The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  The young woman shook her head and said simply, ‘He’s not here.’

  Sutton didn’t believe her and told his officers to search every nook and cranny of the house, before turning their attentions to the garden, which one of them later described as ‘looking like the yard in the BBC television comedy Steptoe and Son’. The search took five minutes and yielded absolutely nothing. In spite of the surveillance, the well-laid plans, the briefing, Bellfield simply wasn’t there.

  Sutton was furious. ‘It was a question of which one of the surveillance team was going to find himself driving a Panda car the next day,’ he was to say later. Even more annoyingly, he also discovered that the other six teams had also drawn a blank. None of them had located Bellfield. Their suspect was nowhere to be found.

  Exasperated, Sutton decided to launch a search of one or two of the hotels that he knew Bellfield sometimes frequented on the edge of Heathrow airport. There had been reports that he had sometimes taken young women to the Premier Inn and the Ibis hotels that overlooked the runways for sex. It was a long shot, but it was worth a try. Sutton called one of the other teams back from their search and started for the airport perimeter road, leaving one of his most experienced sergeants at Little Benty with the angry Emma Mills and her upset children.

  But by nine o’clock that morning, even that extra search had drawn a blank. Bellfield wasn’t at any of the airport hotels, and the discovery left Sutton and his team anxious that they had let a man they thought capable of murder slip through their fingers.

  ‘We had lost him and we couldn’t understand why,’ he was to say later. ‘It was an absolute mystery. The surveillance had been right, he couldn’t have known that we were coming, and still we couldn’t track him down.’

  It was then that old-fashioned police work kicked in again, just as it had done in tracing the suspect white Ford Courier. As Sutton was driving past Heathrow after the futile search for Bellfield, his mobile phone rang. It was the experienced sergeant he had left at Little Benty.

  ‘You won’t believe it, guv’nor,’ his sergeant told him. ‘Bellfield’s here. Emma’s just told me that he’s hiding in the attic.’

  Sutton was amazed. ‘How did he manage that?’

  ‘Apparently as soon as he heard us at the door he jumped out of bed stark naked, ran out into the hallway, jumped on to a chest of drawers pushed open the trapdoor to the attic, lifted himself up and then shut the trapdoor behind him. It’s why we couldn’t find him.’

  The other reason, of course, was that his partner Emma Mills had told DCI Sutton that Bellfield wasn’t there, when he was all the time. The sergeant was a wise old officer, however, and hadn’t taken her denial at face value. After his colleagues had left for their futile search of airport hotels, he had had a cup of tea with the young woman and her children in their kitchen and explained to her exactly why they were so anxious to interview the man she had been with for the past nine years.

  ‘When I told her we were looking at him for the death of the young French girl on Twickenham Green she sort of changed her mind,’ he told Sutton, ‘and whispered that he was hiding in the attic.’

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t try to go up there,’ Sutton told his sergeant, mindful of the fact that they were searching for a man they suspected of hitting a woman on the head with a hammer without a moment’s compunction, and only too aware that the only way into the attic for his officer was through the trapdoor. ‘If you go up there you’ll have to stick your head through first,’ Sutton told him, ‘and I can’t take that risk.’

  No matter how anxious he may have been to get Bellfield into custody, Sutton wasn’t willing to jeopardize the safety of one of his officers. He decided that he was going to get hold of one of the police dog teams that had been allocated to the raids and ask one of the handlers to push open the hatch with his hands and throw his police dog up into the attic to flush Bellfield out. Turning his own car round to go back to Little Benty, Sutton called his dog team and explained what he needed, but no sooner had he done so than his mobile rang again. It was his sergeant.

  ‘Don’t worry, guv,’ he told him. ‘I’ve got him. He’s in custody.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’ Sutton asked.

  ‘I got bored with waiting, guv’nor, so I got on to the chest of drawers myself and pushed open the trapdoor and hauled myself up there.’

  There was no blow to the head. Indeed, when the sergeant climbed up into the attic, Bellfield was nowhere to be seen. It took the sergeant some time to find him. The giant bouncer had hidden himself underneath the yellow fibreglass roof insulation that was laid between the attic beams and across the ceilings of the bedrooms below. He had completely covered his 20-stone frame with the 2-inch thick material, in a desperate attempt to make sure the police didn’t see him even if one of them did take the trouble to poke his head through the trapdoor and look into the attic. After a few minute’s searching, however, Sutton’s sergeant spotted a large lump in the roof insulation and peeled it back to reveal a distinctly embarrassed Bellfield – naked and noticeably scratching himself after spending four hours under fibreglass.

  After reminding him of his rights, the sergeant then accompanied his prisoner back down through the trapdoor. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Bellfield shouted him in his squeaky, strangely unthreatening voice. ‘This is all some kind of terrible mistake. I don’t know anything about this woman Amélie, whatever her name is, and I want a lawyer.’

  Bellfield’s protestations made no difference; he was under arrest in connection with the murder of Amélie Delagrange, and there was no wriggling out of it. But it was only after the officer was confident that the arrest had been correctly carried out under the strict terms of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act that the sergeant allowed Bellfield to find a pair of blue tracksuit bottoms, a white T-shirt and a pair of trainers to wear. Emma Mills had already told him that her partner never wore underwear.

  By the time a smiling DCI Sutton arrived back to Little Benty shortly after 9 on what was now a clear, bright November morning, Bellfield was sitting at the kitchen table in handcuffs. Not that he was altogether repentant: almost the first words he uttered to Sutton were: ‘I want a lawyer.’ Bellfield even named a solicitor in Woking he had in mind. It was someone he had dealt with in the past, and the detective had no alternative but to agree immediately to the request. It was to be the first of a string of delays, obfuscations and refusals to collaborate that Bellfield would inflict on Sutton and his squad in the weeks and months to come. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he would tell them time after time. It was a barefaced lie, but never once would the truth come from the mouth of the suspect himself.

  2. Innumerable Questions

  ‘Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse.’

  John Milton, Lycidas

  In spite of his muscle-bound 20-stone frame; his 19½-inch neck and hands the size of dinner plates, Levi Bellfield didn’t look in the least intimidating as he was led from his home at number 11, Little Benty to the waiting police car outside. In place of his customary belligerence there was a look of embarrassed, meek self-pity on his face as a uniformed officer put his hand on the suspect’s head and bent him forward into the rear of the red-and-white car with its flashing blue lights.

  To the watching neighbours, Bellfield looked pale and drawn as the police car accelerated out of the tangled streets of the estate and down towards the massive roundabouts that make up the spur of the M4 motorway that leads to Heathrow and its terminals. Followed by a second unmarked police car, he was swept down towards the airport at full speed, while in the back Bellfield rocked back and forth on the spot, as he did so often when he was anxious.

  Bellfield was not being driven back to Hounslow police station, where the double murder squad had gathered in the morning chill more than six hours earlier; instead he was being taken to the newly constructed fortress of Heathrow police station on the airport’s northern perimeter with i
ts view of the departing jet airliners. Heathrow police station is one of the few within the Metropolitan Police area with sufficient security to contain a Category A suspect like Bellfield – that is, someone who is suspected of a major crime like murder. DCI Colin Sutton had arranged with the custody officers at Heathrow that he would bring his prisoner there before he had even set out on the raids to locate him.

  White-faced and clearly frightened, the handcuffed Bellfield was helped out of the police car in the Heathrow station’s yard and ushered into the custody suite, where he was officially entered as a remand prisoner who had been arrested for, but not charged with, the murder of Amélie Delagrange. At that stage neither Colin Sutton nor any of his fellow officers had any certain knowledge whatever that their prisoner might well have committed more equally heinous crimes.

  ‘To be honest he looked rather cowed,’ one of the officers was to confess to his colleagues later, ‘certainly not the big man he thought he was.’ Bellfield’s handcuffs were removed, and he was ushered into a clean, new cell, complete with its own aluminium toilet, and the custody sergeant was instructed to keep a close eye on the prisoner. He was to wait while the murder squad decided on its interrogation team for their new prisoner, and which officers would be responsible for his interviews.

  It was just as well that the custody officers had been told to keep a close watch on their new charge, for it was only a matter of minutes after he was first placed in a cell that they caught Bellfield in a crude attempt to commit suicide by wrapping the laces of his trainers around his neck and then thrusting his head into the toilet bowl. The custody officers intervened before he could do himself any harm, but the bungled suicide attempt convinced DCI Sutton that the safest thing would be for the police to take him to the nearby Hillingdon hospital for a complete medical check-up. It would delay his interrogation, but better safe than sorry, and besides it would also allow time for Bellfield’s solicitor to arrive at the Heathrow station to be present at the first interviews.

  It was well into the afternoon on that clear blue November day in 2004 before Bellfield returned to the Heathrow station with the officers who had accompanied him to the hospital. The doctors at Hillingdon had declared him fit enough to be questioned, although they had cautioned that he should be supervised carefully because of what they described as a ‘comparatively fragile state of mind’.

  Not that Bellfield was made to feel entirely comfortable on his return to Heathrow. He was still suffering from the fact that he had spent several hours naked under the fibreglass in his attic, with the result that his body had become itchy all over. In fact it wasn’t until the following day that he was finally allowed a shower by the custody team, some twenty-seven hours after he had emerged from beneath the scratchy yellow fibreglass.

  So it was that, on the afternoon of 22 November 2004, Bellfield began the first of what would be a long series of interviews by officers in the interrogation suite at Heathrow, accompanied by his solicitor. Not once did he admit a thing. He firmly denied any knowledge whatever of the killing of the French student Amélie Delagrange, or owning the white Ford Courier van P610 XCN that was seen on CCTV in the area on the night of 19 August that year. Indeed he fiercely denied ever owning any van at all. At turns both wheedling and arrogant, Bellfield deflected every question about Amélie’s murder on that August evening just three months earlier.

  ‘I don’t own a white van.’

  ‘I wasn’t there.’

  ‘You’ve made a mistake.’

  As time passed, however, Bellfield became increasingly belligerent.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he shouted at his police interrogators across the table in the interview room at Heathrow police station. Time after time, throughout that day and the next, he firmly insisted, ‘It must have been someone else.’ No matter how politely they asked, ‘Were you in the pub that night, Lee? Which pub was it? You can tell us that surely?’ their suspect became ever angrier. As DCI Colin Sutton was to remember afterwards, ‘He just denied everything, every single thing.’

  But the police weren’t just interested in Bellfield. They were also about to question his partner, Emma Mills, the young woman who had originally covered for him when he had climbed up into the attic at Little Benty. Her interviews were to form the first turning point in the case against the nightclub bouncer with a taste for teenage girls. Before they could begin, however, the police hit a legal problem. By coincidence, Emma Mills asked if she could be joined at her formal interviews by exactly the same solicitor that Bellfield had already chosen. The reason she gave was simple. She felt confidence in the woman, whom she’d met two years before when she had taken refuge from Bellfield in a hostel for battered women in Woking and taken out a restraining order to prevent him seeing her. Under the law, the same solicitor couldn’t represent both Bellfield and the woman who had born him three children, and so it was decided that Mills should have the right to her first choice, while Bellfield would, instead, be represented by the firm of solicitors on call to Heathrow police station that day.

  The change was made, and the interviews with Bellfield resumed, but now – on the advice of his new solicitors – he suddenly resorted to announcing, ‘No comment’ in answer to every question the police put to him, no matter how commonplace.

  ‘Do you own any cars, Lee?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Do you sometimes live at 39, Crosby Close on the Oriel Esate in Hanworth?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Have you ever worked as a wheel-clamper?’

  ‘No comment.’

  As the questioning went on, Bellfield’s refusal even to look at the detectives who were sitting across the interrogation table from him became ever more marked. He would turn to face his solicitor, then turn his chair around completely so that the officers were addressing his back. It was a display of arrogance that was eventually to find its way on to YouTube, by way of Romanian television, where his flat refusal to say anything but ‘No comment’ become an unlikely hit.

  In stark contrast, his partner Emma Mills was telling the police everything they wanted to know – and more, far more. She was to reveal the truth about the man she had spent the past nine years of her life with. In particular she was to tell them that Bellfield’s crimes were not restricted to murder.With tears in her eyes the young brunette told the police that the man she had shared her adult life with was, in fact, a sexual sadist and predator, who had violently raped her on a number of occasions. She also told them that he had an appetite for videotaping sex and dealing in drugs. It was the first time that the double murder squad realized that the man sitting in the custody suite of Heathrow police station was a great deal more dangerous than they even they had first imagined, a man not simply capable of cold-blooded murder but also rape.

  As the hours slowly passed the detectives gently peeled back the layers of deception and deceit that Bellfield had wrapped so carefully around his adult life for more than fifteen years. The process revealed the ugly reality of the man beneath. Indeed, as Emma Mills talked to them in the days after her partner’s arrest they realized that they could well be dealing with someone capable of serial murder.

  ‘At first we really didn’t know about the other crimes,’ DCI Sutton was to admit later. ‘It was only after we started interviewing Emma that the full extent of what Bellfield was capable of became clear.’

  The brutal reality began to dawn as officers from the murder squad began to interview the white-faced mother of three, who had first encountered Bellfield as a nightclub bouncer at a club called Rocky’s in Cobham, Surrey, when she was an impressionable seventeen-year-old. The slight, shy teenager who had attended Trinity School in Esher and ‘wouldn’t say “boo” to a goose’ grew into a headstrong young woman who would follow Bellfield to the ends of the earth – no matter how badly he treated her. Shortly after they had met, Bellfield had brought Emma home to her mother’s house in the early hours of the morning after she had had too much to dri
nk and stayed the night. And so started their relationship together.

  Emma’s revelations in those last days of November 2004 would come to transform the police’s attitude to the burly nightclub bouncer. ‘We began to think we had something else on our hands altogether,’ DCI Sutton said later.

  The grim reality was that the murder squad was confronting a man who could well be both a serial killer, a serial rapist and a kidnapper – for Emma Mills was to tell them in great detail about the day that Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler had disappeared just yards from the flat that she was then sharing with Bellfield.

  The suspicion that had been lingering at the back of DCI Sutton’s mind since he had initiated the round-the-clock surveillance on Bellfield back on 10 November – that his suspect might also have had something to do with Milly’s disappearance – began to harden into reality as the police’s conversations with Emma Mills continued, even though at that stage they were only investigating the murder of Amélie Delagrange.

  What was not in doubt to the police was that they were dealing with a violent, sexually aggressive, domineering man with a voracious appetite for sex with young women as well as a desire to maintain multiple female partners at the same time – and to have children with each and every one of them. But an even more terrifying portrait also began to emerge – of a man who could control the women in his life to such an extraordinary extent that they would seldom complain about his brutal behaviour, never condemn his blatant womanizing, never run from his persistent violence or even report him to the police for raping them repeatedly, sometimes at knifepoint. Bellfield was a sexual predator, the detectives discovered, who kept woman after woman in his thrall, almost no matter how he treated them. Almost impossible though it might be for the police to conceive, he turned his female partners into virtual slaves, prepared to do anything that he suggested, to accept whatever depravity he loaded upon them, who never, ever, complained to the police or social services about his repeated violent domestic abuse. His was a reign of terror that a string of women had allowed themselves to put up with for decades, a habit of violence that none of them would ever fully recover from.