‘I would describe Levi as an animal,’ Mayell was to say, and with good reason. No sooner had Bellfield introduced him to Terri Carroll and another of her young friends, who was then fourteen, than Bellfield had bragged that he had had sex with the fourteen-year-old. ‘I remember being disgusted because the girl was so young,’ Mayell remembered.
That wasn’t all. Bellfield also asked him if he wanted to sleep with Carroll. ‘Do you want to buy her off me?’ he asked, but again Mayell refused.
Another man who witnessed Bellfield’s rapacious sexuality was L— Drakeford, another friend of Rodriguez, who had helped to organize the clamping expedition to Chichester earlier that year. Not long after the attack on Rodriguez Bellfield asked Drakeford to pick him and a young girl up at a pub in West Drayton and take them to the flat in Crosby Close. On the way there Drakeford stopped to buy a kebab. When he came out of the kebab shop he discovered that Bellfield and the girl were having sex in the back of his car. ‘I pushed the mirror so I didn’t have to watch them and continued driving,’ he recalled later.
But when they got back to Crosby Close, and after the girl had got out of his car, Drakeford suddenly saw the other side to Bellfield’s sexual bravado. The bouncer and wheel-clamper burst into tears, begging him: ‘Don’t let her see me like this.’ Bellfield confessed to Drakeford that he was deeply worried about what the police might find in the back of the battered white Ford Courier van, which he had used for clamping, and which the police had taken away in the wake of the Rodriguez attack. Bellfield admitted there was a hammer in the van, which he was clearly concerned about, telling his friend, ‘I’m totally fucked. My life is over.’
Drakeford thought it had something to do with the Rodriguez assault and told him that if he hadn’t done it then he had nothing to worry about – but that did nothing to stop the wheel-clamper’s tears. That van was to play a role again in Bellfield’s life in the weeks to come.
13. The Killing Ground
‘It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life that others have made.’
George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methusela
The Rodriguez incident left Levi Bellfield nervous, very nervous indeed. Part of him felt guilt that he had been involved in the fight that had seen ‘Spanish Pete’ hit over the head with an axe and stabbed three times in the stomach and knees with a screwdriver, and part felt relief that the man he had used to fetch and carry drugs for him wasn’t able to tell the police exactly what had happened – as he was in a coma.
The six weeks Rodriguez remained unconscious became some of the most anxious in Bellfield’s life, not least because he suspected that the police were certain he had played a much more significant role in the attack than he had admitted to them. The anxiety only added to the sense of dread that had been gripping him for months, making his panic attacks even worse.
Nevertheless Bellfield did everything in his power to behave as normally as possible. The by now sixteen-year-old Terri Carroll and he couldn’t go back to Crosby Close, because it was an official police crime scene, so they went to live together in a hotel on the perimeter road north of Heathrow airport. It was familiar, and relatively cheap, but it was close to Little Benty, and he had every reason to want to be nearby. Emma Mills was about to give birth.
On 17 July 2004 Mills duly bore Bellfield a third child, a daughter they named Georgina, and who went back to Little Benty with her mother after leaving the hospital maternity unit. Mills and her children were still very much a family even though they didn’t see a great deal of the man they all called ‘Dad’. Bellfield would go and visit them on a couple of days a week, usually in the early evening after clamping and before he went off to work as a doorman and bouncer.
On the surface, as the summer of 2004 deepened, Bellfield’s life continued relatively normally. He and his team, often accompanied by Carroll, would go wheel-clamping during the day at a vast range of sites across west London and beyond, while in the evenings he would still work the doors at Royales in Uxbridge or at The Sorting Room in Twickenham. He saw no reason to change his habits. After all there were still drugs to supply and teenage girls to be seduced.
Beneath the surface, however, Bellfield’s mental and emotional disintegration was gathering pace. The memories of the attack on Kate Sheedy at the end of May, the battle with Spanish Pete Rodriguez barely a week later, the subsequent police investigation and the fact that they were still examining his white Ford Courier van had all contrived to accelerate the mental ‘break’.
He kept telling Noel Moran, ‘I’m fucked, utterly fucked.’
By now Bellfield was a man on the very edge, a man without conscience, a victim of his own sexual desire and his addiction to violence – an addiction he was keeping at bay by smoking crack cocaine and cannabis, as well as consuming ever more copious amounts of extra-strength lager at all times of the day and night.
But his use of drugs and lager wasn’t driven by guilt alone, it was also driven by the narcissism that had gripped since his childhood, when his mother had instilled in him the utter conviction that he was the only significant person in his life – which convinced him he was a man who could literally ‘get away with anything’. Like Tony Montana in Scarface, Bellfield was now creating his own psychological reality.
‘The law doesn’t apply to people like me,’ he would brag to his wheel-clamping colleagues while they were out working. ‘They’ll never lay a finger on me.’ That was partly braggadocio, for in private Bellfield believed that he could see himself in prison over the Rodriguez attack – after all he was already on bail and due to appear in court in August on a charge of perverting the course of justice.
Mills recalled later that he was ‘quite down’ and ‘crying all the time’ during the summer of 2004 and that he ‘worried he was going to get into trouble for the Peter thing’ – especially when Bellfield started to ring her in the middle of the night to cry his heart out. He had developed the habit of ringing her in the early hours of the morning to confess how anxious and unhappy he was.
‘Levi was just in a bad way,’ Mills would explain. On his mobile phone Bellfield would tell her that he ‘didn’t want to live any more’.
In truth, Bellfield descended into a frenzy of both self-pity and anger during July 2004, losing whatever frail sense of proportion and reality that he may once have had. He was not insane, however – quite the reverse. He was still Mr Treacle. He still had the ability to lie at will, to cover his tracks, to plead his innocence no matter how guilty and to ‘charm the birds off the trees’. That was his well-practised ‘reality’, the face that he presented to the world.
Behind that reality, however, his addiction to sex and violence towards young women had escalated to murderous proportions. The practised charm meant nothing. It was a mere false benevolence that concealed his true feelings towards young women. He wanted to hurt them – badly.
On 21 July Bellfield’s superficial confidence received an extraordinary boost when the police returned his white Ford Courier to Little Benty on a car-transporter. They hadn’t discovered anything unusual, or worthy of further investigation, and they certainly hadn’t found a hammer. Bellfield could hardly believe his good fortune when he asked Mills to take delivery. The gods were smiling, he thought: he genuinely could get away with anything.
It was a stroke of good fortune that also encouraged Bellfield to believe that the van was ‘lucky’. Without delay he started using it not only for wheel-clamping, but also for his by now habitual nightly drives around west London and his old stamping grounds of Twickenham Green and Strawberry Hill. The van was his talisman, his good luck charm, ensuring that no one would notice him as he stalked the minor roads.
Yet there could be no doubt that the Ford van was, in fact, distinctive, as many of the clampers remembered. Spiers, for example, used to drive it regularly. ‘The third gear was knackered,’ he would recall. ‘The back doors had a checker plate on them. The windows were
blacked out. The seats were torn. It was a pigsty.’ For good measure the nearside front hub cap was missing and the left headlight didn’t work. It had also been used as a vehicle at Heathrow airport and had a mark on its roof where a yellow beacon light had once been fitted, as well as a small gap in the blacked-out rear windows to allow someone to sit inside and watch a clamping site.
The white Ford Courier van was to become the link that would eventually lead DCI Sutton’s double murder squad to Little Benty – as they were particularly interested in the van’s whereabouts on the evening of Thursday, 19 August 2004.
That afternoon Emma Mills and her three children went to a children’s party at her friend Christine Hawgood’s. There were about fifteen small children there, and during the party Bellfield rang on her mobile phone to ask what she was doing. When she told him about the party he said that it all sounded ‘pretty noisy’, but explained that he was busy wheel-clamping and that he would call her later.
Later that evening, back at home in Little Benty, Mills decided to go the large local Tesco in Hayes. She needed nappies for her new daughter, who was only four weeks old, as well as other things for the children. She had hoped that Bellfield would have come back from clamping to take them, but he hadn’t been in touch, and so shortly after 7 that evening she phoned a local taxi firm. Minutes later Bellfield suddenly rang to say he would have taken her and to ask why she was wasting her money on taxis. It was too late, however; the cab had been ordered, and Mills set off in it with her three children. She had bought baby wipes and Jaffa Cakes, chocolate milk and fish pie, ham and yoghurts – a typical family shop – and the bill had come to just under £70.
Just as she finished shopping Bellfield arrived at the store to collect her and immediately took his two older children across the road to the nearby Toys ‘R’ Us to buy them each a present. He then gave them a lift back to Little Benty in the white Ford Courier van. But Bellfield didn’t stay with them. Shortly after 9 o’clock that evening – as he had done so many times in their years together – Bellfield made an excuse to Mills about having ‘business to do’ and climbed back into the white Ford van and disappeared into the gathering dusk. It was a dusk that he was to wrap around himself like a dark cloak.
By 9.30 on the evening of 19 August Bellfield was driving his white Ford van up the Hampton Road towards Twickenham Green. But he wasn’t going anywhere specific, he was simply driving around. Perhaps he was annoyed at having to collect Mills and their children from Tesco; perhaps he had argued with the teenage Terri Carroll, who always wanted to know where he was and what he was doing every moment of the day or night; but, far more likely, the rage against young women that he had felt for years was gnawing away at him ever more fiercely on that balmy summer evening. What is not in doubt is that Bellfield was out searching for a victim that night.
The area he had chosen was all too familiar – not far from where Mills and he had had their first small flat together on Manor Road, near two of his favourite pubs on Hampton Road and not far from the A316 out of London, where Anna-Maria Rennie had been attacked. Jo Collings’s house in Strawberry Hill was only half a mile away.
That evening Bellfield started driving in a sort of triangle up and down Staines Road and Hampton Road with Twickenham Green at its apex – on the lookout for a young woman alone. At 9.45 he found one – the French student Amélie Delagrange – getting off a London United R267 red double-decker outside the Fullwell bus garage on Hampton Road.
Amélie was an attractive young woman of twenty-two with short blonde hair – very much Bellfield’s type, if a little older than his absolute ideal. Her parents lived in the French countryside outside Amiens on the River Somme about 70 miles north of Paris; she had an older sister, Virginie, who had married in September 1999. Amélie had a passion for English, studying it at school as part of her baccalaureate and then following up with a period of study in Manchester. She had then gone off to Spain to learn Spanish, before returning home to France. But in April 2004 she had decided to come back to England to improve her English still further. She planned to use her fluency in French, Spanish and English to become a tri-lingual personal assistant.
Amélie had decided to rent a room in a house in Gould Road, just north of Twickenham Green. She liked the area, which she felt was ‘very safe’, and her landlady described her as a ‘sensible, intelligent girl’, who was both ‘independent and sociable’. Amélie then found a job at a café and patisserie called Maison Blanc in Richmond and proceeded to develop a close circle of both English and French friends.
On the evening of Thursday, 19 August 2004 she had agreed to meet a group of them at the Crystalz wine bar on London Road in Twickenham, just across the road from The Sorting House pub, where Kate Sheedy had had met her friends just three months earlier.
Amélie and her friends decided to sit outside because it was such a nice evening. It was nearly the weekend, and they were intent on having a good time without going too far. Indeed, one of Amélie’s friends, Benjamin Blatrix, remembered that she only had three or four glasses of wine, as ‘she was working the following day’. Nevertheless, another of Amélie’s friends, Floriane Merzougi, recalled later that had admitted to her that she was ‘a little bit drunk’, even though she had had the good sense to eat a plate of chips.
At about 8.30 Amélie called her new boyfriend, Olivier Lenfant, who worked with her at Maison Blanc, and invited him over to her house for the night because her landlady was away. Olivier turned down the offer, saying he was tired, having just moved flat, but they arranged to meet the next day.
Then, about an hour later, at 9.30, just as it was just getting dark, Amélie asked another friend, Vanessa Roche, to walk her across the road to the bus stop outside The Sorting Room pub to catch the R267 bus back to Twickenham Green and her room in Gould Road. As she stood at the bus stop she waved to her friends still sitting outside the wine bar on the other side of the street.
The closed-circuit television on the R267 that arrived to collect her shows Amélie climbing on board at 9.39. She got off just six minutes later, at 9.45, half a mile or so past her normal stop. Perhaps the bus was hot and the wine had made her a little sleepy; perhaps she was preoccupied by thinking about Olivier, or work the next day. It was a minor lapse of concentration, but one that was to have tragic consequences.
It was a perfectly ordinary night, and Amélie was a sensible young woman. Hampton Road was busy as she made her way back up towards Twickenham Green, and there was no reason whatever for her to fear for her safety. Her inhibitions would certainly have been lowered by the wine, but this was not a dark alley in the East End of London after midnight. It was an eminently middle-class road, home to the respected Mall School.
Amélie did not realize it, but her entire progress up Hampton Road was caught on a variety of CCTV cameras along the way – as was the progress of a white Ford Courier van. At 9.49 she was seen in the video footage from a R281 bus travelling south. Two minutes later she walked past the Loch Fyne restaurant, where she was caught on camera again, and two minutes after that a passing police car travelling south video-recorded her walking north towards the Green. At 9.58 the cameras on another R281 captured her still walking towards the Green, and two minutes later she appeared again on the CCTV system outside a shop known as The Accountants. At 10.01 she appeared on a bus camera again – a Tellings R70 bus – and she was still on the east side of Hampton Road, now very close to Twickenham Green.
It was to be the last image of Amélie Delagrange alive.
By the time this vulnerable young Frenchwoman, who was a little unsteady on her feet, had reached the edge of the Green and started to cross it towards her home in Gould Road one of the vehicles driving up Hampton Road towards the Green had taken a particular interest in her – Levi Bellfield’s distinctive white Ford Courier van.
It was first spotted by CCTV cameras in Hampton Road just before 9.30 that evening, before Amélie got off her R267 bus. Not long afterwards, it was
seen not far away in Staines Road. Then, at shortly before 10, this same distinctive white van – with its left nearside headlight not working – was spotted by CCTV cameras on an R281 bus driving along Hampton Road towards Twickenham Green, and then again on the cameras outside The Accountants shop.
The Ford Courier passed the shop about a minute before Amélie was seen on exactly the same camera – which means that it had passed her as she walked towards the Green. But the white Ford Courier didn’t drive round the Green and back along Staines Road this time – the triangular circuit it had been taking. At 10.05 the van was spotted parked in the bus lane on the Hampton Road side of the Green by the CCTV cameras on an R281 bus, and two minutes later by the cameras on an R70. It was clearly waiting for something, or someone, and that someone was Amélie Delagrange.
Though the shop fronts on the far side threw out a lot of light, the Green itself is ringed by trees, and it was dark as Amélie set off diagonally across it towards her home. Nevertheless she could hardly have expected anyone to interrupt her progress across that most respectable of all English venues, a cricket pitch. Why would she? This was a part of the world that she and her friends had decided during their conversation at Crystalz wine bar that evening was ‘very safe’.
Tragically that did not turn out to be the case for Amélie Delagrange.
By 10.08 that evening, the white Courier van had disappeared from its place in the bus lane on Hampton Road, and Amélie lay seriously injured on the north side of the cricket square. Despite all the best efforts of the staff at the West Middlesex Hospital to resuscitate her, this pretty blonde French woman with a talent for languages died just two hours later later, at two minutes past midnight on the morning of Friday 20 August 2004.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 16
