002. Robert Lesarian 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 MaidstoneCrown Court in October 2003, Howard was found guilty of raping and murdering Williams, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. No recommended 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. Howard died in prison in 2015.
Contrasts in news media coverage
There was a contrast between the girls' backgrounds and a parallel disparity between the news media coverage that each received: images of Dowler, a middle-class girl from a seemingly stable family background who had never previously gone missing, were splashed on the front pages of national newspapers within days as her disappearance attracted national attention, and Danielle, similarly, fulfilled the news media's criteria for a model middle-class schoolgirl. Milly Dowler's body was finally found in September 2002, six months after she disappeared, although it was almost a decade before the conviction of her killer Levi Bellfield. 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, for which he was convicted in December 2002. Hannah Williams, however, was a girl from a working-class single-parent home who had spent time in care and had a history of running away – she attracted scant coverage in the media. A police spokesperson described Williams's mother as "not really press conference material" and, while Dowler and Jones continued to dominate newspaper headlines, Williams was almost immediately forgotten in the news media. The National Missing Persons Helpline noted, in commenting upon the case, that news media treating such stories would often ask for cases where the subject was female, within a particular age range and with a particular social background. 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. 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. 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. 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."
