[intense music]
♪ I heard he is no good for you ♪
♪ I heard he's the devil's work ♪
♪ I'm praying deep down for you ♪
♪ Praying that you don't get hurt ♪
[Alice] Hi there. I just need a bit of advice really.
So, I split up with my boyfriend about three months ago.
♪ Do you, do you ♪
♪ Do you know he's no good for you ♪
[Alice] Since then, I know that he's hacked into my Facebook
and also my phone.
[Gen] There were days where
it was all happy and giggly and he was the nicest person ever.
[Alice] He's been sending me a lot of messages
even though I've asked him not to contact me.
And then there were days where he was very demanding of her time.
I said, "Well, Alice, if you just ignore him,
he will eventually go away."
[Harry] You didn't wanna call me again, so that's why I decided to come down
to give you flowers and chocolates.
[Dave] There is a critical point in Alice's case
when Dhillon says, "I know you belong to another man now."
[operator] Police emergency, go ahead, caller.
[Maxine] I've just come back to my flat, the door was locked
so I've crawled through the window
and my flatmate's covered in blood in the bathroom.
Alice? Alice?
[dramatic music]
♪ Do you, do you, ♪
♪ Do you know he's no good for you ♪
[ominous music]
[heartbeat thudding]
[birds chirping]
[tea kettle whistling]
[dramatic music]
[narrator] At home with the Ruggles family,
a loving place, a safe place.
[Clive] Well, Alice was the third of our four children.
We're really a close-knit family.
We live in a lovely small Leicestershire village.
And so when they were all growing up, you know,
it's a lovely sense of community here
and they play with the other kids in the village
and go to local schools and everything.
[gentle music]
[Sue] Oh, Alice was my advisor.
So she'd advise me on hairstyles and makeup and fashion
and what I should say and what I shouldn't say.
And what students were thinking about me as a teacher.
[Nick] Alice was a really nice little sister.
She always got on with everyone, she was always really fun,
wanted to be involved in stuff, always had a joke.
So she'd always make everyone laugh and entertain people.
[Sue] We used to call her the family glue, because she was the one
who always was the go-between, if there was an argument
and if there was something to find out about someone,
you know, or did they have a new partner, It was Alice who'd say, "Leave it to me.
I'll go and sort it out, I'll find out what's happening."
[gentle music]
[Clive] And when she was about 11,
she went off on a PGL course and was introduced to fencing,
which was not something that we'd ever come across before.
But she really loved it and got involved with it.
And by the time she was 15,
she was in the East Midlands Fencing Team.
And when it came to university,
I think the reason she chose Northumbria in Newcastle
was largely because it had a really good reputation
of a fencing team, rather than particularly what she did as her degree.
And she became captain of fencing while she was there, in fact.
[gentle music]
I really felt that Alice had just found herself.
She just…
She loved life and she was so comfortable in herself.
[Clive] And particularly she loved Newcastle.
And so when she finished her degree,
she decided she wanted to stay in Newcastle.
So for a year or so, she worked in bars and things
to make ends meet.
And then she got a job with Sky.
[narrator] Her job meant talking to customers,
making them feel valued.
[Sue] She was always good with people.
But suddenly she was very happy and she was in a job
where that skill was really valuable.
And I felt that she'd got to that point in her life
when suddenly she was gonna accelerate through
and it was gonna be fantastic for her.
[dramatic music]
[Gen] When I first met Alice, she was at university still.
[gentle music]
She was actually friends with a guy that I was dating at the time.
And we just hit it off straight away,
pretty much became best friends and attached to each other,
as you do at that age.
[gentle music]
I had booked a holiday with a partner
and that relationship just didn't work out.
And she had also gone through a breakup at the same time.
So we decided that we would keep the trip and we would go together.
We were headed to Sri Lanka,
and the second we got onto the plane,
we sat down in sort of a three row.
And the guy next to us immediately took an interest in Alice.
And I think I'd put a photo on Facebook
that just the caption was,
"Already five minutes into a journey and Alice has already been chatted up."
And Harry had actually left a comment underneath,
saying something like, "I'm not surprised."
And that was essentially the first time
that they became aware of each other.
[dramatic music]
[Clive] His name was Trimaan Dhillon.
We all called him Harry because that was how he liked to be known.
[gentle music]
Dhillon was raised in a strict military upbringing.
Father, a Colonel in the Indian Army,
came to the UK to university and study
and then joined the British Army.
[Richard] His childhood was extremely privileged.
He was an only child.
I've no doubt that he was doted on.
I think he was used to people doing what he wanted.
I think he was a young man
who was worshiped by his mother and his father,
and he wanted other people to worship him in that way.
[ominous music]
[Gen] Day one of our holiday
and the only place that you could get Wi-Fi was the lobby.
And she would talk to Harry for those entire hours
that we were there.
So they spoke quite a lot.
And that was within the first 10 days of knowing each other.
I mean it's just a giggly stage,
everything they say is the funniest thing you've ever heard.
They are the most attractive person in the world.
You wanna talk to them all the time.
But then it's also the coupled with the fear
of like, "Should I text them now? Should I double text them?
Should I not? Are they busy? Are they ignoring me?"
And that's the phase that they were in.
But actually they seemed both very invested from the off.
Things went really, really fast.
So they were talking a lot,
all she had the time all day, every day.
And you know, by the end of the month
they were telling people that they were in a relationship,
and they hadn't even met yet physically.
[dramatic music]
[birds chirping]
I think the first time I really noticed
that something was a little bit off maybe
was when we took a group trip to a cottage in Northumberland.
I was receiving messages from Harry
asking me to get Alice to text him or contact him
or if she could use my phone because hers didn't have much signal.
There were points where Alice was moving furniture
from the corner of rooms, to sit in them,
because that's where the best Wi-Fi was.
Dhillon was constantly,
constantly contacting Alice
and she was getting distracted from her friends
that she was on holiday with.
And they started to notice and they didn't like it.
And I think they started to recognize, even then,
that this was a red flag.
They weren't particularly comfortable with it.
[narrator] Perhaps they needed to meet in person
to normalize their relationship.
She did meet him in January, this is 2016 now,
when he came back for two weeks leave.
And his barracks was in Penicuik, South of Edinburgh,
which is about 120 miles north of Newcastle.
But he came down, spent a week with her in Newcastle.
[Gen] She was very nervous, and the first time they met,
I think he was coming to stay for about a week.
And she sent me a text on the way to Central Station.
I think it literally just said something like, "Eep, excited."
And I was like, "Oh, good luck."
And I was at work and then by the time I'd finished work,
I had a couple more texts being like, "This is amazing.
Oh, he's such a nice guy. This is incredible."
And I was like, oh, this is good.
[dramatic music]
The first time we met him was the May bank holiday,
they came down for the weekend.
[Sue] And he was just so anxious to please us
and to show how much he cared about Alice in front of us.
I remember when he left, Clive said to me,
"He definitely just felt like he was trying to say the right thing."
We didn't know what he was like at all.
We just got somebody who was trying to give us an image of the person
they thought we wanted him to be.
There was nothing in his character, when I met him, that made me think,
"Don't like this guy, there's something not right about this guy."
You know, he was friendly enough.
They came back just a few weeks later
for the second May bank holiday,
and already things were a little bit more strained at that time.
[narrator] Strained perhaps, but they remain an item.
I remember thinking he wasn't the boyfriend
I would've wanted for her.
But he was…
If that was what she wanted, then I could put up with him.
[gentle music]
[narrator] So how were things in the real world
for the couple who had met and fallen in love online?
It was on and off.
There were days where it was all happy and giggly
and he was the nicest person ever.
And then there were days where he was
very demanding of her time,
but in a way that if she couldn't
facilitate that for whatever reason,
he would almost sort of penalize and persecute her.
[gentle music]
[narrator] Most of the time,
Alice would see the young men in her life over the web
rather than in the flesh.
There are a few indications early on,
on that online relationship, when he'd make sort of
slightly derogatory comments about her.
So he'd comment on the fact she had quite hairy arms
and he didn't mind, but other men might.
So sort of trying to undermine her self-confidence.
And he talked about the fact she had a big nose,
which is not a very nice thing to say.
[Gen] And it became a real point of insecurity for Alice from that point.
They were talking over Skype and they had had a fight
and he made a point to pull
a really long blond strand of hair from his uniform
and kind of look at it in the camera lens, sort of like,
he held it very close to the camera so she could see what it was.
Alice asked the question and he gaslit her
and wouldn't say anything else, told her she was crazy.
It would really play on the fact that,
"You're crazy, this is your issue, this is your insecurity.
You need to work on this."
Gaslighting, people doubting their own sanity,
"Is it because of me?"
Questioning themselves, questioning reality.
"Is what Dhillon is saying true?"
[Clive] She started to lose weight, she started to lose confidence.
And then, you know, she was not a shy girl.
She was gradually becoming more and more isolated.
The things that he'd say to her in the early stages,
they were a bit like compliments.
So he'd be asking where she was going, what she was wearing,
this sort of thing.
And then gradually this would become more and more controlling.
[Jane] One minute it would be really, really intense
and he'd get quite upset if she wasn't there
to respond when he wanted to.
He would, you know, start contacting her friends
and other people and put pressure on her.
In the end, it got to the point where he needed to know,
would demand to know what she was wearing,
when she was going out, where she was going.
Sometimes he'd even, I think, turn up, you know,
and this is a two hour drive away,
when she'd gone out with some friends somewhere,
and he'd just turn up unannounced.
[narrator] There were other signs, this was not a stable relationship.
And Alice started hearing that he was back on Tinder
and he was looking for relationships with other girls.
She actually found out because the girl messaged her.
She had a contact from someone she didn't know,
a girl she didn't know.
And this other woman said to her,
"Do you realize your boyfriend's cheating on you?"
[Gen] And sent her screenshots of all of the messages.
And it was a hundred percent him talking to this girl.
He denied ever setting it up.
He said it was people in his squad trying to get back at him
but would never say what for.
He basically would manipulate and guilt trip her
by saying, "This is your insecurity that you don't believe me."
But he kept saying that, "I'm a good man, I would never do that."
And she's thought, "No, this is the line that I'm not prepared to cross.
And so this is it,
I don't wanna go out with this person anymore."
[dramatic music]
As far as Alice was concerned, it was done.
She was happy to move on as friends, but nothing more.
This is all about me, me, me.
And of course when that ends,
the risk escalates significantly
because that is the last thing that Dhillon wants to happen.
The problem was that he wasn't gonna have that.
So at that point,
that was when the control within the relationship
turned to stalking.
[ominous music]
[Gen] He would bombard her with messages,
like hundreds of messages, not just like one or two,
it was hundreds, constantly throughout the day.
[Sue] He was trying to contact her on every platform.
So I think she'd wake up
and there would be messages left on her phone.
[Harry crying] Alice, please.
Alice, please, please, please, I can't do it.
Please, not this… Please.
And there would be messages left on the messenger apps that she used.
She was probably getting 10 to 20 messages every day.
[ominous music]
He'd taken over her Facebook account.
She knew that he had the password to her Facebook account
because she must have left her phone around at some point,
he'd taken it.
And he'd installed spyware on her phone.
It was never proved, but we are quite convinced of it
because as things went on,
he knew things that he couldn't have known
unless he was spying on WhatsApp conversations.
So I had to help her get her phone wiped
and the factory reset, cleared off, to solve that problem.
And we were… she was fairly sure
it was Dhillon who was behind it.
I don't know what I thought about it.
I didn't think he was as dangerous as I should have done.
[Dave] Dhillon is closing down her world.
She's having to make changes and regulate her behavior,
not just as a consequence of what she's experiencing,
this is about oppression.
[narrator] The 24/7 abuse was at the hands of a man
with a past that Alice knew nothing of.
He wouldn't accept the end of the relationship.
But he had a history of not accepting the end of relationships.
[Dave] So we know there's a history there of unhealthy relationships.
He was already subject of an order prohibiting him from contact
with another female down in Kent,
which might have been the reason why he was moved
to Edinburgh as a punishment.
Alice didn't know that Dhillon had a history
of stalking and control and abuse
and behaving very, very badly to rejection.
There was an incident just before he met Alice,
where he had seen an ex-girlfriend in the town with her new boyfriend.
He'd gone up to her and spat in her face.
There was a restraining order, you know, which he managed to explain away.
So this was who he was.
[dramatic music]
[narrator] It was time to move on from this soldier boy and his obsession.
[Gen] I heard through the grapevine, from other people,
that she had met someone in Germany and…
and I had text her saying,
"I can't wait to hear about this, tell me everything."
[gentle music]
She'd met a new guy.
He was a friend of her sister's, he was a really decent man
and he was coming to see her that weekend.
[gentle music]
[Clive] It came to a head right at the end of September.
Alice is now living in a ground floor flat
with Maxine, who's a colleague from work.
But she was getting seriously worried about him and seriously frightened.
And the colleagues from work would drive her home every night.
She lived in Gateshead by this time, across the river.
And she'd get driven back to the front door,
put double locks on the front door.
And her colleague, Maxine, would try and be there,
most of the time, with her.
But on this particular night, Maxine was off in Durham with her own boyfriend.
And Alice was alone in the flat.
And a bit after she'd arrived at home, there's this knock on the front door.
When she looks out the little peep hole, no one's there.
And this happened two or three times more intervals in the evening.
But anyway, it gets dark, she goes to bed,
and her bedroom's at the back of the flat.
And just as she's going to sleep,
there's this knock on the back window, behind her bed.
And when she opens the curtains, he's there,
and he's put some flowers and some chocolates
on the back window and he's backing off as if to say,
"Okay, I'm leaving now."
[ominous music]
He drove, from Edinburgh, two and a half hours
and climbed over the back fence with some flowers and some chocolate
and left them on her windowsill.
And then kind of just stood there looking at her for maybe like a couple of minutes.
While he's driving out of Newcastle,
he then reads this message in.
So he sends her this message on her phone.
[Harry] Hey, Alice.
After we spoke you didn't wanna speak, well, you didn't wanna call me again.
So that's why I decided to come down to give you flowers an chocolates.
And… yeah.
Now I'm on my way back. If you want to take it, you can take it.
If you want to bin it, you can bin it. It's completely up to you.
I just wanted to do something just to say I'm sorry
and show that I'm, really am sorry.
I spoke to a couple of the other girls
and we all started pushing her to go to the police,
to talk to somebody.
Her sister Emma was doing exactly the same.
And I definitely remember Alice's older sister ringing me
and saying, "Mom, Alice is being stalked.
It's really serious."
And I sort of made some comment about stalking.
And she said to me, and it stays with me always,
"Mum, stalking, think about what stalking is.
Stalking comes from deer stalking,
and what happens to the deer at the end?"
And so that night she calls the police.
[policeman] Evening, Northumbria Police, Chris speaking. How can I help you?
[Alice] Hi there.
I just need a bit of advice really, more than anything.
So I've split out with my boyfriend about three months ago.
Since then, I know that he's hacked into my Facebook
and also my phone.
And when you listen to that phone call,
I mean it's heart rending, 'cause she's so,
almost apologetic for ringing them.
[Alice] He's been sending me a lot of messages
even though I've asked him not to contact me.
And then tonight he's…
Well, I had a knock at my door, and, well, he'd sent me a message saying,
"I've been in the garden since five."
I had a knock at my door
and then when I went, and I've got like a little,
you know, those things that you can look through,
and there was no one there.
And then it happened again, two or three times.
She's so polite.
She's saying, "I just need a bit of help and advice tonight."
[Alice] And then he's come around the back,
knocked on my bedroom window,
he's been outside and he's like left
some flowers and chocolates on the like outside windowsill,
and like he's walked off, he's not done anything.
But I'm just, I'm concerned.
I just feel a bit like shaken up tonight.
So she's not screaming down the phone saying, "I'm frightened."
She clearly was.
So he basically said there's two things you could do.
[policeman] Go to a solicitor and take out an injunction.
[Alice] Yeah.
[policeman] Keep him away from you.
Now that's bad advice,
because first of all, someone in Alice's position wouldn't--
she'd never approach the law, wouldn't know where to start,
would've been very costly and would've been timely,
and time was not on her side.
The other thing we could do is, you could take out a Police Information Notice,
a PIN notice.
And if you do that, then if he ever comes near you again,
he'll be arrested.
[policeman] So which would you prefer?
[Alice] Can I try that option, please?
[policeman] Of course you can.
The Police Information Notice, the PIN was issued.
A Police Information Notice is the alternative to investigation.
And Alice was told that if he came near her again
or contacted her again in any way, he'd be arrested.
[Sue] It had an impact on him in the sense that it made him angry.
It sort of made you realize that Alice calling the police
had put herself in a lot of danger.
I think the danger really started to rise
when Alice left him.
That's when things started to really get more dangerous for Alice.
And then when the stalking started,
we've gone up another level of danger.
And when he starts going outside of the social media
and physically coming down,
and some of the things he's saying,
move us on again to another escalation.
[dramatic music]
[narrator] By now, the police knew all about him.
She had a new boyfriend.
For a moment in time, Alice Ruggles could breathe easily.
Everyone at Sky said that in the next few days
they had the old Alice back and suddenly she was all vibrant
and she was just herself again.
And that was fabulous…
for a week.
[ominous music]
And at the end of that week, he sent a parcel.
I was like, you need to ring the police.
I was like, he's broken his PIN.
And she spoke to the police and they were not the most helpful.
[policeman] Good afternoon, sorry, good evening, Northumbria Police.
Jeff speaking. How can I help?
[Alice] Hi there.
Somebody's been issued with a PIN so they can't contact me,
however I've had a letter off them.
[policeman] Right, okay. So you're reporting a breach of a PIN.
[Alice] Yeah.
[policeman] So you've got a PIN against who?
[Alice] Against Harry Dhillon.
[policeman] What was the contents of the letter, was he…?
[Alice] So, pictures of me and him,
a notebook that I sent him when we were together and a letter.
[policeman] What was the nature? Was it like threatening or harassing?
[Alice] No, not threatening.
It just, it says at the bottom he won't contact,
you know, this will be a last I hear from him.
But he's said that a lot of times, and it,
he never does seem to stop.
And in fact sort of made her feel like
it was stupid that she'd contacted them.
And I know she sent a text to her sister around that time.
That was awful.
And it was, "Oh well, they'll take me seriously
when he stabs me."
And it's real awful to think that your friend
texted somebody that
and genuinely thought that, that was a real possibility.
Like, what head space do you have to be in,
like, for that to actually occur,
for that to be a genuine thing?
Sorry.
[crying]
[tense music]
She'd done three bad things as far as he was concerned.
She'd ended the relationship with him.
She had started a new relationship and now she'd called the police on him.
[ominous music]
[car engine revving]
[narrator] Trimaan Harry Dhillon goes old school to communicate with Alice.
There is a critical point in Alice's case
when we see in a letter that Dhillon sends,
where he says, "I know you belong to another man now."
In that one sentence, so much is communicated.
The fact that he refers to Alice as a possession,
something that can be acquired and possessed,
Alice is becoming dehumanized.
You're an object, and of course it's easier
to be violent towards objects than it is towards people.
So there were lots of signs.
Alice was right to be worried.
[dramatic music]
And then on the night of the 12th,
just 12 days after her first call to the police,
he came down to Newcastle.
[Richard] Dhillon had traveled down.
Now we're bearing in mind, he's living in Edinburgh
and she's living in Newcastle.
So we're not talking about a short journey.
He traveled down from Edinburgh to Newcastle
and he'd reconnoitred the house.
And we found a photograph on his phone,
a really chilling photograph.
It was of the bathroom window at the back of the house.
And he was undoubtedly, in our view, making a reconnaissance
of how he could get into the property.
And he sits and he waits,
and he waits and he waits outside the house.
Not right outside, but up the road.
[ominous music]
Alice came home from work, she'd been having a lift home from work
ever since Dhillon had started stalking her,
'cause her work colleagues wanted to keep her safe.
[dramatic music]
And then when she's dropped off, we picked up on camera,
his car moving into position.
So he is moving closer.
[Sue] She went into the flat.
She got changed from her work clothes.
And when he arrived at the house,
Alice had been talking to Mike in WhatsApp.
[dramatic music]
You know, he doesn't enter through the front door.
He breaks into the property.
[tense music]
And Mike said that she suddenly stopped.
She would've been startled.
Somehow there's been a struggle.
The door has come off the wardrobe. There's a disturbance in that room.
What does she do? She can't get out of the front door,
she's double-locked it so that he couldn't get in.
So she runs for the only room where she might be safe, the bathroom,
'cause it's the only room that can be locked.
And she got to that door before he did.
We know that, because there were foot marks on the door,
he kicked that door open, forced his way into it.
You know, he's not doing that for a peaceful reason,
he's doing that because he wants to hurt her.
What Dhillon did to Alice was effectively an execution.
"You do not deserve to be in this world."
And as long as you are in the world,
it is constantly an attack to his sense of self-worth.
And the only way that he can repair that harm,
legitimately, as he sees it,
is to remove the problem completely.
And we see an effective execution take place.
[dramatic music]
Six separate drawing of the knife across the throat.
[dramatic music]
[narrator] Dhillon flees.
He leaves Alice's lifeless body behind him.
She's alone, her friend is due home soon.
20 minutes later, Maxine arrived at the flat.
She'd come home to collect some clothes 'cause she was going to stay the night
at her boyfriend's flat.
And she found that the front door was locked.
The snick had been put down on the lock,
so she couldn't get in.
So she's ringing Alice trying to find out where she is,
couldn't get hold of her.
So she went around to the back of the house
and she shimmied up the drainpipe
and climbed in through the window into Alice's bedroom,
ground floor, but still quite high, quite difficult to access.
And she goes through the window,
she's landing in Alice's bedroom.
And she can see the wardrobe doors off, but it's silent.
And she went through the flat looking for Alice.
Now you wouldn't have any idea actually
that there had been a murder here
until she got to the bathroom.
And you know, you've gotta imagine she opens this door
and there is this scene of utter devastation,
blood everywhere.
[operator] Thank you. Go ahead caller.
[Maxine] I've just come back to my flat
and the door was locked, I've crawled through the window
and my flat mate's covered in blood in the bathroom.
[operator] Is she breathing?
[Maxine] I don't know. I can't look, sorry.
[operator] Okay, try and stay calm.
[Maxine] Oh my God, she's dead, she's dead.
[Maxine crying]
[operator] She's in the bathroom?
Is she in the bath or?
[Maxine] Please, I don't know, I don't know.
[operator] Can you look and see if she's breathing? For the ambulance.
[Maxine] She's not, she's not.
[operator] She's not breathing.
[Maxine] No, she looks, no.
[operator] How much blood is there?
[Maxine] There's lots. It's everywhere, it's everywhere.
It looks like she was in the shower.
Everything's been knocked over. It looks like she's been attacked.
Please help.
Alice, are you awake?
Alice?
And straight away she knows what's happened.
You know, she knows this is Harry Dhillon, no one else has done this.
No question.
No question whatsoever who had done it.
[Maxine] She's only 23 and we knew this was coming.
Her ex is an absolute psychopath.
She put in a statement about him two weeks ago.
[operator] About who?
[Maxine] Her ex-boyfriend, Harry Dhillon.
[Clive] And he was then, he drove back to Edinburgh.
He had time to get to the barracks
and clean up and get his clothes in the washing machine.
But of course Maxine had been screaming his name
when the police arrived after a 999 call.
[gentle music]
[operator] She'd been having problems with her ex?
[Maxine] Yes.
[operator] So do you think that that's what it is?
[Maxine] Yeah, I think… I can hear the sirens.
[police sirens blaring]
They'd gone after him.
And they caught him trying to climb out of the barracks.
What he was trying to do was climb out so he wouldn't have to sign out,
presumably to establish his alibi.
-But they caught him. -[dramatic music]
By the time Sue and I got the horrible call at the door
at two in the morning, from our local police,
he was already back in Newcastle in custody.
[Sue] When the police came,
you know when they come in the middle of the night
that this is something really serious.
And I think we knew because of what had happened.
We knew what it was, as soon as they came.
You just got that horrible feeling of, you know,
why hadn't you done things differently?
What could you have done that could have stopped it?
And why on earth didn't you do it?
[dramatic music]
[narrator] Alice's family and friends are swept up in the tragedy.
They then went again.
And half past two in the morning,
Sue and I are sort of sitting at the kitchen table
having been hit by that news, thinking, "What do we do?"
We went up to see Alice.
Which I think if I hadn't have done that, I wouldn't have believed it was real.
[narrator] But it was all too real.
It's one thing knowing what has happened, it is another getting a prosecution.
[gentle music]
[birds chirping]
Harry Dhillon refuses to admit guilt
in the murder of Alice Ruggles.
[gentle music]
[Richard] I was approached at quite an early stage.
Dhillon had been charged with murder
and I was instructed by the Crown Prosecution Service,
a couple of days after he was charged.
The case was tried in the Crown Court at Newcastle upon Tyne.
Dhillon had been arrested fairly quickly.
Held and interviewed, charged
and then sent very rapidly to the Crown Court.
In this case, there was a lot of information
that we needed to pull together from social media,
from telephones, CCTV, witness accounts.
The case against Trimaan Dhillon had a number of key components.
The first was to demonstrate
that he was a particularly controlling person,
who, over a period of time, had sought to control Alice,
had become obsessed with Alice.
And that obsession had become quite dangerous and unhealthy.
[dramatic music]
Then there was a phase of calling evidence
about his background,
evidence that demonstrated from other previous partners
that he had an obsessive tendency,
that he had stalked other women in the past.
He planned Alice's murder, he carried out Alice's murder.
[Richard] His first account when he was arrested
was to say, "I've been in Edinburgh.
I've been in a shopping center. It had nothing to do with me."
That's then disproved by demonstrating
that his phone had moved down to Newcastle,
that his car had been seen on CCTV.
So then he comes up with a second version.
He was unbelievably arrogant.
Arrogant, you know, to us, to the police.
He was so arrogant in court.
He just genuinely believed
that people would believe every word he said,
that was complete nonsense.
Second version is, "Well, I did go down to Newcastle
and I did speak to Alice.
But when I left her, she was absolutely fine."
That's then disproved by Alice's blood
being found on the steering wheel of his car.
Alice's blood being found on his Help for Heroes bangle,
her DNA being found in those locations.
So he has to abandon that.
And then he comes up with the defense that he ran at trial,
which was, he had been with Alice, he'd been in the flat,
he'd been with her when she died.
But all of the horrific injuries she had
were completely self-inflicted.
He lied and lied and tried to get out of it,
tried to put the blame on Alice.
When it came to court.
He was trying to argue that he'd gone into the flat,
which he'd denied before.
And that Alice had attacked him.
[laughing]
And the, I dunno, killed herself in the process, whatever.
The trial was a final exercise
in controlling and torturing the Ruggles family,
taunting them about what they knew he'd done.
And actually looking across at Alice's father and saying,
in answer to a question, that he thought that
it was a shame that their father couldn't be there with her.
You know, and that was all about just taunting the family,
that, "You weren't there when I killed your daughter."
[ominous music]
But he's also putting words into Alice's mouth.
And so he would sort of say,
"And then Alice suddenly did this or did this."
And there'd be some little jibe against me or Sue
or one of the other family, or one of her friends.
And so he was actually using this to put little jibes out to all of us,
even just standing there in front of us.
The jury went out just before lunch, when the case finished.
And I remember sitting there over lunch worrying about how long they would take.
[tense music]
But we didn't have to wait long. We went through the lunch break
and then the jury came back, virtually, immediately after lunch.
And of course when they delivered the guilty verdict
there's just a sense of,
I dunno, there is a sense of relief.
I can't imagine what we would've felt otherwise.
In this case, the judge decided that the minimum terms,
that's the least number of years he'd have to serve
before he could apply to be released, was 22 years.
I would've thought it'd be a very, very long time indeed
until anybody considers that he'd be safe to release.
[dramatic music]
[narrator] There were many more victims of Trimaan Dhillon.
[Sue] I felt horribly guilty for a very long time.
And I felt, in fact, I felt so guilty
that I thought that when I gave my evidence in court
that people would think what a terrible person I was
and how I hadn't sort of done the right thing
for my daughter.
It did eventually go away
because I sort of realized that, actually,
it wasn't just me who felt like that.
And that everybody felt that something that they'd done
could have made a difference.
You know, could have stopped it happening
or could have stopped her meeting him.
And it sort of made me realize that actually,
if we'd all known what all of the others have been thinking,
then we could have made a difference.
Alice and her family, they all,
they all recognized the danger,
they all behaved normally
as you would in this situation.
The problem was they weren't dealing with somebody who was normal.
And it needed, perhaps,
to be recognized more acutely,
the danger that Alice was in at that time.
[tense music]
I listen to people who say they forgive.
And it interests me 'cause I would always have been one of those people.
But I'm not anymore.
I never felt anger about anyone.
I mean, I don't blame the police for doing the wrong thing. It's…
Certainly the wrong things were done, but that is about training issue.
What I ask of the police is that they
admit that things were done wrong and lessons are learned.
And that has been the case.
[narrator] Lessons have to be learned, lives depend on it.
[dramatic music]
When I listen to Alice's first call to Northumbria Police,
the word stalking wasn't mentioned once.
And yet Alice gives an uninterrupted free recall
about what she was experiencing at that time.
And I can't give you much more if you asked me
what does rejected ex-intimate stalking looked like,
I couldn't give you much more than what Alice said
in those couple of minutes.
And yet that wasn't identified as stalking.
And that is a critical point
in terms of how Alice's case developed.
[narrator] For Alice's family, determination to help the next girl
facing someone like Dhillon.
It really shocked me how many people go through this
and how common this is.
And it does keep happening.
And we keep, as a society, not learning from those mistakes.
And people don't understand how dangerous it is.
And I think that's really, really quite upsetting.
The figures for stalking are horrendous.
I mean, one in five women will be stalked
at some point in their lifetime, one in ten men.
So we set up The Alice Ruggles Trust.
Of course with trained professionals,
but our big thing is raising awareness
so that more people who are victims of stalking
or who are friends of victims of stalking
can actually go to the right people
and get help, get something done about it sooner
rather than letting it fester,
or thinking it will get better by itself.
[Gen] Alice will be remembered for drinking more gin
than anybody else in the entire building on a night out,
but still managing to be absolutely okay
whilst everyone else passed out.
She will be remembered for kind words.
She'll be remembered for how thoughtful she was.
This literally happened to her
but it does not and will never define her,
especially for the people that actually know her.
[intense music]
I think about Alice every single day.
Not a day goes past when I don't think about her.
But I just sort of think of her memory
and I think, you know, what would Alice have done,
what would she have wanted and what would she have thought?
Alice is only ever gonna have been as old as 24
and she hasn't gonna have been older than that.
And she's never had the chance to have her own family.
We'll see her brothers and sisters having their own family.
[somber music]
It's quite sad.
[somber music builds]