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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  Ironically, it was to be in front of a female judge of the High Court that Bellfield would learn his fate at the Old Bailey, sitting in one of Central Criminal Courts’ famous wood-panelled courtrooms beneath the statue of the figure of another woman holding the scales of justice.

  15. Trial by Jury

  ‘Human blood is heavy; the man that has shed it cannot run away.’

  African proverb

  Levi Bellfield was destined to spend almost three years on remand in custody at Belmarsh prison before finally being brought to trial for the murders of Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, as well as the attempted murders of Kate Sheedy and Irma Dragoshi and the kidnapping of Anna-Maria Rennie.

  Throughout those years in jail, awaiting trial by a jury of his peers, he steadfastly maintained his innocence, telling his defence team time and again that the Crown’s cases against him was ‘all a mistake’, and a ‘stitch-up’ by the police. ‘It was not the behaviour of a man consumed by guilt, but the reaction of someone who knew that he had to work the judicial system to stand any chance of being found innocent of five terrible crimes.

  As a result Bellfield took an exceptional interest in the presentation of his legal case. He would study the myriad of papers surrounding the evidence with exceptional care, answer any queries that his defence team put to him quickly and clearly and insist that they leave no stone unturned in their effort to defend him. This was a man consumed with the idea that he might still be able to get away with anything, a man determined to defend himself and not give away his true feelings for one moment. As one senior police officer put it as the trial began, ‘Bellfield is a smart man and knew exactly what was necessary to present himself in the best light.’ Any appearance of the rage and anger that he had demonstrated towards the women in his life on so many occasions must never be allowed to surface.

  Bellfield also had no intention whatever of incriminating himself, and so throughout his years on remand in prison he remained as silent as he had been during the majority of his police interviews – ignoring requests for information, refusing to answer questions put to him by the Crown as it prepared its case, turning away from his interrogators. He was allowed to do so by law and knew it.

  But Levi Bellfield also never demonstrated for a moment that he was a man overcome with grief or remorse at the crimes he was charged with. To anyone from the prosecution team that came into contact with him he remained tight-lipped, a man who knew that if he demonstrated remorse it was tantamount to an admission of guilt. He had no intention of making that mistake. He was – in the words of one of the senior police officers who talked to him – ‘a cunning, devious man’ who knew how to manipulate the law in his own best interests.

  It was a trait that he intended to adopt at his trial – when it eventually came.

  In fact, it was not until 2 October 2007 that Bellfield was finally loaded into a long wheelbase white prison van along with three prison officers to be taken from Belmarsh to Britain’s most famous court, just 200 yards from St Paul’s Cathedral in Central London, and always known as the Old Bailey. He was thirty-nine years old.

  The first court on the site had opened its doors in 1539, beside Newgate prison, in a road named Old Bailey for its place as part of the walls of the City of London. The original building was paid for by the then Lord Mayor of London, Sir Richard Whittington, whose memory was famously immortalized in a theatrical pantomime. Until the middle of the nineteenth century those condemned to death in its courts were hanged in the street outside.

  The present Portland stone building was built on the site between 1902 and 1907 with a great dome at its peak, and 212 feet above the ground atop the dome stands a bronze statue sculpted by F. W. Pomeroy. The statue shows a woman with the scales of justice in one hand and a sword held upright towards the sky in the other. Legend has it that the lady is blindfolded, though in reality she is not, but her statue has stood guard above some of the most dramatic murder trials in modern British history.

  It was at the Old Bailey that Dr Crippen was sentenced to death in 1910; where William Joyce, the Nazi Party’s propagandist ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was sent to the gallows in 1945; where James Christie of the infamous 10 Rillington Place was condemned to death in 1953; and where Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, was sentenced to life imprisonment without hope of parole in 1981.

  The courts were damaged in an IRA bomb attack in 1973, just after a set of new courtrooms had been opened next door, which mean that the original grand main entrance is no longer used – but above it still stands the original inscription: ‘Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the Wrongdoer’.

  And it was here, in the wood-panelled splendour of Court 6, that Bellfield was finally brought to justice.

  As he walked into the glass-panelled dock that faced the judge across the room, he looked every inch an honest man. There was no sign of his familiar tracksuit bottoms or T-shirts as the prison officers sat either side of him. He had chosen instead to wear a neat grey suit with a white shirt and a selection of pastel ties and he took particular pains to speak in the politest of voices, and certainly never to shout or display anger. He made certain that the jury would not see some sort of scowling monster. Bellfield knew exactly the image he wanted to present – an upright member of the community who had been falsely accused. On one occasion in the dock he even chose to sport a pink-and-grey Pringle V-necked sweater and a pink tie that wouldn’t have been out of place at one of the golf clubs in west London that he drove past so regularly.

  There was certainly not a trace of a smirk on his round, white face as he sat waiting for the prosecution to open its case against him. Brian Altman QC, a Senior Treasury Counsel, who is charged with prosecuting the country’s most significant criminal cases, was to prosecute him, while the much respected William Boyce QC, who had himself been Senior Treasury Counsel, appeared for his defence. The judge was the Honourable Mrs Justice Rafferty QC, who had been the first female chairman of the Criminal Bar Association when she was still practising as a barrister and before she had ascended to the bench as a judge in the High Court in 2000 had a reputation for formidable intelligence as well as scrupulous fairness. Certainly the fifty-seven-year-old Dame Anne Rafferty, product of the Wolverhampton Girls High School and the University of Sheffield, was determined to give Bellfield far more chance to defend himself than he had given the young women the prosecution alleged that he had attacked.

  But the trial did not begin straight away. It took almost two weeks for the prosecution and defence to select the twelve members of the jury from a pool of 120 candidates. No one who had any connection with the Metropolitan Police or the Surrey Police was allowed to become a jury member, and neither was anyone who was not prepared to devote the next four months to daily attendance in court. So it wasn’t until Tuesday 16 October 2007 that Brian Altman QC rose to open the case against Bellfield. His first words to the jury were all too clear.

  ‘Between October 2001 and August 2004, five women, four of them young women aged between seventeen and twenty-two, were violently attacked. Two of these young women were brutally murdered by being battered about the head with a blunt instrument. One young woman survived the horrific attack on her when she was driven at and run over. One other woman suffered a nasty injury when she was struck on the head; another young woman escaped the attack upon her without injury. The prosecution say that this defendant, Levi Bellfield, was the attacker in each case.’

  Over the next two days Altman meticulously laid out the Crown’s case, pointing out the similarities between the attacks, the small area of west London in which they all occurred, the fact that Bellfield knew the area well, that all took place at or near bus stops, that all were committed in the hours of darkness between 7.30 p.m. and 12.30 a.m., and that all had been committed by an attacker who was ‘a stranger to the victim’.

  ‘Therefore we submit to you,’ Altman concluded, ‘when you examine all the elements of the evidence across a
ll the attacks you will find evidence of similarity and system such that you can be sure that what you are seeing is the work of one man – Levi Bellfield.’

  Among the spectators in the packed public gallery high above the courtroom were Amélie Delagrange’s parents, as well as Levi Bellfield’s mother, brother and sister. They watched in silence in the following days as Altman proceeded to call the prosecution witnesses, starting with Anna-Maria Rennie and progressing through Irma Dragoshi to Kate Sheedy. The court also heard from members of Bellfield’s clamping crew, including T— Morgan, Suraj Gharu, as well as Noel Moran.

  But two witnesses who did not appear before the court were the two teenagers that Bellfield had talked to at a bus stop during the period of police surveillance prior to his arrest in November 2004, the two girls he had made leering ‘sexual suggestions’ to and who had told him they didn’t want to take a lift with him.

  Her Honour Judge Rafferty ruled in private that their evidence might prove too prejudicial to Bellfield’s case and, therefore, unduly affect the jury’s deliberations. She had no wish to see an appeal against any verdict that they might reach on the basis of allowing their evidence to be heard. It was a clear sign that the judge was determined that Bellfield should be seen to have as fair a trial as she could arrange. But Mrs Justice Rafferty did allow the prosecution to present the five cases to the court as a whole – rather than independently – meaning that they could take into account the ‘similarity’ between the offences as part of their deliberations.

  ‘If you are satisfied that the defendant was responsible for one or more of the offences,’ Altman explained to the jury, ‘you are entitled also to take those findings into account when deciding whether it is more likely than not that the defendant was responsible for the rest – whether he was disposed to behave in the way the prosecution say he did not once but on several occasions.’

  This legal point, known as ‘cross-admissability’, was to play a very significant – possibly the most significant – part in Bellfield’s trial as it progressed from October into November and then December 2007.

  Yet it was to be the evidence of two of the Crown’s principal witnesses, Emma Mills and Richard ‘Yosser’ Hughes, that was to provide the most dramatic moments. It was on Monday, 10 December 2007 that thirty-year-old Emma Mills finally took her place in the witness box to describe to a hushed courtroom in her rather weak little voice the extraordinary behaviour of the man who was father to her three young children.

  In effect, Mills was fighting for her very life in witness box. If Bellfield was found innocent there was every possibility that he might come back to haunt her, and her children, in the years to come. As one of the police officers who had interviewed her before the trial was to put it later, ‘Giving evidence against him was the only way that Emma was ever going to escape from Bellfield’s clutches. She had to tell the truth. If she didn’t, and he wasn’t convicted, she would never be free of him.’

  In the public gallery the spectators seemed to hold their breath on that Monday morning as Brian Altman QC lead the pale-faced young woman through the details of her ten years with the man standing in the dock opposite her – details of the rapes and sexual assaults, details of the beatings, details of the disappearances and the strange telephone calls, the men calling for drugs at her door and the succession of young women who also had sexual relationships with the man her children called ‘Daddy’. She spent more than four hours giving evidence and left clearly exhausted.

  Just one week later ‘Yosser’ Hughes told an equally silent courtroom about the time in August 2004 that he had taken a distressed Bellfield to Hillingdon hospital and the defendant had confessed to him in tears that ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of.’

  Mills and Hughes played a decisive part in the trial. ‘They were plainly telling the truth,’ one senior police officer said afterwards, ‘and they obviously made a very strong impression on the jury.’ It was an impression that Bellfield simply had to contradict if he was to convince the jury to find him ‘not guilty’. But it was to be some time before he got the chance.

  It wasn’t until Friday, 11 January 2008 that Altman called one of his last witnesses, the man who had brought Bellfield to the dock at the Old Bailey – Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who would lead the double murder squad that had painstakingly tracked down his cars and his mobile phones and pieced together the details of his motiveless attacks on innocent young women.

  On the morning of Tuesday, 15 January the rotund, benign-faced William Boyce QC rose to call his first witness for the defence – Levi Bellfield. The defendant was to remain in the witness box for the next week, first examined by Boyce and then cross-examined for the prosecution by Altman. Standing in the witness box, Bellfield systematically insisted that the prosecution case was a tissue of lies, that he hadn’t attacked any of the five young women, that other people had been responsible, and that his trial was a travesty of justice.

  ‘No airs and graces,’ he told the jury. ‘This is me. I’m not trying to fool anyone. I’m not an angel. I’m not claiming to be an angel. But I’m not a killer. No way.’ It was Bellfield’s attempt to present himself as a victim – a man who may have had a chequered past, but who was not guilty of these heinous crimes.

  But the most compelling moment of all came when – under intense and persistent cross-examination from Altman – Bellfield seemed to snap.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he told the prosecuting barrister. ‘I’m fighting for my life here.’

  The hush in Court 6 was complete.

  Yet it was not the only ill-judged remark Bellfield was to make during his evidence. At another point he condemned two prosecution witnesses as ‘attention-seeking liars’ who had ‘enjoyed their day out at the Bailey’. On another he brutally condemned two of the police officers called to give evidence against him as ‘downright liars’.

  Over six days in the witness box, Bellfield repeatedly insisted that the witnesses called against him were mistaken, and that he was an innocent man, the victim of a series of terrible mistakes.

  After he left the witness box on 22 January, there were just three more days of defence witnesses before Her Honour Judge Rafferty called the prosecution to sum up its case to the jury. It was not to prove comfortable listening for Levi Bellfield for it systematically tore apart his relentless equivocations in the witness box.

  As Brian Altman QC put it, ‘This is a man who could hardly give a straight answer to a straight question. He made speeches, he obfuscated and confused – black became white and white became black; he was dishonest yet truthful. Bets were hedged, sands shifted, goal posts moved, and behind it all there wasn’t a shred of hard evidence to support a word he says. It was a cleverly rehearsed smokescreen, an attempt to blind you from the obvious. It was ultimately a performance with one end in sight – to fool you twelve, his jury, into thinking he was telling the truth in order to secure what the prosecution say would be a false acquittal. You may think, having watched him over those six days, that this is a man who displays cunning, cunning that meant the law did not catch up with him until November 2004.’

  ‘He blamed everyone but himself,’ Altman concluded. ‘Every witness whose evidence was inconvenient to him was either mistaken or lying … every one of them is wrong … there’s only one person who is right and truthful according to the defendant and that’s Levi Bellfield.’

  It was a forensic deconstruction of the defendant’s attitude, and one which concluded with the central, and most telling, plank of the prosecution’s case against him.

  ‘These are not offences which are unconnected in the sense that they have been committed by more than one man, each unrelated to the other,’ Altman concluded. ‘That we submit would be too fantastic a conclusion. Why do we say that? We submit to you the following. The locations for the offences are proximate to each other. These were areas with which the defendant was familiar … All these attacks on these victims took place whils
t they were or had been at or near bus stops or once they had alighted from buses. Amélie had got off a bus; so had Marsha and Kate; Irma was standing at a bus stop; and Anna-Maria had been sitting at one moments before her attempted abduction. In all cases there is evidence that the offender emerged from and returned to the type and vintage of vehicle with which the defendant was linked at the material time, Anna-Maria – a Ford Mondeo; Irma – a VW Golf; Marsha – a Vauxhall Corsa; Kate – a Toyota Previa; Amélie – a pre-2000 Ford Courier … Is all that just chance? Or is it evidence that the same man was at the control of those vehicles committing similar if not identical crimes?’

  Altman answered his own question by concluding: ‘The behaviour of the vehicles in these cases is so strikingly similar that they prove one man had to be involved.’

  The prosecuting barrister then reminded the jury of his opening remarks four months earlier about the extraordinary similarities between the women.

  ‘Apart from Irma Dragoshi (who was hooded at the time of the incident) the victims were young,’ Altman explained. ‘Anna-Maria was seventeen, Marsha McDonnell was just nineteen, Kate Sheedy was eighteen, Amélie Delagrange was twenty-two. All were alone and vulnerable.’

  Altman went on to point out the similarities in their build and physical appearance. Then he pointed out that all the attacks were carried out during the hours of darkness and between 7.30 p.m. and 12.30 a.m., and all in quiet residential areas. The attacker was ‘a stranger to the victim in each case’, he continued, and bore the hallmarks of someone who, ‘having targeted the victim, would conduct himself with sudden and unexpected violence towards them’.

  On 31 January 2008 Brian Altman QC concluded his remarks by saying bluntly: ‘So it is that we submit to you when you examine all the elements of the evidence in all the attacks you will find evidence of similarity and system such that you can be sure that what you are seeing is not the work of several unconnected men carrying out unrelated attacks but the work of one man, that man being Levi Bellfield.’