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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  Emma Mills made clear throughout her many conversations with the police after Bellfield’s arrest that, although he had been charming at first, he had rapidly become brutally controlling. Colin Sutton had a similar impression: ‘When we started dealing with him he came across as very jokey, like he’s your best mate. But he’s a cunning individual, violent. He can switch from being nice to being nasty, instantly.’ It was that capacity to transform himself from gentleman to monster in the blink of an eye that Emma Mills confirmed.

  The twenty-seven-year-old told the police that Bellfield was the boss in their relationship. She described him as domineering, possessive, threatening and violent, especially in the bedroom. As she was later to repeat to the press, he had hit her, strangled her and raped her.

  She had met Bellfield at the age of seventeen, when she was working as a nanny. She and a group of friends had become regulars at Rocky’s, and she had quickly became infatuated with the muscular man who started buying her ‘buckets’ of red roses. They started having sex together, even though he was living with another of his female partners at the time, a girl called Jo Collings. By the time of her nineteenth birthday, in August 1996, Emma’s relationship with Bellfield was so consuming that she decided to leave her mother’s house and move in with him. The headstrong teenager turned her back on her mother and went to live with Bellfield in a room in his ‘uncle’ Charlie Brazil’s house in Feltham, Middlesex, before they got a bedsitting room in a tall Victorian house in Manor Road in Twickenham, barely 400 yards from where Amélie Delagrange was later to be found murdered on Twickenham Green.

  By the spring of 1997 Emma was pregnant with her first child by Bellfield; Lucy was born just two days before Christmas that year. What Emma didn’t know at the time was that it was Bellfield’s seventh child. He already had four children with a woman called Becky Wilkinson and two with Jo Collings – the second of whom, a son, Henry, had been born while Emma Mills was pregnant with Lucy.

  But it wasn’t only Bellfield’s serial promiscuity that cast a shadow over their relationship, it was also his appetite for domestic violence – a violence that could, and often did, turn into forced sexual intercourse.

  The first time was just six months after their relationship began. It was December 1995, and Emma had gone to a party given by some of her friends without telling Bellfield. But as soon as he heard about it the bouncer became furious, telling her on her mobile phone to ‘get back’ to Rocky’s nightclub within half an hour – ‘or there’ll be trouble’. She did, and everything appeared normal, until a couple of days later. At the time Bellfield owned a white Ford Escort convertible and the next afternoon he asked Emma to drive him in it, proceeding to direct her down a series of small roads, until they reached Walton Bridge. When they got there, he grabbed her by her hair and said, ‘You think you’re going to get away with the other night?’ Undoing her belt and pulling her jeans down, he told her, ‘Next time I tell you not to do something, don’t do it.’ After the attack was over, Bellfield pulled up his trousers and told her to drive on. It was all the teenager could do to meekly comply.

  The next day Bellfield rang her and acted as though nothing whatever had happened, leaving the young woman confused. As she later told the press, she questioned whether it could have been rape at all, given that he was her boyfriend, and began blaming herself for being ‘dramatic’.

  Bellfield’s attack on Emma Mills underneath Walton Bridge was to take its toll on the young woman from Surrey; it was to become part of a violent pattern that she learned to live with as the nine years they spent together went by, a pattern that would colour their entire life together. Yet in spite of the physical abuse, in spite of the sexual attacks, Emma still had feelings for the man who was abusing her so relentlessly. As she explained, it wasn’t every time that he forced her and afterwards he would cry and say that he was sorry.

  Not long after their daughter Lucy was born in December 1996 the couple moved to a bigger flat in Hounslow, but the move didn’t protect Mills from her partner – not for one moment. It had become commonplace for Bellfield to call Emma a ‘bitch’ and a ‘slag’ during sex, to slap her about and pull her hair, but some times he would go further, and the violence would spill out of the bedroom. On one wintry evening Bellfield forced her outside of their flat to have sex, naked, in the garden, leaving the young woman ‘humiliated’. Afterwards Bellfield locked his naked girlfriend out of the flat for half an hour. On another occasion Bellfield pulled her outside the building to rape her in the stairwell of the building where they lived. Using a Stanley knife, he traced lines across her back during sex, leaving her terrified that he would kill her.

  The truth was that Mills lived in abject fear of the man who was the father of her first child, yet, no matter the abuse she suffered, no matter how many other women he might see, no matter how many times he forced himself upon her, she was still prepared to love him unconditionally. Indeed by the beginning of 1999 she was pregnant again.

  It was during this pregnancy that the couple moved to the house in Little Benty, and it was there that she brought her first son, William, home when he was born in October 1999. But even that did nothing to reduce the torment she suffered at the hands of her lover. Bellfield was now, according to Mills, regularly raping her once a fortnight.

  She was later to describe how on one occasion Bellfield raped her ‘all night’ before producing a video camera. He instructed her to perform for him in front of the camera – and to smile while she was doing so. He then proceeded to try to strangle her with her own cardigan. Afterwards he destroyed the tape and told her to have a bath ‘to wash it all away’, forcing her into hot water that she later described as being ‘boiling’ and telling her, ‘Get rid of the all the evidence. You know it’s my word against yours.’

  Bellfield’s attack with her cardigan was to be the last she would tolerate for a time. In despair Emma Mills decided to ring her mother, Gilly, who had naturally been worried about her daughter and who had promised to help her find a place in a women’s refuge near Woking if ever she plucked up the courage to leave Bellfield. So it was that, on the morning after the cardigan attack, Emma’s next-door neighbour at Little Benty gave her and her two children a lift to her mother’s house in Hersham after she had packed some things. The teenager slipped out of the semi-detached brick house she had shared with Bellfield without a word to anyone while he was out.

  It was to be almost four months before she would see Bellfield again, by which time she had spent some weeks in the refuge and then found a flat in Walton-on-Thames for herself and her children. But gradually Bellfield began to wheedle his way back into her life and affections, claiming that it was ‘only fair’ that he be allowed to see Lucy and William – ‘after all they are my kids’.

  Emma finally agreed to allow Bellfield to see their children, but only at the refuge. That didn’t satisfy him. Without her knowing it, the nightclub bouncer started to stalk her. He tracked her down to her new flat and launched a series of intimidating telephone calls to her – and to her mother – which provoked Mills finally to make a statement to a local solicitor in an effort to make him stop. Significantly, however, when she made her statement to the solicitor she did not go into the full details of the sexual abuse she had suffered. ‘All I really wanted was for him to love me,’ she said by way of explanation, still blaming herself for the attacks she had suffered.

  The full details of Emma’s suffering at Bellfield’s hands were to wait for the murder squad detectives two years later.

  But the most single most terrifying revelation during the police interviews with Emma Mills conducted by the detectives in the last days of 2004 came when she revealed exactly where she had been living with her children in the last months of 2001, after she had left the refuge in Woking. It was the flat that Bellfield had tracked her down to, and one into which he was to move back into with her in November that year. That two-bedroom flat was 24, Collingwood Place in Walton-on-Thames, and Bellf
ield and Mills had been living there with their children for five months when Milly Dowler had disappeared on the way home from Heathside School in Weybridge on 21 March 2002, a day that had started grey and gloomy. The pedestrian entrance to Collingwood Place lay right beside the bus stop where Milly’s friend had last seen the schoolgirl on that fateful day, and only yards from the point in Station Road in Walton where she had disappeared.

  But, at that point, Colin Sutton’s double murder squad weren’t investigating the abduction and murder of thirteen-year-old Milly Dowler. That was a matter for Surrey Police. They were only interested in exactly who Levi Bellfield was, and what crimes he had committed in their area.

  It was to be Mills allegations against Bellfield that would eventually allow the police to keep him in custody as they began to piece together the precise details of the murder of Amélie Delagrange on Twickenham Green. After his first court appearance on charges of rape and buggery – not of murder – Bellfield was moved from Heathrow police station to the confines of Her Majesty’s Prison at Belmarsh in south London, home to Category A prisoners from terrorists to murderers. He was to spend almost three years there, waiting to face a jury.

  3. Twilight Citizens

  ‘Soon as she was gone from me,

  A traveller came by,

  Silently, invisibly:

  He took her with a sigh.’

  William Blake, Notebooks

  Before the opening of London’s Heathrow as a civilian airport in 1946 – in the wake of the ending of the Second World War, when it had been used principally for military aircraft – the vast acres of heath and common land that it and the surrounding suburbs now occupy to the west of London were home to thousands of gypsy and travelling families. This western section of London was ingrained into gypsy and travelling culture; it was a place that they had come to call home. In the early part of the twentieth century, for example, gypsy families regularly camped near Walton Bridge over the Thames, just as they did at Chertsey Bridge and on the gravel flats that were to become Kempton Park racecourse, not far from the village of Hampton. These families roamed across the western outskirts of London for large parts of the year, attending the Derby race meeting every June on the downs of Epsom just a little to the south, where many of them worked on the fairground that formed an essential part of the fun on the centre of the course, before disappearing to Kent for the summer’s hop-picking.

  Gypsies and travellers had been a part of British life and culture for 400 years. First called ‘Egyptians’, they had arrived from northern India in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, they were often regarded as social pariahs by local populations, outcasts to be treated with care, even disdain. This is turn bred a sense of ‘differentness’ among them, and they almost revelled in their place outside mainstream culture by taking on jobs that the ordinary population might see as beneath them. That too was traditional: after all gypsies had served as tinkers in India, undertakers in Romania and even hangmen in Brazil. In the nineteenth century their traditional occupations in Britain had been as horse-dealers, basket-makers, knife-grinders, tinkers, peg-makers, blacksmiths and entertainers, although as the twentieth century progressed that gradually evolved into more general ‘dealing’ – in anything from scrap metal to cars – as well as to the seasonal work of picking hops. But as farming grew ever more mechanized, they started to remain in London throughout the year in pursuit of work, and the opportunity to make money.

  But whatever their trade, Britain’s gypsies and travellers, like their counterparts in Europe, forever retained this feeling of being apart, a people subject to persecution – a view confirmed by the fact that no fewer than 400,000 were exterminated in the concentration camps by the Nazis during the Second World War.

  One academic expert, Dr Becky Taylor, describes them now as ‘Britain’s twilight citizens’, a people only too aware of their place on the fringes of conventional society, and it is an entirely apt description. The distinguished commentator Brian Belton, a gypsy himself, has named his people ‘Outsider, Insiders’ in British society, arguing in his 2005 book Questioning Gypsy Identity that the very nature of their tradition sets them apart from other racial or ethnic groups in the country. In his view it is a ‘differentness’ that seeps into every area of their lives. Vividly describing his own upbringing, for example, Belton remembers: ‘While many of my school-age peers were hanging round street corners or playing table tennis … my gypsy contacts introduced me to stalking pheasant, and they took me into the brutal, fearsome, yet exciting worlds of cursing, dog fighting and cockfighting.’

  Belton was also exposed to bareback horse riding, poaching, gambling and bare-knuckle boxing – experiences that were also to form part of the upbringing of the man that Colin Sutton’s murder squad found in the attic in Little Benty on that bright November morning in 2004, a boy born Levi Rabetts but who came to be called Levi Bellfield. The life of the gypsy and the traveller was his heritage.

  But Belton draws a distinction between what he calls real Romany gypsies – ‘I’m a true Didikois,’ he says of himself – and the less traditional ‘travelling families’ who may demonstrate some of the characteristics of the gypsy life but don’t necessarily share the same ancestry or grasp of gypsy traditions of behaviour. Belton believes, for example, that the boy born Levi Rabetts is more of a traveller than a gypsy, as he insists that gypsy culture does not condone breaking the law, nor acting outside it.

  That may be true, but what is not in doubt is that one of the best-known gypsy families in south-west London in the 1950s and 1960s were the Brazils, whose reputation as one of the original gypsy families guaranteed them influence and respect. Significantly, the boy born Levi Rabetts was the nephew of a Brazil, and as such was steeped from childhood in the traditions and culture of a people who saw themselves as outside the normal confines of British society. Encouraged by the tradition, the boy who grew up to become Levi Bellfield came to see himself as an outsider to whom the law did not apply, a man who need only answer to his own conscience and not the conscience of any other: it was in his blood.

  Charlie Brazil, a senior surviving member of the Brazil gypsy family, told the police after Bellfield’s arrest that Levi was his brother’s nephew and very much a part of the family. Indeed it was Bellfield’s ‘uncle’ Charlie – as he was known to Bellfield and his mother – who had first started working as a bouncer at Rocky’s nightclub in Cobham in Surrey. It was he who first helped his brother’s nephew to get a job there.

  The closeness between Brazil and Bellfield is clear enough. It was to his ‘uncle’ Charlie Brazil’s home in Walton-on-Thames that Bellfield first took the impressionable teenager Emma Mills to live after he whisked her away from her mother’s home in Hersham. At the time Brazil was living with his partner, Vern, and the young Emma Mills was astonished by their lifestyle, which appeared to her to involve drinking for most of the day, sleeping in chairs in the sitting room and ignoring every single one of the social conventions that her mother had brought her up to respect. What Emma did not understand when she first met the Brazils was that they played an enormously significant role in Bellfield’s life, so significant that he would for ever remain supremely conscious of what his ‘uncle’ and Brazil cousins thought of him. Gradually Emma came to realize that they were the yardstick by which he measured himself: their attitudes were his attitudes.

  But if the Brazils were a signal part of Bellfield’s life, his mother, Jean, was even more important. If there is a single person who could be said to have been the dominant force in his childhood and adolescence it was his forceful, domineering mother, who steadfastly maintained his innocence against any criticism from anyone over many years. A traveller herself, Jean Bellfield had married a fellow traveller, a motor mechanic named Joseph Rabetts, in the mid 1950s, and born him a son, Richard, in 1961, and then two daughters, Lindy – also known as Lindy Loo – and Cheryl. The couple’s last and youngest child, whom they named Levi, who was born in Isleworth, Mid
dlesex, barely half a mile from his later stamping grounds in Twickenham, came into the world on 17 May 1968.

  From the very beginning of his life – he was a sickly baby – Jean Rabetts doted on her youngest son. When he first went to Crane Junior School in Hampton she made sure the other boys there never got a chance to bully him, a habit she maintained even after he had progressed to what was then the nearby Feltham Comprehensive.

  Throughout his childhood Bellfield lived with his mother in a cramped semi-detached brick villa on the edge of the reservoir in Hanworth, Middlesex, no distance at all from Hampton and the polite, suburban road that was to see Marsha McDonnell’s life come to a sudden and brutal end. Interestingly, the Bellfield family home looked remarkably similar to the house that would later witness Bellfield’s arrest for murder at Little Benty. Both were hidden in hard-to-find cul-de-sacs protected from the public gaze by undergrowth and with a myriad of local alleys which afforded a quick escape from unwelcome visitors. Both houses seemed to represent the Bellfield need for a lair, a warren to escape the prying eyes of the world.

  Not that life was without its dramas for the man who seemed to like to hide from the world. In 1976 tragedy struck the family when Bellfield’s father died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of only thirty-seven. It left his children in the charge of his ferocious wife, but that was a challenge she didn’t shirk. She became the ‘materfamilias’ of the Bellfield family, a formidable defender of their every action. In fact, gypsy tradition has it that the strong woman in any group, called the phuri dai in Romany, always has a particular influence over her own family – not least because of her place as the matriarch and also the simply fact that in many gypsy families the woman had the greatest earning capacity.