A Never Ending Nightmare: The Murder Of Alice Gross

 

The last few weeks have been completely heartbreaking um there’s not a moment of the day that you don’t think about alice and where she is what might have happened or why she might have gone missing it’s almost impossible to describe what that pain feels like but we just want her to know please alice if you’re out there come home and if anyone has any information at all about her movements on that day or about her whereabouts now i just really plead with them to come forward to the police and get her home because that’s where

she belongs and she needs to be here with us  so  alice poppy madeleine gross was born on valentine’s day 2000 in london england she lived in hanwell with her sister nina and parents rosalind and jose she was incredibly creative and had a keen eye for art and design she loved music and singing could play the piano and violin and would often write and perform her own songs on the 28th of august 2014 at around 3 p.m she left her house to go

for one of her usual walks down by the river she told her parents she would be back by six she regularly did this and always kept to her time later in the day she texted her father to say she was on her way home and wouldn’t be long alice was so vigilant with her time keeping that at 7 pm came round and she still wasn’t home despite sending the text message her parents knew instinctively that something was deeply wrong her phone wasn’t ringing anymore and this only heightened her parents concerns alice was only 14 and had been diagnosed

with anorexia and depression and although she and her family were seeking treatment her parents were terrified that maybe she had collapsed somewhere they reported her missing straight away between the police and alice’s family and friends they began to search the area where they knew she would have been walking but found nothing detective superintendent carl mehta was assigned to the case and was immediately concerned the investigation was moving fast and quickly reached the media and before long witnesses were coming

forward to report individual sightings of her using this information the police were able to track down the relevant cctv footage which confirmed these sightings just before 4 pm she was picked up on camera walking along the grand union canal then at a location called the brentford lock not far from where she lived  she was spotted again at 4 26 pm walking along the canal underbridge called trump’s way heading back in the direction of her home in hanwell but after this there were no more sightings of her a few days later and with still no leads

her family made a desperate appeal we love you we miss you we want to know if you’re safe and we want you to come home we know that maybe you’ve been going through some difficult times um but you we want you to know that we’re thinking about all the happy times we’ve had together as a family and the lively and beautiful person that you are anyone that knows anything about alice’s whereabouts we want them to understand that she’s a very vulnerable young girl and if they could please contact the police on 101 with any information they might have

that might be someone that knew that she had any kind of plan someone that she’s contacted in a chat room for example or someone that actually knows where she is now please please let us know that she’s safe realizing the case needed more than just a local search detective superintendent meta turned the case over to scotland yard’s homicide and major crime squad for it to be escalated the public quickly mobilized to try and help find her the hashtag find alice was being used all over social media voluntary searches were being conducted

morning noon and night and traditional yellow ribbons were placed all over the town to draw more attention and awareness for the missing girl on the 4th of september almost a week after she had last been seen the police found her backpack along the footpath by the river brent in it it had her belongings including the shoes she had been wearing although there was still no sign of alice or her phone this was a massive lead as they now had an area to work on the police chose to release the cctv footage they previously found to the public

they showed the backpack and shoes clearly and they appealed for witnesses that may have seen the bag to urgently come forward as alice had depression the police also had to consider the possibility of suicide with 600 officers from eight different forces this had now become the largest deployment of metropolitan police officers in a search since the london bombings in 2005.

 they were reviewing hundreds of cctv cameras and a reward of twenty thousand pounds was being offered for anyone with information that could help find her using divers and sniffer dogs the police began a mass search operation covering nine square miles of woodland area and almost four miles of water this was a massive and painstaking task but with still no sightings or signs of alice they had no other options they searched the murky waters and went through the thick woodlands with a fine-tooth comb but the search turned up nothing the

phone data analysis revealed that when she sent the message to her father saying she was heading home she was right by the river brent detective superintendent meta ordered another search of the area believing there was more to find there as the days continued to pass the possibility of suicide was becoming less and less likely forensic scientists recognized that when a body first goes into the water it will sink as the body begins to decompose bacteria will form which creates gases in the body forcing the body to rise back up to the

surface if she had taken her own life through drowning she would have been discovered by now so if she was in the water it was possible she was being held down by something they ran a search on the missing person’s database for the area and were interested to find that a 41 year old arnis solkans originally from latvia had also been reported missing he had been living in ealing for around seven years working as a builder and when he failed to return home from work his partner contacted the police continuing to review the cctv footage

they saw a middle-aged man on a bike pedaling behind alice over the bridge just a few minutes behind her he surely would have passed her at some point he was spotted again on another camera crossing a busy road and cycling down initially there was nothing untoward except when the police looked deeper they realized that the time it had taken for him to cycle from the bridge to the main road had taken almost 45 minutes when normally it would take just a few the man on the bike was formally identified as anna’s soul cans

the cameras they had used to track down alice began to paint a very sinister picture the police saw zolcans on cctv riding back to the area where alice had last been seen twice in 12 hours he returned at 7 45 and re-emerged from the area at 8 50 on the evening of the 28th he was now wearing different clothes he returned one final time just before 7 a.

m on the 29th further cctv showed him in a shop buying some beers at around 8pm on the 28th metta and his team headed for zulkin’s property in ealing to begin the search upon doing a background check the team’s worst fears were realised zolkans had in fact been previously convicted of murder he had beaten and stabbed his wife to death and buried her in a shallow grave he served seven years in a latvian prison for the murder of his wife in 2009 just two years after arriving in london he sexually assaulted a 14 year old girl

near the same canal he rode his bike down just two miles from where alice had gone missing at the time it wasn’t scotland yard’s policy to run the same checks that they do today so zulkin’s past in latvia was never brought to their attention the 14 year old girl did not make a formal statement and he was never prosecuted four weeks after the search for alice began the police did a reconstruction of the last route she took with an actress wearing an identical outfit in the hope more people would remember seeing her

no piece of evidence was too small and the police needed every lead they could get detective meta and his team knew they were now looking for a man behind alice’s disappearance and likely murder but zulkins was nowhere to be found and the police were panicking that he may have left the country september 30th five weeks after alice had last been seen a devastating and gruesome discovery was made good morning i am commander greg mcnelty from the specialist crime and operations director in the metropolitan police last night the 30th of september a

search was carried out at the river brent as part of our ongoing investigation into the disappearance of alice gross following this search we have sadly recovered a body from the water just a day later they officially confirmed they had recovered the body of alice cross she was naked apart from a single sock tied up in a fetal position and wrapped in bin bags she had been weighed down by bricks and logs and tied to a bicycle wheel further analysis showed that she had died of asphyxiation a cigarette butt was found at the crime

scene which had zulkin’s dna on it dna of his was also found on alice’s shoes inside her backpack during their search of his property underneath his patio they discovered the back of alice’s iphone 4s four days after alice’s body was discovered the police finally found arnis zolkans he committed suicide by hanging himself in a secluded woody area of boston manor park in hounslow the police speculate he had seen alice while riding his bike and attempted to or had managed to sexually assault her and crush her to death he then returned

several times to try and conceal her body it was a truly harrowing picture the police confirmed that if they had found him alive they would have enough to charge him with the murder of alice cross a huge investigation and search commenced and so as a consequence of that is today we can either we can say that honest salkins was responsible for the murder of alice gross on the 23rd of october 2014 alice was late to rest and her family and the community could finally begin to grieve her family fought tirelessly for the policies and

procedures regarding background checks to be reviewed procedures for reading background checks on people entering the uk have now been changed the number of staff employed by the criminal records office has grown and requests for criminal records increased so that 80 percent of foreign suspects are now being thoroughly checked alice cross was a talented vibrant and creative young girl her life was cut terribly short but her amazing energy and passion for life will always be remembered you