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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  It was a compelling argument – but that did not make it decisive. There were no witnesses to any of the attacks, no evidence directly linking Bellfield to the women, no forensic evidence to put him at the sites, no DNA evidence saying he had been present, no CCTV footage of the attacks themselves, no murder weapon in two of the cases, and – perhaps most significant of all – no clear motive. Why had Bellfield decided to attack these five innocent young women whom he did not know, without warning and for no apparent reason? After a four-month trial it was a question that the jury now had to decide. It was to prove no easy task.

  Indeed after two days of deliberation the jury found it quite simply impossible to agree about whether Bellfield had or had not attempted to kidnap Anna-Maria Rennie from Hospital Bridge Road. They did not acquit Bellfield of the crime, but they could not be sure that he had committed it, leaving Mrs Justice Rafferty no alternative other than to allow the crime to be ‘lie on the file’. He had not been found guilty, but he had not been found not guilty. The case against him for the attempted kidnap of Anna-Maria Rennie might one day again be presented to a jury, but for the moment it was dormant.

  The same proved true for Irma Dragoshi. Once again, even though the judge allowed them to reach a majority verdict of ten votes to two if they wished to, the jury failed to agree. They did not find Bellfield not guilty, it was simply that they could not agree on whether or not he had committed the crime. Again, it left the judge no alternative other than to allow the crime to be ‘lie on the file’, waiting for the possibility that he might be tried for it again in the future.

  Those two decisions left the prosecution, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police distinctly nervous that their case might collapse completely if the jury could not agree that Bellfield had indeed committed the murders of Amélie and Marsha and had attempted to murder Kate. Indeed Bellfield might well have felt that there was now at least a chance that he would be acquitted on the remaining three charges. It did not turn out to be the case.

  Another dramatic hush fell in Court 6 of the Old Bailey on the morning of 25 February 2008 when the foreman of the jury stood to read out the verdict in the cases of Marsha McDonnell and Kate Sheedy. Nodding to the foreman, the clerk to Mrs Justice Rafferty asked if they had indeed reached a verdict, and was told, ‘We have, Your Honour.’ The jury found Bellfield guilty of the murder of Marsha and the attempted murder of Kate by a majority of ten votes to two.

  The courtroom erupted, with shouts from the public gallery from the defendant’s relatives and friends, as well as from the relatives of the young women who had been attacked.

  The jury then retired for a final time to consider their verdict on the murder of Amélie Delagrange, the murder that had brought DCI Colin Sutton and his double murder squad to the case in August 2004.

  Her parents had sat in dignified silence in the public gallery throughout the trial – much to Bellfield’s fury. At one point he had even shouted at them – accusing them of being ‘fucking leeches’. The outburst was to do him no good.

  This time the jury were in no doubt. When they returned to the court for a final time, it was with a unanimous verdict – that Levi Bellfield was guilty of the murder of Amélie, an innocent young woman who had done nothing more sinister than miss her bus stop and walk home across Twickenham Green on that balmy August evening.

  Again the public gallery erupted, not least with relief from Amélie’s parents, who had watched in horror as the man they believed had killed their daughter twisted and turned in an effort to convince the jury that he was innocent. As her father Jean-François was to tell his friends outside the Old Bailey on Monday, 25 February 2008, ‘It is late, but there is justice.’

  Mrs Justice Rafferty calmly brought the court to order before she addressed Bellfield.

  ‘You have reduced three families to unimagined grief,’ she told him firmly. ‘What dreadful feelings went through your head as you attacked them and in two cases snuffed out a young life is beyond understanding.’

  She then told the defendant that she would pass sentence the following morning.

  When that morning came, however, Levi Bellfield refused to come out of the cells hidden in the bowels of the Old Bailey to stand in the dock to hear the punishment the judge would deliver. The reasons he gave were that he ‘hadn’t had a fair trial’.

  So he was not there to hear Mrs Justice Rafferty sentence him to three ‘full life’ terms of imprisonment, which meant that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, never to be released.

  With that sentence Bellfield joined an exceptional and very small group of British murderers. Fewer then forty people, and only one woman, have been sentenced to ‘full life’ terms of imprisonment, including the Black Panther, Donald Neilson; the murderer of five Ipswich prostitutes, Steve Wright; the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady; and Rosemary West.

  Outside the Old Bailey life a jubilant DCI Sutton told the waiting media: ‘Levi Bellfield is a predator who preyed on women over a period of time. He targeted his victims at random, attacking those much smaller and weaker than him.’ Clearly relieved at the verdicts, Sutton went on: ‘He refused to face what he had done, lied repeatedly to try to save his skin and treated his victims and their families and the authorities with contempt.’

  It was a contempt that Bellfield had carefully hidden throughout his trial, but now it came out into the open as some of his former partners started to tell the media about their experiences with him. Jo Collings, for example, told one newspaper that Bellfield had kept her as his ‘sex slave’ for two and a half years, adding that he had attacked ‘at least 100 women’ and had even bragged to her about raping a disabled girl on a car bonnet in a nightclub car park after lifting her out of her wheelchair. Bellfield liked to boast to her, Collings went on, that he had ‘had another little slut’ when he got home from his job as a bouncer and insisted that all blonde girls were ‘evil fucking bitches who must die’.

  Even his last full-time partner Terri Carroll, who had been wheel-clamping with him and stayed with him throughout the last tumultuous eighteen months of his freedom, confessed to a newspaper: ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am to be alive. I know I came terrifyingly close to becoming one of his victims,’ adding ‘He made it clear he would kill me and hurt my family if I ever left him.’

  Carroll’s comments gave a lie to the behaviour of the modest, quietly spoken defendant from Court 6 who was now resting in the cells beneath the Old Bailey, condemned to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

  To the media Levi Bellfield had become a modern-day Bluebeard, a man with no respect for women and who wanted nothing more than to end the lives of some of them. It was a reputation that was to follow him to prison.

  After Bellfield’s conviction he was moved from remand at Belmarsh in London to serve his sentence in the equally austere surroundings of the gaunt red-brick Victorian buildings of Wakefield prison in West Yorkshire, known among its inmates as the ‘monster mansion’ in tribute to the crimes of the men incarcerated there. Sitting on the bizarrely named Love Lane, Wakefield is the single biggest high-security jail in western Europe and houses some 740 inmates, including 100 Category A prisoners, who are regarded as very dangerous, and ten so-called ‘high-risk’ Category A prisoners, who are seen as extremely dangerous. Wakefield houses one of the highest concentrations of violent criminals anywhere in Europe and is home to the notoriously violent Charles Bronson – often described as Britain’s single most dangerous prisoner – as well as Roy Whiting, whose sentence for murdering eight-year-old Sarah Payne has been commuted to forty years, Robert Black, the Scottish serial killer and child molester, and Carl Manning, the killer of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié. It is also home to kidnapper Michael Sams, still suspected of having abducted and killed London estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, as well as Britain’s single most famous homosexual child killer, the now frail eighty-four-year-old Sidney Cooke, memorably known to his fellow prisoners as Hissing Sid, who is on
e of the most hated men in the prison. These were the men Bellfield was to join behind its 15-feet-high brick walls topped with razor wire.

  Although Wakefield has been steadily upgraded by the Prison Service over the past ten years, it is still a gloomy, ominous place, a prison that seems to seethe with violence. Suicides among its prisoners are all too familiar. It was here that the notorious serial-killer doctor Harold Shipman – convicted of the murder of fifteen of his elderly patients, but alleged to have killed as many as 235 – killed himself in January 2004.

  Not surprisingly, therefore, Bellfield was put on ‘suicide watch’ when he first arrived as a new prisoner facing a life behind its bars. But he was not in the least overwhelmed by his new surroundings, rapidly establishing himself as a popular prisoner, with a ready line in conversation, and not one to be easily intimidated. The years of steroids and muscle building stood him in good stead among the prisoners in Wakefield, as did his appetite for relentless sexual innuendo, with one newspaper reporting that he had developed a taste for gay relationships behind its walls.

  But one dark shadow still hung over the bouncer and wheel-clamper – the case of the thirteen-year-old Surrey schoolgirl Amanda ‘Milly’ Dowler.

  On the day of Bellfield’s convictions in February 2008 the Surrey police had announced that they were ‘very interested’ in questioning him about her abduction and murder and regarded him as a prime suspect. If he were to be found guilty of that crime, Bellfield knew only too well that his life in Wakefield would become far more difficult, as the prisoners’ loathing of child killers had seen a string of attacks on them – recently on Ian Huntley, the Soham killer. Bellfield had never been convicted of killing a child and so he wasn’t – in prison parlance – a ‘nonce’. He had every intention of preserving that reputation, not least for his own safety.

  But on 30 March 2010 Bellfield was indeed charged with the abduction and murder of Milly Dowler, as well as the attempted abduction of another eleven-year-old schoolgirl named Rachel Cowles, on the day before in Shepperton, west London, not far from Milly’s home in Hersham. On 6 October 2010 he appeared at the Old Bailey by a video link from Wakefield to have those charges confirmed.

  Once again, Bellfield pleaded not guilty, and once again began to prepare himself for a trial. But his experience had taught him a great deal about the workings of the law, and he elected to replace his defence barristers for the new trial. He picked Jeffrey Samuels QC, a feisty Manchester-based barrister, who had acted as junior counsel to the formidable William Clegg QC in the defence of Barry George, whom Clegg had persuaded the court to release after he had originally been convicted of the murder of the television presenter Jill Dando. Prison legend had it that George and Bellfield had been prisoners together at Belmarsh, and George had urged his fellow inmate to ‘get one of my briefs, they’re really good’.

  So it was that on 19 April 2011 Bellfield once again stepped into the dock of the Old Bailey to hear Jeffrey Samuels QC attempt to get the case against him dismissed because of the paucity of evidence against him. Again he took care to dress in his neatest suit and replied to the questions asked of him in the most respectful voice.

  The days in Wakefield had seen him lose a little weight, but he didn’t particularly appear as a man who had suffered dreadfully at the hands of Her Majesty’s Prison Service. If anything, he looked a little younger than his forty-two years and joked with the prison officers as they lead him into the glass-fronted dock of Court 9.

  The prosecuting counsel was his nemesis from three years before, Brian Altman QC, but there was to be a different judge – the Glasgow-educated, sixty-three-year-old Sir Alan Wilkie QC, who had recently joined the Old Bailey’s band of High Court judges from a senior position on the Newcastle bench. Thin-faced, and with an expression of measured interest, he had earned part of his expert reputation as a Law Commissioner.

  If Mr Justice Wilkie dismissed the case against him, Bellfield could return to Wakefield, his reputation safe from accusations of being a ‘nonce’. If he did not, then he would face a full-scale trial for the murder of Milly Dowler, a trial that – if he were convicted – would usher him into the pantheon of child killers and for ever brand him one of the most pernicious serial killers in British criminal history.

  In fact the words ‘serial killer’ were uttered only once during the day-and-a-half hearing before Mr Justice Wilkie on those two hot April days just before Easter 2011, and they came from the mouth of prosecuting counsel Brian Altman QC. They were said so softly that it was almost possible to miss them, almost as though the description was too horrifying to contemplate.

  The hearing was conducted with studious balance, although Jeffrey Samuels QC did allow himself to question repeatedly the prosecutions arguments that the case should be presented to a jury, describing them as ‘thin’, to the obvious delight of his client, who proceeded to thank him warmly at the end of the first day’s hearing.

  Bellfield’s pleasure was to prove short-lived. Shortly after noon on the second day, 20 April 2011, Mr Justice Wilkie announced, with the soft hint of the west of Scotland still in his voice, that the defendant would indeed stand trial for the murder of Milly Dowler. It was to start before him on Thursday, 5 May 2011.

  Once again Levi Bellfield was to stand in the dock of the Old Bailey charged with a crime that would once have seen him hanged – the murder of an innocent schoolgirl.

  16. The Reckoning Begins

  ‘All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.’

  Aristotle , Ethics

  It was just before noon on the warm spring day of Friday, 6 May 2011 when Levi Bellfield finally got to his feet in the armoured-glass-fronted dock of Court 8 at the Old Bailey to face the charge that he had kidnapped and murdered the thirteen-year-old Surrey schoolgirl Amanda Dowler – known to her family as Milly – on 21 March 2002, nine years before. The Court Clerk, dressed in wig and black gown, asked him to confirm that he was indeed Levi Bellfield and proceeded to read out the indictment against him. Then she asked: ‘How do you plead?’

  Wearing a grey suit, a white shirt, a quiet striped tie and an expression that suggested the charges were ridiculous, Bellfield answered in his softest, least belligerent tone: ‘Not guilty.’

  The clerk put to him that he was also charged with the attempted kidnapping of another Surrey schoolgirl, eleven-year-old Rachel Cowles, on the previous day, 20 March 2002. Once again Bellfield answered softly: ‘Not guilty.’

  Bellfield then resumed his seat in the dock, flanked by two male prison officers and a female officer, picked up the small notepad that he used to write notes to his solicitor and defence counsel, who were sitting in the well of the court just feet in front of him, and waited for the case against him to begin.

  He had spent the first part of the morning watching as the jury had been chosen and sworn in. They were made up of seven men and five women, chosen from a jury pool of fifty, and ranged in age from their early twenties to their late forties. Two of the women jurors were black and one was Asian, while the male jurors were all white. These were the twelve who were to decide his fate in the weeks that lay ahead of him, the men and women who had to determine whether he had indeed spirited away and killed Milly Dowler on her way home down Station Avenue on that March day all those years before.

  It was just eleven days before Bellfield’s forty-third birthday, and the court itself was hardly packed. Only the judge, Mr Justice Wilkie, the jury, counsel for the prosecution and defence, the court staff and one or two reporters were there to see him finally arraigned for the murder that would come to define him. The public gallery was deserted, but for one single person. Sitting quite alone was his elder brother Richard, pale and impassive, watching his brother stand accused of one of the highest-profile murders in Britain so far in the twenty-first century. From time to time, brother and brother would look across at each other, but for the most part they stared silently ahead of them – waiting for the trial to unfold.

  Now st
aying, once again, at Belmarsh, where he’d spent his remand during his first trial at the Old Bailey, Bellfield was now well practised in the ways of the British justice system and had taken particular care to study all the documents provided to him by both the prosecution and defence teams. His cell was positively crammed with legal papers – so much so that the joke in prison was that the authorities had privately declared it a fire hazard.

  It wasn’t until shortly after 10.30 on the following Tuesday morning, 10 May, that the Senior Treasury Counsel, Brian Altman QC, rose to his feet to open the prosecution’s case against the former nightclub bouncer and wheel-clamper – whom the jury had now learned was also a double murderer as a result of the judge’s decision to allow them to know about his convictions in February 2008.

  In soft, measured tones, with their hint of the English Home Counties, Altman began by telling the jury about the day Milly disappeared, and how – just moments after leaving Walton-on-Thames railway station after sharing a plate of chips with one of her best girlfriends and fellow Year 9 pupil at Heathside School in Weybridge – she’d left to walk along the road when, ‘just a few minutes after 4 p.m., she vanished: gone in the blink of an eye’. It was to be the phrase that would dominate the newspapers’ headlines the following morning as the first reports of Bellfield’s trial appeared. ‘Milly had simply disappeared in a flash from a street in a suburban town in broad daylight,’ they quoted Altman as saying, adding his phrase that it was ‘every parent’s worst nightmare’.

  In his calm voice Altman went on to tell the jury: ‘For six long months the Dowler family suffered the excruciating agony of not knowing what had become of their daughter until, on Wednesday, 18 September 2002, some mushroom-pickers found, quite by chance, the unclothed and badly decomposed body of a young female … lying in the undergrowth of Yateley Heath Wood in Hampshire. The body was soon identified as that of Milly Dowler.’