The first person to hear about Mills’s departure from Little Benty was Platt. Bellfield told her that Mills had suddenly walked out. ‘She’s sick and tired of the women: she knows I have other women.’ But then he added that he really wanted Mills to stay with him because of the children. ‘They’re my kids,’ he said. ‘I love my kids and I want to bath them at night.’
As ever, Bellfield was not telling the entire truth. Another reason for Emma Mills’s departure was his relentless violence.
‘She’s made out that I’m violent,’ Bellfield told Platt.
‘Well are you violent?’ Platt asked.
‘You know me, I’m a big softy,’ he said, ‘but I would never hurt anyone, I only hurt people who deserve to be hurt.’
It was a barefaced lie, but, at the time, Platt believed him.
‘He had never been violent towards me,’ she would recall. ‘He just got very very nasty verbally towards me, like saying he was gonna burn the car and smash the windows. Silly things like that.’
Mills’s departure sent Bellfield into a paroxysm of rage, raising still further his innate hatred for any woman that ‘disrespected’ him. Platt was not to know it, but it was a rage that was to come brutally to the surface in the weeks and months ahead. The FBI’s behavioural psychologists call such an incident that incites violence a ‘stresser’, and there can be little doubt that Mills’s departure with his children from the house at Little Benty turned Bellfield into an even angrier man than he had been in the past.
But Mills was not out of Bellfield’s clutches entirely. She was obliged to allow him to see their children, which he did from the middle of August. There was also the problem that she could not stay at the refuge indefinitely, and so, towards the middle of September 2001, she left and settled in the flat at Collingwood Place in Walton-on-Thames.
The moment that Mills left the Woking refuge Bellfield started to stalk her – shadowing her in his car and then telephoning her mobile phone out of the blue to tell her exactly where she was and what she was doing. It was intrusive and manipulative, and typical of Bellfield’s behaviour, but, tragically, the young woman who had been so brutalized over the past four years was still under his spell. Gradually – inevitably – Bellfield ensnared the young woman and her children back into his clutches. He insisted he would be ‘a different person’, and she watched as his violence towards her did come to an end. Mills was back within his spell.
Bellfield’s violence towards her may have ceased, but the cycle of rage that her departure had initiated for the skin-headed nightclub bouncer was now to take another direction. He had got what he wanted – his partner and their children back – and so the rage he had felt at her loss was now mixed with a brutal arrogance at his success in persuading her to return. It was a lethal mixture, and one which would eventually come to tip him into mindless violence.
Shortly after 11.30 on the evening of Monday, 15 October 2001, just weeks after Bellfield had moved back in with Mills, the police later alleged that he committed his first blitz attack on a young woman that he had never met.
Her name was Anna-Maria Rennie. Slim, blonde-haired and only seventeen years of age at the time, she represented everything that Bellfield fantasized about in a teenage girl, and the police alleged that he came across her near a bus stop on Hospital Bridge Road in Twickenham, barely half a mile from the studio flat that he and Emma Mills had shared in Manor Road and barely a mile from a flat he regularly used on the Oriel Estate in Hanworth. It was the heart of Bellfield’s patch in west London, all of it on just one two-page spread in the London A-Z.
On that particular Monday evening Rennie had been having a row with her boyfriend, Richard Lewison, with whom she was living in a flat in Whitton, just off the A316 Chertsey Road that leads to the M3 motorway. Fiery by nature, she had decided to take herself off for a walk to calm down and left the flat shortly after 11 on that autumn night. It was cool outside, so she had grabbed her coat and flat keys, but not her handbag or any other belongings. She wasn’t planning to be away for ever, she just wanted a bit of space to think.
It was dark but there was plenty of illumination from the street lamps as Rennie came out of her flat in Ross Road, turned left, walked west into Percy Road and then turned left again into Hospital Bridge Road, before crossing the main Chertsey Road and continuing south along the west side of the road where it crosses a bridge over the local River Crane. Just over the bridge was a bus stop, with red plastic seats and a shelter to protect waiting passengers from the rain, and Anna-Maria Rennie sat down. She had been out for about twenty-five minutes and had recovered some of her composure. Besides, it was late and she wanted to get to bed. So she started back towards home.
As she did so, Anna-Maria Rennie looked back and saw a car pull up about 10 feet behind her on her side of the road. A man climbed out of the passenger seat and walked to catch up with her, and she remembered later stopping to have a conversation with him. When she talked to the police about the conversation three years later she thought it might have gone on for as long as twenty minutes, because she was ‘still upset’ and crying about the row with her boyfriend.
At some point towards the end of their chat the man offered her a lift in his car, but she turned it down, telling him that ‘a man of his age’ shouldn’t be offering young girls lifts at that time of night. The man told Rennie that he was only twenty-five, though if this was indeed Levi Bellfield, as the police allege it was, he was actually thirty-three.
At this point the man asked her to look at something he had in his car, and she walked back with him, where he introduced her to the man who was actually driving the car, which she thought, but couldn’t be sure, was a dark-coloured Ford Mondeo. Anna-Maria Rennie couldn’t be sure of the colour because it was dark, but she thought it might have been dark blue or black. After saying hello to the driver, she told the two men that she had to leave and set off back up the east side of Hospital Bridge Road towards Chertsey Road and her flat on the far side.
But she had only walked about 15 or 20 feet when the man who had engaged her in conversation grabbed her from behind in a bear hug with his left hand, while he put his right hand over her mouth and lifted her off the ground completely to carry her back to the car. It was an unprovoked attack on an innocent young woman on a well-lit main road with passing cars and buses, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment. Anna-Maria weighed only 7½ stone, and was thin as a rake, and so it wasn’t difficult for the man, whom she thought was over 6 feet tall and weighed at least 18 stone, to lift her. He certainly didn’t have any difficulty whatever in carrying her to the car.
The seventeen-year-old was petrified, but she wasn’t going to give up without a fight and started kicking and struggling violently. It worked, because about 3 feet from the car she managed to break free from his grip. Scared half to death, she ran into the park beside the River Crane and away from the two men and their dark car.
As she did so the man who had grabbed her shouted ‘whore’ after her, and followed her a little way into the park, but she was running too quickly to be caught by a man of 18 stone and escaped.
It was to be three days before Anna-Maria Rennie reported her attack and the attempted abduction to the police, and she only did so then when a local constable in uniform came to her flat to investigate something else entirely. She told the officer that she had been attacked by a man who said he was twenty-five, had short blond hair and a ‘round face’ that was fat. She also described him as about 6 feet 3 inches in height and with a tattoo on his lower right forearm. Rennie explained that he had been wearing a cap and a white or cream tracksuit and trainers and had a London accent.
Meanwhile Rennie’s boyfriend told the officer that he had briefly gone out to look for her after she had left the flat that night but had given up and gone home. When she got back, he went on, she was ‘distraught and crying’. He tried to cuddle her and help her to get to sleep, but ‘she didn’t manage to’. Apart from that her boyfriend
didn’t remember very much else, perhaps because – as Rennie was to tell the police later – he was smoking cannabis at the time and was a ‘heavy user’.
The police tried to locate the dark Ford Mondeo Rennie she thought she remembered – which Anna-Maria thought might have a licence plate that began L561 – but without success. None of the fifty-four owners of blue Mondeos with that plate were anywhere near Twickenham or Hounslow in October 2001.
It was only after Levi Bellfield’s arrest for the murder of Amélie Delagrange in November 2004 that they discovered that he had access to a number of dark-blue Mondeos at that time. Platt remembered him having not one but two, while a fellow mini-cab driver also recalled him having a Mondeo.
Indeed it wasn’t until the end of March in 2005 that Bellfield, a man with a habit of never driving the same car twice if he could help it, was arrested for the attempted abduction of Anna-Maria Rennie, and it wasn’t until she had identified him in a video identity parade that he was formally interviewed under a police caution at Milton Keynes police station before being formally charged with abduction.
In the words of prosecuting barrister Brian Altman QC to the jury at Bellfield’s trial for Rennie’s abduction in October 2007, ‘Bellfield demonstrated himself quite prepared to approach and attempt to abduct a lone young female at night, albeit on a main road, even when he was in the company of another male.’ In the end, however, the jury at the Old Bailey failed to agree a verdict on Bellfield’s alleged abduction of Anna-Maria Rennie. He was cleared of attacking her.
What the jury did not hear, however, was information that had reached the police from the other man in the car that night – a man so afraid of Bellfield that he was not willing to testify. The man was B— Kingston, one of Bellfield’s drug customers, who had been getting supplies of cannabis from him for a year or more. That night, he told the police in confidence, he was being given a lift home by the bouncer to his house, in what he thought it was a white BMW, not a dark Mondeo. That fact alone cast doubt on his validity as a witness, but he described exactly what happened to Anna-Marie Rennie and could hardly have done so in such detail had he not actually been there.
According to Kingston, Bellfield was driving along Staines Road and had just turned into Hospital Bridge Road when he suddenly told him, ‘I want to talk to that slut,’ and promptly stopped the car. Bellfield jumped out and approached a girl the informant thought was in her ‘early twenties’ near a bus stop, and they had what he called a ‘heated’ discussion. Kingston then saw his drug-dealer ‘grab the girl and manhandle her’ which so upset him that he got out of the car himself to speak to him. Bellfield told him – in no uncertain terms – to mind his own business. Disgusted, Kingston turned on his heel and walked away. By this time the girl had also run away.
A few minutes later Bellfield pulled up beside him in the car and began swearing and shouting at him. The bouncer told him bluntly, at the top of his voice, never to interfere and then drove off, leaving Kingston to walk home. Kingston also told the police that Bellfield had been perfectly calm and cheerful before the attack, but ‘flipped’ as soon as he saw the girl. Most significantly of all, he also told the police that on a number of occasions when he had been in a car with him, Bellfield had demonstrated what the man described as ‘an unhealthy interest’ in schoolgirls.
‘He would wind down the window and shout abuse or obscenities at them’ or ‘he would jump out and speak to them direct’, although the informant insisted he could never hear what was being said.
Just a few months later a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl was to disappear just across the road from a bus stop on the road that leads away from Walton-on-Thames railway station. Her name was Milly Dowler.
9. Vanished into Darkness
‘The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
The morning of Thursday, 21 March 2002 dawned grey and damp in Hersham, one of the leafier south-western suburbs of London, but in a warm house there a family were getting ready for school. The two daughters, the often smiling thirteen-year-old Amanda Dowler – known as Milly – and her elder sister Gemma, who was sixteen, were packing their school bags and getting ready to climb into their mother Sally’s car to drive to Heathside School in Weybridge, where Sally was a teacher and the girls were pupils.
It was a perfectly ordinary morning, on a perfectly normal school day, and both girls kissed their father, Bob, goodbye and disappeared happily with their mother. But what no one knew on that dull Thursday morning was that it would be the last time the Dowler family would ever be together. It was to be the last morning that the Dowler family would see their beloved Milly alive.
At 3.26 that afternoon Milly caught the train home from Weybridge, but instead of travelling through to Hersham, she got off at Walton-on-Thames, just one stop before her own, to share some chips with a group of her friends at the station café. It wasn’t something Milly did every day, but it wasn’t all that unusual either. She was simply one of a group of teenagers enjoying themselves. At 3.47 she borrowed a friend’s mobile phone to call her father and tell him that she would be home in about ‘half an hour’ or so. Then she went back to gossiping with her friends. The chat went on a bit longer than she expected, but, just after 4 that afternoon Milly set off along Station Avenue to walk the half mile or so back to her home.
She never got there.
At about 4.08 on that grey March day Milly disappeared as she walked down the opposite side of the road from the first bus stop in Station Avenue – diagonally across the road from the station. One of her friends was standing at the stop and watched her pass on the other side of the road, but after that no one saw her again.
It was broad daylight. Cars were passing, people were making their way to the station, buses were collecting passengers, but no one saw what happened to the 5-feet-tall girl with brown eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. No one saw her stop to speak to anyone. No one saw her get into a car, or walk into one of the nearby blocks of flats. No one saw anything.
Milly Dowler simply vanished into thin air.
It was a disappearance that shocked the nation, provoking national appeals for information on television, thousands of pages of newsprint, a BBC Crimewatch reconstruction and countless theories. A video of Milly ironing her jeans at home while dancing at the same time became a hit on the internet, as did another of her playing the saxophone. But the publicity and the outcry across the country were to no avail. Milly Dowler had disappeared.
She wasn’t to be seen again for six months, and when she was all that remained of this charming, effervescent teenager with a knack for making friends was her bones.
One man who knew all about Station Avenue in Walton-on-Thames in March 2002 was Levi Bellfield. The reason was simple enough. He was living there at the time with Emma Mills and their two children, Lucy and William. When Mills had left the refuge in Woking, she had moved into a flat that her mother had found for her. It was at 24, Collingwood Place, an unassuming brick-built flat on the ground floor of a low-rise block just off Station Avenue. The flats were constructed around courtyards, with small paths winding between them.
The easiest way to reach the flat on foot is to take the clearly signposted footpath just beside the first bus stop on Station Avenue – where Milly’s friend saw her on that March afternoon – and follow it for about 30 yards, through a group of other flats, until you reach number 24. To drive there you need to go a little further along Station Avenue and turn left into Copenhagen Way, then left again.
Bellfield and Mills had by now reconciled to the point where he had moved some of his clothes and belongings from what Emma called ‘the squat’ of 11, Little Benty into Collingwood Place. They even shared Emma’s Staffordshire bull terrier, called Cheyenne, always known as ‘Chey’. It was, as far as one ever could be with Bellfield’s appetite for different homes and different partners,
a family home. Yet Bellfield did not conduct himself at Collingwood Place like a conventional husband, partner or father, any more than he had done so in their studio flat in Twickenham. He would disappear for hours, even days, at a time going about his ‘business’ in all sorts of borrowed cars and vans, and still keeping Mills as much in the dark about where he was and what he was doing as she had ever been, though he had be sure to keep in touch with her on his mobile phone – his appetite for controlling his female partners hadn’t dimmed.
When she had moved there from the women’s refuge, Mills had taken a six-month lease on Collingwood Place, but in early March had decided that she would go back to Little Benty with him and the children at the end of the lease in early May. She didn’t want to go back to Little Benty straight away, however. She wanted it smartened up a bit. So in the last weeks of March she had planned to do some painting and decorating there to make the house more ‘habitable’ and less of a ‘squat’. For his part Bellfield was perfectly happy with the arrangement, providing it left him free to come and go as he pleased.
On Thursday, 21 March 2002 Bellfield, Mills and their children weren’t actually staying at 24, Collingwood Place, however. They were ‘house-sitting’ for her friend Christine Hawgood, in West Drayton in Middlesex, not far from Heathrow airport and their house at Little Benty, while Hawgood took a short cruise from Portsmouth to Bilbao in Spain and back. She had needed someone to look after her house and dog. Mills seized the opportunity because it meant she could spend time decorating Little Benty before moving back there without the bother of having to drive all the way over there from Walton-on-Thames. Bellfield went with her to Hawgood’s house on Tuesday, 19 March, when Christine left, and was still there on the morning of Thursday, 21 March.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 10