Immediately after Marsha’s death the Metropolitan Police launched a full-scale murder inquiry to find her killer. One problem the police had was tracing the silver Vauxhall Corsa that had been captured on the video cameras. In spite of widespread publicity and persistent appeals for help from the public, no one came forward to say that they had been driving their Corsa down Percy Road in Hampton in the early hours of that February morning.
It was to take the police more than three years to track down the car, and to do so they had to consider no fewer than 600,000 combinations of registration numbers until they finally identified the owners of 178 Vauxhalls that matched the video footage. One of them was the silver hatchback Y57 RJU that Bellfield had purchased the previous November to use in his new clamping business. But that hadn’t proved easy to track back to him as, significantly, and for no apparent reason, Bellfield had sold the Corsa on 11 February 2002, just a week after Marsha’s murder.
Emma Mills, who remembered going to buy the Corsa with Bellfield, later told the police that he had said he had sold it because he ‘couldn’t afford the repayments’. But he didn’t charge top price for it – so keen was he to get rid of it. He sold it to a man called Sean James for £1,500 and an elderly blue Ford Escort van, which was probably worth £650, even though Bellfield had paid £6,300 for the Corsa just three months before.
But selling the Corsa wasn’t the only sudden decision Bellfield was to take in the days after Marsha McDonnell’s murder. He also announced to Emma Mills that they and the children were all going to take a holiday to Tenerife, the largest of the Spanish Canary islands in the Atlantic Ocean, even though their elder daughter Lucy was still at primary school. A trip abroad in term time was unheard of. Bellfield’s explanation to Mills for the sudden trip was that he had been ‘doing well at wheel-clamping’, and the weather had turned for the worse, so he ‘wanted a bit of sun’. He booked the holiday through Thomas Cook on Saturday, 8 February 2003, just four days after Marsha McDonnell’s killing. The family were to leave Gatwick Airport on Friday, 14 February and return on 21 February and were to stay at a self-catering apartment in the Playa de las Americas. They even decided to take the family friend Richard ‘Yosser’ Hughes with them.
So Emma Mills and her children, Lucy and William, drove to Gatwick with Richard Hughes on the night of Thursday, 13 February and stayed at the airport Holiday Inn to be sure to be there in time to catch the morning flight. But Bellfield didn’t go with them, he turned up later – carrying £2,000 in Euro notes for the holiday, which had already cost him £1,300.
In retrospect the reasons for selling the Corsa and taking a holiday out of the blue were clear enough. Bellfield was intent on disposing of a car that could have been incriminating as quickly as possible and then leaving the country in case the police came looking for him. It was a trick he had used before – ‘making myself scarce’ as he liked to put it – by disappearing from his usual haunts, just in case the police came looking for him.
As Brian Altman QC explained at the Old Bailey, the police and prosecution were convinced that the car driving past the bus after midnight on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 was not only a silver five-door hatchback Vauxhall Corsa but also Bellfield’s Vauxhall Corsa, which, together with the evidence that the attack wasn’t carried out by a pedestrian but the occupant of a car, ‘should, we say, compel you to conclude that Levi Bellfield murdered Marsha McDonnell’.
As Levi Bellfield would discover in February 2008, the jury agreed with the police and prosecution and found him guilty of Marsha McDonnell’s murder. But that day of reckoning was a long way off. For the moment, Bellfield was free to enjoy his holiday and, even more terrifyingly, to kill again.
11. Mr Treacle
‘Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
No sooner had Levi Bellfield returned from his week’s holiday on the Canary Islands with Emma Mills, their children and Richard ‘Yosser’ Hughes than he started to plan another holiday. It was as if he suddenly had no wish to stay at home and wanted to put as much distance as he possible could between himself and Little Benty.
Why? The answer is clear enough. The shadow of Marsha McDonnell’s killing was hanging over him, and he wanted to escape it by any means possible. But that didn’t just mean leaving the country, it also meant leaving Little Benty.
After the beginning of March in 2003 Bellfield started to spend more and more time at the flat at 39, Crosby Close, which he had rented from the man who had arranged for the finance to help him by the Vauxhall Corsa. He even took advantage of yet another flat in Hayes of which he had the use. And at the end of April Bellfield took Emma and the children back to Tenerife for another week, although this time he invited Christine Hawgood’s fourteen-year-old daughter Gemma to go with them to the self-catering apartment in the Playa de las Americas. His aim was to present a calm, unflustered appearance to the world, for Bellfield was shrewd enough to realize that the appearance of nervousness – even to his clamping crew – could weaken him.
This meant that Bellfield went to enormous lengths to conceal his true intentions about anything – be it his clamping business, exactly where he was living, or indeed whom he was living with. He would dissemble about anything and everything, presenting the world with a tissue of lies so great that ‘Yosser’ Hughes nicknamed him ‘Mr Treacle’ for the sheer scale of his ability to conceal the truth.
Bellfield continued to expand his wheel-clamping business. He would clamp cars at random, and then tell the frightened motorist that they had parked illegally, when clearly they had not. It was a perfect scam for a man who was prepared to back up his lies with the threat of violence. The style was such a success that, at the end of March 2003, after coming back from Tenerife, Bellfield began taking on more extra staff to help him. One man he invited to join him was Noel Moran, then almost nineteen, who had been at school with another of his regular clampers, T— Morgan.
Moran remembered later that he started to work for ‘Lee’ – as he knew Bellfield – in March 2003 and went to a large number of clamping sites with him, including ones in Acton, Woking, Addlestone, Staines, Sunbury, Hounslow, West Drayton, Hounslow and Hersham, near Walton-on-Thames, as well as newer sites further away in Bicester in Oxfordshire and Chichester in West Sussex.
‘I would get a day or two notice of which site to go to,’ Moran would recall, ‘and I would usually pick up one of his cars.’ Moran would drive to whichever flat Bellfield was at on that particular morning and park his car. He would then use one of Bellfield’s cars for the day before dropping it off later and collecting his own.
The fleet of cars and vans that Bellfield had at his disposal expanded as his wheel-clamping business became steadily more successful. They included a white Ford Courier van, a white Transit tow-truck with a red stripe on the side, a Citroën Berlingo, a Peugeot van, a green Metro, a red Peugeot 306 saloon, a black BMW, a red Toyota Land Cruiser and a white Toyota Previa ‘space cruiser’. Both the distinctive Ford Courier van, with its blacked-out back windows and the registration number of P610 XCN, and the Toyota Previa ‘space cruiser’, also with blacked-out windows and with its registration number of K885 EFL, would come to play a crucial part in Bellfield’s life over the coming months. But, for the moment at least, they were simply the tools of his rapidly expanding trade.
Clamping at so many diverse locations and using so many different cars and vans guaranteed that Bellfield remained elusive during the spring and summer of 2003. Never in one place for very long, and never permanently in residence at Little Benty, he would go to ever-increasing lengths to ensure that his whereabouts were a mystery to everyone – even his clamping crew. Bellfield also made sure that Emma Mills was never sure where he was, except when they went on holiday together, which they now did with astonishing regularity.
At the end of April, for example, and again between late June and early August, they spent time in a caravan belonging to a
woman they had met in Tenerife earlier in the year, Michelle Wickham. Her caravan was on a site in Kent, but it wasn’t the only caravan that Bellfield had access to. He also used one based at a site on the Isle of Sheppey. Caravans were difficult to track down and were part of the backbone of the ‘travellers’ life-style. They provided him with the perfect place to hide.
By the beginning of September 2003 Bellfield was back in Tenerife for another week, his third trip to the Canary Island in less than eight months. Once again he took Richard Hughes with Emma and the children, but this time he also invited their new friend, Michelle Wickham. His fellow clamper, Joe Ryan and his wife Rachel Brazil, who owned their own apartment in the same complex, joined them. All three of the trips to Tenerife were organized at the last minute by Bellfield and he never consulted Emma Mills about them. ‘Levi wasn’t like that,’ she would admit later. ‘You didn’t question his decisions. You just accepted them.’
Certainly his neighbours in Little Benty were well aware that Bellfield was not a man to be questioned, or trifled with. Like Kingston, they had seen at first hand how violently he would react if ever his decisions were questioned. A Scot called Gary, who was in his thirties and lived next door at 13, Little Benty with his wife Trisha, found that out to his cost in the autumn of 2003.
Outside in the cul-de-sac – and on the green verge opposite the houses – Bellfield regularly worked on his clamping cars and vans together with two members of his clamping crew. One afternoon, as Spiers was to recall later, Bellfield’s neighbour Gary made the mistake of coming out of his house to complain about the litter of cars and vans on their shared driveway and the green opposite. Bellfield’s reaction was dramatic.
‘I saw Levi run across the road and wrestle Gary to the ground in Gary’s front garden,’ Spiers remembered. ‘Levi picked up one of Gary’s flowerpots and smashed it over Gary’s head.’ He then calmly went back to working on the cars with the other clampers. Bellfield’s attack left his neighbour with a cut to his head and a black eye. Not long afterwards he and his wife left Little Benty altogether to return to Scotland.
Bellfield’s habit of suddenly escalating into violence, which had been growing rapidly since the move back from Walton-on-Thames, was by now well established, as was his equally rapid oscillation back to seeing it as ‘a joke’. What was not a joke, however, was the fact that early in November 2003 a young woman named Dawn Brunton was hit over the head by a man at Hatton Cross, hardly any distance at all from Little Benty. The attack took place on Bonfire Night, exactly a year after the attack on Sonia Salvitierra, but Bellfield was never charged with either offence.
Just a few weeks later, however, came an attack which did see Bellfield face a charge. At about 7.40 on the misty evening of 16 December 2003, a thirty-four-year-old Albanian woman named Irma Dragoshi, who had lived in London for many years, was attacked in a remarkably similar way. That night Irma had left the hairdressing salon in Slough where she worked to travel home to the flat in west London that she shared with her husband, Astrit. As usually happened when she worked late she was given a lift part of the way home by her employer, Ruth Baker, and so – at about 7.20 that evening – she was dropped off at a bus stop in Longford Village, on the old Bath Road, which runs from east to west parallel to one of Heathrow airport’s runways and its perimeter road.
It was, of course, dark by the time Irma found herself waiting for a number 81 bus, not far from the White Horse pub on the north side of the road and near an old-fashioned telephone box. But Irma had her mobile phone with her, so there was no need for her to use the telephone box. There was a distinct chill in the air, and there was no one else around.
The bus Irma was waiting for should have arrived at 7.30, but on that particular night it was running late, and so she phoned her husband to tell him she had been delayed. As she did so Irma had the phone in her right hand and was listening with her right ear, with the hood of her coat up and facing in the direction of the White Horse pub and away from the road. By now it was about 7.40.
That was the last memory Irma had of the evening. The next thing she recalled was waking up in Hillingdon hospital in the early hours of the following morning suffering from a crippling pain in the back of her head, and with a large lump on her scalp to prove it. Her eyes were black and blue and swollen, and she had a terrible headache and was feeling perpetually dizzy. Nothing had been stolen, but her mobile had been damaged.
It was her husband who helped the police to piece together exactly what had happened to his wife. He told them that she had phoned him the previous evening to tell him that she had been dropped off by her boss and that there was now another woman standing beside her at the bus stop waiting for the number 81.
Quite suddenly, and out of the blue, Mr Dragoshi explained, he heard his wife scream, and the phone went dead. He immediately rang back, and it was answered by an Englishwoman who passed the phone to Irma, who by now was lying on the ground in Old Bath Road. He spoke to his wife for a minute or two, and she told him that she had been hit over the head from behind and that she was in great pain.
The moment Astrit Dragoshi rang off he called the emergency services and gave them the location of the attack on his wife. He then called a mini-cab and went to the scene himself, where he found her sitting in an ambulance with her head in her hands.
The couple were taken to Hillingdon hospital together, where Irma was able to tell a doctor what had happened before being sedated and left to sleep. But the following morning she had no recollection whatever of what had happened the night before, or indeed what she had said to the doctor.
The landlord of the White Horse pub was also able to tell the police something of what had gone on at the bus stop. He told them that he had found Irma on the ground, in floods of tears, and speaking in a foreign language. He was then joined by the English lady who had been in the telephone box when the attack took place, and they both tried to comfort Irma. Within a couple of minutes a number 81 bus had arrived, and a hysterical and disoriented Irma Dragoshi had insisted that she be allowed to get on to it. So the publican helped her on board and she sat down on one of the seats with her head in her hands, unable to move. At that very moment a second number 81 arrived, and, realizing that Irma was in no state to be moved, the other passengers on the first bus abandoned it and got on to the second. The English lady who had been in the telephone box joined them, and the second bus left.
Irma Dragoshi was left waiting for the ambulance and the police with the first bus driver and the publican, and it was while she was sitting on the bus that the police arrived, at 8.28 that evening, about forty-five minutes after the original incident. Irma managed to tell the two constables who found her that a man had tried to snatch the mobile phone out of her hand, but when she had struggled to hang on to it she had been struck on the back of the head by something – she didn’t know what. The two officers rapidly carried out a search of the area but didn’t find anything that might have been used as a blunt instrument in the attack. The officers then helped Irma into the ambulance, and she left for Hillingdon hospital with her husband.
To the police at the time it was an extraordinary, mindless piece of violence, an attack on an innocent woman without warning and for no discernible reason – but one which saw her brutally injured. Irma’s injuries were so severe that she wasn’t able to return to work for more than a month, and, even more significantly, she was never again able to remember anything about what had happened to her that night at the number 81 bus stop. What was not in doubt, however, was that the seriousness of her injuries meant that whoever had hit her over the head had intended to cause her the gravest harm.
As Brian Altman QC later explained for the prosecution at the Old Bailey at Levi Bellfield’s trial for Irma’s attempted murder: ‘If you accept that Irma Dragoshi was struck over the back of the head with a blunt instrument with such force as to produce such a debilitating injury, that can only have been done with an intention either to kill her or
at the very least to cause her really serious bodily harm … Her attacker could hardly have intended anything less when he hit her over the head in that entirely deliberate and unprovoked way.’
But who had hit Irma Dragoshi over the head?
One man who claimed he knew was twenty-four-year-old Morgan, one of Bellfield’s clamping crew, who later told the police that he had been with Bellfield on that December night in 2003. Indeed they had been driving around west London in Emma Mills’s black Volkswagen Golf, registration number M404 WEH.
‘We were driving in Bath Road,’ he was to say, ‘past the McDonald’s. Levi ignored the No Entry sign, which only allows buses through … I can’t remember what time this was, but it was dark. Suddenly Levi just pulled over. He turned the headlights off and then the engine. Levi said, “ ’Ere, watch this.” I didn’t know why he had stopped or what he meant. Levi got out the car and as he did so he said, “Jump in the driver’s seat.” I got in the seat still not knowing what was going on.’
Bellfield had parked on the opposite side of the Old Bath Road, about four bus lengths down from the White Horse pub. But from where they had parked Morgan could clearly see a woman on a mobile phone. According to Morgan, Bellfield, who had pulled the hood of his tracksuit top up as he had got out of the car, ‘jogged up to her and put his arm out and grabbed her shoulder’.
‘I thought that he was going for her handbag, which, I remember, was over her shoulder,’ he said. ‘I still didn’t know what was going on. Levi grabbed her with one hand and spun her around. It was one action.’
Morgan then saw Bellfield crouched over Irma pulling at her handbag, only to stand up and carry on jogging away from their car and past the pub. ‘He went past the pub and then crossed the road,’ Morgan explained. Then, still jogging, he came back towards the car.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 13