But on that particular March day, Bellfield too disappeared.
As Mills would tell the police three years later, ‘Levi normally rings me every hour or every couple of hours just to say “hello” or to say he would be back at a certain time.’ But on that particular March day he didn’t. Bellfield simply left Christine’s house in the middle of the morning and didn’t appear again until late in the evening. And he didn’t phone her once.
When Bellfield left he was driving Mills’s red Daewoo car, with the registration number of N503 GLT. At the time it was the only one he had the use of, or so Mills believed, but that didn’t mean he behaved in an exactly normal way. Just as he did throughout their years together Bellfield would seldom park the car outside where they lived, preferring to leave it ‘round the corner’. In this instance that meant that Bellfield left the Daewoo on the main road or on Copenhagen Way and walked through to the flat, which took ‘about a minute’, according to Mills. ‘You could see the main road from the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom,’ she said later, even though the flat was protected from the road by a hedge.
‘I remember that day,’ said Mills, ‘because I was trying to ring him all day from Christine’s house, as I needed some money to go to the shop to get some milk and stuff. He had my car, and his phone was off all the time. I just thought it was weird … I thought he was up to something because he had turned his phone off. I thought he was in the pub or with another woman.’
That afternoon Mills took the dogs for a walk and kept on trying to get hold of Bellfield, but she didn’t manage to. In fact it wasn’t until 10.30 that evening that Bellfield reappeared at Christine’s house, and when he got there he was wearing an entirely different set of clothes from the ones that he had left in that morning. Mills couldn’t remember exactly what her partner had been wearing that morning, ‘but I just knew he had changed,’ she explained. ‘He was wearing a white shellsuit-type top, I don’t think it had a hood, and I think it may have had a stripe down the arm, maybe red or blue … I recognized the top as I had seen him wear it before.’
The fact that Bellfield had changed his clothes convinced the young mother that he must have been back to their flat in Collingwood Place during the day to change, because the clothes he was wearing that evening weren’t among the ones he had taken with him for their few days of house-sitting for her friend Christine.
‘He only had a couple of bits of clothing at Christine’s,’ she said, ‘but not that top. That’s why I remember and that’s why I was suspicious.’
Mills had every reason to be – her partner’s appetite for sex with young impressionable women, not to mention his ongoing relationships with Becky Wilkinson and Jo Collings, confirmed his lack of respect for monogamy. It was a convention that didn’t apply to him. Mills also knew that Bellfield had the keys to Collingwood Place, as there was only one set, which were on her key ring, which also contained the keys to her Daewoo. ‘Nobody else had access to the flat,’ she was to explain, and Mills had certainly not been there herself, as she didn’t have any transport.
‘When he came home I could tell that he had had a drink,’ she was to say. ‘He wasn’t drunk, but I could see that his eyes were bloodshot.’
But she didn’t ask him where he had been. ‘If you knew Levi, you don’t really ask questions,’ she said. ‘If you do, it’s none of my business … He didn’t like me asking him questions about where he had been, but then he never liked me asking questions.’
Bellfield had brought home a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal for them and a few cans of lager, which they shared before going to bed.
Meanwhile back in their neat, tidy house in Hersham Milly Dowler’s parents were beside themselves with worry. Milly had phoned her father just after 3.45, but there had been no sign of her since. So at 7 that evening Bob Dowler had phoned the police. Rather than fobbing him off with the idea that Milly might have gone to stay with a friend, or even that she had run away because of an argument at home, Surrey Police acted with commendable speed and rapidly launched a full-scale missing persons inquiry, later to be codenamed Operation Ruby. It was to become the most expensive single operation in their history, costing some £6 million. Police family liaison officers were despatched to speak to Bob and Sally Dowler, as well as Milly’s sister Gemma, and plans were laid to launch a full-scale hunt as soon as it was light the following morning. No time was to be lost in tracking down the missing teenager.
In the early hours of the following morning, back in Christine Hawgood’s house in West Drayton, however, things were about to take an unexpected turn. Between three and four o’clock in the morning, Mills woke up to find Bellfield getting dressed.
‘I thought, that’s peculiar,’ she remembered later; she asked him what he was doing.
‘I’m going to go back to the flat,’ he told her, ‘because I’m going to have a lay-in.’
Mills couldn’t understand why on earth Bellfield had to get out of bed in the middle of the might, because he could just as well have had ‘a lay-in’ at the house. But he wasn’t to be dissuaded. So, at around 4 in the morning of Friday, 22 March Bellfield gave Mills a kiss, told her that he would call her when he woke up and left. She didn’t notice what clothes he put on, because she was half asleep, but she did notice that he took their Staffordshire bull terrier with him.
Remembering the events almost three years later, Emma Mills couldn’t recall exactly when Bellfield had returned to Christine’s house the following day, although she was sure that they had slept there together on the Friday night because Christine was coming back from her trip to Bilbao on the Saturday evening, and Mills wanted to tidy the house for her.
Then things took another strange turn. Bellfield suddenly announced to his young partner that he wanted to go straight back to Little Benty rather than return to stay Collingwood Place – even though they had planned to stay on at Walton-on-Thames for another month.
Confused, and surprised, by his sudden decision on the Saturday morning of 23 March, Mills rushed around clearing up Christine’s house before Bellfield gave her a lift back to Walton-on-Thames so that she could collect her own and their children’s clothes. He dropped her off outside the flat but didn’t go in with her. Once again he just disappeared, as he had done so often in the past.
Inside the flat Mills was in for another surprise.
‘When I went into my bedroom I saw that all the sheets were gone off my bed,’ she would remember. ‘This included the duvet cover, the sheet and the pillow cases. They were all gone, and there was just the duvet in the middle of the bed … I thought at the time that he had had a woman in the flat so I rang him on his mobile.’
‘Oh sorry, Em,’ he replied, ‘the dog had an accident. I’ve chucked it all.’
Mills didn’t believe the story for a second. It was her dog as much as Bellfield’s and it was house trained. Besides, there weren’t any marks or stains on the mattress that would have shown that the dog had made any kind of mess the bed. Bellfield also told her that he had thrown the sheets, pillow cases and duvet cover out with the rubbish, but when she went out to look for them they weren’t there, though she did think the rubbish bins were normally emptied on a Friday morning, the day before she had gone back to the flat.
By that Saturday morning the police search for Milly Dowler was well advanced. Surrey Police had set up a major incident room and appointed a detective chief inspector as senior investigating officer. They had searched through the family’s computers, spoken to her friends and seized every piece of CCTV coverage of the area that they could as well as using police dogs to examine the local allotments and starting going from house to house in search of any information that could help to explain Milly’s disappearance.
That morning four specialist officers had begun a fingertip search of the Dowler’s house and garden, focusing particularly on Milly’s bedroom. They meticulously checked her mobile phone to see if she had made or received any calls on 21 March – but she ha
dn’t. They even removed no fewer than 140 separate items from the Dowlers’ home, for closer forensic examination, but even that brought them no closer to finding Milly.
When Emma Mills arrived back at 24, Collingwood Place on that Saturday morning she could see the police cars and the television camera crews with their satellite trucks camped around Walton-on-Thames railway station. She half expected the police to knock on her door ‘to see if anybody had seen anything’, but they didn’t and she didn’t give it a great deal more thought. Mills simply gathered up her own bed, the children’s bunk beds, the television cabinet and a little tumble dryer and loaded them into the red Daewoo when Bellfield returned and set off for Little Benty. She didn’t approach the police to explain who she was or where she lived, although she was to discuss Milly’s disappearance with Bellfield in the days that followed.
‘I remember saying to him how terrible it was,’ she would recall later, ‘especially when you live opposite to where she went missing from.’
Bellfield certainly took an interest in the investigation. ‘For example, when Levi was out,’ Mills remembered, ‘if he heard something on the news like a car had been seen, he would ring me and tell me.’ Surprisingly, he even seemed to know where the Dowler family lived, but then his mother’s partner, Johnny Lee, had lived in Hersham and knew the area well.
In the weeks that followed, however, Emma Mills started to notice a change in her partner. From a man who seemed not to have a care in the world and did exactly what he chose Bellfield started to display signs of nervousness, even fear. After they left Collingwood Place he started to develop what Mills later called ‘panic attacks’, attacks so severe that he ‘couldn’t even go into a shop’. When he was in the grip of an attack Bellfield looked as though he was going to faint, started sweating so that his skin went clammy and began shaking. The attacks would come on without warning: in bed at night, in the car during the day – anywhere. As far as Mills could see there was nothing that set them off, though he would claim to her that it was only because he was drinking too much at night.
‘It’s only since we came back from Walton that he’s gone funny,’ she would tell her friends later.
Panic attacks weren’t the only problem. Less than a week after Bellfield had suddenly whisked them back to Little Benty, he came back into that cramped house beside the M4 to tell her that he didn’t have her red Daewood car with him. He told her that he had spent the day drinking in a pub in Hounslow with a group of friends and hadn’t wanted to drive home because he had had too much to drink. But when Bellfield went back to retrieve the car on the morning of Tuesday, 26 March it had disappeared. He rang Mills and told her: ‘You’re not going to be very happy, but the car’s gone.’ She remembered later that he ‘didn’t seem particularly bothered about it being stolen’ and had even suggested that one of his ‘cousins’, Charlie Brazil, had stolen it because ‘they’d had a row’.
Emma Mills could not have known it at the time, but the fate of a red car that looked rather like her missing Daewoo was to become the subject of national interest and speculation in the months that followed. The reason was that a red car had been caught on some CCTV footage turning out of Copenhagen Way and out into Station Avenue shortly after Milly Dowler had been making her way home on the other side of the road. Perhaps the driver had seen her, or spoken to her, or even perhaps offered her a lift. No one knew. Certainly the police tried everything in their power to track the car down and launched repeated appeals for anyone who might have been driving it to come forward, or for anyone who might have seen it to contact them, but without success.
The Operation Ruby squad looked at more than 250 CCTV tapes and sent some of them to the FBI’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, to see if they could enhance the images of the cars, but without success. But Surrey Police weren’t just looking at CCTV footage of cars as part of their search for Milly. They also visited 3,500 houses in the course of their inquiries, took an astonishing 4,941 statements, collected 4,800 exhibits and conducted thousands of interviews to see if anyone had any memory of seeing the schoolgirl on that fateful Thursday afternoon in March. But not a single person had seen her get into a car. They interviewed everyone that Milly had come across that day, whether at school, on the way back to Walton-on-Thames on the train or at the station café, but without success. They investigated sex offenders who lived locally, considered the male teachers Milly might have come into contact with, or workmen that she might have met at home or at school. They even interviewed the fathers of Milly’s friends in search of a possible suspect, but to no avail. More than 100 police officers were drafted in to help in the investigation, and they searched no fewer than 300 sites in an attempt to locate her – thirty of them underwater, using specialist teams from the Metropolitan Police. They asked for, and got help from, other forces in Sussex, Essex and Bedfordshire, to check every car that was in the station car park that day: again without success.
Desperate to solve the mystery of Milly’s disappearance, the police encouraged Bob and Sally Dowler to launch appeal after appeal on every conceivable television programme and channel for any information that would help to find her. The Sun newspaper backed that up by offering a £100,000 reward for anything that might help find Milly. Nothing positive emerged – nothing that is except for the occasional lunatic and timewaster who came out of the woodwork to infuriate the police and harass and upset Milly’s parents and sister. A man called Paul Hughes, for example, was jailed for five years after sending letters to her mother claiming to have killed her daughter. The letters were sent whilst Hughes was in prison for indecently assaulting a twelve-year-old girl. Lianne Newman from Tewkesbury phoned Milly’s parents, school and the police pretending to be the missing schoolgirl, and was sent to prison in April 2003 for five months after pleading guilty to five counts of making phone calls to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety. Meanwhile Gary Farr from Nottinghamshire repeatedly emailed Milly’s parents claiming that their daughter had been smuggled out of the country to work as a prostitute and stripper in Poland. In October 2006 he was sectioned indefinitely under the Mental Health Act for being a danger to the public due to a history of schizophrenia. Surrey Police even received 450 calls from people who called themselves ‘psychics’ and who claimed to know Milly’s whereabouts.
Every one of these potential ‘leads’ came to nothing, and so, in an effort to reinvigorate the search, the police appointed a new senior investigating officer, to bring a new pair of eyes to the investigation, but even that did not do the trick.
By August, Surrey Police were forced to admit – in private at least – that they were at their wits’ end. They had no body, no crime scene, no witness, and – even more astonishing – no significant suspect. The search for Milly Dowler had stalled.
Then, out of the blue, on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 – almost six months to the day since Milly’s disappearance – a Polish couple named Mr and Mrs Wislocki found human remains while they were out picking mushrooms in a secluded part of Yateley Heath Wood, near Fleet in Hampshire, 25 miles from Walton-on-Thames. The Wislockis found part of a skull and some rib bones well hidden within a thicket in the wood. Surrey Police immediately thought they might belong to their missing schoolgirl. The following day they launched a detailed search and quickly found other bones scattered around the immediate area. Not long afterwards they found more bones and other remains in a nearby stream.
The remains were taken to North Hampshire hospital in Basingstoke – not far away down the M3 motorway – and on the afternoon of Friday 20, September a forensic odontologist compared the skull and the dental records of Milly Dowler and came to the dreadful conclusion that the remains were indeed hers.
A forensic palaeontologist then told them that he believed the body had lain at that secluded site in a Hampshire wood since shortly after Milly’s abduction six months earlier, because of the pollen that was found beneath her skull and the pattern of rainfall that summer.
Surrey Police’s missing person’s inquiry had become a murder hunt, and they renewed their efforts to track down her killer, searching the sex offenders register for locals to Yateley Heath, interviewing people who knew the area well, as well as retracing their steps and going back to interview those men who might have known her at school or through her friends.
No DNA from anybody else was found at the site where Milly’s body was discovered. None of her clothes were found, nor any of her belongings: not her mobile phone, not her purse, not her backpack. She had been dumped there naked and alone, her mortal remains left to perish unprotected against the elements for six long months. To remind themselves of the tragedy of her death the police even kept a photograph of her skull darkened brown by its period in the open air, a stark contrast to her white teeth – the teeth that had been the only means of identifying her. No one who saw it could fail to be moved.
Surrey Police felt passionately that they had to do whatever they could to bring Milly’s killer to justice and strained every sinew to do so. They even targeted her IT-recruitment-consultant dad Bob, subjecting him – though he did not know it at the time – to covert surveillance, bugging his phones and car, as they explored every inch of his relationship with his younger daughter. They trawled his computer for dark secrets, but found nothing incriminating whatsoever.
Milly’s memory, meanwhile, was marked by a memorial garden at Heathside School, and her parents set up a charity in her name – Milly’s Fund – to help educate young people about their personal safety, and how to protect it. Milly even had a deep-crimson sweet-pea flower named in her honour and to keep her memory alive. But in spite of the relentless publicity, the heartbreaking appeals from her parents, the television documentaries, the endless police interviews and the thousands of separate suggestions from the public, not a single suspect was found for her murder.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 11