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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  ‘If I picked up the children from Becky’s house,’ Mills explained later, ‘I’d have to wait around the corner in the car. Becky used to call me “the stuck-up whore”. I haven’t done anything bad to her, and they were finished by the time I started seeing Levi. Levi would see the children in fits and starts, and there would be long periods where we wouldn’t see the children or Becky at all.’

  It wasn’t just Becky Wilkinson that caused the now eighteen-year-old Mills trouble, it was also Jo Collings. Bellfield was still trying to keep all his options open – telling Mills that even though he still saw Collings they were ‘no longer a couple’. That wasn’t how Collings saw it. After all, she had a daughter of eighteen months and a baby of six months when Mills came on the scene.

  For her part Mills was furious with her, and showed it. One day in the autumn of 1997 Collings remembered that Bellfield and she encountered Mills one day when Bellfield was driving her beige Austin Metro car and Mills was driving her car in the opposite direction.

  ‘Emma saw me and Levi and she was not pleased,’ Collings said. ‘She jumped out of her car leaving it in the middle of the road and ran over to my side of the car. I was in the passenger seat, so I quickly locked the door. Levi also locked his door. He was laughing nervously at her.’

  According to Collings, Mills leaned across the bonnet, screaming and swearing at them both. Bellfield laughed off the incident. As far as he was concerned it was another example of the control he had over the women in his life, further proof of his harem.

  On another occasion, Bellfield was having a drink with Collings in a local pub when he phoned Mills to ask her to collect him in her car. Without a murmur Mills agreed – though what she did not know was that she was to get more than she bargained for.

  ‘Levi came out of the pub with his ex girlfriend, Jo,’ Mills recalled later, ‘and they both came up to my car. Levi told me to wind down the window and I said, “No.” The window was already wound down a little way. Jo said, “Oh wind down the window, Emma, I’m not gonna do anything to you.” ’

  At that moment Bellfield went round to the passenger side of the car, opened the door and started punching Mills on the side of the head near her left eye and shouting, ‘Do as you’re told, do what you’re fucking told.’ It was the first time that the bouncer had hit his teenage girlfriend, though it certainly would not be the last.

  Bellfield then climbed into the car and instructed Mills to take him to his mother’s house, which the terrified teenager duly did, only for him to punch her repeatedly all the way there. The bruises that Bellfield caused were so bad that later that evening even he began to worry that she might need medical treatment. Without a moment’s hesitation, he telephoned Collings to ask her to take Mills to the nearby Ashford hospital.

  ‘Jo came in and sat with me,’ Mills would explain. ‘I gave her name and her address in Twickenham. I was seen by the doctor and told him that some girls had done it. I told that lie because I was frightened of them finding out Levi had done it in case he got into trouble.’

  Bellfield’s domination of his women was complete. They would never betray his abuse and violence to the police or local social workers. They would put up with any humiliation he chose to heap upon them, no matter how terrifying. It contrived only to further increase the swagger in his stride. The fact that they were at each other’s throats only increased his sense of power. Not one of them stood up to him, none questioned his actions, and – even more significantly – it was abundantly clear that the one woman whom Bellfield had always sought to please, his mother Jean, would never object. ‘Levi could do no wrong as far as his mother was concerned,’ one girlfriend declared in 1998, and it was entirely true.

  What pleased Bellfield almost as much as his power over the women in his life, however, was his delight in physical violence, which in turn showed up in his brushes with the law. In March 1998 he was arrested for the possession of an offensive weapon, a baseball bat which he had used in his role as a nightclub bouncer, just as he had been charged with the use of a Stanley knife during another brawl four years earlier. Violence was as much part of Bellfield’s life as the drugs that provided him with a regular income. But it wasn’t just knuckle-dusters or knives. Bellfield also dealt in guns – though he was at pains to keep this quiet from most people. But not from Emma Mills, who was horrified one day when he returned home to her with ‘a long gun like the ones used for clay pigeon shooting’. Bellfield started to saw off part of the barrel of the shotgun – with its ‘great wooden handle’ – on the kitchen table, and showing off as he did it. The sight terrified Mills, who was only too well aware that her children could be hurt. ‘We had an argument about it because the children were in the house,’ she was to say later. ‘And Levi took it away the same day.’

  ‘Levi was a big deal to his mates by the end of the 1990s,’ one police officer who worked on the case was to say, ‘a very big deal, not least because he wasn’t afraid of dealing in guns.’

  Nothing gave Bellfield greater pleasure. By the end of 1998 he was a ‘face’ to be taken seriously in his part of west London, and that bred a confidence that was to encourage him to fulfil his fantasy about hurting young women he didn’t know and had never met – particularly blondes.

  Levi Bellfield’s fantasy was about to come to life.

  7. Sex and Drugs

  ‘They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.’

  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  Shortly after Levi Bellfield’s thirty-first birthday in May 1999, he learned that his latest partner, Emma Mills, was pregnant again, with their second child, due in October. It would bring the total number of children he acknowledged that he had fathered to no fewer than seven – four with Rebecca Wilkinson, one with Jo Collings and now the second with Emma Mills.

  There were rumours that he was also the father to a number of other children but Bellfield always denied it, just as he tried to claim that at least two of the children he had accepted as his own were ‘actually other blokes’’. Their mothers, Wilkinson and Collings, fervently disagreed.

  It was typical of the man. Given to ever-increasing mood swings, he could be dismissive of his five infant girls and two baby boys at one moment and then, equally suddenly, become over-indulgent with them the next. Bellfield would shower them with presents bought with his profits from dealing – in everything from drugs to cars, weapons to violence; he was ‘ducking and diving’ in the twilight zone on the very edge of the law like a man possessed.

  Now a 20-stone man whose head seemed to sit on top of his shoulders without a discernible neck, he was still a nightclub bouncer – most recently at a new club in Shepperton called The Barn – but that was only a means to an end. It provided him with the ideal cover to deal in drugs, but, more importantly, also gave him ample opportunity to try and seduce young girls into his personalized ‘shagging wagon’, his Toyota people-carrier complete with its orange quilt, mattress and purple neon lights. If the girls could be persuaded to accept his offer of a spiked Malibu or Red Bull then so much the better. He would have sex with them in the Toyota and then throw them back out into the nightclub car park, where they would rarely remember exactly what had happened to them. It was the perfect modus operandi: unlimited sex with very young women whom he could use as he chose – and who would never accuse him of anything. If he sometimes invited one or two of his ‘mates’ to enjoy the girls too, well that only made him more popular among the men who had increasingly come to follow his lead. ‘Nothing to be lost,’ he would boast to his friends with a knowing smirk. ‘No one’s ever any the wiser, specially not the girls.’ The fact that it was the ruthless, unprincipled exploitation of vulnerable, innocent young women didn’t cross his mind. Bellfield still felt the law ‘doesn’t apply to me’.

  The truth, of course, was that Bellfield’s brushes with the law had increased rather than slowed down over the years. Since the age of sixteen he had been
charged with no fewer than sixteen offences, from theft to burglary, from actual bodily harm to possession of an offensive weapon. But not one of those charges related to his sexual obsession. He had also come into contact with the police on countless other occasions – particularly over the abuse of his partners. Nevertheless he had only spent one brief period of four months in jail as an adult and had even managed to keep control of Becky Wilkinson and his family while he was away, using his mother and sister to ‘keep a close eye on her’.

  In the summer of 1999 Bellfield was living with Emma Mills in a small flat in Clements Court in Hounslow, near the open space of Hounslow Heath, but he was looking for something bigger, only too aware that he would soon be the father of a toddler and a baby – even though that didn’t stop him ‘always going out in the evenings’, as Mills described it, leaving her to take the responsibility of childcare.

  But that wasn’t the only responsibility Bellfield gave his then twenty-one-year-old lover. Inexorably, Mills was forced to hand over packages to strangers, not knowing what they contained, and only agreeing to do it because she was terrified of him. It was only later that Mills realized the full extent of what had been happening, and what he had been asking her to do. It came as a tremendous shock to the young woman from Esher, who had never taken an illegal drug in her life. Bellfield saw nothing wrong whatever in involving his young partner. Like everything else to him, it was not a big deal, just part of his wheeling and dealing.

  As time wore on, and Mills gave birth to their son William in October, Bellfield made no effort to conceal his own drug use, openly admitting to his partner after nights out that he had had a ‘bit of Charlie’, as he called cocaine.

  Not that Bellfield was incapable of feelings towards his new young partner. During the previous summer of 1998, for example, he had taken Mills and their six-month-old daughter Lucy on a holiday to Ibiza, a holiday habit he was to repeat regularly in the years to come, although he came to prefer the island of Tenerife, as he maintained it was ‘sunnier’.

  For a far greater part of the time, however, Bellfield treated Mills like a slave, disappearing for long periods of time – especially at night – without giving her any kind of explanation. Mills was left to fend for herself, as Bellfield would often not reappear until the following morning. Sometimes he would even disappear for days at a time, going to stay with one of the men who had become his friends on the doors of nightclubs.

  One of the men he met while working on the door at Royales, the Uxbridge club beloved of airmen from the local RAF base, was a man in his early thirties known for his girth and aggressive attitude named J— Spiers. Along with Bellfield, he worked a series of doors together at nightclubs on the outskirts of London including The Works in Kingston-upon-Thames.

  One young woman who saw exactly what Bellfield was capable of on his nocturnal sprees with Spiers was named S— Atkins, who launched into an affair with him after she met him at Royales. She alleged later that Bellfield and Spiers enjoyed such a close relationship that he even would video Bellfield having sex with girls.

  ‘Levi wanted to show me the video,’ Atkins would recall later, ‘but I told him I didn’t want to see it.’ Undeterred, Bellfield put it into the video-recorder and switched it on. Rapidly realizing what it was, she insisted he turn it off at once. Her refusal to watch it did nothing to dampen Bellfield’s enthusiasm, however, as he also asked her if she would like to have a threesome with another man, although he did not mention which other man he had in mind, but again she refused.

  They were the actions of a man without conscience, whose disregard for the law, indulgence of every conceivable vice, and stalking of young women demonstrated for all to see that he had lost contact with any moral code. They were the actions of a sociopath.

  Bellfield boasted to Atkins that he could get hold of a date rape drug and asked if she had like to try it. Again she refused, even though he insisted that the ‘sex was supposed to really great’. It made her ‘feel uneasy about him’.

  As well it might, for it was the formula Bellfield was increasingly using to seduce women in one of his many cars. Atkins herself admitted that the first time she had had sex with him was in a car on their way back from a nightclub.

  Bellfield revealed another ever-growing aspect of his character to the young clubber that he had met in the queue – his increasing appetite for violence.

  ‘He used to boast about throwing people out of Royales and beating them up,’ Atkins said later, explaining that if the bouncers felt ‘bored’ and someone started a fight they would throw them out and beat them up. To prove how much he enjoyed violence, and was prepared for it, he produced a knuckle-duster from his pocket to show her.

  Another man who saw the drug-dealing and violent side of Bellfield was Richard ‘Yosser’ Hughes. Hughes would become a father figure to Emma Mills and almost single-handedly helped her survive the torment of spending her life in the shadow of Bellfield’s moods, his temper, and his relentless violence and sexual abuse. At the same time, however, Hughes remained Bellfield’s confidant, going to unlicensed bare-knuckle boxing matches with his childhood friend.

  Like Mills, Hughes was well aware of Bellfield’s drug-dealing. ‘I have seen him take cocaine on a number of occasions,’ Hughes would recall later, adding: ‘He also dealt in cocaine. He had a press at Little Benty, which he used to make blocks of cocaine. He mixed the cocaine with another white substance so that it would go further.’

  No one was more aware than Hughes of his friend’s temper and capacity for violence. After Bellfield’s arrest that he would describe him as ‘mainly being nice towards people’ but adding that he ‘soon turned if they upset him or his friends. It did not take a lot for him to loose his temper.’ He went on to explain that he had witnessed Bellfield ‘assault people on a number of occasions’.

  One place Hughes saw this propensity for violence at first hand was at a mini-cab firm in Shepperton, Middlesex, called New Lion Cars, where he had started working early in 2000. Bellfield had joined him there shortly afterwards. It was another job that allowed him to come and go as he pleased as well as setting his own timetable. Who was to know exactly what a mini-cab driver got up to when he was out on the road on his own? There was, of course, the additional attraction that driving a mini-cab allowed Bellfield ample time to search for vulnerable young women.

  In the mini-cab office Bellfield showed his true colours – defence of his friends and a capacity for violence. The company’s twenty-three-year-old radio dispatcher reported a colleague to the police for using drugs after an argument in the office. After his arrest, Bellfield picked him up from the police station and went straight to Lion Cars office. There, he took a hot kettle full of water and hit the controller over the head with it, knocking him to the floor, and then laid into him behind the counter. The controller ran off, never to be seen again.

  Not that violence was the only interest Bellfield had at the mini-cab firm. He also started an affair with one of the female drivers. Never one to miss an opportunity, he started having cards printed with his personal mobile number on them – rather than the company’s – so that he could also ‘freelance’ as a mini-cab driver. He would distribute the cards to the girls in the nightclub queues, pointing out that he was always available to take them home. Those personalized cards were just another one of Bellfield’s ruses to get young women into his car alone in the hope that they might be tempted to try the ‘alcopop’ drinks that he offered them ‘to make a great end to the night’.

  One of Bellfield’s friends at the time remembered later that the bouncer had a number of cars and vans at his disposal – though he never knew exactly how he came to have so many. Bellfield would brag about them, calling them his ‘GHB wagons’. This friend saw the inside of ‘at least one’ van, which was fitted out with a mattress, handcuffs and blacked-out windows.

  Another of Bellfield’s friends, who worked with him as a bouncer at both The Barn in Shepperton and at Royales
in Uxbridge, would later confirm to the police that when they were ‘working the doors’ Bellfield never went home straight away as he would either have ‘pulled’ a girl while he was working that night or had one lined up already. It was he who first told the police of the Bellfield’s habit of taking girls to hotels on the northern perimeter of London’s Heathrow airport.

  No one can say for certain how many girls Bellfield abused in this way – as few ever came forward to make a complaint against him to the police, not least because most could not even remember what happened to them. Even if these young women could remember dimly that something had happened to them many also felt a sense of guilt, knowing that they had bought ecstasy, cannabis or even cocaine from the giant bouncer.

  But date rape drugs were not the only means that Bellfield used to conceal his intent. There was also the matter of his cars. He took enormous pains to ensure that he seldom used the same car twice when he went out at night. If the victims could identify his car – which was unlikely but just possible – he wanted to be sure that the car couldn’t be traced back to him, and he did so by making sure that he had access to a large variety of vehicles, some bought, some borrowed, some even stolen for the night, that would make it difficult for any police officer investigating a complaint against him to trace him.

  The officers who investigated Bellfield after his arrest in November 2004 came to believe that a ‘significant’ number of young women had fallen victim to his use of date rape drugs.

  ‘We know he raped young girls in his cars after drugging them,’ one officer would admit later, ‘but we couldn’t prove it. We also believe that he would even dress them up the victims as schoolgirls while they were unconscious to increase his pleasure, and then invite his mates round to abuse them too, but again it was enormously difficult to prove so long after the events.’