Within hours a full-scale police operation to track down her killer had been launched, and just before 7 o’clock on that Friday morning Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, a senior investigating officer with more than eight years’ experience in the role, was contacted at home and asked to take charge of the inquiry. By 9 o’clock he was at Twickenham police station, just yards from where she had spent her last hours at Crystalz, being briefed on the case, and that afternoon he went to the post-mortem examination at Kingston hospital.
By a strange coincidence, the pathologist who examined Amélie’s body was exactly the same man who had conducted the post-mortem on Marsha McDonnell a year earlier, Dr Roger Chapman, and he discovered remarkably similar injuries. Both young women had died from a severe blow to the head made by a blunt object, and neither of them had defensive wounds on their hands. Dr Chapman also told DCI Sutton that Amélie had been ‘hit from behind’ and that there was also evidence of another impact just behind her right ear, as well as further bruising on the top of her right shoulder, consistent with two other, but less traumatic, blows from behind by her attacker.
As Sutton was to say later, the atmosphere at the post-mortem was even more morose than usual, ‘as we looked on at an examination of a beautiful young girl, perfect and healthy in every way until an animal left her with a skull like a dropped Easter egg’.
The question was: was Amélie’s murder a one-off crime, or part of a pattern of crimes? DCI Sutton wasn’t sure, but he was aware that during the year before the police had launched an inquiry called Operation Upwey into three similar assaults in the area between Twickenham Green and Hampton – on Marsha McDonnell, Jesse Wilson and Adele Harbison – because they felt the offences were linked in some way. As DCI Sutton was to write in notes to himself after that first briefing at Twickenham: ‘Attacks like this, where a stranger commits a murderous assault in the street, are extremely rare … Here we had three very similar attacks in very similar circumstances on very similar victims, and all in a small, very suburban and safe corner of London. And now there was a fourth. To me there was every reason to think that they might be the work of one person.’ But for the moment he confined his thoughts to trying to find the man or woman who had killed Amélie Delagrange.
‘My first task was the new one,’ he said later, ‘an offence where I could start from the beginning and where there would be new opportunities. Once we had found Amélie’s killer then and only then might it be worth revisiting the old attacks.’
Within two days DCI Sutton had assembled a murder squad of more than eighty officers – double the normal size in the Metropolitan Police – and they had begun searching for evidence at the scene.
The squad’s first break came when they traced the signal from Amélie’s mobile phone. The police discovered that it had last contacted the T-Mobile network, to which it was connected, at 10.22 p.m. on the evening that she had been killed – after the passing patrol car had found her body, without her mobile phone. There could hardly be any doubt that the phone had been taken by her killer. On the morning of Saturday, 21 August Sutton and his team met again at Twickenham police station to discuss the discovery. The Telephone Intelligence Unit at New Scotland Yard had pinpointed the area where the phone had last contacted its mobile network to an area of about 500 square yards just north of Walton Bridge over the River Thames.
Nothing had been heard from Amélie’s mobile phone since. It had simply disappeared from the network, but there had also been no sign that it had ‘powered down’ by being deliberately switched off. The murder squad immediately realized that it could have had its battery removed, been damaged in some way, or – quite possibly – been immersed in water. On that Saturday morning DCI Sutton’s murder squad took the decision to send a team of police divers to Walton Bridge to see if, by chance, Amélie’s attacker had thrown the phone into the Thames. It proved a wise move.
On the following Tuesday, 24 August, a team of police drivers searching under Walton Bridge quickly found – quite close together – a CD player with headphones, a bunch of keys, an a purse. Inside the purse was a receipt for a mobile phone SIM card as well as an ATM receipt for the withdrawal of £50, and – most telling of all – a receipt from Next for a red camisole top. Amélie’s handbag and her mobile phone, however, were never recovered.
It was a break in the case, but it wasn’t decisive. The murder squad now needed to know how Amélie had arrived at Twickenham Green. So they started to assemble the closed-circuit television evidence from the buses that had passed along Hampton Road beside the Green on the evening of her murder, and it wasn’t long before they found footage of her getting off the R267 at the Fulwell Bus Garage. Now the murder squad knew that Amélie had walked to Twickenham Green, and that her mobile phone had then been taken back to Walton-on-Thames, where it had been located barely twenty minutes after her attack. The obvious conclusion was that the phone had been taken by her murderer, who must have had some kind of vehicle, because the phone couldn’t have reached Walton so quickly in any other way.
That realization was to prove a turning point in the search for Amélie’s killer, for, as DCI Sutton was to put it later, ‘Despite London’s much-reported mass of CCTV cameras (one’s image is captured around 300 times a day in the city on average) the identification of pedestrians is often difficult – particularly at night.’ The identification of vehicles, on the other hand, is ‘rather easier’, as the make, model and colour are regularly discernible, and ‘occasionally even the registration number can be seen’. ‘I knew the killer’s car would be on those recordings somewhere,’ DCI Sutton was to put it, ‘and if we didn’t secure them immediately they would be lost for ever.’
It was the subsequent search by six officers specifically assigned to look at the CCTV footage that was to lead Sutton and his team to a white Ford Courier van with the registration number P610 XCN. The murder squad painstakingly pieced together the CCTV evidence to show that this white Ford Courier van had been parked on Hampton Road by Twickenham Green just after 10 p.m. on the night of Thursday, 19 August but had gone eight minutes later. They also quietly gathered evidence that it had been in the area for almost half an hour, ‘cruising the area with no obvious destination’, and yet had suddenly come to a stop at Twickenham Green – but only for a matter of minutes. It had last been captured at 10.08, parked at the beginning of the bus lane beside the Green. Yet less than thirty seconds later it was seen speeding away from the Green. Within five minutes it was spotted by CCTV cameras in Hampton and at 10.39 it was seen by another set of cameras passing the Toshiba factory in Sunbury, on the way towards Harmondsworth and Heathrow airport.
In the wake of their discovery the murder squad set out to trace the ownership of the white Ford van, but they also discovered that the van had received countless parking fines and committed other offences between June 2003 and August 2004. Indeed on Tuesday, 17 August 2004 a traffic camera had shown it driving in a bus lane in London Road in Twickenham, outside Crystalz wine bar, at 10.56 in the evening.
It was only a matter of time before the murder squad discovered that Levi Bellfield regularly drove the white Ford van, although he wasn’t the registered owner. Once they had done so they set out to track the whereabouts of his mobile phone on the evening of Thursday, 19 August. If they could put his mobile at Twickenham Green that night they had the outline of a case against him for Amélie’s murder.
It didn’t take the murder squad long to discover, however, that Bellfield had as many mobile phones as he had vehicles, and that he changed them repeatedly. Nevertheless they managed to establish that he was using one which ended in the three numbers ‘452’ that evening. Bellfield had taken the phone over from Terri Carroll. The mobile phone records for ‘452’ showed that it had been at Tesco in Hayes that evening and that from there it had made the journey to Twickenham – with Bellfield and P610 XCN. Indeed at 9.37 that evening Emma Mills had called it from the landline at Little Benty, when it was on vide
o driving close to Twickenham Green.
That was their best hope for evidence, because in the days after Amélie’s killing not a single witness came forward to say that they had seen anyone attack her on Twickenham Green. There may have been people walking their dogs, courting couples arm in arm, men standing in the shadows of the cricket sight-screen smoking, but no one had seen anything.
That presented a special test for the detectives – one which no senior investigating officer could turn down. As DCI Sutton himself put it later: ‘For senior investigating officers, the huge wave, the massive trout and the hole-in-one is the Category A+ murder, the high-profile stranger attack where there is no connection between killer and victim, save for the misfortune that their paths happened to cross … The greatest possible test, the most unpredictable challenge: to take out a madman who was killing young women at random and for who knew what twisted reason.’
It took Sutton’s squad almost three months of hard work, but by early November 2004 they were in no doubt whatsoever that Bellfield had been driving the white Ford Courier van they had picked up on CCTV parked beside Twickenham Green that evening, and his mobile phone records proved it. It was the trigger to allow them to launch a full-scale surveillance of Bellfield.
After all, as Brian Altman QC was to ask the jury at his trial for the murder of Amélie three years later, ‘What had been its driver’s purpose in stopping by the Green for no more than eight minutes at the very time we suggest Amélie was struck down? We suggest the answer is perfectly clear. Bellfield was driving the van and spotted Amélie at some point along the route and determined to engage her. There was more than enough time for him to wait for her in his van by the Green, wait for her to catch up and, when she walked across the Green, intercept and attack her, steal her possessions and return to the van and drive off.’
The white Ford Courier van and the mobile phone that ended with the numbers ‘452’ were to lead DCI Colin Sutton and his double murder squad to the front door of number 11, Little Benty at 5 a.m. on that November morning in 2004.
By that time Levi Bellfield had done his very best to conceal any connection there might have been between him and the white Ford Courier van, which – like Emma Mills’s red Daewoo in Collingwood Place in Walton-on-Thames in March 2002 – had disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again.
14. The Noose Tightens
‘Justice is truth in action.’
Joseph Joubert, Pensées
Just after 11 o’clock on the evening of Amélie Delagrange’s murder Levi Bellfield arrived back at Little Benty, but he didn’t stay at the house with Emma Mills, their new daughter Georgina and his other two children. In fact, he didn’t even go inside to see them. Instead he parked the white Ford Courier van round the corner by the garages, called her on his ‘452’ mobile phone and then called the local LHR Express mini-cab firm to take him to Crosby Close and Terri Carroll.
When the mini-cab driver, whose name was Patrick Kelly, arrived to collect him at 11.21 p.m. he watched as Bellfield emerged from the darkness at the side of Little Benty carrying two large black bin-liners knotted at the top which didn’t appear to be very heavy and which he proceeded to put on the back seat. He was also carrying two bottles of beer, drinking from one of them.
Bellfield didn’t go straight back to Crosby Close, however. There was something he needed to do first, although he didn’t explain what he was. He simply told the mini-cab driver to take him to a dead-end road not far away in Hanworth.
When they got there, he got out of the car, made another mobile-phone call, took something out of one of the bin-liners in the back of the mini-cab and disappeared into the darkness to ‘meet someone’. The mini-cab driver didn’t see who he was meeting, but within five minutes Bellfield was back and asking to go to Crosby Close.
Could it be that during those five minutes in Hanworth, Bellfield gave the keys to the white Ford Courier van to someone and asked them to dispose of it, or, at least, to make sure that it was out of sight should anyone come looking for it in the wake of Amélie’s murder? No one will ever know – but what is known is that the whereabouts of P610 XCN were to remain a mystery from that night on and a matter of intense interest to DCI Sutton’s double murder squad.
By the time that the squad began to assemble at Twickenham police station the next morning, Friday, 20 August, Bellfield was on the move again, this time asking the same mini-cab service to pick him up from one of his usual haunts, a pub in West Drayton called the Fox and Pheasant. Acting as though he didn’t have a care in the world, Bellfield went back to Little Benty, collected another of his cars and set off to sign up a new customer for his wheel-clamping business in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire. On the surface, at least, business was going on as usual.
In spite of his superficial confidence, however, the panic attacks that had troubled him since his sudden departure from the flat in Walton-on-Thames in March 2002 were now plaguing him night and day, and although he would bluster that he was ‘perfectly all right’ to his clamping crew, back home in the darkness of the night things were very far from it.
Emma Mills knew that. She remembered his attacks happening ‘all the time’ in 2004. ‘All through the day he had little what he calls fits,’ she would explain. To control them Bellfield had started smoking even more cannabis and drinking even more heavily than he had done before. But the Diazepam drugs that he had been prescribed to help with the attacks weren’t working.
‘Levi would take too many in one day,’ Mills would remember. ‘He was hooked on them really. He had had the odd one now sort of every now and again, but I mean now he gets them all the time, you can’t go anywhere without him having one.’
No matter how calm Bellfield might have appeared to his wheel-clamping crew, in the days after Amélie’s murder his attacks took an even more powerful hold, and his mood darkened steadily – so much so that he left Carroll at Crosby Close and went back to Little Benty to seek solace with Mills and his children.
By the middle of the following week, which led up to the August Bank Holiday, he was all but inconsolable, his mood not helped by the fact that he was also due to face a charge of perverting the course of justice over the Rodriguez affair at Isleworth Crown Court that week. Bellfield’s life was out of control.
Matters came to a head on Wednesday, 25 August – less than a week after Amélie’s murder – when his friend ‘Yosser’ Hughes went round to visit him at Little Benty around lunchtime.
‘I went to his bedroom and saw him lying on the bed in his shorts,’ Hughes said later. ‘He was crying his eyes out, and I asked him what was wrong. He said, “I think I need some help.” ’ Hughes was to spend the next half an hour or so trying to calm Bellfield down. ‘I thought he was in this state because of drink or possibly drugs,’ Hughes added, and he tried to persuade his friend to go to hospital. But the sobbing Bellfield refused, and Hughes left. He wasn’t gone for long.
Three hours later Hughes returned to find Bellfield in exactly the same state, but this time he agreed to go get help, and Hughes took him to the nearby Hillingdon hospital. Choking back the tears during their trip to the hospital together, Bellfield told Hughes, ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’
Bellfield arrived at Accident and Emergency in Hillingdon just before 7 o’clock that evening and told the staff he had a history of panic attacks over the past two years and had used Diazepam to control them. He also admitted that he had been feeling suicidal over the past few days and that he planned to hang himself. Significantly, Bellfield told the nursing staff that the stress he was under was partly the result of his ‘domineering’ mother and the fact that he was ‘getting grief’ from both his mother and his wife, which he couldn’t control. He also admitted that he was in ‘£20,000 worth’ of debt. As a result, that evening he was admitted to the Pinn Ward of the hospital’s Riverside Centre, the mental health division of the Hillingdon hospital. Hughes stayed with him to keep him company until about 3 o’clock in
the morning and then went home.
When Hughes went back to visit Bellfield the following morning, he learned that the hospital’s doctors were going to discuss whether Bellfield should be ‘sectioned’ under the terms of the Mental Health Act to prevent him doing himself harm. But when he told the wheel-clamper, Bellfield became tremendously agitated and demanded that Hughes got him out of there. That was exactly what happened. Without official consent Bellfield checked himself out of the hospital, and Hughes took him back to Little Benty.
Then, in spite of his promising faithfully to return to Hillingdon the next day, Bellfield announced that he and Mills and their three children were going to Kent the very next day to stay with their friend Michelle Wickham. The decision came as a distinct shock to Mills, who had been planning to go to a birthday party for her grandmother that Friday afternoon, but she didn’t object.
The question was: how were they going to get there? Bellfield was very vague about the whereabouts of the white Ford Courier van and insisted that Mills ask Hughes if she could borrow his Vauxhall Astra. But she wasn’t allowed to tell him – or anyone else for that matter – exactly where they were going. Ever anxious about her children, Mills warned Bellfield that she wanted to be back early the next week to get them ready for school. Her daughter Lucy was going into a new class, and her son William was going for the first time – into the reception class. Bellfield agreed, or appeared to, and so, on the afternoon of Friday, 27 August, they set off for Kent, leaving ‘Yosser’ to look after their dog Cheyenne at Little Benty.
There was, of course, an all-too-familiar pattern to Bellfield’s behaviour. Just as he had done after the murder of Marsha McDonnell – when he had suddenly whisked the family away to Tenerife – he was intent on making himself as scarce as possible should the police come looking for him. He specifically told Mills to lie about where they were going, telling her to say they were at the caravan site in Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey if anyone asked.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 17
