The Surrey Police investigation was to stretch on for years, but Operation Ruby drew a blank. Milly Dowler may have been found, but her killer had not.
10. Keeping Up Appearances
‘Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.’
Confucius, Analects
In the weeks after Levi Bellfield dramatically whisked Emma Mills and their children back to Little Benty from Walton-on-Thames on that Saturday in March 2002, his panic attacks grew steadily more severe. Without warning, and for no apparent reason, he would start shaking and then break out in unexpected, drenching sweats that rendered him all but unable to move. He would do his best to laugh it off, blustering that he ‘didn’t know what had come over him’, but Mills knew in her heart that something had changed.
‘Levi wasn’t quite the same after we left Collingwood Place,’ she was to confess to her friends nearly three years later. No matter how much he tried to keep up appearances, in the darkness of the night there was no concealing the fact that he had crossed some kind of Rubicon. Bellfield was still working as a nightclub doorman, now also at a club called Park Avenue in Richmond as well as the two original clubs, but he seemed distracted, not quite the same big-mouthed, bullying ‘Jack the Lad’ that he had been in the previous year. It was almost as though he had frightened himself. He wasn’t even quite as interested in Atkins, whom he had been seeing since the previous summer. In May 2002 their relationship just ‘sort of fizzled out’, and it looked for a moment as though this latest member of the harem of women he had taken such trouble to build up around him might be the last.
There were shakes and night terrors in private, but in public Bellfield did everything to prove that he was still firmly in control, and his temper certainly hadn’t improved. His response to the panic attacks was to become even more violent whenever anyone annoyed him, and to do so with such force that he seemed to have lost all sense of self-control.
One friend who experienced his rapidly escalating violent nature was Kingston, the man who was later to insist that he had been in the car with him when Anna-Maria Rennie had almost been abducted on the edge of Twickenham. By the summer of 2002 Kingston was literally terrified of Bellfield, the man who had started off supplying him with cannabis and then had gradually drawn him into his drug-dealing business, and he had every reason to be. Kingston was assaulted repeatedly by Bellfield in arguments over the drug profits that one may have owed to the other.
The most dramatic example came in the summer of 2002, when Bellfield claimed that Kingston owed him £3,800 over a series of drug deals. The two men were at the house in Little Benty when the row started, but it quickly got out of hand – so much so that Bellfield produced a shotgun and proceeded to threaten Kingston with it. In fear of his life, Kingston ran out of the house and away down the cul-de-sac, with Bellfield chasing after him, still brandishing the shotgun – but no shots were actually fired.
It wasn’t the only occasion when Kingston was threatened with a gun by Bellfield, but he never reported the bouncer to the police, nor did he break off their professional relationship over drugs. Kingston simply elected to suffer in silence, aware that after every tantrum Bellfield would suddenly become overcome with guilt, and apologize profusely for the violence he had threatened only moments before.
Like someone suffering from a form of bi-polar disorder the fat bouncer seemed to oscillate dramatically between extremes of emotion, ferociously angry at one moment, utterly repentant the next, apparently unaware of exactly how unstable he had become. Any control that he might once have had over his actions and emotions was slipping away.
Perhaps to convince himself that everything was exactly as it had always been Bellfield launched into another relationship with a teenager. In the summer of 2002, he started seeing a sixteen-year-old named J— Tilley. Like so many of the very young women in his life, Tilley first encountered Bellfield outside a nightclub and she was also aware that he lived – some of the time at least – in Little Benty with Emma Mills and their two children. Bellfield did not let that inhibit him, however. He had also recently rented another flat on the Oriel Estate in Hanworth, barely half a mile from where Anna-Maria Rennie had been attacked, to which he took his other young women.
Significantly, 39, Crosby Close, the new flat, was just as difficult to find as his house at Little Benty, unless you knew exactly where to look. A visitor had to make his or her way through a maze of alleyways and car parks before eventually reaching it, tucked far away from the road. Bellfield’s appetite to find a lair that made him hard to find had not deserted him.
He had reason to find one, because in the autumn of 2002 Bellfield decided to branch out from working as a nightclub bouncer and drug-dealer and take on another occupation which offered large amounts of ready money, providing he wasn’t afraid to use intimidation. Bellfield turned his hand to wheel-clamping. As far as Bellfield was concerned the wheel-clamper’s life was too good to be true. He could arrange clamping contracts with offices, clubs and shops across London which guaranteed the owners that no one would be able to park illegally on their property. If anyone were foolhardy enough to do so – against the instructions he would place on the parking area – he would clamp their cars and then charge extortionate prices to have the clamps removed. If the vehicles’ owners objected it was not a problem. Bellfield would deal with them in precisely the same way that he did with angry clubbers in the queue at one of his nightclubs – with the threat of violence. After all, he was still carrying the knuckle-duster and the baseball bat with him in the car whenever he went to work.
According to his friend Spiers, who had worked with him on the doors at Royales in Uxbridge, Bellfield started in the clamping business with a man called Joe Smith, known as ‘Jimmy Stockings’, and his two brothers, Aaron and John, who taught him the business. Like Bellfield, the Smiths were travellers.
In no time at all Bellfield had left Jimmy Stockings behind him and branched out on his own with a company called Access Controlled Parking, and to help in his new business he recruited as many of his friends as he could.
One person Bellfield turned to for help was twenty-three-year-old L— Smith, who had been a friend of Spiers for the past four years, since they had met when he was a doorman at the Works nightclub in Kingston. Bellfield met Smith regularly at Spiers’s house, and in late October 2002 told her that he was going into the clamping business and asked if she would like a job helping him.
‘I would be there when Levi and Spiers were clamping,’ she explained later, ‘and I would answer their phones for them, calls from people wanting their cars unclamped. Basically I just sat in the car all day, but because I spent more and more time with Levi, I got to know him a bit better.’
As time passed Bellfield gradually signed up clamping contracts around some of the areas he normally worked as a doorman, including a nightclub in Park Royal, West London, a pub in Hounslow, an estate agent’s office in Addlestone, a telecom shop in Woking and a carpet shop in Staines.
As his clamping business expanded, so the young Smith quickly came to see her new boss in a different light. ‘To be honest I thought Levi was a bit of a prat and arrogant,’ she was to say. ‘He would wind people up a lot. I remember once that he clamped somebody even before they had got out of the car. We didn’t get on too well.’
‘Levi fancied me, he didn’t hide that,’ Smith admitted. ‘He would say that he wanted to sleep with me and things like that. I would say I had better taste. I think that is why he didn’t like me, because I turned him down.’
One other thing was clear. Smith didn’t like being left alone with Bellfield and told Spiers so firmly. In particular Smith disapproved of Bellfield’s habit of whistling at thirteen- or fourteen-year-old schoolgirls in short skirts when he saw them in the street. The fact that he would then shout ‘Do you want some sweets?’ distressed her. She remembered one occasion when she was with him outside a parade of shops not far from Little B
enty when he had kept going into a shop where there were two or three girls in their school uniform. Smith told Bellfield to ‘stop perving’, but it didn’t put him off in the slightest. ‘He did the same sort of thing on a number of other occasions,’ she would remember. ‘It must have been really intimidating for the kids because Levi isn’t a small man.’
It wasn’t just Bellfield’s attitude to schoolgirls that dismayed Smith, however. She also became increasingly angry about the fact that he wanted to have sex with her, even though she knew he was living with Emma Mills. ‘He kept wanting to come over to mine to see me,’ she would explain, ‘which I didn’t want. So I told him he was a fat idiot.’
The ever-touchy Bellfield – especially when it came to his weight – told Smith she should ‘watch her back’ because she would ‘be sorry she said that’, although, in fact, Bellfield never took revenge on the young woman. The two simply lost contact, while he reserved his anger for other women – young women who were complete strangers he had stalked at night. Bellfield’s appetite for driving around west London at night looking for female prey hadn’t dimmed. Far from it, as his clamping business expanded it seemed to grow in intensity. He took an ever-increasing pleasure in boasting to the friends who went out clamping with him about what he would do to ‘the slags’ when he caught up with them.
The clamping business also gave Bellfield the financial muscle to increase his collection of cars. The extra vehicles were necessary because he would often travel to a clamping site with both a car and a van to carry the clamping equipment. But there was the added attraction that it gave him access to a wide variety of vehicles, making his movements even more difficult to trace.
Wheel-clamping was a lucrative business. Bellfield charged up to £215 to remove a clamp, as well as up to £500 for a tow, and he always demanded the money in cash. Given the fact that he was clamping a minimum of thirty cars a day, he could certainly afford a new car. It was bringing him in more than £30,000 a week in cash. With the proceeds, Bellfield bought himself a second-hand silver five-door Vauxhall Corsa hatchback in early November 2002 to use for clamping. He signed the registration document in his own name and organized finance for the purchase in the name of his company, Access Controlled Parking. The car’s registration number was Y57 RJU, and it would come to play a significant part in his life over the next few months, not least because he used it to drive around west London at night stalking potential victims.
One of Bellfield’s favourite methods of stalking was to drive slowly past buses at night and look inside to see if he could spot a single young woman alone who was just about to get off. He would then follow her once she was on foot.
One young woman who may well have had the misfortune to come into contact with Bellfield in the last months of 2002 was Sonia Salvitierra, who happened to be walking up Hampton Road in Twickenham on 5 November at about 10.30 in the evening. Just as she arrived at the junction with Trafalgar Road – only a few hundred yards from Twickenham Green and close to a bus stop – a man appeared out of nowhere and hit her over the head with a blunt object before running off and then driving away in a car. The police later believed that it might have been a white Ford Sierra Estate car, although it might also have been a silver Vauxhall Corsa. They were not certain, and neither was the unfortunate victim.
Could the attack have been carried out by Bellfield on his nocturnal wanderings around west London? After his arrest in November 2004 on suspicion of the murder of Amélie Delegrange on Twickenham Green, DCI Colin Sutton’s murder squad certainly became convinced that it was, but he was never to be charged with the offence.
The murder squad were equally convinced that another teenager had been another of his victims after she was hit on the head with a blunt object by a man that ran away and then drove off in a car just a few weeks after the Bonfire Night attack on Sonia Salvitierra. This time the vehicle that was used was probably a white Bedford pick-up truck – though, again, neither the police nor the victim could be certain. Jesse Wilson, who was only sixteen, was attacked at 8.45 p.m. on the evening of 8 January 2003 outside number 2, Walpole Gardens in Twickenham, once again near a bus stop, and just across Strawberry Hill golf course from the Salvitierra incident. She received massive head and facial injuries after being struck on the back of the head with a heavy instrument, quite possibly some form of hammer.
Significantly, Walpole Gardens was barely 50 yards from the shadowy alleyway leading down from Strawberry Hill railway station that Bellfield liked to hide in when he was ‘stalking’ victims while living with Jo Collings. Was she another victim? No one can be sure.
What is not in doubt is that Hampton Road in Twickenham and Walpole Road in Strawberry Hill were very much part of Bellfield’s patch, the square mile or two of west London that he had lived in, drunk in and driven round endlessly over the years, a part of the capital where he knew ‘all the back doubles’. It was an area in which he felt entirely at home. The forensic psychologist Professor David Canter of Liverpool University has pointed out: ‘Where a criminal operates is one of the most distinctive features of the shadow that he casts.’ Canter calls it their ‘geographical centre of gravity’, and this small section of West London was the epicentre of Bellfield’s universe.
If these two random attacks were indeed carried out by Bellfield, they proved not only his appetite for random violence, but also his increasing belief that he could get away with anything he set his mind too. He was refining his skill as a stalker and a ‘blitz attacker’, and his confidence was growing by leaps and bounds. Like the increasingly obsessive Cuban criminal Tony Montana in Scarface, the 1983 film starring Al Pacino, the more he risked and the more he got away with it, the more convinced he became that nothing and no one could stand in his way.
Kingston saw that all too clearly in December 2002, when – after another argument about money – Bellfield held a revolver to his head at the house in Little Benty and threatened to pull the trigger. Again Kingston was literally terrified, but again didn’t report the assault. And, as usual, Bellfield laughed it off afterwards, suggesting it was nothing but a ‘bit of fun’.
Another ‘bit of fun’ took place on New Year’s Eve that year in Laurel Lane, West Drayton, just round the corner from Little Benty. Kingston, and another of Bellfield’s friends, Joe Ryan, were at a party in a block of flats in Laurel Lane just off the Harmondsworth Road, which crosses the M4 motorway on a bridge. The New Year’s Eve party was described by Kingston as a ‘free for all’ for anyone who fancied it, which meant that he had no idea of the identities of many of the people who were there – except, of course, Bellfield and Ryan. The host was a keen fisherman, with a rather plump, ginger-haired, fourteen-year-old daughter. As midnight approached, the party came to what Kingston called ‘an abrupt halt’ when the father accused Bellfield of having ‘touched up’ his daughter in the flat’s toilet. Kingston and Ryan – along with most of the other guests – quickly left the party and fled back to the safety of their own homes, but Bellfield remained at the flat. As far as Kingston knew, the police were never called, and the matter was ‘resolved’. Afterwards Bellfield refused to discuss the incident with his friends, although the rumour among some of the guests was that he had actually sexually assaulted the girl. If he had, the incident served only to confirm his by now certain conviction that he could get away with anything.
It was a conviction that would lead to murder.
Part of the area that Bellfield knew very well was around Hampton in Middlesex, south-west of Twickenham and not far from the A316 artery out of London. His aunt had lived there in Fearnley Crescent, and his former partner Jo Collings had kept horses at the stables in Oak Avenue. His own sister had also kept a pony at the stables, and he had visited the stables regularly with her over the past two years. And it was here, barely half a mile from the stables, that shortly after midnight on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 a nineteen-year-old blonde named Marsha McDonnell was hit on the head by a random attacker outside numb
er 60, Priory Road, just yards from her parents’ front door. But, unlike Sonia Salvitierra and Jesse Wilson just weeks earlier, Marsha did not survive.
It was just 17 minutes after midnight on that February evening when Marsha got off the number 111 bus after her evening at the cinema with her friends. And at the very moment she did so the closed circuit television cameras mounted on the double-decker revealed a car driving towards it, which slowed as it passed and then stopped just a few yards further on at the entrance to Priory Road. The video footage showed the car stopping suddenly in the moments after Marsha got off, its red brake lights standing out in the inky night. As prosecuting counsel Brian Altman QC was later to tell the jury at Bellfield’s trial for the murder of Marsha McDonnell, there was ‘no obvious reason why at 12.17 a.m. the car should have slowed and suddenly come to a stop where it does other than … because of an interest in the bus and its disembarking lone female passenger’.
It was after midnight, the streets were quiet, there was no other traffic, and the CCTV cameras on the bus revealed that the car was a silver-coloured five-door Vauxhall Corsa hatchback. No one knows exactly what happened next. No eyewitness saw what happened in the next six or seven minutes – between the time that Marsha got off the bus and the time that she was suddenly and brutally attacked.
What is known, however, is that she was being stalked by the car that was caught on the bus’s video cameras. There can be no doubt about that because, as she walked the few hundred yards home, she was also being watched by another CCTV camera, this time one mounted on a greengrocer’s shop at number 72A Priory Road. The camera revealed that within a minute and a half of Marsha getting off her bus a car was parking in Priory Road at its junction with Bloxham Crescent.
It was just before 12.20 when Marsha was attacked without warning outside number 60 Priory Road. Someone had run up behind her and hit her brutally, and fatally, on the left side of her head – but that someone was not picked up on any of the CCTV cameras.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 12