Moving on from murder

It is a morning routine beloved of teenage girls, if not their mothers. Every day before Sally Dowler was allowed to leave home to go to the comprehensive school where she taught maths - and where her daughters Milly and Gemma were pupils - Milly would make sure that her mother's outfit didn't make her look "like an old fogey".

On the day I meet Mr and Mrs Dowler I know that Milly wouldn't have been embarrassed on her mum's behalf. Wearing a chocolate brown top, skirt and leather boots with a smattering of simple gold jewellery, Sally looks far more fashionable than the average middle-aged mum. Her husband Bob is similarly youthful-looking in combat pants and a casual shirt.

Despite the impersonal environment - we meet in the office of the public relations company which is promoting the latest safety awareness project in which the Dowlers are involved - there is a lot of warmth and laughter between them.

It is a very different image of the couple from the ones we all remember, their distraught television appeals for the safe return of 13-year-old daughter Milly, who went missing on 21 March last year. She was last seen at 4.08pm after saying goodbye to some friends at a train station a mile away from home in Weybridge. She called her father, who was working from home, to say she would be back in half an hour. She never arrived. Six months later her body was discovered in woodland some 20 miles away near Fleet, Hampshire. Her murderer still hasn't been caught.

To say those six months were hell for the Dowlers is something of an understatement. At the time Gemma, then 16, talked about the incredible strain she was under. "When you try to go to sleep your heart goes boom, boom, boom and you think about everything. I had a panic attack and couldn't stop crying." She was prescribed sleeping tablets and was scared of being in the house alone.

"The whole not knowing made us utterly incapacitated," says Sally now. "It was horrible to think that we might live for many years and she would never be found, and you couldn't answer any of those questions. Although we thought that [Milly had been murdered] there was still an element of hope. I could have gone mad because my mind was working frantically to try and answer all the questions. You can do two things: you could sink into a hole and be totally absorbed in grief and self-pity or you can think 'I can't let that happen because I've still got Gemma and Bob'."

For Sally, physically wearing herself out was her coping mechanism. "As soon as I started to feel very anxious I would drive to the gym immediately and get on the treadmill. But even when I was doing that I still couldn't think of a way of blocking it out of my mind.

"Then I thought, I need to go water-skiing. It was the only thing I could think of that would use all my physical energy and concentration. It gave me a few minutes' relief and that was the first time that I had any, day or night." Sally laughs heartily when she recalls the blasts across cold and muddy water.

For Bob, lying on the sofa, watching "mindless television, just letting it wash over me", was all he could do. "I couldn't watch television. In fact I very rarely do now," says Sally, "because there was always something that would set me off, a drama or the news. Sometimes it still takes me by surprise when the video of Milly ironing is shown on TV. That can be really hard." The footage, which has become poignantly familiar to many of us, was filmed only two days before she went missing.

Milly's body was found in September last year but, before then, the Dowlers had to endure the discovery of five other bodies. "My heart was racing all the time and the anxiety was horrible," says Sally. "I wouldn't describe myself as a natural worrier so I wasn't used to any of those types of feelings. Each time they found a body we'd be told, then there was a wait of several hours, or even days, before it was confirmed whether it was Milly or not. We were just up and down.

"I didn't think she would ever be found. After she was, I could gradually feel parts of my mind coming back because I felt that at least I had an answer. In our case it was the one we were expecting."

After months of feeling helpless the family were finally able to do something. "People started asking who to make donations payable to and we decided to set up the charity," explains Sally. Milly's Fund is the result of their tireless work to promote personal safety for teenagers. Neither Bob, an IT consultant, nor Sally, have returned to work, instead putting all their energies into the charity, which has raised in excess of £200,000. "There's no rulebook that tells you what to do when you're faced with something like this," says Bob. "What's right for both us is to channel energy into what we're doing." Sally nods her head and says quietly: "The pain is phenomenal but it gives us something else to focus on."

The response from the public has, in the Dowlers' own words, been "overwhelming". This must have been a comfort, given that their faith in human nature must have been shaken to its foundations? "One of the questions that Gemma has asked us, and I've asked myself, is what kind of person could possibly do this - and as a normal person you can't answer that," says Sally. "But we've found that ordinary people will do anything to help if you ask them to."

Bob says: "The fund really brought the local community together but we've also had fantastic support from people all over the country. There are a huge number of people doing things. I know of a couple of men who paddled across the English Channel on a raft for 10 hours. One of them was blind, one was a paraplegic. They raised about £3,000. It's lovely to be able to harness the energy that for those six months people had but couldn't do anything with."

The fund has already produced a safety video that has been sent to every secondary school in the UK, set up a teacher training programme and has a website up and running. "We thought that if we made the objectives achievable we could then think about what we want to do," says Sally. "We may not want to carry on raising money in Milly's name forever. One day we may look at what we've achieved and think we've done enough. I wouldn't like it to take over our lives but I want to do what we said we'd do."

The couple are passionate about promoting personal safety for teenagers, and one of the factors in this is a CCTV video that may - it has never been confirmed - show Milly just before she stepped into a darkcoloured car. "We considered all the different scenarios, such as what could have made Milly get into a car. I don't want to scare teenagers - I want them to be happy and enjoy themselves - but I also want them to have that sense of awareness," says Sally.

The latest project, launched this week, is Teach UR Mum 2 TXT, a campaign to get parents and guardians to keep in touch with their children via text messages. When Milly first went missing, against all the instincts the Dowlers must have been feeling, they were careful not to keep Gemma wrapped in cotton wool.

"It was difficult for us to let her go out but I started texting her and she'd tell me where she was," says Sally. "It was a very extreme situation and I felt very secure knowing where she was. I thought we should do a teach-your-parents-to-text campaign. It is not embarrassing for a teenager to receive a text from their mum because nobody needs to know who it's from."

Bob also emphasises: "[What happened to] Milly was the extreme, worst thing that can happen but there are lots of other things that happen along the way, almost every day for some children, like the bully who waits on the corner for them every night."

Meanwhile, of course, the investigation into their daughter's murder continues.

"It's essential that whoever has done this is apprehended. In a practical sense, why wouldn't they do it again?" says Bob. "I know that one day we will get that call," adds Sally.

The Dowlers are an utterly ordinary family - if an extremely close, strong, loving family can be considered "ordinary" these days - to whom something tragically extraordinary has happened. Sally professes to dislike the term "moving on" but some semblance of normality has to return to the Dowlers' lives.

Holidays have been one of the hardest things because the four of us always went away together," says Sally. "Not long before Milly went missing we went to Mexico and we had a fantastic holiday. Milly swam with dolphins. It cost a lot but I'm so glad we did it. Before she went missing we had booked a trip to Portugal-for last summer. The three of us still went but we couldn't bring ourselves to call it a holiday, we called it a 'break'. We took five mobile phones so we could stay in touch with the police."

"We've got another daughter so everything we're doing is not just for ourselves, it's for Gemma," says Bob. "We're very proud of her, she's done really well."

Nearly two weeks ago the Dowlers put on a variety show at the London Palladium to raise money for the fund. One of Milly's favourite pop stars, Will Young, performed. "The lovely thing about the show was that it was full of music and laughter. That was Milly," says Bob. "She loved music - she played the saxophone - and laughing and joking, usually at my expense."

But do they ever feel guilty about laughing, as they often do? "The pain doesn't ever go away but I'm getting used to it. I always feel it first thing in the morning when I wake up - I open my eyes and a little tear runs down my cheek," says Sally. "But I don't feel guilty about laughing because that was one of the best things we always had as a family. So we can't feel guilty - she would want us to laugh."