This innocent thirteen-year-old had been stripped naked and dumped, and the prosecution case was that the ‘person who abducted and killed Milly Dowler was the defendant, Levi Bellfield’, who was living at the time in a flat in Collingwood Place in Walton-on-Thames, just a few yards from where Milly had vanished, with his partner Emma Mills, their two children and a Staffordshire bull terrier dog.
Altman did not look behind him at the prisoner in the dock, but the jury could hardly take their eyes off him. For his part Bellfield sat dead-eyed, pasty-faced and sullen, his eyes often cast down, or looking at the notes he was writing to himself on his knee. From time to time he would push one of them through the gaps in the glass of the dock to his solicitor sitting in the well of the court in front of him.
Milly Dowler’s disappearance had started what Altman told the jury was ‘a massive missing person’s inquiry and a police investigation on a national scale’. Her wide, open face, with its gentle smile and slightly raised eyebrows, had stared out of newspaper front pages and television news broadcasts for weeks.
But it was not only Milly who had been approached by Bellfield in those late March days in 2002. Altman also told the jury that another schoolgirl, Rachel Cowles, aged eleven, had been stopped by a man driving a red car in Upper Halliford Road in Shepperton just before 4 in the afternoon on the day before Milly had disappeared and tried to trick her into getting into his car by claiming to be her new neighbour and offering her a lift. Rachel had declined. It was quick thinking, the prosecution said, that had ‘probably saved her life’.
‘The prosecution say there can be no doubt that Levi Bellfield, and no one else, was responsible for both,’ Altman said. ‘He has proven to be a predatory and violent offender towards young women, with convictions in 2008 in this very court.’
Bellfield barely moved a muscle or blinked an eye, remaining studiously impassive, almost as if he were a little bored.
Altman then proceeded to sketch the background to the case, telling the jury that Milly had been born on 25 June 1988; she would have been almost twenty-three now, had her life been spared. She had lived with her parents, Bob and Sally Dowler, and her older sister, Gemma, in Walton Park in Hersham, Surrey, and was a pupil at Heathside School in Weybridge, as was her elder sister. Their mother taught maths there.
‘Milly was slim, pretty and intelligent,’ the prosecuting barrister went on, ‘she was popular with her friends’ and was ‘attaining the usual milestones to be expected of a young teenager. To all intents and purposes she was an ordinary girl who was developing into a fine young woman.’
Moving on to Rachel Cowles, Altman told the jury that she was just two weeks shy of her twelfth birthday, having been born on 4 April 1990, and was a schoolgirl at Bishop Wand Church of England School in Laytons Lane, Sunbury, a few miles north of Walton, and she lived with her family in Shepperton. He also pointed out that she bore an ‘uncanny resemblance’ to Milly Dowler in her school photographs – her uniform was just like Milly’s and she had had her hair done up in a ponytail, just as Milly had done on the day she vanished,
The jury then heard that Bellfield himself was born on 17 May 1968 and had worked as a doorman and wheel-clamper in west and south-west London for ‘most, if not all, of his life and knows that area, as well as Walton and Shepperton, extremely well’. Altman also told them that he was ‘left-handed, around 6 feet 1 inch in height’, and ‘big built’.
In fact, sitting in the dock, Bellfield looked a little slimmer and fitter than he’d done in the last days of his first trial for murder in February 2008; the fitness regime and rather more healthy diet on offer at Her Majesty’s Prison in Wakefield had clearly had their effect.
As Tuesday turned into Wednesday, another warm spring day outside the windowless air-conditioned court room, Altman laid out the prosecution’s case to the jury. He explained in detail how Emma Mills lived with Bellfield at 24, Collingwood Place, Walton-on-Thames at the time Milly went missing and Rachel had been approached – although they were in fact house-sitting at the time for a friend named Christine Hawgood in Harmondsworth, Middlesex, just north of Heathrow airport, on the very day of Milly’s disappearance.
Altman then described in detail what the prosecution believed had happened on that fateful day. Milly’s mum, Sally, had given her and her elder sister Gemma a lift to school, as usual, leaving home at around 7.40 in the morning – when her dad Bob had given her a kiss goodbye. An IT recruitment consultant, he had a meeting in Basingstoke that day and was going there instead of making his usual trip into his office in London.
At the end of the school day Milly had intended to stay on and wait for a lift home with her mother and sister but had completed some outstanding homework early and decided to take the train home instead with some school friends from Heathfield, including Danielle Sykes.
On that Thursday afternoon she’d walked across the woods from school to the Weybridge railway station with her friends, wearing her school uniform of a short grey skirt, white blouse, blue V-necked jumper, navy-blue blazer and black school shoes with white trainer socks. She was carrying a beige and black Jansport rucksack containing her ‘glittery’ pencil case and her Nokia mobile phone. Milly and her friends caught the 3.26 train from Weybridge – which was running a little late – and arrived at Walton shortly after 3.30.
‘Ordinarily,’ Altman explained, ‘Milly would have continued her journey to the next train stop at Hersham,’ which was nearer her home, but on this day ‘she was persuaded by Danielle’ to leave the train at Walton and buy some chips at the station café. While she was in the café Milly had borrowed another pupil’s mobile phone – because hers had run out of credit – to phone her father at 3.47 to tell him that she would be a bit late home.
Barely a quarter of an hour later, shortly after 4, Milly left the café to walk home; Danielle asked her if she’d be all right to walk home alone. ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine’ she told her friend. Tragically that wasn’t to be the case.
Milly set off in the opposite direction from Danielle, down Station Avenue towards her home in Walton Park, and as she did so another schoolgirl from Heathside, Katherine Laynes, who was waiting at the bus stop in Station Avenue, saw her walking down the other side of the road away from the station. By now she’d taken her blazer off: after rain showers in the morning, the sun had suddenly come out. Katherine Laynes was the last person, other than her killer, to see Milly Dowler alive.
As Brian Altman pointed out to the jury: ‘If that evidence is accurate and reliable, then it means Milly had to have been taken from that part of Station Avenue, right outside Collingwood Place, and right on the defendant’s doorstep.’
When Sally and Gemma Dowler got home from school at 4.45 that afternoon Milly wasn’t there, and just after 7 that evening Bob Dowler reported his daughter missing to the police. Meanwhile, according to the prosecution, Levi Bellfield had disappeared for more than nine hours to hide his ‘wicked and terrible deed’.
In the afternoon session of Wednesday, 11 May, Altman then explained the events of the day of Milly’s disappearance through the eyes of Bellfield’s partner Emma Mills – who was to come to court herself to give evidence.
On that critical afternoon of 21 March 2002 Bellfield had ‘just disappeared during the day’, which was, according to Mills, ‘unusual’ as they would normally talk on the phone ‘a number of times’ every day. He was driving her red Daewoo Nexia car at the time, and she’d told the police that she hadn’t, in fact, seen him again until between 10.30 and 11 that evening, when he had returned to Christine Hawgood’s house with a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway and some lagers for them to share.
‘Emma noticed immediately that he had changed his clothing,’ Altman told the jury, ‘which made her think that he must have returned to Collingwood Place because that is where he had his clothes.’ She was suspicious that Bellfield had been with another woman, as she knew he had the only keys to the Walton flat on her key ring along with her car
key. ‘But she did not ask him where he’d been.’
During the early hours of the following morning, Friday, 22 March, Emma woke up to find Bellfield getting dressed and had asked him what he was doing, Altman went on. ‘I’m going to go back to the flat, ’cause I’m going to have a lay-in,’ Bellfield had told her and left at about 4 a.m., taking the Staffordshire bull terrier with him.
‘You will want to ask yourselves what was it that was so important that in the middle of the night he decided to get up and drive over to Walton,’ Altman said, ‘a trip which a timed run demonstrated took just over twenty-seven minutes at that time in the morning and covered a distance of some 13.7 miles.’
‘You can be sure it was no lie-in,’ he concluded firmly. ‘So why return to Collingwood Place in the dead of night? To walk the dog? To lie in?’ Altman asked, and then he answered his own question. ‘If the prosecution is right that he abducted and killed Milly Dowler, then he had to dispose of her body and clean up.’
Later on that Friday morning, Altman explained, Bellfield had asked a friend called Malcolm Ward to help him remove a mattress and some clothes from the Collingwood Place flat, and when Emma Mills went there later in the day she found the bed with no sheet, pillowcases or duvet cover. When she challenged him about it, Bellfield told her that the dog had had an ‘accident’ and that he had ‘chucked it all’. On that very Friday, Bellfield also told Emma Mills that he wanted to move back to their house at 11, Little Benty immediately, ‘even though they had not planned to move back for a month’.
‘You may wish to ask the question, why was the defendant in such a rush at this time of all times to make an unplanned and accelerated move away from Collingwood Place?’ Altman provided his own answer. ‘In fact, this was identical to how he was to behave following the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange in 2003 and 2004, when he left home with his family to take sudden holidays or move them from home, as we shall see.’
‘What then became of the red Daewoo Nexia?’ Altman went on. Bellfield and Mills used it to transport most of their belongings to 11, Little Benty, but a week later it was reported stolen, ‘and it has never been traced’. The significance of the prosecutor’s remark wasn’t lost on the jury for a moment, as just minutes later there was a hushed silence in court as he went on: ‘If the defendant abducted and killed her then he needed the red Daewoo Nexia to dispose of the body, and so the disappearance of that car so soon thereafter is no coincidence.’
On Wednesday, 18 September, almost six months to the day after Milly disappeared, a skull and some small bones were discovered off a little-used pathway in a wooded area in Yateley Heath Wood near Fleet in Hampshire, Altman continued. Police searched the area the next day and discovered other bones, which were identified as those of Milly Dowler. Altman told the jury that Bellfield knew the area well, as he would make regular trips to Blackbushe Market and Blackbushe Car Auctions, just north of Yateley, when he was still living with his former partner Johanna Collings. ‘They would walk her dogs there,’ Altman said firmly.
Drawing his remarks to a close, Altman then explained the five ‘features of similarity’ that marked Bellfield’s ‘offending’ and made the prosecution’s case against him so strong.
There were the geographical links that connected his other murders to south-west London. He had links with both Shepperton, where he’d worked as a mini-cab driver, and Walton Bridge over the River Thames, where he’d disposed of some of Amélie Delagrange’s belongings. Then there was the fact that he targeted young female victims who were strangers to him; that he used vehicles to target them; his behaviour of the time of his offences; and that he acted with ‘speed and motivation’.
‘There being no actual or attempted sexual interference with any of the victims, the defendant’s motivation for killing or attempting to kill was not obvious,’ Altman added, ‘but it is, you may conclude, at the very least consistent with someone who harbours a very great animosity towards women of the description of those victims and who goes on to act upon it.’
Drawing the jury’s attention to Bellfield’s previous murders as significant to the evidence in the Milly Dowler and Rachel Cowles cases, Altman pointed out that without those convictions the jury could not understand the full implications of the evidence overall: ‘how it might be that in broad daylight, and within a flash, a thirteen-year-old girl can be plucked from the street unless you know that the defendant was capable of and had indeed gone on to kill, not once but twice, and nearly a third time, with decisive speed and without real concern for being seen to do so’.
‘The evidence also allows you to conclude,’ he went on, ‘that it would be contrary to common sense to say that there must have been two men with such capabilities appearing by happenstance in the same place at the same time.’
‘We say,’ Altman concluded, just before he sat down in his seat in front of the judge, ‘you can be satisfied that the abductor of Rachel Cowles and the abductor and killer of Milly Dowler was this defendant, Levi Bellfield, and no one else.’
For his part Bellfield looked straight across the court at the judge, his face still.
Outside the Old Bailey the television crews and their reporters told a watching world about the prosecution’s allegations, and the following morning the newspapers speculated that Milly ‘probably spent her final, terrified moments inside her killer’s lair’ after Bellfield had ‘dragged her off the street or lured her into his ground-floor flat’ as she walked innocently home in the sudden sunshine. There, some newspapers alleged, she was ‘killed, stripped naked, and bundled into his car, before Bellfield drove her lifeless body to a remote patch of woodland 25 miles away and dumped it in the undergrowth’.
The trial of Levi Bellfield had begun in earnest, but in spite of the prosecution’s devastating opening the defendant himself was far more interested in ensuring that he manipulated the prison and the judicial systems to his advantage at all times. As part of his opening speech Brian Altman had explained to the jury that the day after he’d finished addressing them they would all be going on a ‘site visit’ to look at the scenes of both crimes – it was a familiar procedure in major murder trials. But what was not so familiar was the defendant’s response. He insisted on going too. Bellfield firmly exercised his right to attend the visit along with the judge, jury and the barristers for both sides. That meant he had to be transported there, allowed to change out of his prison uniform (as he was allowed to do in court) and be escorted among the general public as the jury were shown the scenes of his alleged crimes.
So it was that, on the morning of Thursday, 12 May, accompanied by three prison officers and two Surrey police officers, Bellfield was escorted – his hands in cuffs – around Upper Halliford Road in Shepperton, where Rachel had been propositioned, and then Station Avenue in Walton-on-Thames, where Milly had disappeared. Bellfield cut an extraordinary figure walking just yards behind the judge and jury in full view of vast numbers of innocent, and utterly bewildered, bystanders.
In a quite extraordinary display of hubris, Bellfield joked with passers-by and even offered a word of encouragement to a television reporter covering the scene. A faint smirk never left his face, confirming his private conviction that he alone was in control of these events, in spite of the guards surrounding him. It was the perfect example of Bellfield’s arrogant, brutal desire to take every opportunity to bend British justice to his will and demonstrate that he could always get what he wanted – no matter what the cost might be to the court, the jury or the witnesses.
Indeed, as the trial began, he started to complain loudly and repeatedly to his counsel each morning that he was not being treated ‘properly’ by the prison service, and in particular that he was not reaching the Old Bailey early enough to hold a meeting with his defence team before the beginning of the court’s day at 10.30.
The perpetual complaints underlined Bellfield’s sense of self-importance, the feeling that he was the equal of any of the legal brains
involved in his case, and that they – and the court – should dance to his tune and to nobody else’s.
At one point during a break in proceedings Bellfield even beckoned to me, exactly as I imagined he had done to Milly Dowler on that Thursday afternoon in Walton-on-Thames, careful to present a picture of innocence and humility – before the true horror of his intentions became nightmarishly clear.
‘Mr Wansell,’ he said in that distinctive squeaky voice.
‘Yes, Mr Bellfield,’ I said, walking towards the glass around the dock so that I could hear him.
‘You will make sure it is a fair and accurate account,’ he said, leaning towards me, for he knew full well that I was writing a book about him. I had asked to see him before the trial through his defence team. But he had refused to see me.
‘That’s what I’m intending to do, Mr Bellfield,’ I said, and he nodded appreciatively.
‘Good,’ he muttered as he walked back to his seat in the dock, smiling across at me. It was part manipulation, part veiled threat, but utterly typical of his desire to turn everything to his own advantage. The implication was clear. Everyone should dance to his tune and his tune alone. He wanted to manipulate the court, and me, in exactly the same way as he had done the women in his life for so many years.
How must the ‘polite’ Milly Dowler have felt as she was beckoned across Station Avenue by this man who took such pains not to seem a threat to anyone? It was a thought almost too terrifying to contemplate. This was a man entirely capable of appearing nothing more than an affable giant at one moment, then turning into a monster the next, with barely the blink of an eye between. It was a brutal transformation that Milly Dowler must have seen at the closest quarters and my heart went out to her.
The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield Page 21
