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Girl who dreamed of being Croydon's next top model
Paul Cheston, Evening Standard22 Feb 2008
Sally Anne Bowman had everything to live for. The 18-year-old - who had gone to the same performing arts school as singers Katie Melua and Amy Winehouse - had been offered a modelling contract and had appeared in a leading fashion show.
She dreamed of emulating Kate Moss and appearing on the cover of Vogue.
In an interview, she said: "I would love to be compared with Kate Moss because she is just so amazing. To be where she is one day would be brilliant. I really enjoyed doing the fashion show and I'm looking forward to doing more shows - at the moment I am the happiest girl in the world."
Peter Kaminski, head of Pulse Model Management, had no doubt she was heading for the top. "Sally blew everybody away, the photographers were like bees around a honeypot. She was a natural," he said.
"We believed she was going to be the new Kate Moss - we were putting her into bigger and better things."
Her mother Linda described Sally as a "perfect angel" and her sisters called her "star" because she loved to be the centre of attention.
At 18 she was the youngest of four girls, the baby of the family, and they were fiercely proud of her. She had beaten 700 applicants to a place at the Brit School of Performing Arts in Croydon and had won a modelling competition to become the face of Swatch watches.
She could dance and sing and performed in local pubs and clubs, singing her favourites, My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, and Whitney Houston's Saving All My Love For You.
"We were always on at her to audition for the X-Factor or Stars In Their Eyes," said her sister Nicole, 24. "But she'd say 'I don't want to be famous but I want to be known.' Everyone knows who she is now, for the wrong reason."
Eldest sister Danielle remembers her as "a very girlie girl who loved her pinks and lilacs and always said she wanted to live in a big white house and drive a pink Smart car".
"She was the type of girl who'd take two hours to get ready. She wouldn't go to the supermarket unless her make-up and hair were perfect. Everything had to be just-so." Mrs Bowman, 44, still dabs her daughter's favourite Dolce & Gabbana perfume on her pillow each night so she can "wake up with her".
"You don't have good or bad days - you have a good five minutes," she said.
"That only happens when you're distracted by something like watching the grandchildren playing. I talk to Sally everyday. We say personal things between mother and child.
"I keep expecting Sally to come skipping up the footpath or I hear the phone ringing and hope it is her."
For Sally's father, amicably separated from her mother, the pain is unrelenting.
"She had just turned 18, there will be no 21st birthday, no wedding, no first home, no children and no career," Paul Bowman said. "There is just this unimaginable emptiness and a naked, deep, horrible pain that may well fade in time but will never actually go away."
