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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  In the wake of her husband’s death Jean Rabetts reverted to her maiden name of Bellfield and never married again, although a few years later, when Levi was still very young, she moved another male partner, Johnny Lee, into her house on the edge of the Hanworth Reservoir, and he has remained there ever since.

  The death of his father seemed only to have increased Bellfield’s reliance on his mother and reinforced his closeness to her. His friends at the time remember him as a ‘spoilt mummy’s boy’ who found it difficult to relate to his contemporaries.

  One childhood friend, Richard Hughes, always known as ‘Yosser’ after a character in Alan Bleasdale’s seminal 1982 television drama Boys from the Blackstuff, remembers that as a child Bellfield was ‘very skinny and short’, yet a boy, he recalled, ‘with no appetite for violence whatever’. That was not to last, for the puny boy was to be transformed as he became a teenager. Bellfield later admitted to Hughes that he had taken steroids regularly to build up his muscles.

  Bellfield was well aware that he was something of a runt at school. Years later, when he was well into his thirties, he would reveal the extent of the private insecurities of his schooldays by confiding to the Friends Reunited website that he ‘was short at school – now over six feet Ha Ha’, before adding: ‘I haven’t grown up still think I’m 18 out clubbing, Ibiza, Tenerife’. He even went on to admit that he was ‘a bit flash’, adding, ‘Am I sounding a prat????’ before concluding, chillingly: ‘Don’t look my age have seen a few people from school they look 45 sad … any single girls out there e mail me’.

  After he had reached puberty Bellfield not only built up his muscular physique but also developed a lascivious attitude towards young girls. In particular he was fascinated by the pupils that attended the nearby Gumley House Convent School for Girls in Isleworth, just half a mile from his birthplace. It was a fascination that would eventually see him attempt to abduct one of them. Even as a teenager he would haunt his local area, prowling for girls that he fancied, like a dog marking out his territory, trying to engage them in suggestive conversations that always turned to sex. It was a habit that was to saturate his life.

  There was a perception in his family that a traveller has to make his own way in the world, and fight for what he believes is his by right – especially when it comes to women. This led to Bellfield becoming ever more possessive of his female conquests – determined that they should never leave him. Once his partner, they could be no one else’s. Any suggestion that they might choose another man was impossible to accept and would only lead to violence. That paranoia too was to shape his life, and there may have been a chilling early example of what it meant.

  When Bellfield was twelve years old one of his first serious girlfriends was a blonde local schoolgirl named Patsy Morris, who was two years older than he was. Patsy’s father, George, a retired army chef, and her mother, Marjorie, had only recently moved to Isleworth from Birmingham and sent their daughter to Feltham Comprehensive, along with her sister and two brothers. It was there, shortly after the start of her first term in the autumn of 1979, that she met and befriended Bellfield.

  Barely nine months later, on the sunny afternoon of 16 June 1980, Patsy Morris disappeared from her school at lunchtime, never to be seen alive again. Her lifeless body was discovered two days later in undergrowth on Hounslow Heath, and a post-mortem discovered that she had been strangled with some kind of ligature, but there were no signs of any sexual assault. Had she angered the young Bellfield by telling him that she didn’t want to continue their adolescent romance? Had she refused to agree to his demands that she do whatever it was he told her? Had she refused to have sex with him? We may never know. All that we do know is that the fourteen-year-old who had been his first serious girlfriend was murdered.

  The Morris family never fully recovered from the loss of their daughter, and to this day suspect that Bellfield may have had something to do with her death. Patsy’s sister Nicola, who is now in her forties, said recently, ‘It was a shock when we found out they knew each other.’

  George Morris, who has spent thirty years grieving for the loss of daughter, remembers that he received a phone call shortly after her body was discovered from what he thought was ‘a young teenage boy’. ‘The phone rang,’ Morris said recently, ‘and someone said, “I’m going to kill you.” It was a local male voice and it was very strange.’ To this day Morris is convinced in his own mind that the anonymous voice on the end of the phone in July 1980 belonged to Bellfield. ‘He’s a local man, which is why it could be him,’ he’s maintained. ‘And it’s terrifying to think that someone of twelve or thirteen could have done it.’

  George Morris has no proof whatever that his daughter’s relationship with the young Bellfield resulted in her death, and the Metropolitan Police have certainly not charged Bellfield with the offence. But the suspicion that the spoilt ‘mummy’s boy’ who lusted after ‘tight young virgins, young schoolgirls’ might have had something to do with her death is difficult to avoid completely – not least because no one else has ever been convicted of the crime in the three decades since it was committed.

  Whatever the truth, Bellfield quickly put the death of his first girlfriend behind him and grew into a burly, tall young man weighing more than 17 stone. But what he could not change was the timbre of his voice. No matter how large and intimidating he became, no matter how many steroids he took, his voice was to remain the high-pitched squeak it had been during his childhood. Yet his Chipmunk-like, cartoon voice brought its advantages, for it meant that he somehow seemed less intimidating to the young women he met than he might have done. It meant the girls who might have been wary of his muscular frame were lulled into a false sense of security by the unthreatening sound of his voice and the slick charm of his patter.

  Never exactly a committed student – there were too many other more exciting things to do – Bellfield left school in 1984 with no formal qualifications whatever. He had always preferred ‘ducking and diving’, as one of his contemporaries was to put it years later, picking up pocket money where he could by providing what he later called ‘personal services’ to his friends. Those services might include helping them to find a source of cannabis, ecstasy or cocaine, a little ‘protection’ from bullying friends if they were under threat or buying and selling cars of all shapes and sizes. Bellfield quickly became what many a traveller had been before him, ‘a dealer’ in everything – but one with no fear of violence, and prepared to use it if the occasion demanded it. This is not to suggest for one moment that every Romany gypsy or traveller has an appetite for violence, it is simply to point out that the tradition, when added to Bellfield’s sense of his being an outsider during his adolescence, reinforced his belief that he could operate outside the law as society defined it, and when it suited him.

  The first time that Bellfield’s disdain for the law showed itself came when he was just thirteen. He was convicted on two counts of burglary and theft in April 1982. One friend at the time remembers: ‘He always believed the law didn’t apply to people like him, or his family.’ It was a belief that led to long string of criminal convictions.

  The young man who was often called Lee by his friends started to spend almost all his time on the fringe of the law, a place where he felt comfortable, whether it was the exotic worlds of illegal cock fighting and dog fighting, or illegal gambling and bare-knuckle boxing. Bellfield increasingly developed the habit of dealing in drugs for his friends, as well as seizing the opportunity to indulge his appetite for cars, and dealing in those as well. By the time he had learned to drive at seventeen he had amply demonstrated his disdain for other people’s property by taking no fewer than three cars without their owners’ permission, which saw him convicted on three counts of taking a conveyance in December 1985.

  Less than a year later, in November 1986, he was in trouble with the law again, this time for failing to surrender to the court when he was bailed for another driving offence, and in March 1987 he was convict
ed on three further counts of taking a conveyance.

  In an effort to escape the attention of the police, the teenage Bellfield then took to the habit of using a string of aliases to confuse anyone who might take an interest in exactly what he was doing. If no one knew his real name it made it all the easier to get away with something. It was a desire to disguise his true identity that Bellfield would never lose – just as he would always take particular care not to be directly connected with any single car or van if he could avoid it. That way no one could be certain that he was the owner or the driver. If he called himself by a different name he could flee back to the lair of the family home in Hanworth with no one any the wiser.

  Over the next two decades Bellfield would come to use no fewer than seventeen different aliases, ranging from some close to his own name – Liam Rabetts, Leroy Bellfry and Levi Smith – to David Bennett, Gavin Mercer, David Smith, Lee John, Liam James and Troy Nugent. The reasons for the subterfuge became clear just after his twentieth birthday, when he was convicted of possession of an offensive weapon in June 1988. The young man who had also started to dabble in a little small-scale benefit fraud – including claiming unemployment benefit when he had a part-time job – was growing far bolder and more dangerous by the day.

  Nowhere did that display itself more clearly than in Bellfield’s relationships with women and in particular his first long-term partner, barmaid Rebecca Wilkinson. No one would come to see the strain of violent brutality that was burgeoning in his soul more clearly than this cheery blonde, whom he met in September 1989, when he was twenty-one and she was just seventeen. She was to become the first true victim of his fascination with young women and his disdain for the law.

  4. A Dark World of Abuse

  ‘At worst, is this not an unjust world, full of nothing but beasts of prey, four-footed or two-footed?’

  Thomas Carlyle

  When Levi Bellfield first met the cheery, blonde and slightly chubby Rebecca Wilkinson in the autumn of 1989 she was working behind the bar of the Oxford Arms pub in Twickenham Road, Hanworth. Her elder sister Lucy was already working there, and it had seemed a natural place for the young woman to get a part-time job to help her make ends meet. With its polished brass rail and etched mirrors, the Oxford Arms was one of Bellfield’s regular drinking haunts; now that his body mass had expanded to a steroid-packed 18 stone, his appetite for alcohol had grown dramatically. Now twenty-one, he liked to start the mornings with a can or two of Tennent’s Super Strength lager and progress from there, with more lagers at regular intervals throughout the day, topped up with a little Malibu or vodka.

  If Bellfield was ‘Jack the Lad’, then Becky – as she was known to her friends – was certainly no saint. When she first encountered him she already had a six-month-old daughter, Hayley. She had become pregnant at sixteen by her first proper boyfriend. Her relationship with him wasn’t destined to last, and he moved out of the area during her pregnancy, leaving Becky to cope with motherhood alone. In fact she had only seen him twice since Hayley’s birth in March 1989. But that hadn’t dismayed her in the least. Calling on a natural supply of pluck, and her mother’s help, she had just about managed to look after her new daughter ‘after a fashion’, as she told her friends.

  Money was tight, and Becky needed all the financial support she could get to buy baby clothes for her daughter and put food on the table. That was why she was working at the Oxford Arms, while her mother looked after her daughter. It was to be those needs that made her a perfect target for a natural predator like Bellfield. Vulnerable to the charm of a man with money in his pocket, Becky was flattered by the attentions of this older man with a ready smile when they first met, even though she knew very well that he had a steady girlfriend called Cherie. That was no secret – everyone in the pub knew it – but she was young and, besides, she wanted to believe that her life could be better. Perhaps he could be the one to make it so. What could be more tempting than the attentions of a man who wasn’t slow to flash his wad of banknotes? For a teenager struggling to bring up her baby daughter it was nothing short of intoxicating.

  Like a fox that senses a rabbit across a cornfield on a winter’s morning, Bellfield saw this cheerful young woman as prey. Encouraged by his mother, he had grown into a man who believed he could have whichever woman he wanted, and what’s more could persuade her to do anything he chose. He certainly sensed that opportunity with the impressionable Becky Wilkinson and, before she had really understood it, he had pounced.

  ‘He was a real charmer when we first met,’ the young barmaid would say fifteen years after their first meeting. ‘I thought he was a nice bloke.’ What she didn’t know was that her life with him would rapidly turn into a seven-year nightmare.

  At first everything seemed fine. Becky bathed in the glow of being wanted by a man older than she was who seemed to ‘know his way around’. The only trouble was that, after Bellfield’s initial charm offensive, he suddenly became hard to contact. Within months she discovered that she was pregnant with his child. Uncertain what to do, Becky tried to make contact with Bellfield. Finally she discovered that he was in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and would be back soon. He didn’t explain why he was there, didn’t apologize for the silence, didn’t ask if she was all right, just assumed she would be pleased to hear from him. Though Becky Wilkinson didn’t know it at the time, it was to be the shape of things to come. Things were to get worse, much worse.

  Bellfield’s problems with his girlfriends weren’t the only things preying on his mind at that moment, however. One reason for his trip to Great Yarmouth was a desire to ‘make himself scarce’ to the police, as he was about to add to his criminal record with another conviction in July 1990. This time it was for using a fraudulent tax disc on one of the many cars he had access to as well as, once again, failing to surrender to the court while on bail for the offence. The habits he had grown into as a teenager were now ingrained.

  Becky Wilkinson knew nothing of that as her pregnancy developed. The local authority understood her predicament and in August 1990, when she was five months pregnant and with an eighteen-month-old to look after as well, she was offered a three-bedroom house in Hounslow for her and her growing family. In the meantime the father of her unborn child would arrive from time to time to pay attention to her, before disappearing again for days at a time, without telling Becky where he was going.

  As she later revealed, during her pregnancy Bellfield’s lack of concern was clear: ‘The night I went into labour, it was snowing, and we didn’t have phone, but he would not take me to hospital. I had to walk to a phone box and call my mum to take me.’ Worse was to come, as two days after she returned home, Bellfield kicked the young mother down a set of stairs, demonstrating a pattern of violence that was to become a regular feature of their relationship. As their family life together began, Bellfield was soon hitting Wilkinson and ‘bringing other women back to the house’ when she was out.

  Tragically, the abusive relationship between the young barmaid and Bellfield was to be exacerbated once again by her partner’s latest brush with the law. Once again he had been knowingly avoiding the police – this time aware of a charge of causing actual bodily harm. But at 5 o’clock in the morning of Monday, 21 January 1991, just four weeks after the birth of his daughter, the law caught up with him. Police officers broke into Becky’s house in Hounslow and arrested him. He was immediately taken to Isleworth Crown Court, where he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

  Even from his prison cell, however, Bellfield continued to control the young mother of his child. He insisted that Becky should go to live with his sister, rather than move into another new flat she had been offered in nearby Feltham. The reason he gave was that if she did so it would mean he could ‘keep an eye on her’ – from his prison cell. It was an outrageous demand, but Bellfield’s possessive, jealous nature when it came to his girlfriend knew no limits.

  Nevertheless, still hypnotized by his charms and in spite of his v
iolence, she agreed to stay with his sister Cheryl, just as she agreed to visit him every two weeks while he was in jail. By the middle of June 1991, however, the young barmaid was growing ever more uncomfortable with the company of Bellfield’s sister – not to mention his mother Jean – so much so that she decided to move into the new flat she had been offered in Feltham. But she didn’t escape.

  On 4 July 1991 Bellfield was released from jail and immediately returned to haunt her, though not to live with her every day, as that would have constrained his right to do ‘whatever I want’. For his part Bellfield simply resumed his habit of drinking heavily and disappearing from her flat for hours, or even days, at a time. But the more she questioned him, the angrier he became, leading him to beat her on many occasions. Even more dramatically, however, Bellfield also turned his young partner into a prisoner in her own home. He decided that he would not allow her to go out of the flat without him, paranoid that she might meet another man.

  Bellfield’s appetite for violence, which could appear at a moment’s notice, and disappear just as quickly, was not fuelled by Becky Wilkinson, however, there was also the question of his relationship with the police, who had become an ever present part of his life.

  Even though he had served his latest sentence, Bellfield’s brushes with the law certainly didn’t come to an end in the months after his release, not least because of his repeated attacks on his young partner. Police officers from the local station often visited Becky’s flat – called by neighbours who had realized that he was assaulting her with ever-increasing regularity. But the charm he had used trap his young partner hadn’t deserted him. A smiling Bellfield would answer the door to the officers when they arrived as a result of the neighbours’ complaints and protest his innocence.