The girls on their way to the station who use the alley every morning and afternoon on their way to and from school might never think so, but it is a perfect place for a stalker to seek his prey, the ideal spot to watch from the shadows and pounce on an innocent victim. And it was in this alleyway that Levi Bellfield practised doing exactly that.
The reason was clear enough. No matter how many women might fling themselves at him, Bellfield was never satisfied. He might have had a harem of partners, but he wanted fresh blood, young women he could use and discard, women who would not answer back, not tell their parents, or the police – in short women who would become his victims. And none were more desirable than schoolgirls. To Bellfield they were all ‘begging for it’.
Perhaps it can all be traced back to his adolescent infatuation with the girl who had become his first fantasy, Patsy Morris. Did she perhaps reject this once spindly, uncertain traveller’s son with the domineering mother and refuse to accept his immature fumblings? Did he then lose his temper with her so dramatically that he couldn’t control himself? And did that cost her her life? Did she become what the behavioural psychologists now describe as the ‘trigger’ to his violent, obsessive behaviour towards schoolgirls and young blonde women? No one can be certain, but what is without doubt is that Bellfield rapidly developed an obsession with very young women that was to remain a central part of his character throughout his adult life, a part that would shock his female partners – not least Jo Collings.
After Bellfield’s arrest on suspicion of murder in November 2004, Collings told the police how horrified she had been when she had first encountered his appetite for schoolgirls. She explained that he took a particular interest in the girls from Gumley House Convent School in Worton Road in Twickenham.
‘He would look at them as we were driving along when the schools would turn out and he’d be really dirty,’ Collings would explain. ‘He used to call them dirty little whores and slags and they all needed fucking because they had little skirts on.’ Then he would demand that she dress up as one herself. When she said no, ‘I’d get a really good hiding because I refused point blank to do it,’ she added. ‘I said, “You’re sick,” and he went mad, the usual stuff: screaming, shouting, kicking and punching.’
That wasn’t all. Bellfield also wanted her to walk up and down their bedroom in school uniform carrying a vibrator and then use it on herself as he watched so that he could videotape her doing it.
Girls from a number of the local schools regularly used the alleyway at the back of the Collingses’ house as a shortcut to the railway station at Strawberry Hill, and it was there that Bellfield would lie in wait for them. Originally, it may only have been as a voyeur, a stalker who wanted to stoke up the fantasies he carried from his own schooldays in Isleworth – and the image of Patsy Morris – but as time passed so his desires grew darker and more dangerous.
Jo Collings certainly noticed the change in him, so much so that, towards the end of 1996, she tackled him about his habit of ‘going out for a walk’ after dark in the winter, when the alley behind the house was cloaked in shadows.
‘It would normally be 7 o’clock or so,’ Collings would remember, ‘and he would be wearing dark clothing – the dark jacket that my dad owned and dark top, black nylon bomber jacket, black Reebok jogging trousers, trainers and maybe dealer boots.’ Bellfield always went out through the garage at the side of the house, where he kept the dark jacket. Sheila Collings had given him his own set of keys. ‘I thought he was out seeing another woman,’ Jo Collings was to explain, ‘so I confronted him.’
Sobbing like a child, Bellfield sat on the end of their bed and told her, ‘I’ve got a problem.’
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I’ll take you and show you.’
Bellfield led her to the alleyway at the bottom of the garden, and together they walked along it until it veered slightly to the left, where there was a gap by a tree.
‘That’s where I wait for girls – victims,’ he told her.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ she screamed.
Bellfield told her that he had nearly caught one girl, but that he had been disturbed by someone appearing out of the gloom further down the alley. Collings told him bluntly that he was ‘sick and needed help’. But she didn’t tell anyone else about the conversation. She didn’t even tell her mother, or the police, though she knew in her heart, as she was to admit later, that he was ‘waiting to attack a girl’.
That wasn’t the only confession that Bellfield made to Collings. At one point during their four-year relationship he also bragged to her that he had raped a disabled girl on a car bonnet in the car park of the nightclub he was working at as a bouncer: ‘I lifted her out of the wheelchair,’ he told her with pride in his voice. On another occasion he told her that he had given a girl a lift home when he was a doorman at Rocky’s in Cobham and that he had ripped her tights and her clothes.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘I wanted it so I took it,’ he replied. ‘I raped her.’
Again Collings meekly accepted Bellfield’s explanation that he ‘felt guilty’ about it.
Perhaps she thought he was exaggerating about his sexual conquests – though that is a little hard to believe, as she later admitted to the police that she thought he was ‘shagging’ one of his cousins when his former partner Becky Wilkinson was in hospital having his daughter. Even when Collings was confronted by the clearest evidence of his violent sexual attitude towards women she did nothing to stop him. For it wasn’t just Bellfield’s appetite for the alleyway behind her house that pointed to his desires, there was also the three-quarter-length jacket that she discovered in the family garage towards the end of 1997.
‘The pocket was cut away from the inside,’ she explained later, ‘and in it was a nine-and-a-half-inch bladed kitchen knife and a full-faced balaclava with only eye and mouth holes.’ It would have concealed Bellfield’s face completely.
That wasn’t all Collings discovered in what she was later to describe as his ‘rape kit’. There were also a number of issues of Cosmopolitan and other women’s magazine in a black bin liner. The face of each and every one of the blonde models in the magazines had been slashed with a knife. ‘Not the dark-haired ones,’ she was to remember: ‘Only the blondes.’
When she challenged Bellfield, he confirmed without a moment’s hesitation that he would go out into the alleyway behind their house wearing the dark coat and balaclava to wait for women. He calmly told Collings that he ‘wanted to hurt them, kill them or stab them or rape them’.
But Collings didn’t tell the police. One reason was that, after she had discovered the mutilated photographs, Bellfield had beaten her with exceptional ferocity. ‘He forced my face over the pictures of the blondes shouting, “I fucking hate blondes, they should all fucking die,” ’ she said. Collings also confessed later that he had told her: ‘I hate women.’
But even that extreme reaction from the man who was sharing her house didn’t convince her to take any official action. She made no anonymous call to Crimestoppers, no furtive call to the local police – nothing at all. ‘I was still sort of with him at this time,’ she was to say years later. ‘Even though he was with Emma by then, he was still controlling me; you weren’t allowed to have a life.’
Time and again Collings forgave Bellfield – in spite of the beatings, the cigarette burns and the relentless abuse, in spite of the fact that he took cocaine and smoked heroin when he was with her, and in spite of the distinctly strange fact that he would repeatedly burn brand new clothes that he had only worn once without explaining why. Nothing provoked her to blow the whistle on this violent, sadistic and abusive man.
It was only after Bellfield’s arrest that Collings was able to tell the Sun newspaper that she believed he had attacked more than 100 women, sometime two in one evening, and had described blonde girls as ‘evil fucking bitches who must die’. She also admitted that he would regula
rly boast to her when he got home in the early hours of the morning about having ‘another little slut’ in the back of his car that night, and would force her to get out of bed when they were together and go and ‘scrub out’ the car he had been using so that ‘there was no trace of what he had done’.
Despite this, Collings was reluctant to give evidence against Bellfield in court for fear of the reaction of his family. ‘They will think that the fact I am prepared to give evidence is disloyal,’ she explained, ‘and I will feel very uncomfortable with all of them watching me.’ However, she would also admit that having to stand up in a court and ‘tell people about what he did to me and what I suffered is really embarrassing’, adding, perhaps a little late in the day, ‘I am ashamed that I let it go on so long.’
Collings’s silence speaks volumes about the reign of terror that Bellfield waged over his female partners over the years – clearly backed up by his family and friends. What began as infatuation with the man who could be a ‘Prince Charming’ turned within weeks to fear and trembling at what he was capable of and what he might do. Just as it was true for Becky Wilkinson, so it was true for Collings. Both women would put up with the worst forms of humiliation in order to keep him and to survive.
One means Bellfield used to control them both was by keeping them constantly on edge. As Collings once vividly put it, ‘You never know when he’s going to come home what mood he’ll be in. You live your whole life all the time on your nerves and in fear of him coming in and being off his head or even normal.’
That wasn’t all. Bellfield would also routinely humiliate his female partners, forcing them into a level of subservience that belittled them to such a degree that they lost the ability to judge what was normal and what was not. One horrifying example concerns Bellfield’s toilet habits, probably bred by his mother’s habit of spoiling of her youngest son. After his arrest Collings told the police, ‘He even made me wipe his arse when he had been to the toilet, I would have to sit on the bath next to him while he was on the toilet.’ The degradation did not stop there. ‘If I went to the toilet I didn’t lock the door, as I wasn’t allowed to’ she confessed.
It wasn’t even just his bathroom habits that his partners had to accept. It was also his serial infidelity, and his desperate desire to keep in contact with the mothers of his other children.
To an outsider it would have seemed that Bellfield was a man completely out of control, and growing more so by the day. He had started drinking strong lager in the mornings and then continuing to drink for the rest of the afternoon and evening, while adding cocaine to the mix as his day progressed and even – according to Collings – ‘smoking heroin’ on a regular basis. Bellfield was also still having regular brushes with the police – not only for his persistent harassment of Becky Wilkinson but also for a variety of minor offences, including common assault outside the nightclubs he worked at, where he would get carried away in fights with the customers. All the while, Bellfield was still ‘ducking and diving’, driving a string of cars and vans, all different, all for short periods, to throw any police officer who might begin to take an interest in him off the scent. He would scuttle through the back alleys and byways of west London in vehicles of all shapes and sizes, always on the lookout for young women, but never staying still long enough to attract too much attention.
Throughout the mid 1990s, when Bellfied was nominally with Jo Collings and their two children, he would flit from place to place, never content to stay anywhere for very long, always moving, always prepared to keep everyone around him on their toes and off guard, always unpredictable.
Bellfield was not a man to stray far from his familiar stamping grounds in west London. He took pride in ‘knowing all the back doubles’, as Collings explained later, and a similar pride in the fact that all his partners knew each other – Collings knew Wilkinson, and in 1996 both women knew that he had embarked on a relationship with the timid and impressionable Emma Jane Mills.
Like a Moorish sultan, Bellfield liked to surround himself with a contemporary version of a harem, where his women were always available to him, even if he chose to keep them in fear rather than in comfort. He was a creature of habit, and of limited horizons: his world was remarkably small. He liked it that way. Everyone knew everyone else – especially the girls in the nightclub queues.
Jo Collings, for example, first met Emma Mills at Rocky’s in Cobham. ‘She was very young, and I remember her as a very quiet, sensible, little well-spoken girl,’ Collings said later. ‘I remember she always used to drink water.’ But it wasn’t long after the birth of Collings’s first child with Bellfield in February 1996 that she learned Mills had become another of Bellfield’s conquests.
‘I knew he was seeing someone,’ Collings would admit, ‘but I didn’t know who. He used to say he was going fishing. I caught him out and he finally admitted it. I was fuming and I was angry with both of them. I think she was scared of me because of what she had done. I did shout and swear at her but I never hit her.’
The relationships between the women in his life added fuel to Bellfield’s growing sense of control and power. That power was one of the reasons for the ‘rape kit’ that he kept in the Collingses’ garage in Strawberry Hill. In his own mind he was creating a fantasy about what he could do to every impressionable young woman that crossed his path, a fantasy that he became ever more anxious to carry out.
For the moment the possibility of abducting a complete stranger remained just that – a fantasy – something to sustain him in the darker hours of the night when he drove around west London, stalking potential targets. His business was drugs and violence, and providing them to the highest bidder. As his relationship with Collings waned in 1996, and his closeness to Emma Mills deepened, so his drug-dealing grew apace, extending from ecstasy tablets and cannabis to cocaine and heroin for a more select group than simply the girls in the nightclub queue, a client base that could afford higher prices.
In turn the drugs lead to other things – notably violence, and the use of weapons. If there was a fight at one of his nightclubs Bellfield would be the first to get involved. If there was someone who needed to be intimidated – for whatever reason – he was happy to help his friends do exactly that. His steroid-created frame, honed with a little bare-knuckle boxing, was enough to intimidate, but with the help of a baseball bat, a brass knuckle-duster and a knife he became a potentially terrifying figure, especially when he had been taking drugs himself.
Bellfield liked nothing more than to cast himself as a ‘bit of a gangster’, someone the local girls would describe as a ‘bad boy’ with a bit of a nervous giggle when they talked about him. They knew and he knew he was dangerous, and that added to his attraction. He relished the frisson his reputation created.
No one was more impressionable than seventeen-year-old Surrey schoolgirl Emma Jane Mills – who knew he was living with Jo Collings, just as she knew he was still in contact with his previous partner Becky Wilkinson. Indeed, she was to admit a decade later: ‘In the beginning of our relationship together, when Levi was living with Jo, I sometimes dropped him off at Becky’s house. Levi told me that there was nothing in it and that they were now friends.’
By July 1997, however, when Jo Collings gave birth to her child with Bellfield – a boy they named Henry – their relationship was all but over. The rows had become relentless, and he rarely stayed at the Strawberry Hill house, preferring to disappear to Emma Mills or a flat in Hounslow that he also had the use of.
Sheila Collings had watched her daughter’s decline as the years with Bellfield had worn on, and though she had never actually witnessed his violence towards her daughter she was certain it was happening. ‘There were occasions,’ she would explain, ‘when it was obvious that Johanna had marks and bruises, which she tried to hide. The problem was she wouldn’t talk about things.’
As a consequence, Mrs Collings had to watch her daughter change from a ‘lively happy girl to a scared nervous one’, trapped wit
h a man who liked nothing more than to boast about the fights he had had and how he had just beaten someone up.
It was into this maelstrom that the naive and impressionable Emma Mills walked as a teenager – only too keen to demonstrate to herself, and to her mother, that she was now a fully grown woman, and use her new relationship with Bellfield to prove it.
By the autumn of 1997, Mills was living with Bellfield in a small flat in a Victorian villa in Manor Road, Twickenham, not far from the Green. It was there that Mills got used to her new partner’s attitude to his children, and his ex-partners. At that point Mills was six months pregnant with their first child, Lucy, who would be born just before Christmas that year – barely six months after Jo Collings had given birth to her own new son with the nightclub bouncer.
Bellfield’s appetite for polygamy and fathering children with whichever partner happened to be dominant at that particular moment was by now well established. The overlapping children tied the women to him securely. They proved he was a man, and that he could conduct himself in any way he chose, when he chose. His children with Becky Wilkinson, Jo Collings and now Emma Mills not only meant that the women knew all about each other, it also, in turn, lead to tensions which none of them could, or chose to, escape, as well as to a series of extraordinary arrangements for allowing the children to see their father.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 7