‘We were due to have a weekend away,’ Mills was to explain ‘but he just never wanted to come home. He said, “When I go home the police will be looking for me.” ’
In fact, Bellfield, Mills and their children stayed away from Little Benty for almost three weeks, and while they were away the couple rarely went out, although Mills did persuade him to allow her to take Hughes’s car back, which was replaced by another white van – this time a Citroën Berlingo. There was still no sign of the white Ford Courier with the broken headlight. But Bellfield wouldn’t even park the Berlingo outside Michelle Wickham’s house. He preferred to leave it down the road out of sight, telling his partner ‘not to worry about anything’ and to leave everything to him. He also refused to use his mobile phone while they were in Kent, relying instead on the local telephone box and clearly worried that the police might track his mobile phone’s signal if he switched it on.
In the end, however, the trip to Kent seemed to settle Bellfield’s mind, and he finally agreed to return to London on 16 September, although Mills’s two elder children didn’t actually get to school until Monday, 20 September, a fortnight after the school term had started.
By that time Bellfield was back wheel-clamping. As far as the outside world was concerned everything was back to normal – so normal, in fact, that even though he attended one follow-up appointment at Hillingdon hospital in late September, he failed to appear for two subsequent appointments in October and November 2004. Bellfield’s suicidal thoughts had apparently dissipated.
Bellfield was also back living with Terri Carroll. They had returned briefly the flat at Crosby Close, but it was suddenly repossessed at the end of September and they had to find themselves somewhere else. Once again Bellfield fell back on his usual haunts: he arranged for them to return to another hotel on the Heathrow perimeter, from where he could pay his periodic visits to Emma Mills.
One thing that struck Carroll as strange as they moved into the hotel at the beginning of October was that Bellfield had shaved all his hair off. When she asked him why he had done it, he didn’t give a reason beyond saying that he had been in trouble with the police – ‘something to do with fraud and clamping’. The true reason might have had far more to do with his reluctance to leave DNA evidence anywhere he went.
Nevertheless Carroll remained with him, sometimes staying in the airport perimeter hotels but just as often sleeping on the floor of the bedroom in Spiers’s flat. On other nights she had go back to her mother’s while Bellfield went to stay with Emma Mills at Little Benty.
Bellfield was still intent of preserving the appearance of a family life there with his three latest children, however, and was still taking an apparent pleasure in having family photographs with them whenever the chance presented itself. There was still a part of his personality that depended on his being seen as a ‘family man’, even though the horrifying reality of his true attitude to women – and particularly young girls – was far removed from this comfortable stereotype.
As autumn turned to winter in 2004, Bellfield’s life settled into a by now familiar pattern, and for the time being he seemed to have given up his nocturnal drives around west London, perhaps only too aware that the police might be looking for a man driving the streets on the lookout for vulnerable young women getting off a bus.
On the night before his arrest in November 2004 Bellfield took Carroll to her mother’s and went to stay with Emma Mills, where their friend Michelle Wickham from Kent had been staying for the weekend. He had spent the day wheel-clamping in the Woking area of Surrey with Noel Moran and acting as though he had barely a care in the world – in stark contrast to the man who had been taken to Hillingdon hospital just three months before. The police hadn’t turned up at Bellfield’s door in those three months, and the shadow of the prison cell seemed to have faded from his consciousness.
That did not mean that DCI Sutton’s double murder squad had been idle, however. While Bellfield had been hiding in Kent, they had been trying first to identify and then to track down the white Ford Courier van by meticulously piecing together the CCTV footage from the buses on Hampton Road and Twickenham Green at the time of Amélie Delagrange’s death. And it was precisely that old-fashioned police work that was eventually to lead them to Bellfield’s door at Little Benty.
There was no direct evidence linking him to Amélie’s murder – no murder weapon, no eyewitness, no DNA, nothing directly to suggest that he was a prime suspect. But there was the van, P610 XCN, and the CCTV images, which showed a man who looked remarkably like Levi Bellfield driving it on the night of 19 August on the roads around Twickenham Green. It was those CCTV images and the knowledge that the white Ford Courier van had been in Bellfield’s possession at the time of Amélie’s murder that led the detectives of a Metropolitan Police murder squad to bang on the door of number 11, Little Benty at five o’clock in the morning of Monday 22 November 2004.
By the time that Bellfield had been discovered hiding under the yellow fibreglass insulation in the attic by Sergeant Norman Griffiths and been driven back to the custody suite at London’s Heathrow police station, the murder squad were well prepared to ask him a string of questions about the Ford van, his mobile phone and his whereabouts on that warm August night when Amélie met her death. What they were not prepared for was Bellfield’s aggressive response. The more questions they asked the angrier he became. He resented his arrest, he told them; he had nothing to say; he was innocent; they had made a terrible mistake; it was a ‘stitch-up’. But as the hours passed Bellfield’s tantrums turned into a sullen non-cooperation.
As the police questioning wore on, Bellfield started to refuse to answer any questions whatever, restricting himself to saying ‘no comment’ repeatedly, in his distinctive high-pitched voice. Time after time he would then turn directly away from his police interrogators in the interview room, finally turning his back on them completely in an act of blatant defiance. No matter how hard the police tried to cajole a cooperative answer from him, Bellfield remained adamant. He wasn’t saying a word.
Question: Tell us where you went at 9 o’clock when you left Little Benty …
Answer: No comment.
Question: … in a hurry. Because there may be somewhere you went that we can check up on.
Answer: No comment.
Question: Is there anyone you could tell us that was with you at this time that can say ‘No, Levi was with me’? It would be a good time to tell us if there was, wouldn’t it?
Answer: No comment.
Question: What were you doing after that, Levi? After leaving Little Benty?
Answer: No comment.
Then, a little later:
Question: Did you have a phone with you that night?
Answer: Ahh, no comment.
Question: What do you mean by ‘Ahh’?
Answer: No comment.
Question: At 2138 the landline at Little Benty calls the 452 phone …
Answer: No comment.
Question: What’s that about then?
Answer: No comment.
Relentlessly, and for weeks on end, Bellfield refused to explain his actions on the night of Amélie’s murder, beyond saying that he had gone to look at a car he was interested in buying and that he might not have been in possession of the white Ford Courier for part of that night, although he was less than forthcoming about who had had it that night, beyond saying that he thought it might have been Morgan and Suraj Gharu.
Question: So who had the van?
Answer: No comment.
Question: Who had the van?
Answer: No comment.
Question: Had you sold the van by then?
Answer: No comment.
Inevitably, the murder squad detectives put the obvious question to him.
Question: If you weren’t driving the van on the 19 August, then anybody would surely be keen to say, ‘I didn’t have the van: I got rid of the van; such and such was driving it; I don’t know who was driving
it; it could have been any one of them …’
Bellfield’s answer was: ‘No comment.’
He saw no reason to elaborate on any of his answers to the police, relying instead on presenting himself to them as a man who had been ‘wronged’ by their ‘vicious accusations’, a victim of their mistaken belief that he was, in fact, capable of murder.
DCI Sutton’s murder squad weren’t to be put off their task, however, but it wasn’t the murder of Amélie Delagrange that was to keep Bellfield on remand in custody in the weeks and months that followed his arrest at Little Benty, it was his repeated sexual abuse of his three principal female partners over the preceding fifteen years. Gradually, as Becky Wilkinson, Jo Collings and Emma Mills – the mothers of eight of his children – told their stories to the murder squad, Bellfield’s pattern of the rape and abuse of his partners emerged into the harsh light of day. As a result Bellfield was charged with rape, which allowed the police to ask for his remand in custody – which was granted repeatedly – while continuing their investigations into the murders of Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, as well as the attacks on Kate Sheedy, Irma Dragoshi and Anna-Maria Rennie.
While those investigations continued it was also becoming all too clear to the murder squad officers that some of the other members of Bellfield’s wheel-clamping crew were not entirely blameless when it came to matters of serious sexual misconduct and violence. In November 2005, for example, Suraj Gharu, who had worked with Bellfield since the wheel-clamping business began, was imprisoned for five years for having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl from a Hillingdon Council children’s home. Friends of Bellfield, particularly Terri Carroll, told the police stories of Suraj Gharu ringing the wheel-clamper repeatedly to ‘offer him’ girls. ‘Suraj would ring Levi and tell him that he had a girl with him,’ Carroll was to say, ‘and he would ask if Levi wanted to shag her.’ Bellfield’s habit of sharing sexual conquests with his friends had not died out – indeed it was clearly reciprocated.
Throughout the clamping years Bellfield had also kept up his connections with the sixty-two-year-old paedophile Victor Kelly, from whom he would sometimes buy drugs, and who had also been sent to prison for eight years in November 2005 for giving a twelve-year-old girl cocaine in order that he could have sex with her. At least one member of Bellfield’s clamping crew believed that Suraj Gharu was one of the people who had helped Kelly procure young girls for under-age sex.
It was not just Bellfield’s ‘known associates’ that interested DCI Sutton’s murder squad, however. They were also intent on tracking down the three important vehicles that were linked to attacks they now saw as part of a pattern, and which were all linked to Bellfield. The more the squad had looked at the violent attacks committed in west London over the past few years the more convinced they had become that they were investigating one man – Levi Bellfield.
As DCI Sutton was to explain: ‘The fact is, happily, that attacks like this where a stranger commits a murderous assault in the street are extremely rare,’ a fact that had convinced him that Bellfield was responsible for all the attacks, even though the officers who had investigated before him believed it was ‘unlikely’ that the McDonnell and Sheedy attacks were linked to Amélie. Sutton disagreed. ‘To me,’ Sutton was to say, ‘there was every reason to think that they might have been the work of one person.’
So Sutton and his team started to take an interest not only in the missing white Ford Courier van, P610 XCN, seen near the attack on Amélie, but also the white Vauxhall Corsa, Y57 RJU, seen near the attack on Marsha, and the white Toyota Previa people-carrier, K855 EFL, that may have been used in the attack on Kate Sheedy. If they could link them to one man they would have a strong case to convince the Crown Prosecution Service to press for charges of murder.
The squad had to search through nearly 25,000 possible Ford Couriers before finding the one that had shown up on the CCTV cameras on the buses that passed it on Hampton Road in Twickenham on the night that Amélie was killed. They also had to search through 600,000 possible Corsas for the one that passed Marsha McDonnell’s number 111 bus at its stop in Percy Road in Hampton. It was painstaking work.
The squad never located the missing white Ford Courier van, they simply found ample evidence after interviewing his partners, his friends and his clamping crew that it had been used by Bellfield in the first weeks of August 2004. Their statements helped to convince the squad that he had had use of the van on that August night.
The police had rather more luck with the Corsa, although they had to travel the length and breadth of the country to interview the legal owners of 178 possible Vauxhall Corsas that could have been the one seen stalking Marsha in the early hours of that morning in February 2003 before they could pin the single one down that was decisively linked with Levi Bellfield.
As for the Toyota Previa, the police finally tracked it down to a traveller named Jimmy McCarthy, who had bought it from Bellfield’s clamping associate Noel Moran for £1,100 in July 2004 – two months after the attack on Kate Sheedy. They also established that the Previa had been used by Bellfield’s clamping crew at the time of the attack and had a damaged wing mirror – which Kate had identified as significant on the people-carrier that drove over her.
The cars and vans were central to the police investigations into the attacks, but there was another element that helped to convince the murder squad that they had tracked down the right suspect – the use of mobile phones. In spite of Bellfield’s appetite for having as many different phones as he had vehicles, seldom using the same one twice, a pattern of use did emerge that enabled the detectives to be sure that his ‘452’ mobile phone had been in the Twickenham area on the night of Amélie’s murder.
It was this attention to detail that eventually persuaded DCI Sutton’s murder squad that they had enough evidence to convince the Crown Prosecution Service that they should charged Levi Bellfield with the attacks. But it was to take the CPS some time to agree with them, for there was little in the way of corroborating evidence to help – there was, of course, no DNA evidence; there were no witnesses to the attacks; no weapons had been discovered to link him to the crime. Indeed there was no confession from Bellfield himself.
It was not until 2 March 2006 that DCI Sutton formally charged Bellfield with the murder of Amélie Delagrange. And it was to be another two months before he formally charged him with the murder of Marsha McDonnell, on 25 May 2006. Both dates are for ever etched on Sutton’s mind – the days when his long battle to uncover the man who had brutally murdered two total strangers in the respectable, leafy streets of west London for no apparent reason finally came to its end.
By that time Bellfield was on remand in custody at the high-security Belmarsh prison in south-east London, and while he was there the police had also begun to hear stories of his bragging to other prisoners about what he had done. One fellow inmate in particular told the police murder squad privately that Bellfield had ‘confessed’ to killing Amélie Delagrange. Significantly he had also told them that Bellfield described women as being like ‘pet dogs’: ‘You feed them and you keep them, and you can do what you want with them,’ he told him. It was a ‘confession’ that struck a chord with the officers who had been taking statements from Becky Wilkinson, Jo Collings and Emma Mills about Bellfield’s behaviour towards them during the course of their relationships – further confirmation that they were dealing with a man who saw himself as above the law.
Bellfield was not alone in that conviction, however. On 2 January 2006, his fellow wheel-clamper and close friend Noel Moran, then still only twenty-two, attacked a man with a Samurai sword after a disagreement at a New Year’s Eve party at the Fox and Pheasant pub in West Drayton, one of Bellfield’s favourite haunts, the place he had been picked up from on the morning after the murder of Amélie Delagrange. Wielding swords, Moran and a friend called Gavin Ward had broken into the home of computer expert Christopher Mills – known to his friends as ‘Millsy’ – and attacked him vici
ously, severing an artery in his left leg. The pair insisted that he had ‘disrespected’ them at the pub on New Year’s Eve. They carried out the attack in front of Mills’s girlfriend, who was so frightened that she had to hide in the wardrobe with her five-year-old daughter.
After fatally wounding Mills, Moran and Ward went in search of another man whom they thought was equally guilty of disrespect, but failed to find him. They then disappeared to southern Ireland, but were tracked down by a Metropolitan Police murder squad and charged. In June 2007 both men were found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey. The following month both were sentenced to life imprisonment, and Moran was told he would have to serve a minimum of fifteen years.
Meanwhile Bellfield steadfastly maintained his innocence in Belmarsh prison – calling his mother Jean up to four times a day while he was on remand to insist it was ‘all a stitch-up’ by the police and that he had had nothing to do with the killings of any young women in west London.
Bellfield told the same story to Terri Carroll, whom he also spoke to on the telephone in the first few months of his remand, telling her tearfully that he ‘still loved her’ and that he was innocent. But their relationship gradually came to an end as the months on remand in Belmarsh turned into years.
It was to be almost three years before he would face a jury accused of murder, but throughout those years he maintained his innocence.
As Emma Mills was to say later, ‘I don’t think he’ll admit to killing anyone. He’s not the type to own up to anything. He’s a control freak. He likes to have the power and control over everything – and that includes women.’
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 18
