The bag was found along the riverbank first. Then her sneakers. Then the items that would tie everything together. Alice Gross had left home on August 28, 2014, at around one in the afternoon.
She told her parents she was going for a walk and would be back by evening. She was fourteen years old, a Valentine’s Day baby, a girl who wrote her own songs, played violin and piano, and loved her three cats and her dog. She never came home. By seven that evening, her parents reported her missing.
The Metropolitan Police launched the largest search operation since the London bombings of 2005. More than six hundred officers from eight services scoured nine square miles of woodland and three and a half square miles of waterways. Divers searched the heavily silted River Brent, where visibility was barely three centimeters. They spent hours submerged, feeling their way along the riverbed.
Security footage showed Alice walking along the Grand Union Canal towpath at 4:26 p. m. , heading toward the River Thames. Around that same time, she texted her father to say she was coming home.
She was wearing dark blue jeans, a dark green cardigan, glasses with plaid frames, and blue Vans sneakers. The community wrapped West London in yellow ribbons. They painted the streets with her face and her name. Her parents appeared on television, pleading, their voices cracking.
Her sister Nina said simply, “I just really hope she knows that we really, really love her and we really need her back. ”
Two days into the search, police found Alice’s backpack, her sneakers, and other items along the riverbank. Her phone wasn’t among them. They ordered a renewed search of nearly three miles of riverbed.
Then, a week and a half after Alice vanished, police made an arrest. A vehicle near where her backpack was found contained a shovel, ropes, and sacks. The suspect wasn’t cooperating. But something else surfaced.
A name. Arnis Zalkalns was a forty-one-year-old builder from Latvia. He’d gone missing himself, reported by his partner on September 4th after he failed to return home from work. CCTV footage placed him in the same area as Alice on the day she disappeared.
Fifteen minutes after Alice crossed the bridge at Brentford Dock, he was captured cycling in the same direction, coming from work. His behavior raised more questions. At 9:30 p. m.
, footage showed him on the towpath again in different clothes. Later, he was seen at a local shop buying alcohol, his trousers rolled up as though he’d been wading through mud or water. The shopkeeper described him as disheveled, dirty, and looking like he hadn’t slept properly. Police searched his home exhaustively.
They dug up his entire garden looking for anything that might carry her DNA. When they looked into his background, what they found made their blood run cold. In 1998, in Latvia, Arnis had murdered his wife. He’d lured her into a wooded area, stabbed her repeatedly, bludgeoned her, and buried her in a shallow grave he’d dug in advance.
When questioned, he led officers straight to the grave. He showed no remorse. He admitted to drinking vodka while burying her. He was sentenced to eight years.
He served six. After his release in 2007, he moved to England, where no one knew about his criminal record. In 2009, he was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a fourteen-year-old girl, but the case was dropped after she chose not to press charges. When Arnis came under suspicion in 2014, his criminal record initially came back clear.
His prior murder conviction was legally classified as spent. By September 16th, police named him as a person of interest. His former mother-in-law, decades after her daughter’s murder, asked, “How can a human being do something like that to another person? He was her first man, her first love.
Everything was first. He was sentenced with such short time for her planned murder. Is that justice? It is not.
”
On September 30th, nearly five weeks after Alice disappeared, police made the grim discovery no one wanted. A body was found a ten-minute walk from where Alice was last seen. It was recovered from the River Brent. Alice had been wrapped in a trash bag and weighed down with a bicycle wheel fitted with bricks.
Wooden logs kept her submerged. The post-mortem took two days due to the complex nature of the case. The cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation. Investigators concluded that Arnis had assaulted Alice and, in the process, suffocated her.
A shoe and a cigarette near her belongings carried his DNA. The cover of her iPhone was recovered from the patio area of Arnis’s home. Four days after Alice’s body was found, police found Arnis. He was dead, hanging from a tree branch in Boston Manor Park, concealed among dense shrubs.
The condition of his body indicated he’d been dead for several days. Dental records confirmed his identity. The family was denied the chance to see him tried. But the Crown Prosecution Service independently reviewed the case and confirmed the evidence would have met the threshold for a charge of murder.
The inquest established that the motive was sexual. A senior coroner lost a thirty-page case file containing sensitive evidence about Alice’s murder while traveling on a train. It was reportedly destroyed as waste. Alice’s family wasn’t told for almost a year.
They expressed anger and bewilderment, saying, “We are extremely concerned, bewildered, and angry. ”
The inquest was transferred to a different coroner. In 2016, a jury concluded the system could not be held legally responsible for Alice’s death. The coroner instructed them that the evidence did not support findings that any actions or inactions of the Home Office or police caused or contributed to her death.
But for Alice’s family, the pain remained. Her mother said, “Life is broken and cold without her. I believe the state failed Alice and our family. ”
She rejected any attempt to use Alice’s death to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment.
She said the answer wasn’t to get rid of freedom of movement, but to reform the system of information sharing so people can be protected. Alice was buried in Portugal. Her funeral was full of music, as she would have wanted. The community lined the streets as her coffin passed.
Her family established the Youth Musical Memorial Fund to support other young people with the same spark, creativity, and joy that defined her. It raised over eighty-one thousand pounds. Her mother still remembered walking her daughter to primary school through a wooded lane between golf courses, stopping to look at squirrels. Alice always saying she loved her.
Her mother said, “It’s an enormous void. It’s something that can’t be repaired. I can’t see how it can ever be healed really.
”
Alice had designed her prom dress when she was eleven.
