ABANDONED TO HER KILLER
Alice TWICE told police she was terrified of her stalker ex. Now she’s dead – and, tragically, her mum’s blaming herself. Read on and decide what really went wrong ...
DUSK on a cold October evening, and the terraced houses on Rawling Road, Gateshead, already have their curtains drawn. Inside one, a beautiful young woman excitedly tries on a new dress in her bedroom.
Alice Ruggles is looking forward to a weekend with her new boyfriend, an Army officer who makes her feel safe and happy for the first time in months. They exchange messages about his arrival the next day.
Outside her house, a man sits in a white BMW and contacts a woman he has never met via a dating app. He asks if they can ‘hook up’, presumably for no-strings sex, casually adding that he will be free in around ‘20 to 30 minutes’. What Harry Dhillon doesn’t mention is how he plans to fill those minutes; he plans to murder Alice.
This week Dhillon, a 26-year-old soldier, was jailed for 22 years for the barbaric, premeditated killing of Alice, a privately-educated, university graduate he had stalked after she ended their ten-month relationship.
For three months Dhillon, who was in training for the SAS, had relentlessly pursued the 24-year-old. He’d threatened to blackmail her with intimate photos and made 240-mile round trips from his barracks in Edinburgh to her house at night to knock on her window, leaving flowers and chocolates outside. Using skills learned in the military, he hacked into her social media accounts and bombarded her with ‘creepy’ phone calls.
Then on October 12 last year, the Lance Corporal and signaller with the 2 Scots regiment, climbed through an open window of the flat Alice shared with a friend.
Grabbing a 6in knife from the kitchen, he chased her into the bathroom, pinned her down and slashed at her neck with such ferocity that he cut through to her spine.
Utterly remorseless, after his arrest Dhillon denied murdering her — despite being found with her blood on his steering wheel. He claimed she repeatedly attacked him during their relationship and fell on a knife during a struggle, even though Alice suffered 24 injuries while ‘super fit’ Dhillon — who at 6ft 1in and 12st 7lb was almost a foot taller and three stone heavier — suffered none.
But for Alice’s heartbroken family serious questions remain as to what led to the events of that night. Alice’s mother blames herself for not having taken Dhillon’s threat seriously after her daughter confided in her.
‘I’ve been living through an endless nightmare,’ Sue Ruggles said. ‘I’ve failed Alice as a mother. All I want to do is hide away and give up on life.’
But Alice contacted the police twice for help in the ten days before her murder, saying she feared for her safety. Shouldn’t more have been done to prevent her murder?
And how did Dhillon, an only child from a loving home, end up so hateful and twisted? Because, as the Mail can reveal, Trimaan Dhillon, known as Harry, was born in India to wealthy parents. His father Kuldip was a parachute regiment Major and mother Parminder was a graduate of Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar.
Dhillon attended Catholic schools and military academies. There were riding lessons and holidays to America and Europe. His Facebook account is full of photos with his doting parents, along with proud messages from them.
During his 11-day trial at Newcastle Crown Court, he said he had dreamed of joining a regiment like his father but, to broaden his options, had opted for a degree in India in strategy management, which included two years at Queen Margaret’s University near Edinburgh.
This was how, aged 19, Dhillon, who had led a conservative life with his devoutly religious Sikh parents, came to the UK and was exposed to the freedoms and excesses enjoyed by British students. Photos from this time show him partying with scantilyclad young women.
KEEN to pursue military ambitions, he applied to become a British Army officer but his UK citizenship was not complete so he had to take a non-commissioned rank.
His training began in August 2011 at Catterick, North Yorkshire. He passed out the following May and was posted with the Royal Regiment of Scotland to Canterbury, Kent. It is here that his controlling behaviour towards women began to emerge.
Dhillon met Eniko Nemeth, 18, a student from Bulgaria in Faversham. She was his first girlfriend. They got together in September 2012 — he had proposed by the end of the year.
At his trial Dhillon explained the swift engagement was due to his upbringing: ‘If you start going out with a girl, that is a girl you are likely to stay with. In my parents’ case the first girl my father met, he married.’
This suggests that while, outwardly at least, Dhillon had embraced liberal Western cultural attitudes, deep down he may have struggled to accept the freedoms that British women enjoy, especially when it comes to sex and relationships.
His increasingly possessive and difficult behaviour meant Eniko ended their relationship in spring 2014 but Dhillon would not accept it. He confronted her as she walked with a new boyfriend, spat in her face and called her a ‘bitch’. He was arrested but released without charge and instead given a restraining order by police.
Speaking from their home in Kent this week, Eniko’s parents said she had a ‘very lucky escape’.
Her mother Marianna revealed Dhillon threatened to throw acid on Eniko’s face and stalked her.
‘He was evil. Real evil,’ she says. ‘My daughter totally changed after she met him. I am just so very sorry for Alice’s parents.’
Dhillon later went on his first tour of Afghanistan. He also got to know of Alice, one of four children of Professor Clive Ruggles, 64, an expert in archaeoastronomy (a mix of archaeology and astronomy), and Dr Sue Hills, 56, head of maths at £11,600-a-year Leicester High School for Girls, where Alice was a pupil.
HAvING graduated from Northumbria University with a degree in product design, Alice, a talented singer and fencer, was an office co-ordinator with Sky in Newcastle.
She was on holiday with a friend in Sri Lanka when her friend, who knew Dhillon, posted a photo of her on Facebook. Dhillon commented: ‘She is the most naturally beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’
Flattered, Alice decided to get to know him and the pair began to message and video chat daily. She posted him care packages and he sent her flowers. Three months later, in January last year, they finally met.
But their relationship was fraught from the start with Dhillon trying to make Alice jealous.
Meanwhile, he was extremely possessive about her, demanding to know where she was and who she was with, berating her for dressing in an attractive way while making cruel remarks about her appearance.
But their relationship continued, with Dhillon even joining Alice for a family holiday to Cornwall.
But, by August, Alice finished with him, after learning he had repeatedly cheated on her with women he met on dating apps. He was enraged when Alice dumped him and took increasing steps to terrify her in the months leading up to her death.
As Judge Paul Sloan QC said: ‘Alice went within a few months from a happy, outgoing, vibrant person into being miserable, lonely and scared.’
Dhillon posted letters and poems, and even sent a rambling Facebook message to her mother asking her to persuade Alice to take him back.
He also tried to blackmail her, vowing to release intimate photos of her. Indeed, when police searched his computer, they found a folder of such images entitled ‘Tramp’.
As Richard Wright QC, prosecuting, explained: ‘This was a dangerous obsession borne out of his inability to let go of something he viewed as being his...He was determined she should not be happy with anyone else.’
Alice’s friend and flatmate Maxine McGill, 29, a manager at Sky who would discover her body, told the court: ‘Alice became an introvert, visibly shaking with anxiety, she became skinny, she lost so much weight, she was pale and nowhere near as outgoing as she used to be.’
A month before Alice’s death, things started to improve after a trip to Germany to visit her sister Emma, 29, an Army officer. While there, she
met Mike Thaibsyah, a fellow officer from Watford and the pair hit if off. But news of her romance infuriated Dhillon. He hacked into her Facebook account and sent Mike messages to say she was being unfaithful to him.
But Mike didn’t taken them seriously and booked a flight to see Alice, who has brothers Nick, 27, and Patrick, 21, for October 13 — the day after she was murdered.
‘It was a chance to spend quality time together by ourselves,’ he explained. ‘We were so excited.’ Aware of this impending date from hacking her account, Dhillon stepped up his harassment to such an extent that ten days before her death, Alice contacted police.
In a statement, she said: ‘I feel harassed, alarmed and distressed by this male. I want him to leave me alone. I want nothing more to do with him.
‘I am terrified of his actions. I am being stalked and I want it to stop. I don’t feel safe in my own home.’ The police gave Dhillon a notice warning him to leave her alone. Yet the next day he posted her letters and photographs of them together.
Alice contacted the police again and this time was asked whether she wanted him arrested. Tragically, she declined.
‘Alice is such a nice person, in a way she didn’t want to make a fuss, didn’t want to get him into trouble, bless her,’ explained her heartbroken father Clive. ‘So it was left at “well do you want us to arrest him or not?” ’
Although she had said no to his arrest, she felt ‘palmed off’ by the police, telling her sister: ‘They’ll respond when he stabs me.’
Dhillon returned to her flat on reconnaissance, taking photos of a back entrance. Two days later he put his evil plan into action. Alice’s mother Sue admits she will forever be haunted by guilt that she and the police could have done more to save her daughter.
Two days before her death, Alice rang Sue to say she was worried after her second call to the police. ‘I reassured her that was OK,’ Sue recalls. ‘The police knew what was going on and it would be all right, if she just ignored him he would ignore her.’ A few minutes later, her other daughter Emma called to warn ‘he is going to kill her, you have to do something’, which Sue felt was an over-reaction.
Later, as police arrived at her house to say her daughter was dead, she says: ‘It felt like we were living through something predefined. I felt such a sense of guilt for telling Alice not to worry and Emma not to worry when actually if I had not said that, Alice might still be alive.’
ALICE’S family are now campaigning for a change to police procedures. Why, for example, when Alice reported Dhillon to Northumbria Police for breaching the warning, was it not flagged up that he had an existing restraining order towards Eniko?
Detective Chief Inspector Lisa Theaker, of Northumbria Police, said at the time no one knew the level of threat that Dhillon posed. ‘Alice didn’t fully understand his level of behaviour and the stalking and the lengths of behaviour he was going to,’ she added. ‘The family and friends won’t have fully understood it either.
‘We went through a risk assessment. We would not have been able to predict at that stage that he would go on to murder Alice.’
But should it be left to vulnerable, scared people to decide if someone they fear is arrested?
Dhillon remained stone-faced throughout the trial, adding to the pain for Alice’s family.
‘We were looking for some sign he understood the enormity of what he had done but there was just nothing at all,’ says Sue.
For now, there is little to help fill the chasm left by the death of their ‘amazing, happy, smiley Alice’, but they have vowed to fight and raise awareness for victims of stalking.
‘We all hope to do as much as we can to learn lessons,’ says her mother, ‘to raise awareness, and ultimately, as we all sincerely hope, — to help prevent what happened to Alice happening to others.’