Murdered teen Alice Gross was found ‘naked, apart from a sock, tied in the foetal position and wrapped in bin bags’
The 14-year-old's body was not found for more than a month after she went missing
MURDERED schoolgirl Alice Gross was found naked apart from a sock, and tied into the foetal position, an inquest has heard.
The tragic teen had also been wrapped in bin bags before being weighed down by bricks tied to a bicycle wheel in the Grand Union Canal.
Alice's mother has told of her concern that a man convicted of killing his wife in Latvia - the man thought to have killed her daughter - was able to freely move into the UK, as the inquest into her death heard details of similarity between the two murders.
She made an emotional speech today to those gathered at the inquest into her daughter's death at Westminster Coroner's Court, sitting at the High Court.
Her 14-year-old daughter went for a walk on the afternoon of August 28, 2014, and when she did not come home by 7pm was reported missing.
The biggest police manhunt since the London 7/7 bombings was launched and her body was not found until more than a month later on September 30.
Her killer, Latvian Arnis Zalkalns, was found four days later, hanged from a tree in Boston Manor Park in Hounslow.
The 41-year-old had murdered his wife in Latvia and buried her in a shallow grave. He spent seven years behind bars, before moving to the UK in 2007.
It is thought he used techniques similar to when he buried his wife, after he had lured her to some woods and beat her with a pole and knifing her with a homemade blade, to conceal Alice's body until he was ready with a system to weigh her down in the river.
Zalkans had also been previously convicted for possession of firearms and sexual assault, including knowingly passing on a sexually transmitted disease.
Because he was an EU national he had undergone no background checks on his arrival and was unknown to the British authorities.
However he had been arrested in Britain in 2009 on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl two miles away from where Alice was killed, but the case was dropped after the alleged victim would not make a statement.
Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Chalmers told the inquest today he believed Alice's body had been concealed in bushes overnight before her body was dumped in the river.
He told the court Zalkans stole plastic bags from the building site he was working on in West Drayton.
He added: "Subsequent efforts he took to conceal his wife I think are comparable to the efforts he made to conceal Alice.
"The area offered someone the opportunity to take someone out of view, out of the eyes of the public and into the undergrowth.
"He might have killed her while trying to subdue her and keep her quiet.
"I think he hid her body in the undergrowth - I believe he returned that evening and that's when she was hidden in the water. I have no proof of that but that seems a likely conclusion.
"He went down the following morning - probably smoking the cigarette that was found on the bank - and realised he was going to have to take greater measures to conceal her."
Logs, about a metre in length piled above the tow path from where the council had cleared undergrowth were found to have been rolled into the river and stacked in a pyramid shape above the body.
Alice's mother, Ms Hodgkiss, dressed in a navy blouse with white polka dots, told the court her daughter was an aspiring singer-songwriter and a "talented" student.
She added: "It is impossible for us to convey the devastation to the family by Alice's death.
"There are a lot of unanswered questions and we will likely never get to the bottom of what happened that day.
"We want to reiterate that the reason for these questions is so that we can establish or not the systems for monitoring foreign offenders and cross-border sharing of information are robust.
"We appreciate that they may have changed significantly, but we remain stunned that a foreign national convicted for murder in his own country was not monitored, or not even known about in any way.
"This has destroyed much of our faith in our country's ability to protect its citizens.
"The Home Office and the police forces nationwide should be doing everything to ensure this should not be allowed to happen again."
This inquest is expected to touch on potential failures by the Government and police and if they played a role in the schoolgirl's death.
An inquest last September ruled that Zalkans, a builder, took his own life, and that no third parties were involved.
RELATED STORIES
His girlfriend and the mother of his child Katerina Laiblova previously said in a statement read by the coroner she was 'struggling to accept' his involvement in Alice's death.
'I'm having great difficulty accepting he had anything to do with her disappearance or murder,' she said in her statement.
'However, she later added that 'after being given all this information I can understand why police wanted to speak to Arnis'.
She told police that Alice was 'very thin' like the wife he murdered.
CCTV footage revealed Zalkans went to a shop to buy beer after killing the teenager in what is thought to have been a sexually motivated attack.
Police said after he hid her body in the water he went back to the site several times to check it was still undiscovered.
DCI Chalmers said the site of the police cordon may have precipitated his suicide.
He told the court: "When he lost control of the deposition site he saw a lot of police activity and he must have come to the conclusion that if we hadn't already found Alice, we soon would find her."
He added: "This was an opportunistic, unforeseen event, I didn't know what his motivation was but I suspect there must have been a sexual driver.
"Whether he intended to murder her or not in resulted in her death, I believe the efforts he took to hide her body, he clearly didn't intend her to be found.
The court heard today there were no obvious signs of injury on her body, but the theory is that her death was likely to have been caused by a larger body lying on top of her and stopping her from breathing.
Pathologist Dr Ashley Feegan-Earl said the method of crushing someone to death was known as 'burking' as it was used by Scottish serial killers Burke and Hare.
A post-mortem found no signs of injury on the teen's genitalia, but Zalkans' DNA was found on her vulva.
His DNA was also found on Alice's shoes, a cigarette butt and on the bin liners used to wrap her body in.
Dr Feegan-Earl said: 'There's nothing to suggest that she drowned, there are no injuries consistent with a struggle.
'The circumstance of her finding dictate that sexual assault must be considered, considering she was naked.
'The finding of DNA on the vulva must support the possibility that this was a sexually motivated homicide - the circumstances indicate this was an unnatural death with a likely sexual motivation of homicide.'
Police also believe Alice may have been given the date-rape drug 'liquid ecstasy' before being sexually assaulted, but a pathologist said it was 'most likely' Alice did not have drugs in her body at the time of her death.
Dr Fiona Wilcox, chief coroner for Westminster, told the 11 jurors they would have to determine who died, when they died and under what circumstances.
She said: "You are here to hear evidence in relation to the death of Alice Poppy Madeleine Gross, who was found deceased on September 30, 2014.
"At that point she was 14 years of age.
"Alice had gone missing on the August 28, 2014. There was an extensive police enquiry.
"As a result of a search of the River Brent and the Grand Union Canal and around that area, her body was discovered on September 30, 2014, wrapped in plastic and was weighted down."
At a previous point in the investigation in Alice's death senior west London coroner Chinyere Inyama came under fire after it was revealed he left the original 30-page file containing sensitive information on the police inquiry on a train in November last year.
Scotland Yard has never recovered the lost file and believe it has been destroyed as waste.
On Mr Inyama's request, the inquest was transferred to Dr Fiona Wilcox and the Ministry of Justice launched an investigation as to why the coroner defied police advice to keep the documents in his office.
The inquest continues.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4368.