The recorded time of Kate’s call was 12.39 on the morning of Friday, 28 May 2004, and within a matter of minutes the paramedics had found her, and so had her mother and father, who had run from their respective houses.
Badly shocked and brutally injured Kate was taken to the nearby West Middlesex hospital, where she was diagnosed as having a collapsed lung and a broken collar bone and – much more worryingly – serious internal damage to her abdomen and liver. She nevertheless managed to tell a detective constable who had been sent to interview her that she had seen the vehicle ahead of her on Worton Road turn its lights off, but that no one had got out, which she ‘thought was suspicious’.
That was the only description Kate was capable of giving on the night of her attack, and her injuries were so serious that she was rapidly transferred to King’s College hospital in central London and placed in the liver intensive-care unit, where she had surgery to her liver, and then further surgery for an injury to her back.
Just as dawn was breaking on that Friday morning, an official police photographer took a series of photographs of where Kate had been knocked down. One showed just one of the pink sling back shoes that she had been wearing lying in the middle of the road, a poignant reminder of the tragedy that had struck this innocent young woman.
Kate Sheedy was to remain in intensive care for no fewer than sixteen days after the attack. She wasn’t discharged from hospital until 21 June – a full three weeks after she had been deliberately run over in Worton Road. But that was just the beginning of her recovery. In the months to come she had to have continuous physiotherapy to help her walk again, as well as hydrotherapy to improve her fitness.
The attack left her with a large scar on her lower back, which was to leave her in constant pain, a right collar bone so badly broken that it was out of alignment and formed an unsightly lump in her chest as well as what one of her hospital consultants later described as ‘severe and lasting psychological effects’.
Hardly surprisingly, Kate missed her A levels that summer, although the examination boards awarded her A-level grades on the basis of her predictions from AS level the previous summer and told her that she could not go up to university that autumn. In fact it was to be another year before she was able to follow her friends, and take up her place. Her life had been turned upside down in a matter of moments by the hit-and-run driver in Worton Road.
When detectives from the Metropolitan Police finally came to interview Kate Sheedy after her release from hospital, she was typically sensible, doing her very best to remember what had happened in as much detail as she could. She said the people-carrier was definitely white, with blacked-out windows and a number plate that included an M or an N. She also said that the wing mirrors were black, and the one on the driver’s side may have had a broken casing or have been defective in some way. Significantly Kate also said that the driver ‘was leaning quite far forward on the wheel, quite hunched over the wheel’, and that she thought there were two men in the front seats – although she only saw their outline. They both had short hair and broad shoulders.
There were no other witnesses to the attack. No one came forward to tell the police that they had seen what happened and to confirm that the people-carrier had driven at Kate quite deliberately. All the police had were Kate’s recollections.
They had a little other evidence, however. Two CCTV cameras were mounted on the front of The County Arms pub – one facing north, the other south – and video footage retrieved from them after the attack on Kate clearly showed a white Toyota Previa people-carrier with blacked-out windows stalking the H22 bus before it stopped at 12.33 a.m. and then, a minute or so later, disappearing at speed south down Hall Road. But the cameras had not captured the attack itself. That was out of range.
The footage did reveal, however, that the Toyota stopped behind the bus – rather than overtaking it – which meant that the driver had a clear view of Kate getting off at her stop. It also showed that the people-carrier then overtook her and stopped with its lights off and its engine running.
The images were strikingly similar to those of the Vauxhall Corsa that stopped behind the bus in which Marsha McDonnell had travelled home from Kingston just fifteen months earlier – the same view of the occupants from outside, the same pausing in a road junction as if waiting to see who got off the bus. But this time the car was a people-carrier, not a five-door hatchback saloon.
Levi Bellfield’s wheel-clamping crew were certainly familiar with a white Toyota Previa people-carrier with blacked-out windows and the registration number of K855 EFL, because they had all used it over the preceding months. They also knew that he had used it as one of his ‘shagging wagons’. This particular vehicle had been bought in April 2003 by Aaron Smith, a member of the ‘travelling’ family that Bellfield had gone into business with when he launched his clamping crew, and in May that year Smith had sold it on to Bellfield.
Emma Mills also remembered it, and the fact that Bellfield specifically had blackened its windows after he had bought it from Smith, only to sell it at Christmas to the father of one of his clamping team, Christopher Moran, who in turn then gave it back to his son Noel as an engagement present in early February 2004. Moran regularly used the Toyota Previa for clamping with Bellfield.
Terri Carroll also remembered the people-carrier very clearly. She was to tell the police that she had often been clamping in it in 2004, even though it was officially Noel Moran’s car. ‘When we were out clamping, Levi would teach me how to drive in the Toyota,’ she was to say. ‘Levi took me for driving lessons around March or April time.’
On the Thursday that Kate Sheedy was run down, Noel Moran later told the police that Bellfield was using the Toyota while they were clamping at The White Hart pub in Bicester in Oxfordshire. That was corroborated by a man whose car had been clamped in the pub’s car park the day before. He remembered that a white Toyota Previa had pulled up in front of his van when he was examining the clamp, blocking him in. He later identified the driver – it was Bellfield.
Richard ‘Yosser’ Hughes also remembered that in early June 2004 Bellfield had suddenly decided to take the Toyota Previa to a ‘car valeting service’ to have it thoroughly cleaned inside and out, at a cost of some £60. The cleaning took two full days. Hughes had no idea why his friend had decided it needed cleaning – but then he hadn’t been in Worton Road on the night of 27 May 2004.
There could be no denying that Bellfield knew Worton Road exceptionally well. When he was still with Jo Collings she would regularly drop him off at The County Arms, though she did not know why. He would disappear into a local alleyway without giving her any explanation. She also remembered collecting him there ‘seven or eight times’ during their time together.
Just as significantly, Kate Sheedy’s school was less than a quarter of a mile from the entrance to the industrial estate where she was knocked down on that May night, and Bellfield certainly knew its girls.
Jo Collings would explain later: ‘Throughout the time I was seeing Levi he would leer at the schoolgirls from Gumley Convent School. When he would see the girls walking along in their uniform he made comments like “Dirty little whores, they’re begging for it.” He would always call them sluts. Sometimes he would turn the car around and drive past them again, then roll down the window and shout things like “You know you want it.” ’
There was also no doubt whatever that Bellfield knew the two pubs where Kate Sheedy had spent the evening on the night she was attacked. He had been working as a doorman at The Sorting Room since the previous November and had also spent time working on the door of the Hobgoblin just across the London Road in January. Was that a coincidence? Or had he been stalking her from the moment she and her friends left the Hobgoblin pub that night? No one will ever know. But what is certain is that both Worton Road and London Road in Twickenham were part of what the forensic psychologist and criminal profiler Professor David Canter has called ‘the geographical centre of gravity’ of a
serial attacker. They were familiar parts of Bellfield’s patch of west London, places which gave him a sense of comfort because he knew them so well. It was a sense of comfort that gave him the confidence to kill.
As Brian Altman QC later explained to the jury at the Old Bailey at Bellfield’s trial for the attempted murder of Kate, ‘The prosecution submit you can be satisfied that the vehicle which ran over Kate Sheedy and left her for dead was a white Toyota Previa with distinctive non-standard blacked-out windows. That the driver of that Previa meant to kill her can hardly be an astonishing proposition. It is true that no blunt instrument was used to strike Kate over the head, but if the prosecution is right he used a different blunt instrument to attack her – the blunt instrument of a car … the prosecution submit that the evidence regarding this offence … should lead you to the view that this terrible crime was the work of no one other than Levi Bellfield.’
But when it came to his trial Bellfield resorted to precisely the same excuse that he had used to explain the attack on Irma Dragoshi – he hadn’t been driving at the time. Bellfield claimed that he had lent the Toyota Previa to his wheel-clamping colleagues Morgan and Suraj Gharu for a ‘birthday celebration’ – although he did admit to driving it on Wednesday, 26 May in the car park of The White Hart pub in Bicester. On the night of Thursday, 27 May, however, when Kate was run over Bellfield insisted that he had lent it to Suraj Gharu, and so could not have been driving it.
In the end the jury did not believe his version of events and convicted him of the attempted murder of eighteen-year-old Kate, a young woman who had done nothing whatever to incite his interest beyond being a young blonde on a bus late at night when he was trawling the streets of west London looking for an appropriate target to focus his rage against schoolgirl ‘slags’.
But that conviction for attempted murder was still four years away. As May turned into June in 2004, Bellfield was still a free man, free to give full vent to his anger against women, and in the weeks that followed the attack on Kate Sheedy he became more steadily more and more volatile, arguing violently with both Terri Carroll and Emma Mills, and even finding time to argue again with Jo Collings.
Just a few days after the attack on Kate Sheedy Bellfield’s inability to control his violent temper became all too apparent when he launched an attack on his friend, and fellow drug-dealer, ‘Spanish’ Pete Rodriguez, a rakish thin man of 5 feet 7 inches in his late twenties with short dark hair. The two men had been sharing the flat at 39, Crosby Close, just off the A316 road out of London, though Rodriguez had been forced to sleep on a futon on the floor in the front room while Bellfield and Terri Carroll had shared the bedroom. Carroll later described Rodriguez as Bellfield’s ‘lapdog’.
Unbeknown to Bellfield, however, Rodriguez had struck up a friendship with Jo Collings and had arranged to go and live with her until he had ‘sorted himself out’, as she was to put it. The move was to take place over the weekend of 5–6 June – barely a week after the Sheedy attack.
Rodriguez had stayed with Collings on the preceding Friday night, leaving on the Saturday morning to collect his stuff. But Rodriguez didn’t return to her flat when she expected him to that night. So, not certain what was going on, she phoned him from her mobile phone on the Sunday afternoon while she was at a horse show at Hickstead in Sussex. He told her not to worry – he would be coming round that evening.
Back home, Collings rang him again between 7 and 8 that evening, only for Rodriguez to tell her, ‘It’s all kicking off,’ and that she should ring him again in an hour. At this point he was still in the flat in Crosby Close he had been sharing with Bellfield and Carroll.
As the evening wore on, Collings became ever more concerned and rang Rodriguez again between 9.30 and 10 o’clock. This time, however, he told her, ‘I haven’t got anything at the moment,’ a code phrase they used to let her know that Bellfield was with him, and that she should ring off. She could hear Bellfield in the background as well as the voices of three other men. They were arguing, but she rang off fully, still expecting to see Rodriguez later on that evening. But he never appeared.
Exactly what happened to ‘Spanish Pete’ on the evening of Sunday, 6 June 2004 at the flat at Crosby Close has never been fully explained, but the aftermath was clear, and disturbing. The night ended with Rodriguez being rushed into hospital having been viciously attacked with an axe and a screwdriver, an attack that was to see him on a life support machine for the next six weeks.
What is also not in doubt is that Bellfield had been out wheel-clamping on that Sunday afternoon, and that Terri Carroll had been with him, as had Spiers and Noel Moran. They had spent the day in Hemel Hempstead and got back to Crosby Close at about 7.
Given Bellfield’s appetite for lying, it’s almost certain that the truth about what happened that evening will never be known, but the Metropolitan Police became convinced privately that Bellfield had fallen out comprehensively with his friend and fellow drug-dealer and had attacked him.
Part of the reason for the attack could have been that he had asked Rodriguez to store about 250 ecstasy tablets for him in the fridge at his mother’s flat in Battersea, south London, and he had failed to collect them. At the time Rodriguez’s mother is in hospital. But another reason could have been his discovery that ‘Spanish Pete’ was now close to his former partner Jo Collings, and yet another reason involved another very young woman.
That weekend, a fourteen-year-old friend of Terri Carroll had rung her to say that she had been thrown out of her home by her mother and asked if she could stay with her. Bellfield had immediately suggested that she could join them in Crosby Close. And on the night of Sunday, 6 June the visiting fourteen-year-old was allegedly sexually molested. To this day no one has been identified as responsible.
One thing is certain, however: the events on that Sunday evening so upset Bellfield that at about 1.30 a.m. in the morning of Monday, 7 June he phoned Emma Mills at Little Benty to tell her to ‘get out of the house – they’re coming’. He meant the police, for he clearly believed they would blame him at least for the attack, if for nothing else, and he wanted to make himself as scarce as possible. When Mills told him she didn’t have a car, Bellfield told her to call his sister Lindy-Lou and get her to collect her even though it was the early hours of the morning and Mills was nearly eight months pregnant. Then, at 3 a.m. that morning, Bellfield took Terri Carroll and their fourteen-year-old visitor to stay at a hotel on the Heathrow airport perimeter road, before announcing that he was off to visit Rodriguez in hospital – though whether he actually went there is less certain.
Did Bellfield attack Rodriguez? The police who investigated the attack certainly become convinced that he did, although the myriad of conflicting statements they received from people who knew what had happened did not make the events clear.
Was the known paedophile Victor Kelly involved? There was a suggestion that Carroll’s fourteen-year-old friend had been seeing the sixty-two-year-old and could have been attacked by him. Again, a set of conflicting statements from those who knew about the events brought the police no closer to the answer – even though everyone at Crosby Close that evening knew, or at least knew of, Kelly and his predilection for girls aged between twelve and fourteen.
In the end all the police could do was to suspect that there had been a deliberate attempt to cover up the events in Crosby Close that night, and that Bellfield had been in some way involved. Proving it was a different matter, however, although to help them do so they took away two of the cars parked outside the flat that evening, a Vauxhall Vectra and the white Ford Courier van which Bellfield used for wheel-clamping.
Whatever the truth, one thing was quite clear. Bellfield had no intention of accepting responsibility for the attack. He insisted that ‘the Paki had done it’, meaning his fellow wheel clamper Suraj Gharu. He also told Emma Mills that Victor Kelly had also been involved in some way, although he wasn’t specific about how he may have been, beyond warning Mills that Kelly was
‘dangerous’.
In private Bellfield believed that he would be arrested for the attack on Rodriguez. He confessed to Mills that he was convinced the police ‘are gonna do me for Peter’, and she certainly recalls that he was arrested, then charged with perverting the course of justice and given bail. But even that didn’t prevent him telling her repeatedly: ‘You know I didn’t do it, Emma.’
Mills also knew that no member of his wheel-clamping crew would tell her the truth. They were as closely bound together as a family of Dickensian criminals, all knowing secrets about one another, secrets that they would not share with anyone else – and certainly not the police. Their ‘omerta’ of silence was as much part of their creed as was Bellfield’s devotion to his travellers’ roots – a sense that they would never let one another down, and could only trust one another in any kind of emergency.
It was that loyalty to one another that made it exceptionally difficult for the police investigating the brutal attack on Rodriguez to penetrate. They took statements from the people who seemed to be involved, but none of them had seen anything of any significance. A blanket of silence and secrecy was thrown around the events of that evening , and the reason was plain to see: too many people had too much to lose by telling the truth about what really happened.
Nevertheless, the attack on ‘Spanish Pete’ demonstrated vividly exactly how far Bellfield was involved in the twilight world of under-age sex and drugs. It had been part of his life for the past fifteen years, and he was certainly not capable of breaking free of it. The Rodriguez attack was the final evidence of his descent into addiction.
One man who witnessed that descent at first hand was a friend of Peter Rodriguez called C— Mayell, who had first met Bellfield in April 2004 and had immediately been asked to join the clamping crew. It didn’t take long for him to realize the nature of Bellfield’s attitudes to sex and women.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 15