The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  ‘I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what he had done,’ Morgan went on. ‘As he jogged back towards the car, he crossed over … to the driver’s side. I jumped over the gear stick and back into the passenger seat. Levi got in. He turned the engine on but not the lights. He drove off past the pub then turned the lights on. Levi was laughing. I couldn’t believe it.’

  Bellfield then drove back to the garage area behind his house at Little Benty and parked the VW Golf, which took about five minutes. ‘We never spoke about what had happened during the journey,’ Morgan said later. ‘He had stopped laughing and we sat in silence. We both got out and we both said goodbye.’

  Morgan never told anyone what he had seen that night until after Bellfield’s arrest on suspicion of murder, a year later.

  ‘There was no way I was going to tell anyone about it,’ he said, ‘because Levi Bellfield has made me feel scared and bullied for as long as I’ve known him. He generally makes you feel like you have to do what he tells you … If you don’t, he verbally threatens you. He lives off his reputation, and it is safe to say I am frightened of him. I felt that, if I’d have told someone about it and it had got back to him, he would have beaten me up.’

  In fact there was another reason why Morgan was frightened of Bellfield. There was more than a hint of sexual jealousy between the two men, because Morgan’s new fiancée, Tilley, had had a sexual relationship with Bellfield before she had left him to become Morgan’s permanent partner.

  ‘I was more scared for my girlfriend and still am,’ Morgan was to tell the police, and he had every reason to be. He had seen at first hand Bellfield’s attitude to young women and his capacity for violence against anyone who disobeyed him.

  But when Morgan’s recollection of the events of that cold, misty December night in 2003 were told to Levi Bellfield after his arrest on suspicion of attempted murder, his version of what happened was significantly different. The man ‘Yosser’ Hughes had nicknamed Mr Treacle insisted that it had been Morgan who had carried out the attack on Irma Dragoshi, and not him. Although the police were never to seriously suspect Morgan, it wasn’t for want of Bellfield’s trying. Bellfield admitted that he had been in the car with Morgan that night, but had been so shocked at what Morgan had done that he had driven the car away from the attack and then waited at the end of the road. He also insisted that his fellow wheel-clamper hadn’t hit Irma over the head but had merely ‘pulled’ at her handbag, and she had hit her head on the ground when she fell.

  So what was the truth? Mr Treacle was certainly capable of lying, and Morgan had no history of attacking young women out of the blue and without reason. But he had every reason not to tell the police, or anyone else, what had happened.

  Bellfield had used the attack to prove to Morgan exactly what he was capable of and, just as significantly, to bind Morgan to the crime. If he continued to say nothing to the police, Morgan was therefore complicit in it and compromised. It gave Bellfield a considerable hold over an impressionable twenty-one-year-old.

  In the end no one could be quite sure what had happened to Irma Dragoshi on that misty December evening. She said she had been hit on the head, but Bellfield insisted that she had hit her head on the ground, and the two police officers couldn’t find a weapon. Meanwhile Morgan wasn’t able to say with any conviction that Bellfield had hit her over the head during the struggle. In the end Levi Bellfield was not found guilty of the attempted murder of Irma Dragoshi.

  As far as he was concerned in December 2003 the attack underlined once again that he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to. The police hadn’t questioned him about Marsha McDonnell. His new wheel-clamping business was expanding, as was his drug-dealing operation, and he was now working as a doorman at The Sorting Room in Twickenham, as well as his other clubs. On top of that Emma Mills had discovered that she was pregnant again with their third child.

  Perhaps it was the pregnancy, or perhaps it was simply a matter of habit, but no sooner had Bellfield learned that he was to become a father again – for at least the eighth time – he launched into a new relationship with another young blonde teenager. Her name was Terri Carroll, and she was only fifteen. Provocative, confident and certainly sexually aware, Carroll had first met Bellfield through their mutual friend Morgan, outside the school in Hayes, West London, where she was studying for her GCSEs. As she later told the press, ‘I was instantly attracted to him. I thought it was cool that an older guy paid me attention. He was funny, charming and kind in the beginning.’ Bellfield’s apparent maturity clearly attracted Carroll, although once again his natural gift for bending the truth was at the fore: the thirty-five-year-old Bellfield told Carroll he was in fact twenty-eight. It was also his ability to spend money on his new girlfriend that won her over: ‘He would take me out for dinner, pay for taxis home, and he bought me a mobile phone and presents.’ Unsurprisingly, the young woman, who had spent some of her childhood in care, was bowled over by the overwhelming attention. As she became increasingly infatuated with him she chose not to tell her family or friends about the relationship, not least as Bellfield had insisted she keep it a secret.

  Bellfield for his part maintained the appearance of a ‘tough, yet nice’ older man, explaining to Carroll that he was separated from his partner and had a ‘couple of kids’. Whatever appearance Bellfield was keen to maintain was only a temporary mask, however, which was soon to slip. During one of their first dates together Bellfield took Carroll to a Kingston nightclub, impressing her by showing her into the VIP area of the club, where he proceeded to buy the teenager alcopop drinks throughout the night. Later that night Carroll let Bellfield drive her to his flat in Hanworth, where he led her to the bedroom. Despite her protestations, the two had sexual intercourse. Afterwards, she explained, ‘I felt sick and cheap. I had slept with one boy before Levi, but I was very inexperienced.’

  It was a few weeks later that the mask fully slipped: ‘After a few weeks, he took me to a hotel room, where again he got me drunk before we had sex. He kept hitting me and slapping me on my face and body while we were on the bed. I told him he was hurting me, but he just carried on and laughed. When he had finished, he called a male friend and told him to come round and that I would have sex with him. When I refused, Levi got so angry, he punched me in the face. He said if I didn’t do what he said he would dump me and find another girl. Luckily his mate didn’t turn up.’

  Of course Terri Carroll was simply the latest blonde teenager to fall under Bellfield’s spell, and as he was the inexperienced teenager’s first boyfriend she was desperate not to lose him. It wasn’t long, however, before love turned into fear, as Bellfield soon began to threaten to kill her or hurt her family if she left him.

  Just three weeks after she had met him, Carroll was pressured by Bellfield to move into his flat. He ordered her to stop going to school, and Carroll was soon spending twelve hours a day alone in Bellfield’s flat, strictly forbidden to leave without his permission.

  Bellfield’s possessiveness became obsessive. As Carroll explained, ‘He didn’t want boys coming near me. If he rang me from work and I didn’t answer he would accuse me of having someone in the flat. Before we got a landline installed, he would call me on my mobile and make me flush the toilet to prove I was inside.’

  Bellfield’s constant changing of temper and behaviour towards Carroll kept her in thrall to him and terrified of leaving: ‘One minute he would be cuddling me and telling me he loved me, the next he would throw me to the floor like a rag doll and kick me as I begged him to stop. He got off on rage and loved to control me. When I cried at his insults, he laughed and told me I should be grateful to have him. I was constantly on edge, never sure what mood he would be in when he came home from work.’

  Meanwhile, Bellfield’s clamping business was beginning to infuriate the local residents of Chichester. In the words of the local paper, the Chichester Observer, he was a ‘notorious and uncompromising clamper, who targeted the vulnerable and the elderl
y’. He was charging £155 to remove a clamp and £265 to tow a car he had clamped. One of his victims, David Worcester, called him ‘very unpleasant’ and explained that he was ‘extremely aggressive and uncooperative’, while concluding: ‘He was the sort of person who really should not have been let loose in society.’ Mr Worcester’s wife Phyllida had to rescue him from Bellfield’s rage when he didn’t have enough cash to pay the £155 fine. ‘He was not going to budge an inch on getting the money,’ she said. ‘He was just a thug. It is not something you expect to find on the streets of Chichester.’

  A matter of hours after the first of these stories about Bellfield’s exploits in the comfortable West Sussex town appeared, the shopping centre which had hired him suspended his clamping agreement. But that didn’t worry Bellfield in the slightest. He returned to London bragging that the expedition had brought him at least £30,000 in profit in less than two weeks. The truth was it had probably brought him much more.

  Bellfield’s relationship with Carroll continued, with his latest teenage girlfriend now a virtual prisoner to his bidding and another in a line of partners desperate for his affections. He was thrilled that he was the focus of so much attention from the women in his life, but he had the same perpetual feeling that all woman were nothing but trouble – only underlining the feeling of rage he felt towards them.

  Shortly afterwards that rage may well have expressed itself in another attack.

  Just after 10 o’clock in the evening of Sunday, 18 April 2004 a young woman in her early thirties named Adele Harbison, who worked as an accountant, was hit over the head with a blunt object by a man in Trafalgar Road in Twickenham, barely 300 yards down Hampton Road from Twickenham Green, at the epicentre of Bellfield’s hunting ground. She was found by a passing motorist with a massive wound to the back of her head and facial injuries that were severe enough to required reconstructive surgery. The doctors’ detailed examination showed that her injuries were the result of three or four heavy blows, but there were no defensive wounds to suggest that she had put up any kind of fight. Once again the attack clearly wasn’t a robbery, as her mobile phone and handbag were still with her, and nothing had been stolen. In the wake of his arrest on suspicion of murder, the police became convinced that Bellfield was the young woman’s attacker, but they could not prove it and he was never charged with the offence.

  Barely a month later, however, another young woman was attacked at another of Bellfield’s familiar stamping grounds – and this time he was charged. The young woman’s name was Kate Sheedy.

  12. Into the Abyss

  ‘No man is angry that feels himself not hurt.’

  Francis Bacon

  Kate Sheedy was exactly Levi Bellfield’s type. A slim eighteen-year-old schoolgirl with long blonde hair and a fair complexion, she was just over 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed a little over 7½ stone, the sort of girl that reminded him of his own schooldays. With her oval face and friendly, open smile, Kate was even a pupil at the all-girl Gumley House Convent School in Twickenham Road, Isleworth, barely half a mile from the house he had grown up in. It was the very school that he had made a habit of driving past, leering at the teenage pupils and shouting ‘slags’ to whoever was in the car with him.

  Though he would never admit it, there was little doubt that the Gumley House girls stirred a sense of resentment in Bellfield, a reminder of the anger he had felt when Patsy Morris had turned him down when he was a skinny, but sexually precocious, twelve-year-old. There was something about them that made Bellfield want to ‘take them down a peg or two’. A part of him wanted revenge for past slights.

  Bellfield was to turn Kate Sheedy into his latest victim – even though he had never met her, didn’t know anyone who knew her and had no interest in her apart from the fact that she represented everything he both lusted after and yet at the same time loathed. For him she was an object of hate and desire; hurting her helped him to satiate his desire for revenge on every young woman who appeared to look down on him.

  But Kate Sheedy was unaware of all this on the morning of Thursday, 27 May 2004 as she and her girlfriends began to celebrate the Gumley House leaver’s day, their last official day of school before heading off for a period of ‘study leave’ before their A levels. As the school’s head girl, Kate had the responsibility of organizing the day. There had been presentations, gifts from one girl to another and the inevitable tearful goodbyes. This was the end of their school lives, a moment never to be forgotten.

  Kate was intending to go up to university that autumn. There was to be no gap year, as she wanted to get on with her life, and she had a part-time job in the Next store in nearby Kew and a boyfriend who lived in Lincolnshire to prove it. She was every inch the finest kind of school-leaver, a balanced, happy, enthusiastic young woman, full of every kind of promise.

  She and her friends had decided to go out after the school’s official leaver’s day ceremonies and have a private celebration of their own. So after leaver’s day was over at about 4 o’clock, she went home to her mother’s house to change. Kate’s parents were divorced, and she and her sister lived with their mother in Worton Road, just south-east of Isleworth and the school.

  Shortly after 7 o’clock on that Thursday evening, Kate left her mother’s house with some of her friends, dressed in a pink jumper, a black skirt that went just below her knees and pink sling-back shoes. The girls caught the number H22 bus into Twickenham, where they first went to The Sorting Room pub in London Road, just down from the railway station, and then, at about 10.30, to the Hobgoblin pub over the road.

  By the end of the evening the Gumley House girls were merry, but no one was drunk. Kate just remembered later being tired and ‘a little sad’ because they were all going their separate ways. Their lives at school were over, and the future lay ahead of them; it was both frightening and enticing at the same time. There were a few tears, and a lot of hugs and promises of ‘never to forget you’ before they agreed to leave together.

  Kate left the Hobgoblin pub at about midnight with three of her friends to catch their respective buses home, but her friends caught theirs before Kate’s H22 arrived to take her back to Worton Road. In fact it wasn’t until about 12.20 in the early hours of the morning of Friday, 28 May that the bus finally arrived.

  She climbed on to the single-decker and sat two or three rows back on the left-hand side, thinking about the day and remembering the evening. She had hardly been on the bus a minute when one of the three friends she had just been with her called on her mobile phone to say she was home already. Kate told her friend that she would be home ‘any minute’ as she was just a few yards from her bus stop in Worden Road, just past The County Arms pub.

  Tragically, it wasn’t to be the case.

  As the bus came to a stop in the well-lit suburban street, Kate was the only person to get off, and, as far as she could see, there was no one else around, although she thought she remembered a car driving past her. So, lost in her own thoughts, she got her house keys out of her handbag as she walked along Worton Road towards her mother’s house. It was then that she heard the sound of a car engine and noticed that on her side of the road about 50 yards ahead there was a large white vehicle parked facing away from her with it engine running, but without any lights on. It was a white people-carrier with blacked-out windows.

  Kate Sheedy was a bright, sensible young woman, and it was well after midnight, so she crossed Worton Road to the other side so as not to walk past what she later called this ‘dodgy’ car. What she did not know was that the people-carrier had been stalking her on the number H22 bus on her way home, all too visible on its brightly lit lower deck to anyone looking in from outside.

  As it turned out, Kate’s worries about the blacked-out people-carrier with its engine running were justified. As she crossed the minor road that led off Worton Road into the Worton Hall industrial estate – and reached the traffic island in the middle – the white people-carrier switched its lights on and revved its engine l
oudly. For a moment Kate though it was about to drive off, and she started across the second lane of the road. It was a terrible mistake. Without any warning the people-carrier did a U-turn in Worton Road and drove directly towards the entrance of the industrial estate – straight at Kate Sheedy.

  Kate screamed and made an attempt to run to the pavement opposite her, but the people-carrier got to her before she could do so. It struck her, knocked her down and drove over her. But that wasn’t all. It then paused and quite deliberately reversed back over her prostrate body before racing away south down Worton Road.

  Some local residents heard Kate’s scream, but thought little of it as they lived near a pub where the departing patrons could be a little rowdy. What they did not know was that Kate was now lying on the ground at the entrance to the industrial estate gravely injured and in dreadful pain.

  There was no reason that this bright, open-faced schoolgirl should be attacked in a quite residential road in a respectable suburb of west London without warning, but then there had been no reason for the attack on Marsha McDonnell fifteen months earlier. The attacks were the work of someone with scant regard for human life, and a rage against their fellow human beings that was almost tangible.

  But Kate was nothing if not a resourceful eighteen-year-old. Though badly hurt, she tried to crawl home. It was a brave decision, but it didn’t work. Within a few seconds, she found she could barely move. She did, however, manage to drag herself across to her handbag, which had been thrown across the road when she had been hit by the people-carrier, to retrieve her mobile phone. She then had the presence of mind to call an ambulance, before calling her mother.

  The first words Kate uttered after having been run over were to the 999 control centre were: ‘He ran over me twice.’ She then went on: ‘The car stopped and checked me out … I thought he was dodgy, so after he turned round and ran over me and hit me again … I thought he was going to take me in his car but … when he saw that I knew he was dodgy he just ran over me.’