21 July 2022 Fact checks

Murder of grandmother didn’t take place in UK, or in 2022

By Sarah Turnnidge • 2 mins

What was claimed

Dorothy Dow, 83, was murdered in the UK in 2022 and “the national media was silent”.

Our verdict

This is false. Ms Dow was murdered by a group of people who burgled her home in 2016 in the US. Her death was reported on by national media in the US at the time.

A post on Facebook details the murder of an 83-year-old woman and the custody pictures of five people, with the caption “happens in UK 2022”.

The post describes a violent attack on Dorothy Dow, 83, in her own home, giving details of her injuries and adding that she “died in agony weeks later”. 

It also says “the National media was silent”.  

This is a real case, and the five people pictured were all sentenced for Ms Dow’s murder and home invasion. 

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However, it did not take place this year or in the UK, as stated in the caption. The crime took place in 2016 in Georgia, USA. 

It’s not the first time Ms Dow’s murder has been the focus of misinformation online. The fact checking site Snopes wrote in 2016 that a number of websites had falsely claimed that the crime was racially motivated, describing it as “gang-related”.

Ms Dow’s grandson, Grant Dow, told Snopes: “It had nothing to do with race. It just happened [the suspects] were black, and my grandmother happened to be white.”

The murder and the trial received extensive coverage in the US, both in local papers and national publishers such as Fox News, and was mentioned by Mail Online. 

Image courtesy of Scott Rodgerson

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Social media

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Ms Dow was murdered in 2016 in the US.