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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  For the prosecution Brian Altman then asked Milly’s mother about the day her daughter disappeared. On the way to school, she told him, Milly had been in a ‘lovely frame of mind’, joking with her and her sister Gemma in the car about a radio programme they were listening to. Once they’d reached Heathside, the three split up, and Sally didn’t see Milly again until after the end of the school day, when she left her gym bag with her and told her that she had decided to go home by train rather than wait an hour or so for her mother and sister. She had told her mother she would probably get home by about 3.40 – but, of course, she never arrived.

  Sally and Gemma Dowler had arrived back at the family home at about 4.45 to find her husband in the dining room with the door closed, making ‘phone calls’. Gemma called out to her sister when she got in, but there was no response, so she knew Milly wasn’t at home, but that didn’t worry Sally Dowler unduly, as she thought she’d probably gone to visit a school friend’s house.

  Treading as carefully as he could, Altman then raised the question of the pornographic magazines with Sally Dowler, whose eyes were now cast down as if she were being hunted by a hungry animal. She told the prosecution counsel that Milly had come to tell her that she’d found the magazines ‘maybe about a year ago’, and that her daughter had been ‘taken aback’, as she didn’t know they were there.

  Sally Dowler had told her younger daughter: ‘It doesn’t mean that Daddy doesn’t love me.’ She also insisted that Milly’s attitude to her husband hadn’t changed after the discovery, and that she hadn’t had any other discussion with Milly about the magazines. ‘Absolutely not,’ she told the prosecution counsel firmly.

  As the afternoon session in court was drawing to a close, Brian Altman then asked Sally Dowler whether Milly would have got into a vehicle with a stranger and was told she didn’t think she would ‘unless there was a very good reason’. Then, after a moment’s thought, she added: ‘But she was a polite girl.’

  It was virtually the last exchange of the court’s afternoon, for shortly after 4.15 Jeffrey Samuels asked if he could begin his cross-examination of Sally Dowler for the defence the following morning, when the witness and the jury would be fresher. Mr Justice Wilkie agreed, and the court rose for the day, leaving the Dowler family all but destroyed in a trial that had been supposed to bring them justice.

  What their feelings were as they made their way home to Surrey only they could know, but the feelings in the press benches in court was that their treatment had been ‘hideous’ – all the more so because it had been deliberately orchestrated by a man who would do anything to convince the world that he was not responsible for their daughter’s death – Levi Bellfield.

  The court did not sit the following morning because two of the barristers had prior appointments at the Court of Appeal, and so it was not until shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday, 17 May that Sally Dowler returned to the witness box to face the defence – and its cross-examination.

  The prospect alone must have given her a sleepless night, for she looked tired and strained as she walked across the courtroom towards the witness stand, steadfastly looking straight ahead, determined not to catch a glimpse of the man she believed had brought her there – the defendant sitting impassively in the dock.

  Jeffrey Samuels did not waste any time. His first questions concerned the discovery of the pornographic magazines hidden under the chest of drawers in the bedroom that she shared with her husband at the family home.

  ‘Do you recall the nature of the magazines?’ he asked.

  Sally Dowler’s pale face wrinkled in despair as she explained that she did, and repeated that she’d told her daughter Milly, who’d found them, that: ‘It doesn’t mean Daddy doesn’t love Mummy.’

  Asked if she thought finding the magazines was distressing for a child of Milly’s age, Sally Dowler conceded that it would have done, but went on to explain that she and her daughter hadn’t discussed the subject again. But she had talked to her husband about the magazines.

  ‘Bob said that he would remove them, and that was the last of it,’ she told Samuels.

  ‘You didn’t demand that he threw them away?’ the defence barrister asked.

  ‘I can’t recall exactly what I demanded of him,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  There was a pause, and Samuels asked her if she remembered telling the police the month after her daughter had disappeared – and long before her skeleton was found – that she had noticed a ‘sort of change’ in Milly at the time of the discovery, ‘but then it went back to normal’.

  By now the tears were coursing down Sally Dowler’s cheeks.

  ‘Is it fair to say,’ Samuels then added softly, ‘that you may have shut your eyes to that material and what effect it had on Milly?’

  ‘It was ten years ago, and it’s really hard to recall it,’ she almost screamed ‘and as a result of this I’ve had a nervous breakdown.’

  Sally Dowler did what she could to gather herself and insisted that she had always had a ‘good, open relationship with her daughter’.

  It was the admission that Samuels was clearly looking for, as he instantly turned to the poems and ‘suicidal’ letter that the police had found in Milly’s bedroom during their search of the Dowler home.

  ‘A lot of girls write that kind of stuff,’ Sally Dowler said bravely. ‘It’s not that unusual.’

  ‘But did it produce a picture of your daughter which you did not recognize as her mother?’ Samuels asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Sally Dowler admitted, still struggling to control herself.

  Citing the letter and poem, Samuels went on: ‘Were you aware that Milly may have felt that you favoured her elder sister over her?’

  The piercing, plaintive wail that suddenly emerged from Sally Dowler’s mouth as she started to reply echoed around the courtroom.

  ‘But it wasn’t true,’ she wailed, tears coursing down her face again. ‘It was not true at all.’

  No one could have failed to have been moved by the emotion in Sally Dowler’s voice as she addressed the court, but Levi Bellfield sat, as he had throughout her testimony, utterly impassive. It was his revenge on the Dowlers, proof that he would extract a terrible price from anyone who dared to question his right to do as he pleased. They believed he had taken their daughter, so now he was destroying their life.

  But Sally Dowler’s ordeal wasn’t at an end. On behalf of his client, Jeffrey Samuels then carefully painted a picture of Milly Dowler’s ‘double life’ away from the eyes of her parents. Milly Dowler had created an e-mail address, he suggested to her, with the username of ‘sexmeslow28’; she had visited internet chat rooms, and written e-mails about feeling ‘ugly’ and bullied – while all the time she appeared to be ‘a happy girl’ to her mother and father. Samuels also reminded Sally Dowler that she had admitted to her brother that Milly ‘seemed to be living a double life’.

  Then came the final twist of the knife, as Samuels reminded Sally Dowler about a call she had made to the police in early hours of the morning on 25 May 2002, two months after her daughter had disappeared, in which she had told them that she might have recalled that she might have caught a ‘fleeting glimpse’ of Milly with a ‘group of boys’ before she had vanished ‘in the blink of an eye’.

  Red-eyed and distraught, Sally Dowler confessed that she had asked the police to hypnotize her in an effort to get to the truth.

  ‘I was so desperate to recall something,’ she said. ‘My mind was going over and over again trying to remember the minutiae.’ Sally Dowler then paused for a moment. ‘I was on the brink of insanity at this stage. I was driving myself mad.’

  The court was to hear that barely two weeks later Sally Dowler had withdrawn her request to be hypnotized.

  Rising to re-examine her for the prosecution, Brian Altman asked her if there had been any problems between Milly and her husband, Bob.

  ‘No,’ she replied firmly.

  ‘Did she ever threate
n suicide?’ Altman went on.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did she ever threaten you with running away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was she a dark and depressed person?’

  ‘No.’

  Then, after a pause, Sally Dowler added: ‘We were a happy family,’ and with that she broke down again in tears, the emotion flooding across the courtroom in a tidal wave.

  Thanking her for her evidence, Altman released her from the witness box, and Sally Dowler started to walk across the court, but as she did so she bent double as though the pain of the ordeal had cut through her like a sword. Bob Dowler and a police officer took her arms and helped her to the doorway, but as she left the sound of her anguished cries resonated around the panelled walls of Court 8. She had been there less than eighty minutes, and the blank expression on Bellfield’s pale, round face hadn’t flickered for a moment.

  Outside the confines of the court, Sally’s daughter Gemma was waiting to give evidence, but as she saw her mother helped out of court she too broke down in tears, becoming so hysterical that at one point she lay on the floor screaming in utter despair.

  It was all too clear to the prosecution and the defence that Gemma Dowler was now in no emotional state to take the witness stand, and it was rapidly agreed between them that she would not be called to give evidence in person, but an agreed statement on her behalf would be read to the court the following morning.

  The Dowler family had paid a heavy price for their desire for justice for their daughter Milly – a public humiliation orchestrated by the man they believed in their hearts had killed her, Levi Bellfield.

  18. Witness for the Prosecution

  ‘In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt

  But, being seasoned with a gracious voice

  Obscures the show of evil.’

  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  Gemma Dowler never made her way to the witness box in person to give evidence in support of her murdered sister, but she did – finally – have her say in front of the jury when her agreed statement was read to the court on the morning of Wednesday, 18 May, the day after her mother’s collapse.

  In fact Gemma was in court at the time, sitting beside her father, and she listened intently as her words were read out to the jury by Brian Altman on behalf of the prosecution. She stared straight ahead and didn’t turn to her left for one moment to look at the man she believed had killed her sister sitting in the dock no more than six feet away.

  Gemma Dowler’s statement brought her sister back to life in a way no one could have imagined in that quiet courtroom. For she went to some lengths to describe the famous video of Milly ironing a pair of jeans in the family home that had been played on television time after time during the long six-month search for her.

  ‘She’d never ironed anything in her life before,’ Gemma told the jury, and that was the reason her mother had made a videotape of her doing it for the first time. It was a unique event in the teenager’s life, and it had taken place on the Monday evening of the week Milly had vanished while she’d been preparing to go to a Pop Idol concert starring Gareth Gates on the following evening.

  Describing the day Milly actually disappeared, Gemma confirmed that, when she and her mother had got home from Heathside, she had expected to find her sister at home and had called out: ‘Amanda, Amanda, where are you?’ But there had been no reply. Within two hours – after trying to reach her on her mobile phone and then going out to look for Milly herself – Gemma had sensed something was dreadfully wrong.

  ‘I knew immediately that something bad had happened to Milly,’ she said, ‘and that she’d been abducted. There is no way she would ever have run away from home or gone off with someone without telling us. Mum and Dad really drummed it into us that we must telephone one of them to let them know when we would be late.’

  Confirming that Milly didn’t have a current boyfriend, and that she also hadn’t met anyone in an internet chat room, Gemma added: ‘I do not think Milly would have ever got into a stranger’s car or gone off with a stranger unless he told her something really convincing, although she may have got into the car of someone who she knew or trusted.’

  Then, at the end of Gemma’s statement, Milly Dowler herself made an appearance in court as the jury were shown the videotape her sister had described so movingly of the young teenager ironing a pair of jeans while she danced behind the ironing board. It was as if her ghost had walked across the green-carpeted floor of the courtroom, past her father Bob and her sister Gemma, and taken her own seat beside the jury.

  Milly Dowler’s ghost was to remain there for days to come, as the evidence of her school friends, the last people to see her alive, was revealed to the jury. Indeed when the striking, blonde figure of twenty-three-year-old Danielle Sykes, one of Milly’s friends, walked into court to give her evidence in person it was impossible not to imagine that Milly Dowler might have looked exactly like her, had her life not been brutally snuffed out at the age of just thirteen.

  Danielle had been with Milly on the ill-fated train journey from Weybridge station to Walton-on-Thames on that Thursday afternoon. They had even hugged each other goodbye on the train, as Milly had planned to go on to the next stop at Hersham, nearer her home. It had been Danielle who had persuaded her not to, and to get off at Walton, a decision that was to cost the thirteen-year-old her life. Just as the train was pulling in to Walton station Danielle had suddenly said to Milly: ‘Would you like to come and have chips with me at the café?’

  ‘I’d better not,’ Milly had told her.

  ‘OK, fine then,’ Danielle replied, teasing her friend.

  A split-second later, Milly changed her mind. ‘Ah, no, actually I will come. I’ve got nothing better to do.’

  It was a joke between two teenagers that was to change their lives for ever.

  Once off the train, Milly and Danielle had made their way to the Travellers’ café on Walton station and ordered a 90 pence plate of chips each, although Milly had to borrow 10 pence from her friend to do so. Then they’d spoken to three male pupils from school who were there already, and Milly had borrowed one of their phones to ring her father. Not long after four that afternoon the two friends left the café, and Danielle had given Milly a final hug.

  ‘I asked her if she would be all right to walk home on her own,’ Danielle told the jury, ‘and she’d replied, “Yeah, I’ll be absolutely fine.” ’

  They were almost the last words anyone said to Milly Dowler. For, as the jury also heard, her killer was the only person who could have spoken to her after that. The last that Danielle saw of her friend was as Milly left the station and walked towards Station Avenue.

  In the wake of the Dowlers’ ordeal in the witness box, it was inevitable that Brian Altman would have to ask Danielle about the pornographic magazines found under father’s chest of drawers, and whether the discovery had upset her friend. Danielle told him frankly that they’d left Milly feeling ‘disappointed’ and ‘weirded out’.

  ‘But then no one wants to think of their parents in that light,’ Danielle went on.

  By now close to tears, with the memory of her dead friend all too fresh in her memory, Danielle explained that Milly always found a way to laugh things off.

  Yet, on the following morning, the jury heard from the girl who had been Milly’s closest friend that she didn’t laugh at everything, and that she did indeed have ‘a dark side’. Hannah McDonald, who was now twenty-two, had been another pupil in Year 9 at Heathside with Milly, and she told the court that they’d become ‘really, really close’ and confided ‘secrets’ to one another. When Hannah was asked by Jeffrey Samuels for the defence whether Milly was ever upset, she confessed that her friend sometimes ‘used humour to mask her lack of self-confidence’. Hannah also said that her friend had been upset by bullying and name-calling at school. In particular, Milly was self-conscious about the size of her nose, and didn’t like being called ‘big nose’ at school.r />
  Did that upset her, Samuels asked, and Hannah admitted that it did.

  ‘Just like any thirteen-year-old, she would take it to heart more than an adult would. Looking back, it was pretty trivial, and there was no need to get upset by it,’ she said.

  But Hannah then went on to explain that Milly had even tried to ‘slit her wrists with a dinner knife’ because of the name calling.

  Despite this, Hannah also explained that: ‘Milly did like to exaggerate things, and she only told me a year or so after the event. She didn’t break the skin, or so she told me.’

  In fact the jury learned that the attempt had taken place two years before Milly disappeared, and that she’d been much happier since then. Nevertheless the image of an almost teenage girl trapped in anguish on the edge of puberty seemed to float across the court, no matter how hard Hannah tried to brush it aside.

  ‘She was a joker. She would always make you smile,’ Hannah explained defensively. ‘She had funny voices she used. She liked to be liked. I don’t think anyone wants to be disliked.’

  Hannah also told the court that on the day Milly disappeared they had been looking forward to a rock gig they were going to the following day, Friday, 22 March, and that Milly had been ‘just normal’.

  Two of Milly’s other friends then confirmed to the court in written statements that she had been perfectly happy on the day she had gone missing. She may have had her secret moments of anguish, but her school friends confirmed that on the day that she disappeared she had been as happy as the girl dancing behind the ironing board.

  Then came another moment of poignancy, as the jury heard from the very last person to see Milly alive – apart from her killer – another Heathside pupil, the now twenty-four-year-old Katherine Laynes, who was two years above Milly at school, in Year 11. Katherine told the jury that, on the afternoon of Thursday, 21 March 2002 she had been sitting at the bus stop diagonally opposite Walton-on-Thames railway station – and, incidentally, right outside the entrance to 24, Collingwood Place – when she had spotted Milly walking down Station Avenue away from the station on her way home. The two girls knew one another because Katherine was a friend of Gemma, and she had been to visit her at the Dowler family home.