The River Brent Killer

Alice Gross was a 14-year-old from Hanwell in west London. On the afternoon of August 28, 2014, she walked along the towpath beside the Grand Union Canal and the River Brent, and she did not come home. Her disappearance led to the Metropolitan Police’s largest search operation since the July 2005 London bombings, with about 600 officers involved.

CCTV showed Arnis Zalkalns, a 41-year-old Latvian builder, cycling along the towpath behind Alice. He then stopped out of camera range for at least 80 minutes and later came back to the area several times, once on a different bike. Zalkalns had served a prison sentence in Latvia for murdering his wife, Rudite, and had moved to Britain around 2007. In 2009 London police arrested him over an alleged sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl, but the case was dropped and no one checked his record abroad. He disappeared on September 3.

On September 30, 2014, Alice’s body was found in the River Brent, weighted down with bricks and a bicycle wheel and hidden under sections of tree trunk. On October 4, Zalkalns was found hanged in woodland in Boston Manor Park. Police said they would have charged him with murder. In July 2016 an inquest jury concluded that Alice was unlawfully killed in a sexually motivated attack, and coroner Fiona Wilcox recommended mandatory overseas record checks when foreign nationals are arrested.