Alice Gross, the 14-year-old whose sexual assault and killing in August 2014 at the hands of a Latvian man was used by pro-Brexit campaigners to argue against free movement, wrote a thoughtful essay in defence of the EU just months before her death, her parents have revealed.
Gross wrote compassionately about the cultural benefits of European migration and, with an unsettling prescience, the flaws of blocking foreign criminals from entering the country.
“Personally, I believe that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the EU as it allows our country to be considered a communal and friendly country,” she wrote.
In an interview with the Guardian, Alice’s mother Rosalind Hodgkiss said the essay was “horribly ironic”. Her daughter’s killer, Arnis Zalkalns, had served eight years in jail in Latvia for the brutal murder of his wife. Zalkalns entered the UK in 2007 and had even been arrested by the Metropolitan police on suspicion of sexual assault in 2009 before he attacked Alice in August 2014. But it was not until after he was reported missing that the builder’s criminal record came to light. It was too late; Alice was dead and so was Zalkalns. He hanged himself from a tree a mile from the canal towpath where he is believed to have abducted her.
With the knowledge of how Alice met her end, reading her essay is eerie. Discussing Ukip’s call for foreign criminals to be barred from crossing the border into the UK, she wrote in late May 2014: “They believe that this will keep Britain safe from crime by eliminating the number of criminals living in its premises. However, I believe that this takes away the concept of equality amongst the community by implying that criminals don’t deserve the same rights everyone else has. It also depicts Britain to believe foreign criminals are different and dangerous compared to the British criminals, reintroducing the idea of racism.”
Hodgkiss and Alice’s father, Jose Gross, say the essay underlines Alice’s compassion towards others. They have decided to release it because anti-immigration groups, Brexiters including the official Vote Leave campaign, and individuals with a “racist agenda” have seized on Alice’s death in an attempt to further their arguments. Gross and Hodgkiss have urged those exploiting Alice’s name for these causes to desist, but they continue to do so. After an inquest into Alice’s death returned a verdict of unlawful killing on Monday, the Telegraph published an article headlined “The Alice Gross murder is everything that’s wrong with freedom of movement”. And dozens of people on Twitter have held Alice aloft as a poster child for the closed-borders argument. “Alice would have hated that,” Rosalind says. “It’s distressing.”
Both parents make it clear that they believe the current system for monitoring foreign offenders is flawed. The police did not run any background checks when Zalkalns was arrested for sexual assault in 2009, five years before he killed Alice. But crucially, if they had, the police would have learned of his conviction for murder as in Latvia it was not spent. The coroner presiding over Alice’s inquest said she was likely to make recommendations to the authorities to shore up the background-checking process. But Gross and Hodgkiss are unequivocal in their belief that this system is better reformed from within the EU.
“What we’re talking about and what we’re asking for is a very targeted and proportionate sharing of information about violent offenders,” Hodgkiss says. “We’re talking about a very small group of people. When that is seized upon to make an argument against all freedom of movement and all immigrants, it’s really dangerous. It tars people with the same brush. It’s a racist agenda.”
Gross says his own ancestral background has made enduring the spectacle of his daughter being used as propaganda to campaign against immigration even harder. His father was a Ukrainian Jew who fled persecution to the UK during the second world war. He was shortly joined by his French wife. “Because of his beliefs and who he was – because he was Jewish – in order to survive he had to come to this country,” Gross says. “They came to get away from racist persecution and not being allowed to express their own thoughts and beliefs. So when the idea of racist causes using my daughter to promote their …” Gross tails off and stares into the distance. “It made me practically physically sick.”
After Zalkalns’s name was released by the police in September 2014, the far-right group Britain First rapidly seized on the crime to suit its anti-immigration agenda. It was shortly followed by Nigel Farage and Ukip. During the referendum campaign, Vote Leave, spearheaded by Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, issued a press release listing 50 EU criminals in Britain, including Zalkalns. “Vote Leave is today publishing a dossier which shows how the free movement of criminals across the EU puts British families in danger,” the release said. Alice’s parents were shocked. “We didn’t know they were going to do that,” Hodgkiss says. “They didn’t contact us. I was horrified that they would do that.”
Alice’s parents relived all the horrific details of their daughter’s disappearance and death during the inquest. She went missing from her home in Hanwell, west London, on 28 August 2014. One of the largest search operations ever conducted by the Met was launched and she was found, weeks later, on 30 September during a search of the river Brent where it meets the Grand Union canal. She was wrapped in plastic black bin bags, tied in a foetal position to a bike wheel weighed down by bricks and logs. Zalkalns’s body was found nearby in Boston Manor park on 4 October after he had been reported missing from his Ealing home on 3 September. The Met discovered his murder conviction on 10 September after contacting Interpol.
The Home Office and police, and the autonomous coronial process, left Hodgkiss and Gross feeling like “the little people”. “It’s meant to be an inquiry but in terms of how we were treated as a family, we were often being presented as adversarial,” Hodgkiss says. Gross quotes from a speech by the home secretary, Theresa May, in the wake of the findings of the Hillsborough inquest. “Often the institutions that should be the ones people can trust to get to the truth combine to protect themselves. They have a natural instinct to look inwards to protect themselves rather than do what is right in the public interest,” May said. “You would never have guessed that she had said that,” Gross adds. “It seems like they were doing exactly that.”
Ultimately, however, the inquest achieved what Alice’s parents had longed for – a broader inquiry into the broader issues brought to life by their daughter’s death. Now, they hope the authorities take heed of the coroner’s recommendations and make changes to the monitoring of foreign offenders to prevent such tragedies from recurring.
With the inquest over, Hodgkiss and Gross are considering their future. Gross, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and regularly shuts down mid-speech as if he has frozen, admits he is only just facing up to what happened to his daughter. “For me, it’s like time has stood still. I’ve had a few moments to reflect on Alice, but I couldn’t really cope with it so I’m only really starting to allow myself to think about her. But it feels like it was just yesterday and is as incomprehensible and as unbelievable as it was at the beginning.”
Hodgkiss reacted in an opposite manner, immersing herself in memories of Alice. She had a rebellious streak, being told off at school for piercing the top of her ear. She had a kind and thoughtful personality, greeting her mother with a hearty breakfast as Hodgkiss returned home from a lengthy walk. Alice was fiercely creative: she played violin, piano and was learning the guitar. Alice was not political, but politically aware, as the essay written months before her tragic death reveals.
And in that essay, in its final line, Alice appears to address those who have seized on her demise to campaign against the cultural diversity she loved and cherished. “It reflects on the good of our country, not only showing the strength and stability of our nation but the trust and cooperation we have to make our world successful, which in turn earns the respect of others,” she says. “Although there are some disadvantages that result in our country having slightly less power over its citizens, but what is power over loyalty and alliance amongst a civilised and peaceful union?”
• The Gross family would like to encourage people to donate to Alice’s Youth Music Fund, details of which can be found here: http://alice.poppymadeleine.gross.muchloved.com/
