| Hannah Williams | |
|---|---|
A photograph of Hannah Williams released to the public. |
The murder of Hannah Williams was an English case where a 14-year-old schoolgirl was murdered after going missing during a shopping trip on 21 April 2001. Commentators, including the UK charity Missing People (formerly the National Missing Persons Helpline), have presented the contrasts in media coverage between this case and the cases of the murder of Danielle Jones and the murder of Amanda Dowler as examples of missing white woman syndrome.
Williams' body was discovered on 15 March 2002[1] in an industrial area of Northfleet, Kent, beside the Thames estuary.
The body was initially speculated to be that of Danielle Jones, who had been missing from East Tilbury in Essex since 18 June 2001, but was soon identified by Williams' distinctive clothing. The discovery of Williams' body overlapped with the investigation into the disappearance, and later murder, of Amanda Dowler, from Surrey who vanished on 21 March 2002.[2] 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.[1][3][4]
There was a stark contrast between the girls' backgrounds and the news media coverage that each received: images of Amanda, a middle-class girl from a stable family background who had never previously gone missing, were splashed on the front pages of national newspapers as her disappearance attracted national attention. Danielle, similarly, fulfilled the news media's criteria for a model middle-class schoolgirl. Williams, however, was a girl with a working-class background from a single-parent home who had spent time in care and had a history of running away, and attracted barely any coverage from the media.[2][4][5] A police spokesperson described Williams' mother as "not really press conference material", and whilst Dowler and Jones continued to dominate newspaper headlines, Williams was forgotten by the news media almost immediately. The National Missing Persons Helpline noted in commenting upon the case that the news media in treating such stories would often ask for cases where the subject was female, within a particular age range, and with a particular social background.[6][7]
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 was Jones. In contrast, the media coverage of the two girls who were victims in the Soham murders generated 898 articles in under two weeks.[8]
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."[2]