By the following morning the Bellfield case covered every newspaper in the land. There was relentless coverage of the blackness of Bellfield’s character, and the fact that he had eleven children by five women – though without detailing their names or exactly whose children they were. His white, flat-faced police mug shot stared out from every single front page.
It was the prelude to the last act of the drama of Regina v Bellfield, a trial that had transfixed the nation for seven weeks in the early summer. Shortly before 10.45 on the morning of Friday, 24 June the trial, which had cost at least £2 million, came to a sudden and unexpected end. On an application from Jeffrey Samuels the judge ruled that he had no alternative but to ‘discharge’ the jury from making its decision on the Rachel Cowles case because of what he called ‘an avalanche of adverse publicity’ which was ‘most unfortunate and deplorable’. The ‘trigger had been pulled too soon’ by the media, he said. Indeed, Mr Justice Wilkie then announced that he would refer the case to the Attorney General with a view to his taking out contempt of court proceedings against some of the media organizations involved.
‘The one person who suffers most is Rachel Cowles,’ he said, the despair clear in his quiet voice, for she was ‘undoubtedly the victim of an attempted crime’. But she was to be denied ‘knowing whether a jury had decided it was Levi Bellfield or someone else’. In the end her case was to be allowed to ‘lie on the file’, just as Anna-Maria Rennie’s and Irma Dragoshi’s had in the first trial, when Brian Altman announced for the Crown that they would not be seeking a retrial.
Finally, Mr Justice Wilkie turned to his sentence, though without the defendant in the dock to hear him. Bellfield had not even deigned to come to court from his temporary cell at Belmarsh prison. That fact was not lost on the judge.
‘He is marked out as a cruel and pitiless killer,’ he told the court. ‘To this is added the fact that … he has not had the courage to come into court to face his victims and receive his sentence. He subjected Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, to what must have been a terrifying ordeal for no other reason than she was at the wrong place at the wrong time … He robbed her of her promising life, he robbed her family and friends of the joy of seeing her grow up. He treated her in death with total disrespect, depositing her naked body without even semblance of a burial, in a wood, far away from home, vulnerable to all the forces of nature, thereby, as he clearly intended, causing her family the appalling anguish for many months of not knowing what had become of her.’
Mr Justice Wilkie then turned to the defence and pointed out firmly that it was Bellfield who had instructed his lawyers to expose to the world her ‘most private, adolescent thoughts, secrets and worries’ and to ‘increase the anguish of her family, particularly her mother, Sally Dowler, in ways which were made dramatically clear to all in court’.
‘But he has failed in what he intended. Milly’s memory will survive and be cherished long after he is forgotten.’
The judge then announced that Bellfield would serve a term of life imprisonment without the chance of parole – a ‘whole life’ term – for the crimes.
The wheel-clamper and nightclub bouncer from a travelling family in west London thereby became the first man in modern legal history be given not one but two ‘whole life’ terms at two different murder trials. It is a distinction that Bellfield will take back with him to prison – and it sets him apart from his fellow murderers in infamy.
But this time there will be no chance for him to resume his place as a flash ‘Jack the Lad’ – one of the boys – in Wakefield, or anywhere else. Now he is the murderer of a child – a ‘nonce’ – and will suffer the brutal criticism, and the justice, of his fellow prisoners, a justice far less constrained than that he had faced at the Old Bailey. No matter how arrogant he may have cared to appear in court, no matter how affable before the jury, Bellfield will now forever be forced to look over his shoulder in prison for fear that his fellow prisoners might exercise their own private justice.
Yet not once has this brutal, devious, poisonous toad of a man offered as much as a single word of remorse for any of his appalling crimes; nor has he ever described what had really happened to Milly Dowler. That ushers him into a select pantheon of evil men, a pantheon that includes the Moors Murderer Ian Brady, whose victims included the twelve-year-old schoolboy Keith Bennett, whose smiling, bespectacled face has haunted the world since his disappearance in 1964 and whose body has never been found.
Like Brady, from this day forth there can be no escape for Levi Bellfield from the condemnation of the world, and yet that can do nothing to bring back to life the smiling, warm-hearted Milly Dowler, the girl whose little dance at the ironing board sent a shiver down the spine of every single person at his trial.
Bus stop killer Levi Bellfield, who is likely to remain imprisoned for the rest of his life.
Bellfield with two of his children by Emma Mills. He is father to at least nine children.
The road where Bellfield lived in Little Benty, West Drayton.
Kate Sheedy, who suffered horrific injuries when she was run down by Bellfield in May 2004, just three months before he killed Amélie Delagrange.
The families of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange at a press conference in 2008, shortly after Bellfield was found guilty of both murders.
The police handout of nineteen-year-old murder victim Marsha McDonnell.
Marsha getting off the bus, shortly before Bellfield murdered her in London in February 2003. She was found just yards from her home after being clubbed to death.
The Vauxhall Corsa used in Bellfield’s attack on Marsha McDonnell.
A floral tribute at Marsha’s funeral. Her brutal murder caused shockwaves throughout Hampton.
The photo of French student Amélie Delagrange used by the Metropolitan Police during the early stages of their investigation.
A CCTV grab of Amélie boarding a bus after a night out with friends in Twickenham, shortly before she was found with fatal head wounds.
Police search for clues in leafy Twickenham, where Amélie was bludgeoned to death.
The intense search operation led police to the banks of the River Thames near Walton Bridge, where some of Amélie’s belongings were found.
Amélie’s parents, Jean-François and Dominique Delagrange, outside Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 2006 after Levi Bellfield was charged with their daughter’s murder.
Amélie’s parents lay floral tributes at the base of a tree planted in her memory on Twickenham Green.
Just your average teenager, Milly Dowler had her whole life ahead of her.
Milly got off the train one stop early at Walton-on-Thames to meet friends at a café. She was last seen by a friend waiting at a bus stop.
Leaving school on the day she was kidnapped in Walton-on- Thames in broad daylight, just after phoning her dad to let him know she was on her way home.
A nationwide search followed Milly’s disappearance. The investigation was the largest ever mounted by the Surrey Police.
It was six months after Milly went missing that her body was found in Hampshire and identified by dental records. None of the clothes she was wearing, nor her schoolbag or mobile phone have ever been found.
Milly’s father Bob, sister Gemma and mother Sally walk behind her coffin in the funeral procession.
A court drawing of Levi Bellfield in the dock at the Old Bailey as he pleads not guilty to the murder of Milly Dowler.
Milly’s father Bob Dowler reads a statement outside the Old Bailey following the jury’s guilty verdict.
Epilogue: Milly’s Memory
‘A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.’
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Levi Bellfield’s trial for the murder of Milly Dowler ended on the day before what would have been the teenager’s twenty-third birthday – had she but lived to celebrate it. Instead the life of this ‘
funny, sparky, enthusiastic teenager’, as Mr Justice Wilkie described her, was brutally snuffed out, robbing her of the chance to grow into what the judge called a ‘self-confident articulate and admirable young woman’.
Yet in all the weeping and wailing that followed the dramatic finale of the trial of her murderer it was somehow almost too easy to forget that Milly was the true victim of Bellfield’s crime, and that Bellfield was the true villain. That grim reality – that this delightful, smiling schoolgirl had had her life taken from her by a monster – seemed to be overwhelmed in the avalanche of publicity. Outside the Old Bailey, on the very afternoon that the case ended, the world watched hypnotized as the Dowler family condemned the ‘torture’ they had suffered at the hands of Bellfield’s defence team, and how they had been forced to pay ‘too high a price’ for the nightclub bouncer’s conviction for their daughter’s murder.
‘For us,’ Sally Dowler said, ‘the trial has been an awful experience. We have felt that our family, who have already suffered so much, has been on trial as much as Bellfield. We have heard Milly’s name defamed in court.’
‘We despair of a justice system that is so loaded in favour of the perpetrator of the crime,’ her husband Bob went on. ‘It has often appeared almost incidental that this is a trial concerning the murder of our daughter.’
While their daughter Gemma insisted: ‘In my eyes justice is “an eye for an eye”. You brutally murder someone then you pay the ultimate price: a life for a life. So in my eyes no justice has been done. He took away my beautiful sister and he will now spend the rest of his life living off taxpayers’ money.’
The last word was left to Sally Dowler, who said simply: ‘I hope whilst he is in prison he is treated with the same brutality he dealt out to his victims and that his life is a living hell.’
It was an unprecedented outpouring of grief from the Dowlers about their treatment in court, and yet somehow the memory of the cheery schoolgirl dancing behind the ironing board while preparing to go to a Pop Idol concert seemed to get lost. The following morning, on the very anniversary of her birthday, the Chief Constable of Surrey police seemed to forget her too.
‘The family’s experience was so exceptionally traumatic that they now regret supporting the prosecution of Bellfield,’ Mark Rowley wrote in The Times. ‘While it is, of course, in the public interest to draw a line under an unsolved murder, I understand why they feel that way.’
It was a quite extraordinary remark from the senior officer in a force which had just convicted a man who would spend the rest of his life behind bars. The distinguished legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg was to write shortly afterwards: ‘If chief constables are going to condone the refusal of witnesses to give evidence, dangerous criminals will escape conviction, and the public will be put at risk.’ Turning to the Dowlers treatment, Rozenberg went on: ‘Bellfield was entitled to put forward evidence that might suggest to a credulous jury that Dowler bore some responsibility for his daughter’s murder. The jury had little trouble in dismissing this preposterous notion, though the same cannot be said for Surrey Police. After apparently concentrating their initial efforts on trying to implicate Dowler, they have apologized for missed opportunities that might have led to Bellfield being caught before he committed other murders.’
Surrey Police had, after all, knocked on the door of the fateful flat, 24, Collingwood Place, no fewer than eleven times before getting an answer, and they had never attempted to contact the local estate agents to see who might have been living there at the time of Milly’s disappearance – even though the flat was barely 50 yards from the bus stop in Station Avenue. They had knocked on the door and talked to the residents of every single one of the other fifty-two flats in the block – but not number 24.
In the largest investigation in the force’s history – costing £6 million – Surrey Police had also identified 256 people of potential interest, taken 5,000 statements, launched 15,000 separate investigative actions, used 100 officers in 3,500 house-to-house inquiries, but they had not linked the attempted abduction of schoolgirl Rachel Cowles on Wednesday, 20 March by a man in a red car with the disappearance of another schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, the following day at almost exactly the same time in the afternoon just three miles away. Had they done so, the lives of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange might, just conceivably, have been saved, and Kate Sheedy’s life prevented from being turned upside down on the very day she left her school as its head girl.
And what about the ‘torture’ of the Dowlers? In his article for the Guardian Rozenberg was equally clear. Bellfield’s counsel, Jeffrey Samuels QC, he explained, was ‘required to follow his client’s instructions to the extent permitted by the experienced judge. Even so, those close to the case say that Samuels did not go as far as his client had wanted him to.’
Anyone who sat through their cross-examination, as I did, would agree that their cross-examination was a hideous experience for both Bob and Sally Dowler, but it is also one that they should have been better prepared for. The Crown Prosecution Service later insisted that they had explained the possibilities to Mr and Mrs Dowler, but their message clearly did not get through, or perhaps the CPS were too polite to tell them the truth about what might happen in court. Either way it is no fault of the defence, or the prosecution. This was, after all, a murder trial. In the first half of the twentieth century Bellfield’s very life would have been at stake. Were the Dowlers seriously suggesting that a defendant should not explore every avenue if he were innocent of murder? The trouble, of course, was that Bellfield was a convicted murderer, which meant that to some – including perhaps the Dowlers – he did not warrant a serious defence. That is a misunderstanding of British justice. Any man, no matter how bad his character, is entitled to be treated as innocent until he is proven guilty and allowed therefore to use any arguments he may choose to in his defence.
As I explained to Rozenberg when he asked me about the case shortly after the end of the trial, ‘The Dowlers were naive to think that Bellfield would not do everything in his power to make their lives a misery, and took great pleasure in it. But the villain here is not Jeffrey Samuels but Levi Bellfield.’ But in the vast wave of publicity about the Dowlers’ feelings, and Bellfield’s sexual past – including eight women who told the Sun about their rapes at his hands after being given a date-rape drug, more than one of whom had been dressed up as a schoolgirl while they were in his power – the fate of Milly Dowler was overlooked.
For me that is no small tragedy, for she deserved so much more, as she had suffered so much and so brutally. Like Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange, Milly lost her life to that rarest of all murderers, a blitz attacker who kills complete strangers at random and for no apparent reason other than a delight in doing so.
She also demands to be remembered because of the implication that she may have been sexually attacked by Bellfield before her death. Thankfully, in spite of Bellfield’s sexual attraction towards schoolgirls – who were all ‘slags’ and ‘asking for it’ – there is no evidence whatever that Milly Dowler was, in fact, sexually abused. Bellfield wanted pliant schoolgirls, rendered so by his date-rape drugs, not a spirited teenager who would have fought back, and by doing so enraged him still further. He would not have bothered with discussion, or waiting for a drug to take effect; death would have been his first and only response. Indeed, if the prosecution’s case at her killer’s trail is to be trusted, and there is no reason to suggest that it is not, there would have been very little time for a date-rape drug to take effect on the teenager or for there to have been rape followed by her suffocation and strangulation. In my view, the most likely reality is that she died as suddenly and decisively as Marsha and Amélie.
To see what I mean let us retrace Milly Dowler’s last steps along Station Avenue on that sunny Thursday afternoon as she walked home from the station.
There had already been a string of terrible coincidences that delivered her there – she’d decided not to get a l
ift home with her mother, she’d decided to accept Danielle Sykes’ sudden invitation to have some chips, she’d decided not to take the train back to Hersham but to walk instead – each and every chance decision putting her life at risk, without her knowing it.
If the prosecution’s timing is correct, and the jury certainly accepted that it was, then Milly was at the start of Station Avenue beside Walton station’s car park at 4.08 in the afternoon on Thursday, 21 March 2002, where she was seen by Katherine Laynes from the bus stop on the opposite side of the road. She was to disappear within the next forty seconds or so: CCTV camera two on the Bird’s Eye building did not see any sign of her during its next forty-two-second rotation, when she should have been there. It did not see her on the south side of the road, nor on the north side, near the bus stop, though if she had been at the entrance to Collingwood Place she would have been hidden from the camera by the hedges.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 27