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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  One other partner of Levi Bellfield’s was to make an appearance in court. Johanna Collings, the woman he’d lived with in Strawberry Hill, also came to give evidence in Court 8 on the afternoon of 6 June , after a week’s break in the trial. She’d been called to give evidence about her experiences of visiting Yateley Heath Woods with Bellfield in the 1990s – where the skeletal remains of Milly’s body were discovered in September 2002. Now thirty-eight, Jo Collings walked into court wearing a pair of tight white trousers, a broad-shouldered, heavy-breasted woman considerably larger now than she’d been when they’d been together at the end of the 1990s. Her red hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she sported long white fake plastic fingernails as she took her seat in the witness box. To the outsider she resembled nothing so much as a rather stern barmaid on the brink of serving Malibu to a teenage patron, who may well have been under age.

  Jo Collings certainly looked confident and she’d demanded no ‘special measures’ to prevent her making eye-contact with the defendant – although she took particular care not to look across the court at him.

  In a firm voice she told Brian Altman for the prosecution that Bellfield had accompanied her to horse shows at Yateley more than five times – and the jury were then shown two photographs of the pair there, one which showed Bellfield holding the horse’s head while a rather slimmer Jo Collings was sitting in the saddle. Twisting a strand of her hair, Jo Collings also told the court that she and Bellfield had also taken their two whippet puppies to the area when he was trying to train them for coursing for rabbits, and that they’d also visited the local Blackbushe car auctions. Cross-examined by Jeffrey Samuels, she also explained that she’d told the police that he ‘disappears all the time at five or six o’clock in the morning’, telling her that he was ‘going to the market’. When she asked which one, he would say ‘Blackbushe’.

  Jo Collings then told him that her former partner went through a lot of cars, although he ‘didn’t do legal cars, MOTs, tax or anything like that’. If one ever broke down ‘he just got a new one’. One of her cars had been stolen when they were together. When a member of the jury passed a note to the judge asking if any trace of it had ever been found, she told them it had been discovered ‘burned out’ three or four months later.

  There was none of the high drama of her predecessor Emma Mills’s evidence, however, although Bellfield did start swearing under his breath when Jo Collings was asked about media interviews she had given in the past, and whether she had been paid for them.

  Yet not everything was as it appeared to be in Jo Collings evidence, for the jury were to hear just a few days later that her eldest child, a daughter, was not Bellfield’s at all. Bellfield had known that since the start of his first trial in 2007, and it could have been one reason why her evidence so enraged him, that and a fierce resentment that she had been making a profit out of their relationship, and he wanted her to admit it in open court. But all that she would admit was that she had been paid twice – ‘less than £10,000’ – on each occasion, and that she’d used the money for her children.

  As Jo Collings walked back across the courtroom, still studiously refusing to look at him, Bellfield was still fuming under his breath, still intent on taking every ounce of revenge he could on anyone who questioned his right to do exactly what he pleased, whenever he pleased.

  In the days that followed the jury heard detailed evidence from a CCTV expert to help to establish whether there had been any sighting of Milly Dowler on the closed-ciruit cameras on the Bird’s Eye factory building on Station Avenue on that Thursday afternoon – there had not. Nor was there any sign on the cameras that a man and a girl had crossed Station Avenue that day, although there was a window of some forty-two seconds at the time Milly was starting to walk along the road which was not covered by the cameras. If the CCTV cameras on Walton-on-Thames station had been working that day there seems little doubt that they would have spotted Milly – but, tragically, they weren’t, not as a result of sabotage but the simple fact that a decorator had moved the CCTV unit and inadvertently disconnected it.

  The jury also heard evidence from a mobile phone expert on the whereabouts of Bellfield’s mobile phone, which ended in the numbers 104, on the days in late March 2002, and in particular on the day Milly disappeared and later that night.

  They learned that his phone had been ‘unavailable’ between 3.28 in the afternoon of Thursday, 21 March and 4.48 that afternoon, when he’d telephoned his mother Jean from somewhere near her home in Hounslow. The jury also learned that his mobile phone had fallen entirely silent during the seven hours between 1 o’clock in the morning of Friday, 22 March – in spite of his sudden trip back to Collingwood Place from Christine Hawgood’s house in Harmondsworth, and that it hadn’t been used again until after 8 o’clock that morning.

  Then, in one of the last moments of the prosecution’s case, Sally and Gemma Dowler came back to Court 8 in the late morning of Monday, 13 June to hear the official pathologist, Dr Hugh White, explain that he had conducted the examination of Milly’s remains and confirmed that they were indeed hers, and point out that he could give no firm indication of a cause of death because all that he had to examine was her bones. A sombre hush fell as the white-haired pathologist explained that Milly had been left naked. No clothing whatever had been found near her remains in spite of a police search that went on for almost three weeks. Dr White also confirmed that she had been dead ‘for months, not weeks’ when she’d been found. Asked by Brian Altman for the prosecution how the teenager might have died, he could not rule out her having been suffocated or strangled, but he was certain she had been murdered, even though the official cause of death was formally ‘unascertained’.

  ‘This is a girl of thirteen years old found in an environment where she could not have got to by herself – and she was without any clothes,’ Dr White said quietly.

  In the dock Bellfield sat quite still, while beside him in court, though protected from his gaze by a large flat television screen, Sally and Gemma Dowler’s faces were a study in abject misery.

  It was a misery that was compounded the following day when the court heard from Detective Sergeant Tim Barrett of Surrey Police, a bluff, stocky man who had worked on the Dowler case since the day Milly had first disappeared, that Bob Dowler was one of ‘fifty-four suspects’ investigated by the police. It hadn’t been the finest hour for Surrey Police, as DS Barrett also revealed that, although all the other occupants of all the fifty-two flats in Collingwood Place, as well as others in the area, had been interviewed, ‘The occupants of Flat 24 were neither seen nor identified during eleven separate visits,’ later adding: ‘No inquiries were made with estate agents in order to trace those occupants.’

  That admission came after the jury had been read the full details of Bellfield’s murders of Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, as well as the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy – but one person who had not been there to hear them repeated was Levi Bellfield. He had retired to the cells with a ‘migraine’.

  Perhaps even Bellfield could not face the jury, knowing the stark reality of what he was capable of. Whatever the truth, shortly before 4 o’clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, 14 June, Brian Altman announced to the court: ‘That is the case for the prosecution.’

  It was now time for Bellfield to prove his innocence – or not – to the remaining eleven jurors, the twelfth having been discharged as the result of a sudden illness.

  19. End Game

  ‘To deny all is to confess all.’

  Spanish proverb

  Throughout his second trial at the Old Bailey Levi Bellfield continued to play the roles of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. When the jury were in court, he took great pains to present himself as the innocent defendant, taking endless notes to assist his defence, a man unfairly wronged by the judicial system. Like a malign toad Bellfield sat there impassively on the lily-pad of the dock with poison oozing from every pore, pretending that he could do no wrong, and that th
e outrageous allegations the prosecution were making against him were a mockery of the truth. It was only when the jury were not there that he allowed the bile within him to surface, and the dark, violent rage that his victims and his female partners had seen crept into the light of day. Only then did the true Bellfield reveal himself, with his anger bubbling to the surface in the blink of an eye – an anger directed at those who had chosen to give evidence against him, and at his counsel for not pointing that out strongly enough in his defence.

  When the jury left the court for a break, Bellfield would launch into coruscating whispered attacks on the world – littered with expletives – through the gaps in the glass fronted dock at his defence team. Indeed, as the final stages of the prosecution’s case drew to a close, Bellfield grew steadily more agitated – not least about his former partner Johanna Collings contacts with the media. At one point he even shouted at his counsel during a break while the jury were out that he wasn’t going to bother to come up and sit in the dock that afternoon if something wasn’t done to put his point of view across.

  In the end Bellfield did indeed refuse to appear – although he made sure to suggest to the jury that he hadn’t been receiving the correct medication from the prison service to cope with his ‘headaches’, which meant that he now had a migraine. It was an excuse, but one that served to make sure that he was not in the dock when the prosecution read the details of his previous murders to the jury. It is hard, after all, to present yourself as an innocent while the jury hears the details of your two convictions for murder and one for attempted murder.

  But there was another, less obvious, reason for Bellfield’s belligerence – beyond, of course, his desire to manipulate the court to his will at every opportunity – and that was the decision about whether he was to take the witness stand in his own defence. He knew only too well that his defence team would argue forcefully that the prosecution had not proved there was a case against him, but the temptation for him to go into the witness box himself, to convince them, was all but overwhelming. In Bellfield’s supremely arrogant mind, he thought that he knew better than his defence team, and that he alone could convince the jury that he could not possibly have abducted and killed Milly Dowler. But, and it was a large but, Bellfield also knew that he had taken the witness stand in his own defence in the first trial, spending almost seven full days being examined and cross-examined, and it had done him no good whatever. He had still been convicted.

  Should he risk making the same mistake again, and once again see his tortuous lies revealed to the jury by Brian Altman QC for the prosecution, or should he remain silent, allowing the defence barrister to make his case for him? It was a dilemma that only contrived to increase his headache in the Category A holding cells beneath the Old Bailey. Indeed it wasn’t until after the prosecution had closed its case that Bellfield finally came to a decision that he would not give evidence on his own behalf. It was a risk, for failing to do so might suggest to the jury that he had something to hide and wasn’t prepared to be cross-examined by the prosecution, but he came to the conclusion that the risk of his silence was outweighed by the fact that he might just weaken his own case by going into the witness box.

  So it was that on the morning of Thursday, 16 June that Jeffrey Samuels stood up before Mr Justice Wilkie and announced that his client, Levi Bellfield, would not be giving evidence, and that the defence would not be calling any other witnesses. Mr Justice Wilkie then asked the defence counsel if he had advised his client that ‘the jury may draw such inferences as it sees proper’, and Samuels confirmed that he had. Meanwhile Bellfield sat expressionless in the dock.

  And so, shortly after 10.40 that morning, Brian Altman got to his feet to give his closing speech to the jury, and he started, inevitably, by seizing on Bellfield’s decision not to take the witness stand.

  ‘There is a wealth of evidence in this case,’ he began, ‘regarding the defendant’s conduct, his actions and his words around the time of Milly’s disappearance that you would have wanted to hear the defendant explain and have tested on oath from the witness box. He has deprived you of that opportunity. How, for instance, would he have explained – when tested – his behaviour on the day of and night following Milly’s disappearance? We don’t know, because he has declined to give us his account, tested and examined from the witness box. He ducked the opportunity. You might reasonably have thought that a man accused of murdering thirteen-year-old Milly Dowler and of seeking to abduct Rachel Cowles the day before would want to grasp the opportunity of explaining and protesting his innocence to a jury. But he has not done so.’

  Altman paused, then added: ‘The reason you may think he has not done so is that he does not have an innocent account to give – an account that will stand the test of critical scrutiny, and he knows it. The prosecution say he has a clear case to answer, yet he declines to do so. It is his failure to give evidence about these matters that you are entitled to hold against him, if you think it fair to do so.’

  Asking the jury to examine the whole of the evidence, he then explained that the Crown’s case against him relied on ‘many strands of circumstantial evidence’.

  ‘No one saw Milly snatched from Station Avenue,’ Altman admitted. ‘As we have seen, the road was relatively quiet at that time, and no one saw it or, as I have said before, no one saw it for what it really was – such was the skill, brazenness and resourcefulness of her abductor and killer.’ Bellfield must have managed to ‘lure or force her’ into the ground-floor flat at 24, Collingwood Place ‘from which she was never to emerge alive … and so, as was her killer’s intention, no one witnessed the fatal event either’.

  ‘Circumstantial evidence,’ he went on, ‘is by no means a poor substitute for direct eyewitness evidence. It can, depending on your view … provide the most telling evidence of a defendant’s involvement. It does not involve a leap of faith by you. Indeed, it was upon almost entirely circumstantial evidencethat the jury in 2008 convicted the defendant of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange in 2003 and 2004, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy in 2004.’

  But then Brian Altman turned to the brutal questioning of both Bob and Sally Dowler in the witness box by Jeffrey Samuels – on his client’s direct instructions. It was impossible to ignore the disgust in the barrister’s voice as he described the Dowlers’ treatment. If Bellfield had planned his revenge on the Dowlers by subjecting them to an ordeal in the witness box, then Altman was returning the favour. He made it abundantly clear that the suggestions were no more than a smokescreen to conceal the truth – that Bellfield wanted to convince the jury that he was innocent.

  ‘As we understand it,’ Altman said fiercely, ‘it is going to be suggested that Milly was a runaway who did not want to be alone in her father’s company that day, and so she hung around in or about Station Avenue only to slip away without being noticed into the hands of another killer at another time, and at another place, so that Levi Bellfield cannot have been her abductor and killer. What underpins that theory? As we understand it, it was the father’s lifestyle, as well as aspects of Milly’s character.

  Turning to the ‘extreme’ magazines that Milly had found in her parents’ bedroom, Altman told the jury they could be forgiven for thinking they’d been discovered on the very day that she’d disappeared, when, in fact, they’d been found nine months earlier. ‘There is no avoiding it,’ Brian Altman continued, ‘this evidence is now being used to suggest that he contributed to his daughter’s disappearance and eventual death.’

  His words hung in a stunned silence in the court. Bob Dowler and his wife, as well as their daughter Gemma, were sitting barely seven paces from the prosecuting counsel, a Surrey police liaison officer at their side.

  Altman paused. ‘But more than that,’ he went on, ‘there was the implication in cross-examination of Sally Dowler that she hadn’t dealt with the matter properly, so that somehow her inadequate response to it as a mother had also contributed to her daugh
ter’s disappearance.’

  Once again the contempt in Altman’s voice was unmistakable.

  ‘So the theory goes something like this,’ he said firmly. ‘Milly did not walk home, but must have hung back, and diverted – not to be captured by the Bird’s Eye CCTV cameras – only to meet her killer at some other time, at some other location, anywhere else, of course, so long as it is not on Levi Bellfield’s doorstep.’

  There was a hush as he spoke.

  ‘No one, absolutely no one in this court room,’ he went on, ‘other than Mr and Mrs Dowler and Gemma, their surviving daughter, can possibly know or understand what it is like to have lost a child or a sister in the dreadful circumstances they did on that March afternoon, not knowing for month after month what had become of her, only then years later to have their lives laid bare in the full glare of the national media in this courtroom.

  ‘But the grieving parents are not the ones on trial here. That fact might have been forgotten … when the Dowlers came to give their evidence. There is only one person on trial in this courtroom – and that person is Levi Bellfield. Yet he has not had the courage to give you his account tested in the witness box.’

  Turning to the so-called ‘goodbye note’ that Milly had written, found by the police among a jumble of other childhood memorabilia at the bottom of a toy box at the foot of her bed, Altman dismissed the suggestion that Milly was anything other than an ‘intelligent girl, top set at school, interested in all the topics a thirteen-year-old girl would and should be.’

  ‘Girls of her age go through developmental processes,’ he explained, ‘which any parent of girls that age will know can sometimes be challenging. I daresay Milly was no different.’