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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  But Bellfield was very careful to make sure that his displays of hubris were never on display when the jury were in court – Bellfield knew only too well that he had to gull them into seeing him as a gentle, softly spoken man who had been wronged, not someone intent on manipulating the legal system.

  Bellfield was certainly at pains to be the picture of innocence as the jury took their seats in court and the first of the prosecution’s witnesses entered the court shortly after 10.30 on the morning of Friday, 13 May. Bellfield’s brother’s male friend had now joined his brother in the public gallery, sitting next to one another, and, of course, the jury did not know who they were.

  One thing was clear to the jury, however. Rachel Cowles now wasn’t the eleven-year-old schoolgirl whom it was alleged he’d approached on Upper Halliford Road in Shepperton on Wednesday, 20 March 2002, the day before Milly Dowler disappeared. She was instead a cheery-looking, chubby, twenty-one-year-old with dark-red hair, glasses and a wide-eyed stare. In a firm, clear voice she told the court that on that afternoon a car had pulled up beside her as she was walking home from school, and the driver had leaned across the passenger seat to say to her – through the car’s open window: ‘Hello, I’ve just moved in next door, would you like a lift home?’

  ‘I said, “No thank you, it’s all right,” ’ Rachel explained. It was a decision the prosecution alleged saved her life.

  She then told the court that a police car had driven past just as she was talking to the driver and that he’d driven off without saying anything more. She couldn’t really describe the car, or its registration number. But she could remember that the driver was a man between thirty and forty years old, with a bald head and a rather ‘round’ chubby face and was wearing a gold loop earring in his left ear.

  The encounter left the schoolgirl feeling ‘shocked and confused’, and she’d told her mother all about it fifteen or so minutes later when she’d got home. Rachel also told the court that she’d made a point of looking for the car near her house – ‘to check if he’d been telling the truth’. But she couldn’t see it anywhere.

  Worried by what had happened, Rachel’s mother Diane had phoned her father at work to tell him, and then called the police to report the incident. When she did so, she passed the phone to her eleven-year-old daughter, who started crying when she spoke to the officer. The tape of her call to the police was to be played to the jury during the trial.

  ‘I felt scared,’ Rachel said in the witness box, ‘because I suddenly realized the enormity of what had happened.’

  Jeffrey Samuels QC then rose to his feet to cross-examine the witness on behalf of the defence. It wasn’t an experience she was destined to enjoy as, working directly upon Bellfield’s instructions, he sought to cast doubt on her evidence – and on her description of the man she had said had offered her a lift home on that March afternoon nine years before. In particular, Samuels pointed out to Rachel that when she’d made a statement to the police about the events in March 2005 – three years later – she had indicated that he had had a beard, and that she may have been affected by a recent television report about Milly’s disappearance.

  Uncomfortable, and uncertain, Rachel told Samuels: ‘I was stressed that day.’

  The court also heard that she’d later been asked by the police to attend an identity parade but had been unable to pick out Bellfield.

  As she left the witness box, the twenty-one-year-old whose life may just have been saved by her own clear thinking nine years earlier looked chastened and on the verge of tears.

  In stark contrast, sitting across the court from her in the dock, Bellfield looked rather pleased, as though his plan to make everyone who was to give evidence against him suffer was succeeding. The following week, the world and the court would see his plan take its first casualties – Milly Dowler’s family.

  17. The Dowlers On Trial

  ‘Wrong must not win by technicalities.’

  Aeschylus , The Eumenides

  Trapped in the windowless Court 8 at the Central Criminal Court, with no sign of the weather or indeed the world at all beyond its pale wood-panelled walls, it was easy to forget the terrible price that the Dowler family had paid to be there. It was, after all, their thirteen-year-old daughter Milly who had disappeared on that early spring day in March 2002, a girl they plainly loved, and whose videotaped antics of dancing while ironing a pair of jeans, or playing the saxophone, had touched the nation’s hearts during the six months she’d been missing and before her skeletel remains were found in wooded heathland just off the M3 motorway.

  For nine long years the Dowler family had waited to see the wheels of British justice bring a man to trial for the abduction and killing of their daughter, years which had seen them struggle to cope with the dreadful demons that any parent would feel at the loss of a child – snatched from them for no apparent reason, suddenly, brutally and without warning or explanation from a leafy suburban street in Surrey.

  The Dowlers had lost their daughter Milly and were now coming to the Old Bailey to see the man they believed had taken her stand trial, and they walked confidently towards court hand in hand, the tall figure of Bob Dowler towering above his wife Sally and his only surviving child, Milly’s elder sister, Gemma. They were in search of justice, an end to the torture of their daughter’s disappearance and murder, but what they did not know as they made their way towards the Old Bailey in the early afternoon of Monday, 16 May 2011 was that it was they who would find themselves on trial almost as much the prisoner sitting pale-faced and apparently emotionless in the dock. They were to become the victims of the justice they craved.

  The court’s day had begun quietly enough – with a lengthy legal argument behind closed doors. Nothing threatening in that, the Dowlers would have imagined, but they were to be proved wrong, dreadfully, heartbreakingly wrong. For the argument held in private partly centred around material that Levi Bellfield’s defence team were anxious should be allowed into evidence in open court.

  There was no hint of that, however, shortly after two o’clock when fifty-nine-year-old Bob Dowler walked across the floor of the court to take his oath in the witness box. Bald now, and with what little was left of his hair turned grey, he might almost have been a police officer as he stood to give his evidence in a clear voice.

  Bob Dowler told Brian Altman, who was questioning him for the prosecution, that he had met his wife in 1981 and they had married three years later. They had then gone on to have two daughters, Gemma, born in January 1986, and Amanda, whom they always called Milly, in June 1988. It meant that she’d been thirteen when she disappeared on Thursday, 21 March 2002.

  That day, Bob Dowler explained, he’d been due to go to a meeting in Basingstoke rather than travel up to his office in London, which meant he’d been at the family home when his wife Sally had left to drive their daughters to Heathside School. Bob Dowler had kissed his daughter Milly goodbye that morning: ‘It was very important I gave Amanda a kiss in the morning,’ he told the jury. ‘It was a bit of a family habit with her.’ He’d forgotten the previous morning, he confessed, and she’d reminded him about it.

  Dowler then explained that he had got back home to his house in Hersham at about 3.15 that afternoon and had taken a call from Milly at ‘about 3.45’, saying she was at the station café in Walton-on-Thames and would be home in ‘about half an hour’. She hadn’t asked him to come and collect her in his car, and he hadn’t offered to do so.

  ‘It was a totally normal conversation,’ he said, his fingers extended downwards in front of him, as if he were trying to balance on them.

  He also told Altman that he’d been making a series of business phone calls that afternoon ‘which were very stressful’ and hadn’t noticed whether Milly had come in or not, though he had been aware that Sally and Gemma had arrived. His wife had been due to babysit for her brother and had gone off shortly after 5 that afternoon, leaving him a Post-It note asking, ‘Where’s Milly?’

  At 5.
21 Bob Dowler called Milly’s mobile and left a message; ‘Where are you?’, and half an hour later he left another. By then he was becoming anxious, and by 6 had gone out to search for her in his car. She was nowhere to be found, and so, just after 7 o’clock that evening, he called the local police station to report her missing.

  The tragedy that was to engulf the Dowler family had begun. But it was now about to get even worse. The loss of a daughter brought them almost unbearable grief, but their all too human frailties were now about to be exposed to the world – in front of the media – at the instruction and encouragement of the very man that they believed had kidnapped and killed her, Levi Bellfield.

  Rising to his feet in front of the jury, Jeffrey Samuels QC, acting on Bellfield’s specific instructions, and thereby doing the job that he was required by law to do on behalf of his client, began his cross-examination gently. He asked Bob Dowler for details of his day, but then suggested, resting his arms on the cardboard box of files in front of him with his hands clasped together: ‘You became the focus of the police inquiries for a time.’

  Bob Dowler blanched but accepted the suggestion was true – he had been the focus of inquiries – just as he agreed with Samuels that the police had even told him: ‘You are a suspect, whether you like it or not.’

  The tall, confident figure of Bob Dowler then started to crumple slightly as Samuels put it to him that his daughter Milly wasn’t ‘an entirely happy-go-lucky character’.

  ‘She had her demons, did she not?’ Samuels put to him.

  ‘I think she had natural childhood fears,’ he replied.

  In a firm, yet unhectoring voice, Samuels then read to Bob Dowler, and the jury, a poem that Surrey police had discovered in Milly’s room after her disappearance. ‘I don’t know what it is I do,’ it began, ‘they all just seem to hate me. All they do is slag me off and force everyone against me. I know I am pathetic and helpless and I know I’m not pretty or fit. But what do they have that I haven’t? Let’s face it, I am just totally shit. I know what people think, I know how they feel.’ It was as if Milly’s own voice were echoing around the courtroom from beyond the grave in the hush that descended. ‘What the fuck, I don’t know. What do I do to make them hate me? Maybe I should just go. Sometimes I think how life would be without me, for Mum and Dad to have a beautiful little girl who is something like Gemma. She would be everything I am not, everything I dream to be: pretty, smart, intelligent, wanted, loved.’

  It was the anguished cry of a typical teenager, the outpouring of the agony that growing up can be for a girl on the verge of adulthood and uncertain how to cope with it, a cry for understanding and affection that virtually every one of her school contemporaries would have made at one time or another, but none the less painful or poignant for that.

  It ended: ‘Then I hit myself and wake up to reality and how bad school’s going to be in the morning. I hate it, but not nearly as much as I hate myself.’

  Controlling himself as best he could, Bob Dowler accepted that the notes were ‘very sad’.

  But that was not to be the end of his torment in the witness box, for Jeffrey Samuels then proceeded to read to him another document found by the police in Milly’s bedroom in the family home – one which was even more distressing.

  ‘Dear Daddy and my beautiful Mummy,’ it began. ‘By the time you find this letter I will be up there, or down below. I have always been that way, below other people. I am sorry, you deserve a better daughter. So I have left. If anything, you should be happy now, you can concentrate on lovely Gemsy, without me getting in the way. You should have had an abortion, or at least had me adopted and at least I would not have made your life hell as well.’ It was certainly the letter of a young woman with her ‘demons’, as the defence had called them, for it ended: ‘I think it would be best if you tried to forget me. It is nothing you have done. I just feel I had to go. Please don’t let any harm get to any of you. Lots of love, as always, your little disappointment. Amanda.’

  The very life seemed to ebb out of Bob Dowler as the letter was read out to him. By the time it was finished he was sobbing uncontrollably, tears running down his broad, open face. The man who had lost a daughter was now seeing her memory stained for ever at the instigation of the man he believed had taken her, Levi Bellfield, who sat in the dock motionless as the letter was read out.

  But Bob Dowler’s agony did not even end there, for Samuels then went on to point out to him that the police had also found a note from his daughter describing what she called ‘this whole Dad thing’, which had been written after she’d found pornographic magazines in his and his wife’s bedroom. In a steady, firm voice Jeffrey Samuels put it to Bob Dowler that the magazines weren’t ‘mainstream or top-shelf pornography’ but rather ‘extreme pornographic material of a fetish nature’, which featured bondage and latex.

  Now clearly distressed, Dowler coughed nervously and took a drink from the plastic water cup in front of him. He accepted that his daughter would have found the magazines ‘horrible and disgusting’.

  The dissection of Bob Dowler’s private life wasn’t over, however, for Samuels then went on disclose to the jury that the police had also found pornographic videos in the house as well as a bag in the loft that contained items of clothing and equipment ‘associated with bondage-style sexual practices’, including a ‘rubber hood and a ball-gag’. Looking across the courtroom towards him, Samuels pointed out that he could not ‘exclude the possibility’ that Milly may have discovered the content of the bag, nor could he exclude the possibility that she might also have found a ‘specialist contact magazine’ which was also in the loft for ‘those who provide such services’ and which had been ‘annotated by you indicating that you may have used such services’.

  By now Bob Dowler was a shadow of the confident man who had walked across Court 8 barely an hour earlier. He shamefacedly accepted that the discoveries amounted to ‘a complete betrayal as a father’, although he firmly rejected the suggestion that they may have contributed to her disappearance.

  The implications in the questions were clear: Milly may have run away after finding the ‘extreme’ bondage pornography.

  ‘Are you in any way responsible for Milly’s disappearance?’ Jeffrey Samuels asked him directly.

  ‘The only way I can be responsible is if she had seen some of this material,’ Dowler repeated, recalling what he had told the police when first confronted with the Milly’s notes and the discoveries. ‘But I have no other involvement with Milly’s disappearance whatsoever … God forbid she decided to take her own life or run away.’

  Yet even those frank admissions didn’t halt his ordeal, for the defence proceeded to remind him that he’d made a further statement to the police not long after Milly’s disappearance. It stated that on his way back from his meeting in Basingstoke on the afternoon of her disappearance he’d stopped at the Fleet services on the M3 motorway, where CCTV cameras had captured him looking at ‘magazines of a sexual nature’.

  ‘You’d been aroused by them,’ Samuels continued calmly, so much so that, when you returned home, ‘you masturbated in the bedroom’ before you embarked on the series of business phone calls and just ‘shortly before you got the call from Milly saying she was going to be a little late’.

  Now utterly humiliated, Bob Dowler could only hang his head and admit that it was true.

  If anyone had been on trial in Courtroom 8 of the Old Bailey that afternoon it had not been the defendant, but rather the man whose daughter had been abducted and murdered.

  Rising to re-examine him in the wake of his fierce mauling at the hands of the defence, Brian Altman quietly asked Bob Dowler if there had been any change in Milly’s relationship with him in the wake of her discovery of the pornographic magazines.

  Struggling to hold himself together, Bob Dowler told the court that he hadn’t been aware of any change. Nor was he aware, Bob Dowler continued, that Milly had any reluctance to be in the house with him, and that there w
as nothing whatever in her voice when she called from Walton-on-Thames railway station on the way home that afternoon that she was in any way disappointed with him.

  Then, to complete his humiliation, Bob Dowler was asked if his wife knew about the ‘items’ found by the police in the loft of the family home.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. He told her after the police had found them and described her reaction by saying: ‘Distressed is hardly the right word.’

  After just eighty minutes in the witness box, Bob Dowler walked out of the court, not even glancing at the impassive face of Levi Bellfield in the dock. The pain on his face, and the slowness of his stride, spoke volumes about how he felt.

  His humiliation was to be completed the following morning when the press went into considerable detail about his admissions. The Daily Telegraph chose the headline: ‘Pornography made Milly’s father first suspect’.

  But the Dowler family’s anguish was not over. Minutes after Bob Dowler left the court, his fifty-one-year-old wife Sally was led in by a Surrey Police team. Clearly aware of what had happened to her husband, she was already distressed as she walked towards the witness stand wearing a smart grey dress, a gold necklace and gold earrings, with her short hair tinted blonde.

  A maths teacher at her daughters’ school – though she did not teach either Gemma or Milly – Sally Dowler told the court that her daughter was a confident girl, who had been very happy in the days before she had gone missing in March 2002. The family had spent the Sunday before on a ‘fun run’, where Milly had been asked to play the saxophone at the party afterwards.

  ‘At one stage tears were running down her face she was so happy,’ she told the jury. Indeed Milly had told her afterwards that it had been ‘one of the best days of her life’.

  It was in stark contrast to the portrait of the suicidal girl built up less than an hour beforehand in court as Milly’s poem and letter had been read out by the defence. ‘Overall I would have said she was happy,’ Sally Dowler explained.