The True Story Behind I Fought the Law — And What Happened to William Dunlop

ITV is back in its true-crime lane with I Fought the Law, a four-part drama that sticks closer to the facts than most because the woman at the center of it, Ann Ming, had a hand in making it. It is based on her memoir, For the Love of Julie, and it is not an easy watch. But it is a clear-eyed one.

What the show covers

The series follows the murder of 22-year-old Julie Hogg, the two failed attempts to convict the man Ann believed did it, and the 15-year campaign that ended up changing an 800-year-old British rule: double jeopardy. Sheridan Smith fronts the series as Ann, and the show does not lean into sensationalism so much as it methodically walks you through a system that said no until Ann forced it to say yes.

The real story, step by step

• November 1989: Ann can’t reach her daughter Julie, who has missed a court hearing to seek a legal separation from her estranged husband, Andrew. Ann reports her missing. Police assume Julie left on her own — even suggesting she may have headed to London and left her young son, Kevin — and take days to dig deeper. They search Julie’s house for nearly a week and find nothing. The case stalls.
• 80 days later: Andrew goes back to the family home and notices a smell. Ann, who has a medical background, recognizes it instantly. She pries off a bath panel and finds Julie’s body wrapped in a blanket. The post-mortem says she was sexually assaulted and strangled.
• 1991: Police rule out Andrew and focus on William Dunlop, a builder’s laborer who was at a friend’s place next door the night Julie vanished. Hours earlier, he had violently assaulted a man at a rugby club. Prosecutors argue he knew Julie, turned up angling for sex, and when she refused, he attacked her — a planned, brutal assault. There is plenty that worries Ann: investigators find Julie’s keys under Dunlop’s floorboards. Still, the first trial ends without a verdict. The second ends in an acquittal. Under the rules at the time, that’s supposed to be it.
• 1997: Dunlop is convicted of an entirely separate attack — he stabbed his pregnant girlfriend with a toaster fork and beat up her lover — and gets seven years. While inside, he tells a prison officer he killed Julie. In a later taped interview, he says he snapped during an argument and strangled her. He thinks double jeopardy protects him from ever being retried for Julie’s murder.
• 2003: Using that confession, prosecutors secure a perjury conviction — not a murder conviction, because double jeopardy still blocks a retrial for the killing.
• 2005: After years of lobbying from Ann — think meetings with the Crown Prosecution Service, a sit-down with then-Home Secretary Jack Straw, and a speech in the House of Lords — the law changes to allow retrials in serious cases when new and compelling evidence emerges. Dunlop pleads guilty to Julie’s murder. He gets life and must serve at least 17 more years.
• 2007: Ann is awarded an MBE for services to the criminal justice system. The ripple effects of the law change she fought for help land at least a dozen other convictions, including one of the men involved in the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
• 2013: Ann’s husband, Charles, who stood with her throughout the fight to overturn the law, dies after living with Parkinson’s and dementia.
• 2025: A Parole Board says Dunlop could move to open conditions and is unlikely to abscond, but Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood blocks it, citing public protection. The Ming family says they are relieved and grateful.

The law bit (yes, the inside baseball)

Double jeopardy sounds like pub-trivia filler until a case like this hits. For centuries, once someone was acquitted of a crime in England and Wales, that was that. Ann’s campaign didn’t just make noise; it helped push through a change that let courts revisit serious cases when strong new evidence surfaces. That is how a confession that once seemed useless became the key to a murder conviction.

"A lot of people did think I had a team of lawyers doing it on my behalf and this wasn’t the case."

That is Ann, summing up years of grinding work most of us would not have the stamina to keep doing. For what it’s worth, she also received £20,000 in damages from Cleveland Police over how the original investigation was handled.

Where things stand now

Dunlop told the Parole Board he used to be a violent, uncaring person and likely would have committed more crimes had he not been imprisoned, but says he has changed. The government was not convinced enough to loosen his conditions. Ann, now nearing 80, says she will keep pushing to ensure he stays behind bars because she never wants another family to go through what hers did.

Where to watch

All four episodes of I Fought the Law stream on ITVX from Sunday 31 August.