If that did happen, there can be little doubt that it increased Bellfield’s hold over the group of men who were gradually forming around him as his ‘known associates’ – to use the official police term. Attracted by the bouncer’s bravado and audacity, not to mention his complete lack of conscience and eye for a drugs deal, they saw Bellfield as man who was afraid of nobody and prepared to do anything. For his part Bellfield liked to sustain his image as a ‘leader’ by drawing them into his drug deals and sexual attacks – and thereby ensuring that they could never give evidence against him. If they were to inform on him they would only be guaranteeing their own arrest and imprisonment. But if they remained silent they could participate in the profits of the drug deals and the availability of young women who were not only beneath the age of sexual consent, but also drugged and incapable of giving it.
But Bellfield’s sexual conquests under sixteen were children in the eyes of the law, which inevitably drew him into the dreadful, ugly world of paedophilia. At one stage he bragged to a friend that he had been to a paedophile ‘meeting place’ in a park where he could engage in sex with under-age girls. He confided that it was a place where paedophiles of all kinds could meet to indulge themselves but he didn’t reveal the exact location, except to say that it was outside London and to the south with the word ‘Hill’ in its name. There is no doubt whatever that Bellfield knew of the existence of a paedophile ring in west London and at least one of its members, Victor Kelly, a man whom the police would later describe as ‘one of Britain’s most dangerous paedophiles’.
Operating out of a flat in Hayes, west London, Kelly, then in his early sixties, would groom young girls for sex after buying them presents of clothing or mobile phones and then giving them cannabis and cocaine. A career criminal, he supported his lifestyle by dealing in drugs and had been jailed for six years in 1982 and eight years in 1990 for drug offences. He was finally sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment in November 2005 after a being convicted of giving a twelve-year-old girl cocaine so that he could have sex with her. The police knew of at least thirty other victims and believed that Kelly, known in west London by the nickname of ‘Uncle Joe’, may well have abused up to 200 young girls – all of them between the ages of twelve to fourteen – over a seven-year period stretching from 1997 until 2004. It was at precisely this same time that Bellfield was bragging to his friends about his own conquests of fourteen-year-old girls, and when he too, like Kelly, was sustaining his lifestyle by selling drugs. After Kelly’s conviction at the Old Bailey in November 2005 Detective Chief Inspector Matt Sarti described Kelly as ‘a ruthless man who presents a real threat to children’ and called him a ‘serial groomer and abuser of children’, who used violence or the threat of violence to stop his victims revealing what had happened to them.
It is highly unlikely that Bellfield, who lived in exactly the same part of west London and was also involved in dealing in illegal drugs, didn’t know of Kelly and his appetites. Indeed several of the bouncer’s friends and ‘associates’ also knew Kelly and his reputation in the western fringes of the city.
But Levi Bellfield was adept at presenting himself to the world – and particularly to young women – as ‘a big softy’ who ‘never hurt anyone’. It was this ability to groom those around him, both male friends and female victims, and to pass himself off as ‘no more than a grown-up kid’, that was to save him from being identified by the police and other authorities as a sexual predator for more than a decade.
Like the Gloucester serial killer Frederick West, Bellfield knew how to make himself inconspicuous, even helpful, to the police. Indeed by the time that he was finally arrested for the murder of Amélie Delagrange in November 2004 the police criminal records files showed that he had attracted the attention of the Metropolitan Police’s officers on no fewer than ninety-two separate occasions before he finally found himself in Heathrow police station being interrogated by detectives from DCI Colin Sutton’s double murder squad. There were criminal records of his possession of offensive weapons, of possession of stolen vehicles, of burglary and theft, of assault involving actual bodily harm, even accusations of rape and buggery, but Bellfield somehow remained ‘comparatively harmless’ in the eyes of the authorities in west London. And the reason was his natural ability to ‘charm the birds off the trees’. Time after time Bellfield would play the part of the naughty boy, large of stature, certainly, but never threatening, when he came into contact with the police and social services. Indeed at one stage he even started to offer titbits of information to the officers at Hounslow police station – just as Frederick West had done to the officers in Gloucester. It was a ruse to make them underestimate him, to see him as no more than ‘small-time’, while the reality was completely the opposite. Bellfield was a very dangerous man indeed.
Every bit as importantly Bellfield had learned to mask his desires behind his image as a ‘Jack the Lad’ who really wouldn’t hurt a fly. He might display his true self – the sexual marauder relentlessly searching for fresh prey – to his male ‘associates’, but he was careful to keep it hidden from everyone else. Photographs of Bellfield with partners and their children at this time show a man who seems to revel in his role as a father, rather than rapist on the edge of a psychotic break who was about to turn to murder. He presented himself to the wider world a man anxious to seem as ‘normal’ as possible, even though he knew only too well, in his heart, that nothing could be further from the truth. Underneath that apparent normality there lurked a far darker and more frightening character, and one whose appetite for sex and violence had been whetted and was about to be satiated.
So, as the millennium came to its end, Bellfield’s appetite for sex with naive and impressionable young women had grown to consume his life completely. The more it did so, the less able he was to control himself, and the more his addiction to it increased. But why did it escalate? And why now? The obvious answer is that Bellfield had managed to go unpunished and undetected for more than a decade. He was now thirty-two years old and well aware of the satisfaction he got from indulging his violent sexual fantasies on three permanent partners, Becky Wilkinson, Jo Collings and Emma Mills.
Professor David Canter, one of Britain’s leading psychological criminal profilers, explains in his 1994 book Criminal Shadows: ‘The destructive mixture of a callous search for intimacy and an unsympathetic desire for control is at the heart of the hidden narratives that shape violent assaults.’ The twin traits of the ‘loving father’ and ‘controlling partner’ lie at the centre of Bellfield’s personality and provide part of the explanation of why it was about to fracture for ever.
His own lack of a father figure almost certainly contributed to his distorted view of what being a husband and father meant. The skinny child whose father died when he was eight, who was then vastly over-indulged by his mother, and then rejected by his first proper girlfriend – who may even have paid for it with her life – was about to ‘compensate’ by attacking women at random. It was, at least in part, his private retaliation against what Sigmund Freud called ‘the mother he is afraid to challenge’.
This explosion of inner rage into violence against female strangers whom he neither knew nor cared about was to see him launch an unprovoked attack that would bring him to trial beneath the statue of a woman bearing the scales of justice in her hands above the Central Criminal Court in London’s Old Bailey.
There could be no more appropriate image for the crimes of Levi Bellfield.
8. Sultan of Sex
‘Men must have corrupted nature a little, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves.’
Voltaire, Candide
In September 2000 Levi Bellfield and Emma Mills, together with their children, two-year-old Lucy and eleven-month-old William, moved into the cramped cul-de-sac house at 11, Little Benty, in the shadow of the M4 motorway. It was to be their family home together – with one or two exceptions – for the next four years.
On the surface
Bellfield was still presenting himself to the neighbours as a family man who liked nothing more than to play with his toddler daughter while helping to look after his baby son, the sort of father who liked taking them out for ‘treats’ like a trip to the country in one of his many cars, and taking family photographs to prove it.
As Emma Mills knew only too well, however, beneath that facade, Bellfield was a darker and more threatening character altogether, with a prodigious appetite for Tennant’s strong lager and recreational drugs. He was still attacking her repeatedly, denying her money and disappearing for long periods of the day and night without explanation. He had also developed the habit of never parking whatever car he was using outside their house, but always ‘round the corner’, as if preparing for a quick getaway.
One person who saw at first hand the private torment of Mills’s life at Little Benty was her mother, Gilly, who had been concerned about her daughter for the past four years, but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Concealing her private fears, Gilly Mills had kept her dignity and had even been present at the birth of both her daughter’s children, alongside Bellfield, regardless of his temper and abuse – though she also knew that on both occasions he had made a rapid excuse to leave the maternity ward for the local pub.
Mother and daughter remained close, and Emma continued to visit her mother’s house in Esher with her children after she had moved into Little Benty. But the visits to her mother only sharpened Bellfield’s desire to control his partner and family. Whenever Emma went to see her mother, Bellfield would ring her repeatedly – on her mobile and her mother’s landline – between six and eight times in just two hours, determined to break the intimacy between them and disrupt their conversations. In Bellfield’s mind, Mills was his property and he was intent on making sure he alone controlled her.
Meanwhile, although he was living with Mills, he was keeping in contact with both Becky Wilkinson and Jo Collings. His appetite for multiple affairs was as much part of his character as his swaggering behaviour on the doors of the nightclubs he worked at. He was, it seemed to some, intent of being nothing less that a sultan of sex, as another young woman who came into contact with him in the first months of 2001 discovered very quickly.
In her early thirties with three children, the woman in question, A— Platt first encountered Bellfield at a funeral in May that year. The deceased was related to the Bellfield clan so they were strongly represented at the ceremony. Sensing an opportunity for another sexual conquest, the rapacious Bellfield asked Platt out for a drink ‘to catch up on old times’, and suggested she come out to Royales nightclub in Uxbridge with her ‘mates’ and he would make sure she got in free.
Though Platt was still married at the time, she was well aware that her marriage was failing and a couple of weeks later took Bellfield up on his offer. ‘Levi made me feel secure,’ she remembered. ‘He would look after me. I saw him as someone who would protect me.’
She was then subjected to the familiar pattern of grooming that Bellfield had perfected over the past decade – and she exactly matched his preferred type, even if she was a little older. She was naive and intensely vulnerable – with three children from a previous marriage and a husband whom she alleged was violent towards her.
‘Levi took an interest in me,’ Platt was to confess. ‘He kept on saying, “Come out for a drink.” He used to buy me drinks all the time, and he was very pleasant. He would take me out for curries.’
Platt never met Emma Mills, although Bellfield did admit to her that she existed, and that they had two children together. ‘He always kept her separate from me for some reason, I don’t know why,’ she was to admit later.
It didn’t take very long for Platt’s relationship with Bellfield to turn into a sexual one. He would visit her at her home while her husband was out at work, and there would be encounters in his car. But things did not go exactly to plan.
‘The first few times we had sex I don’t think he did ejaculate,’ she said. ‘He used to go limp and that was it. He said it never happened with other girls. But then as he got more comfortable with me he did, but it was almost like he didn’t enjoy having sex with me. That was the impression I got. Although he made out that he was the big man around women and boast about it, with me he was completely opposite: he was shy, timid and gentle.’ Platt explained, ‘Levi would never take his top off and he would never let me take his top off because he was embarrassed about his stomach.’ He even told her that his ‘ejaculation problem’ was because he was ‘so close to me’.
But when she asked him about all the other women, Bellfield merely replied that it was ‘different with them, just sex, it doesn’t matter’. Three years later Platt would admit that it was ‘more of an excitement thing, being with him. He was protective, and I was going through a bad time. It wasn’t a very sexual relationship.’
That didn’t prevent Bellfield from demonstrating his penchant for sex with other, much younger, women. Indeed one reason for his sexual difficulties with Platt could well have been that she was more than a dozen years older than his preferred ‘schoolgirl’ type. As an older woman she could well have led him to feel inadequate even though she made no secret of her vulnerabilities. In Bellfield’s sexual pantheon a young impressionable girl was one thing, a mature woman quite another.
Bellfield’s problems certainly weren’t replicated when it came to the teenage girls in the queue at Royales. She used to watch him taking them up to the room above the nightclub with its grotty sofa. ‘He used to joke about it,’ she would remember. ‘But all the girls knew about Emma. He would always tell them he was with Emma, and they all willingly had sex with him.’
At one point Platt even warned him that he might catch AIDS, but Bellfield had his answer well prepared. ‘No, no, no I’ll never catch AIDS,’ he told her. ‘Why do you think I always go for the young ones? They’re clean, that means that I’m clean.’
No matter how it may have appeared to his neighbours in Little Benty, behind closed doors Bellfield acted in exactly the same way that he had done for the previous decade. He manipulated the women in his life, intimidated them with violence, while dealing in drugs to sustain his lifestyle. He even extended his drug-dealing to Platt and her three daughters.
On one occasion when Bellfield was at her house, the oldest daughter woke up at nine o’clock one evening wanting some chocolate. Her mother told her to go back to bed, but Bellfield persuaded her to allow him to take her out and buy her some chocolate – on the surface the act of a caring man. The reality, of course, was altogether different. There was a drug deal to be done, and Bellfield took the girl, and Platt’s car, and drove to Royales nightclub, staying out for about two hours. ‘I was livid,’ she would remember. ‘The next morning I spoke to my daughter about it, and she told me that they were outside Royales, and Levi had tablets in a bag. I couldn’t believe it. I thought: what am I getting into?’
Bellfield’s oscillation between charm and menace was still part of the intimidation technique that he depended on. It left Platt reeling, unable to predict how he would respond to her behaviour, and as the summer of 2001 continued that meant she would agree to accede to whatever demands he made on her – no matter how outrageous.
One way in particular that Platt would give in to him was by allowing him to borrow her car. Bellfield would tell her he had ‘some business to do’ and ask if he could borrow it, although he would never tell her what exactly the business was. It wasn’t long before she found out. One day in July 2001 he came back with the car and said to Platt, ‘Look what I’ve got,’ and produced a long-barrelled shotgun with a brown handle, which he proceeded to hide under the units in her kitchen, by taking out one of the bottom boards, pushing it into the space beneath the units, and then replacing the board.
‘What the hell is that doing in my house?’ Platt asked him.
‘I just need somewhere to put it for now,’ Bellfield replied.
‘Well you’re not leaving that here,
’ she said. ‘I’ve got the kids here. If someone found a gun in my house I would get into trouble.’
Bellfield wasn’t to be dissuaded. ‘It’s only for a short time’ he told her. ‘It’s just I don’t want to move it right now, its daylight.’
That night the gun disappeared.
But the gun wasn’t the only weapon that Platt saw in Bellfield’s possession. One day she opened the glove compartment in one of the cars he was driving and found a brass knuckle-duster, which he told her was ‘for my bouncing work’, while on another occasion she found a flick knife.
‘He said it was to protect himself,’ Platt said later, ‘but I told him if he got caught he would get into trouble.’
Unabashed, Bellfield told her: ‘No one will ever catch me.’
To prove how unconcerned he was, Bellfield also started carrying a baseball bat in his car. ‘He always said it was for his protection,’ Platt would insist. ‘Not that by the size of him he would need protecting.’
Bellfield’s mood swings became steadily more severe as the end of the summer of 2001 approached, and it wasn’t just Platt who felt it. Emma Mills did too, and all the time he was still indulging his passion for promiscuity. Throughout the summer he would see Platt most weekends, regardless of his relationship with Emma Mills. It was finally to tip Mills over the edge. Together with the verbal abuse, the disappearances, the mood swings and the endless violence, it finally convinced her to leave, and take her children with her.
In July 2001 Mills took her children to a women’s refuge near her mother’s home in Woking. She was to remain there for the next two and a half months, and while she was there she began to describe some of her experiences at Bellfield’s hands to the female volunteers. But she couldn’t keep it up. The memories were too painful.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 9
