Looking composed, Katherine explained that she had stayed behind at school that afternoon to work on a Design and Technology project and had then got the train to Walton from Weybridge to catch the 556 bus home to Shepperton. Katherine had walked across the road to the bus stop and sat down to wait. There was nobody else with her as she watched Milly walk past on the other side of the road.
‘We made eye contact,’ she told the court. ‘I didn’t wave or anything but I thought we both recognized each other.’ At the time, Katherine remembered Milly’s hair was tied up in a ponytail; her blazer was over her left arm, and her rucksack was on her back.
Katherine remembered that the blue single-decker bus she was waiting for came along quite quickly after Milly had passed out of her sight – obscured by the advertising hoarding on the bus stop – and she’d climbed on, paid her 50 pence child’s fare and sat down on the left-hand side of the bus looking out across to the side of Station Avenue where she had last seen Milly. As the bus drew away along the road, however, Katherine couldn’t see any sign of Milly. ‘It was quite weird I hadn’t seen her,’ she explained. ‘I could see quite clearly down the road but I still couldn’t see her.’
What made Katherine Laynes so significant to the jury was that she was the only witness who claimed to have actually seen Milly Dowler walking down Station Avenue. That meant that she was certainly one of the last people to see her alive before Milly met whoever was to take her life.
Over the next two days the jury also heard statements – read out to them – from other people who had been in Station Avenue on that Thursday afternoon in March, as well as from some of other residents of the flats in Collingwood Place, which lay just behind the bus stop where Katherine Laynes had last seen Milly Dowler.
But it was to be Levi Bellfield’s partner in March 2002 Emma Mills – the true tenant of 24, Collingwood Place – who was to provide the jury with the greatest insight into what might really have happened on the afternoon of Milly’s disappearance. Mills was to become the signal witness for the prosecution, but she asked for ‘special measures’ from the court to allow her to do so. She was now so terrified of Levi Bellfield that she wanted to be allowed to give evidence to the jury from behind black curtains, which would prevent her from seeing or making any kind of eye contact with the man she’d shared almost ten years of her life with and with whom she’d had three children.
This wasn’t unusual in a major murder trial, and the defence raised no objections.
Levi Bellfield did, however. When discussing the arrangements with Mr Justice Wilkie at the end of Tuesday, 24 May – after the jury had been dismissed for the day – Brian Altman, for the prosecution, explained the procedure that would be put in place in court the following morning. Emma Mills would be brought into court first, and allowed to sit behind a curtain until she was called into the witness box, where she would be screened by a further curtain so that she could not see Bellfield when he was brought into the dock, and he could not see her.
‘If there is any difficulty,’ Altman said quietly, ‘the usual practice is for the defendant to move along the dock slightly so there can be no chance of eye-contact.’
That was too much for Bellfield.
‘I’m not moving along the box,’ he announced in a loud, belligerent voice, following the declaration with an expletive or two for good measure, and then kicking one of the empty chairs beside him in the dock.
‘That is Mr Bellfield’s view,’ Altman commented calmly.
It did not affect the court’s view, but it did, once again, underline Bellfield’s darker, angrier, side – a side that he had been at pains to conceal from the jury.
The following morning, Wednesday, 25 May, black curtains were indeed place around the witness box as Emma Mills was ushered to her seat behind them, but Bellfield had not moved his seat in the dock. He was still clearly determined that he should command as much of the legal proceedings as he possibly could and prove that he wasn’t concerned what this particular witness had to say. Indeed, for the first time he chose not to wear his suit in the dock. In its place Bellfield had chosen a blue-and-white striped polo shirt with short sleeves. He was a man in control, a man who would not be intimidated – by anyone.
And so, shortly after 10.30, the slight, brunette figure of Emma Mills climbed into the witness box and took the oath in a soft, timid voice. The mousey looking thirty-three-year-old was clutching a tissue in her left hand and looked for all the world like a frightened fawn as she cowered behind the black curtains.
Brian Altman began by asking her gently about how she’d come to meet the defendant, and how their relationship had started.
Emma Mills told the court how she first met him at Rocky’s in Cobham, when she was about eighteen, then moved into his uncle Charlie Brazil’s house with him before they got a small flat together in Manor Road, Twickenham, and then into another in Clements Court in Hounslow, before finally moving to 11, Little Benty at the ‘end of 1999 or early 2000’.
With each answer her voice seemed to falter, as if she was trembling on the brink of some terrible abyss of despair. Then, from time to time, she would blow her nose with the tissue in her hand, to recover her poise. The attempt didn’t often work.
Turning to events in 2001, Emma Mills told the jury that she had moved out of Little Benty that summer and gone to a woman’s refuge – because ‘her relationship with Bellfield had broken down’. Then in September her mother Gillian had found her the two-bedroom flat at 24, Collingwood Place through a friend at the local estate agents. Emma had become the tenant, and signed a one-year lease with a break clause which allowed her to move after six months, providing she gave the landlord’s agents two months’ notice in writing. Her mother had paid the deposit and the first month’s rent, while the local Elmbridge Council had paid the rent from them on, as she was a single mother with two small children.
But by Christmas 2001 Emma had resumed her relationship with Levi Bellfield as a result of their meeting regularly so that he could see their children. As the New Year turned he’d started to ‘stay over’ with her at Collingwood Place ‘most of the time’, she told the jury quietly. He had brought with him his dog, a Staffordshire bull-terrier, which was black with a white bib and two white socks and was called ‘Chey’, short for Cheyenne, though she pronounced it ‘Shy’. ‘Levi took it about with him,’ she told the jury.
After Emma had left the refuge her mother had also bought her daughter a car for £800, a Red Daewoo Nexia, N530 GLT, which Bellfield had taken to using. There was only one key for the car, just as there was only one set of the keys that opened the front door at 24, Collingwood Place, and they were all kept on one key ring.
Her voice still trembling, Emma then told Brian Altman that the car was always ‘untidy’ and littered with children’s belongings, crisp packets, magazines and ‘general day-to-day rubbish’. It also had a solid car seat for her young son William and a smaller ‘booster’ seat for her daughter Lucy.
By the beginning of March 2002, Emma Mills had also agreed with Bellfield that they would move back to what had been the family home in Little Benty, but that she hadn’t wanted to go back there at once as ‘it was a bit of a squat really’. So they had decided to redecorate it and then move back together ‘as a family’, and she’d given notice to the local estate agents on 20 March 2002 indicating that they intended to stay at Collingwood Place for ‘a couple of months’ and leave in late May.
Brian Altman then asked her about the events of the week that Milly Dowler had gone missing, and, in particular, where she, Bellfield and their children had been at the time. With her voice still on the verge of breaking, and with the white tissue now in her right hand, she replied that they’d been house-sitting for her friend Christine Hawgood in Harmondsworth Road, West Drayton, just round the corner from Little Benty. Being closer to Little Benty would make it easier for them to supervise the redecoration work there. So she, Bellfield and the children had gone to stay
at Christine’s on Tuesday, 19 March 2002.
Everything was normal on Wednesday, 20 March, Emma Mills explained. Bellfield went off to work, as he usually did, and she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. But on the day Milly disappeared Emma told the court that she had found it difficult to get hold of Bellfield on his mobile phone. He had ‘disappeared’ and turned his mobile phone off. She remembered it clearly, she explained, because she hadn’t got any money at the time and Bellfield had her red Daewoo Nexia, so she couldn’t drive out to get some. She added that his behaviour that day had been ‘unusual’.
‘Normally he would ring me or I would ring him, on and off during the day, to see what I was doing,’ she said, but on this particular day, ‘he didn’t ring me at all until later on, I didn’t see him past lunch time’.
Bellfield had left Christine’s house in the late morning, Emma explained, and she hadn’t heard from him again until 5.38 that evening when he’d phoned her. She’d then asked him where he’d been and what time he’d be back, but he hadn’t explained, and she didn’t actually speak to him again until 8.51, when she’d rung him to ask him when he’d be back. He’d then phoned her back at 9.45, but still hadn’t returned.
Bellfield finally got back to Christine’s between 10 and 11 that evening, but when he’d arrived Emma Mills told the jury: ‘He was wearing different clothes from those he had on in the morning. They would have been from the flat in Walton.’
‘Did you question him?’ Altman asked.
‘I did, but I would never get a straight answer, and even if he did tell me something I would never know if it was the truth,’ Emma replied.
The prosecution barrister then asked about the other events of that night, and Emma told him that Bellfield had got up between 3 and 4 a.m. in the morning and told her that he was ‘going back to the flat to have a lie-in’ and had taken his bull terrier with him.
Then, when Emma Mills had spoken to Bellfield just before 8.30 a.m. that morning, he had suddenly announced to her that he wanted to move back to their house in Little Benty straight away. He told he wanted her to pack up – he was all ‘happy and jokey’, she said, admitting that sometimes it was easier ‘just to say “yes” with him’.
But when she finally got back to the flat at Collingwood Place – Bellfield dropped her off there and didn’t go inside with her – Emma had discovered that their double bed in the main bedroom had ‘no sheets or pillow cases’ and ‘no duvet cover’.
She had immediately rung Bellfield to ask what had happened to them.
‘He said the dog had had an accident on the bed,’ Emma explained to the jury. ‘I didn’t believe him for a second. He said he put the sheets in the rubbish because they couldn’t be washed.’
But when Emma had gone to look for the soiled sheets in the rubbish area outside the flat at 24, Collingwood Place there’d been no sign of them whatever.
Nevertheless, the couple and their children had spent that Friday night at the flat, but the following morning had packed up and set off for 11, Little Benty – even though the redecoration was far from complete.
It was a damning sequence of evidence against Bellfield from the young woman cowering behind the curtains.
Then – just after she’d described the sudden departure from the flat in Walton-on-Thames – Bellfield suddenly coughed ostentatiously in the dock, the cough of a man making a point. It wasn’t lost on his former partner. Emma immediately broke down in tears.
Asked if she wanted a break from giving evidence, Emma Mills nodded, her eyes now red and swollen, and the jury were sent out for a fifteen-minute break.
Once again, Bellfield had demonstrated his ability to manipulate the court, just as he had manipulated the women in his life for so many years.
Back in the witness box after the break, Emma Mills went on to tell the jury that when she’d got back to the flat in Walton-on-Thames on Friday, 22 March she had seen the police vans around the station and she had been aware of the hunt for Milly Dowler, but that no officers had arrived at her front door while she was there.
The following night at Little Benty Emma and Bellfield had had to sleep on sofa cushions on the floor, but while she was redecorating the children’s bedroom about a week later she had asked him about the Thursday he had gone missing, ‘because I thought he was with another woman’.
It was to provoke one of the trial’s most dramatic moments.
‘Why do you keep going on?’ Bellfield had asked her. ‘What do you think, I done Milly?’
Emma Mills was horrified, but didn’t pursue it any further.
‘I didn’t ask him about it,’ she told the jury. ‘It was so awful. I was used to him making horrible remarks. I thought it’s disgusting. It’s not even funny.’
It was the remark that was to make headlines the following morning, repeated endlessly on the television news channels, and it came just as Emma’s evidence as a witness for the prosecution was coming to its end.
The only other thing of significance that Emma told the jury was that Bellfield had rung her on the Tuesday after they’d moved back into Little Benty to tell her that her red Daewoo had been stolen from outside his uncle Charlie Brazil’s house in Hounslow. The car was never to be seen again. Unlike the remains of Milly Dowler, it disappeared without trace – for ever.
And so it was on the following morning, Thursday, 26 May 2011, that Emma Mills was confronted by the cross examination of Jeffrey Samuels in defence of her former partner, who had arrived in the dock that morning wearing a purple polo shirt. By contrast, the mother of three of his children was dressed all in black, with her face even whiter than it had been the day before.
Samuels began by pointing out to Emma Mills that, in spite of her horrified reaction to the disappearance of Milly Dowler, and Bellfield’s remark about having ‘done Milly’, she’d nevertheless remained with him for the next two years and had even had a further child with him in the summer of 2004, a daughter named Georgina. Indeed, Samuels pointed out to the court Emma Mills did not even mention Milly to the police until after Bellfield’s arrest on the suspicion of the murder of Amélie Delagrange in November 2004.
‘You never contacted the police about Milly,’ Samuels put to her directly.
‘No,’ she confessed.
‘You didn’t then harbour any suspicions?’
‘I didn’t think he’d done it,’ Emma told him. ‘But when he made that comment it made me think, “Why did he make that comment?” But I didn’t think he had done it.’
Samuels then asked her what her response was to the remark about Milly.
‘I asked how he could make a joke like that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t say much’ – and she paused, before adding quietly that she thought it was ‘disgusting’.
‘You didn’t tell anyone about that remark he made, not even your mother?’ Samuels asked.
‘No,’ Emma Mills confessed.
The defence barrister then pointed out to her that in fact she’d only tried to ring Bellfield four times on the afternoon that Milly disappeared – rather then trying to contact him ‘repeatedly’.
Crouching in the witness box, clutching at the curtain, Emma Mills looked horrified.
‘You say it was unusual for him to have his phone off,’ Samuels said. ‘I say it wasn’t.’
Emma Mills’s ashen face crumpled, her right hand twisting her hair into a strand.
But she firmly denied Samuels’s suggestions that the true reason that she’d left the flat in Walton-on-Thames so suddenly was that it was very ‘damp’ or that she had discovered that Bellfield had been running a credit card fraud from the flat using the name and details of a former tenant and wanted to escape the interests of the police.
The defence cross-examination went on all day, with Samuels repeatedly questioning Emma Mills about the details of her phone conversations with Bellfield, about who had actually reported the red Daewoo car stolen, and about exactly when they had moved back to Little Benty. Throu
ghout she twisted her hair and looked genuinely afraid, but she did not back down once in the face of Samuels’s bombardment.
Then, on the following morning, Friday, 27 May, she resumed her place behind the black curtains for the final time – to face the prosecution’s re-examination. Still clearly distressed, again she didn’t falter, although she did become visibly distressed when she was asked to look at pictures of the former family home in Little Benty.
At last, just before 11.20 on that Friday morning, Emma Mills was released from the witness box. She had spent almost eleven hours giving evidence, and she walked slowly out of the court as though she still carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.
The exact nature of Emma Mills’s relationship with Bellfield was then thrown into high relief by her mother Gillian, whose statement was read to the court. Gillian Mills insisted that her daughter had been ‘well-behaved’ before she’d met Bellfield when he was a bouncer at Rocky’s nightclub when she was seventeen. When Emma met Levi, her statement read, ‘her personality changed. She was besotted by him.’
‘I didn’t like the look of him,’ Mrs Mills insisted. ‘I would describe Levi as a big, fat lump with a high voice. He had no neck.’
Gillian Mills also explained that she had been disappointed when the couple had got back together again and had a third child.
‘I think she let him back into her life because she was lonely,’ she said, but it was only after Bellfield had been arrested on suspicion of murder that Emma had felt ‘free and able’ to talk to the police about him.
For once Bellfield may have been relieved that the witness had not come to court to give her evidence in person. The tone of Mrs Mills’s statement suggested she would not have cowered behind a curtain to make her opinion of her daughter’s former partner abundantly clear. She loathed him.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 24