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

by Wansell, Geoffrey

  Witness after witness, Altman said, had told the court that Milly was ‘very close to her family’ and a girl with a ‘very happy life’, who was absolutely adored by her mother and father, and that she was ‘looking forward to the rest of the week’ on the day she disappeared, ‘just as she was looking forward to the rest of her life’.

  Did the video of Milly ironing her jeans, he asked the jury, really look, and sound, like a girl about to run away from home? Ramming the point home, he reminded them that the one thing missing from all the writings produced by the defence was ‘any threat to run away’. Indeed all her friends had paid tribute in their evidence to how ‘happy’ she’d been on the day of her disappearance and how she’d told all of them that she would ‘see them tomorrow’.

  ‘As I’ve already commented,’ Altman added, ‘if she had truly wanted to run off – to make a stand about something, a protest – why not lodge with a friend for a time? Call Dad or Mum and seek to tell them why she was not coming home until the issue had been sorted out – whatever it was. Give Dad the cold shoulder, have a family conference, but at thirteen to run off like that with not a penny or a purpose or a plan?’ Altman paused again, before adding fiercely: ‘Utter nonsense.’

  ‘So if she didn’t run away’ he asked the jury, ‘and had been heading home along Station Avenue, but didn’t make it, then she was abducted – but not abducted anywhere – but in the very place where Bellfield was that very afternoon – a conclusion the defence is trying so very hard to avoid.’

  There was barely the sound of a breath in the court room as the words hung in the air.

  Over the course of that Thursday Altman painstakingly took each and every aspect of the defence’s apparent suggestion that she may have run away out of ‘disgust’ with her father and demolished them one by one.

  The horrifying truth, he explained was that ‘whoever abducted Milly achieved what he did without it being captured’ on the CCTV cameras, which was probably the result of ‘pure luck’, as it just happened to take place in the critical forty seconds or so that the camera ‘swept away counter-clockwise from the visible part of the roadway’.

  Altman then gave the jury an explanation for why Milly might have crossed over to the north side of Station Avenue as she walked along. ‘Is it too fantastic a suggestion to make that Milly did cross to the north side, almost directly opposite Collingwood Place, hoping perhaps to see and flag down her mother for a lift home – because it would be that side of the road on which Sally would be driving home?’

  If she did so then she could have been quickly snatched and dragged behind the hedges of Collingwood Place, which would have made it impossible for the CCTV cameras to see her.

  ‘It was then a short step and a simple thing,’ Altman explained ‘for a big man to get or drag a slight thirteen-year-old to the front access door into 24, Collingwood Place – through the door marked “No entry”, which was always open and unlocked … then into number 24, where at some stage and somehow he killed her. You’ve seen for yourself how small it all is inside the area at the front of the flats,’ he concluded, ‘and you can see it would take seconds for a big man to have manhandled a small girl inside without screaming.’

  As the court day drew to its close, Altman again rammed home the point that Bellfield was prepared to tell any lie necessary to divert their attention from the truth, and that included implicating his partner Emma Mills.

  ‘Stooping so low,’ he concluded, ‘to divert police attention from him, he was quite prepared to incriminate his own partner and the mother of his children, so he could avoid his just desserts for what he had done … That provides you with a fine example of the dishonesty of the man you are dealing with.’

  Shortly after 4 on that Thursday afternoon in June the jury filed silently out of the courtroom clearly affected by what they’d heard, a forensic, clinical representation of the prosecution case and what Altman felt was likely to be the defence’s response.

  As the jury were ushered back into court the following morning the air was filled with expectation, and Altman did not disappoint them. He began by describing what may have happened to the now notorious Red Daewoo Nexia that belonged to Emma Mills but which Bellfield had taken to driving himself – and in particular where it was on Thursday, 21 March 2002.

  ‘If the theft story was a true one,’ he said, ‘and someone had stolen the car not for its resale value – it was a bog standard car worth £800 – but to joy-ride it, where is the evidence that it was joy-ridden, or dumped, and abandoned? Why has there not even been a simple parking ticket?’ Then, as he’d done before, Altman answered his own question. ‘Just like the Ford Courier van in 2004,’ he told the jury, ‘in poor condition and of low value, yet inexplicably it too disappeared never to be found by the Metropolitan Police.’ The implication was abundantly clear – the defendant had a habit of making cars disappear, especially cars that might contain forensic evidence that might help to convict him.

  As for inside the flat at 24, Collingwood Place, he went on, Bellfield had lied to Emma Mills about what had happened to the bedding as well as the theft of the Daewoo ‘not in panic, and not because there was some other “truth” he didn’t want to tell her … he lied to her on two significant matters at two different times for one reason and one reason only, and that was because he could not afford to tell her the truth about why the bedding had to go – never to be recovered – and then why the car had to go – never to be recovered’.

  The reason, he said firmly, was obvious. ‘Both were linked to the disappearance and – as was to be discovered 6 months later – the murder of Milly Dowler.’

  Altman then took the jury to the site where Milly’s body was discovered in Yateley Heath Wood, a place that Johanna Collings had told the jury that she and Bellfield had visited ‘more than five times’ to walk his whippets and train them to catch rabbits.

  ‘So Milly disappeared from an area where the defendant lived,’ he said, ‘and at a time when he was actually present, and her remains were found in an area with which he was familiar.’ Then Altman paused again before asking: ‘What are the chances of that being a matter of pure coincidence?’

  By now it was well into the afternoon of Friday, 17 June, and Altman was reaching the end of his closing speech. But before he did so he turned to the attempted abduction of the then eleven-year-old Rachel Cowles the day before Milly went missing. The prosecuting counsel told them that they were quite ‘entitled’ to use the evidence of Milly’s disappearance to ‘inform’ their views about Rachel, and ‘vice versa’. If there were similarities between the two events they could conclude they were the work of one man – Levi Bellfield.

  ‘One important question for you,’ he explained, ‘is what are the chances of there being two large, big-built men, with round, chubby faces, linked with untidy red hatchbacks, with child seats in the back, appearing in the same area over two consecutive days, at the same time of day, targeting females to attack?

  ‘Rachel, at the time looking in stature remarkably similar to Milly, wearing a ponytail, and also dressed in school uniform, shared with Milly another identical feature,’ Altman went on. ‘Both were walking home alone from school, and vulnerable, as indeed was each of the women the defendant chose to target in 2003 and 2004.’

  Bringing his speech to its end, Altman finished by listing the links and similarities between the offences he had been describing. There were the geographical links in that all the offences – including those in his previous trial – had taken place in west London. There was the targeting of vulnerable young women. ‘All of the defendant’s victims,’ Altman said, ‘were vulnerable young women or lone girls’ whom he’d either targeted on buses or spotted walking home alone quite by chance. There was the use of vehicles to flee the scene of his crimes, or in Milly’s case, to dispose of the body, as well as the fact that the Ford Courier van in Amélie’s case and the Daewoo Nexia had both disappeared entirely without trace. ‘Speed of actio
n and decisiveness’ was another link. ‘Milly disappeared from the street very suddenly, and without any opportunity to scream or call for help. In that respect, the speed of her abduction chimes with the speed and decisiveness with which the defendant later attacked his other young victims.’ Then there was Bellfield’s behaviour – the fact that he always turned his mobile phones off, and his ‘forensic awareness’ that led to the clean-up of 24, Collingwood Place. Finally, there was his decision to leave the flat in a hurry, similar to his decisions to take the family on holiday after the killing of Marsha McDonnell and after the killing of Amélie Delagrange.

  ‘So those are similar features which we say point to these offences being the work of one man, that man being this defendant, Levi Bellfield.’ They demonstrated ‘a pattern of serial attacks upon girls and young women within a period of just over two years.’

  But then he made his critical point.

  ‘It would be contrary to common sense,’ he went on, ‘to say that there must have been two men with such capabilities appearing by chance in the same locality at the same time. You may wish to consider how likely it is that there were two such men, capable of committing murder, behaving in exactly the same way, in the same place, at the very same time.’

  Pointing directly at the defendant in the dock, Altman concluded: ‘The prosecution say that you can be quite sure that this defendant and no one else is responsible for these dreadful acts, and we invite you to find him guilty.’

  And so, shortly before 4 o’clock on that Friday afternoon, Brian Altman sat down after addressing the jury for two days. It had been a virtuoso performance, and silenced the court room repeatedly, but it was not the end of the case.

  To his left, Jeffrey Samuels, for the defence, remained seated. The jury would have to wait until the following Monday morning to hear his reply.

  Bellfield, who had been writing pages of notes to his counsel throughout Altman’s speech, was clearly upset that Samuels hadn’t got to his feet immediately to begin the counter-attack. He left the court grumbling under his breath that he would be having a ‘terrible weekend’.

  The jury, of course, were not in court to hear it.

  But they were certainly in court when Samuels got to his feet on behalf of the defence at 10.45 on the morning of Monday, 20 June.

  Within minutes the contrast between the styles of the two barristers was clear for the jury to see. Unlike the meticulous, confident Altman, with each page of his speech typed out in front of him, there was the conversational, confidential Samuels with his hand-written notes all too clear for the jury to see.

  But Samuels began with a touch of drama.

  ‘Courage,’ he said loudly, and suddenly. That is what the defence asks of the jury, ‘courage to try the defendant according to the evidence’.

  ‘This is trial by jury, not trial by media, or trial by Facebook,’ he went on, the slight tone of Lancashire in his voice, then immediately defended his client’s decision not to give evidence himself. ‘The defendant has chosen not to give evidence, not refused … there is no obligation on him to prove anything, still less his innocence. People do not give evidence for all sorts of reasons. It does not alter the burden of proof one bit.’

  It was for the prosecution to prove that Bellfield was guilty, Samuels said, and insisted that they were only criticizing his client’s silence in an effort ‘to mask the fundamental weakness’ at the core of their case.

  Samuels dismissed the prosecution theory about Milly’s disappearance as ‘pure fantasy’, adding that they would not be ‘doing a service to the Dowler family, still less to Milly’s memory, by convicting this man, however unattractive he may be’. And he looked at the jury steadily.

  ‘The truth is the truth,’ he told the jury, ‘and its hallmark is consistency.’

  Rachel Cowles had failed to pick out Bellfield at an identification parade three years after she’d been approached by the man in the red car, and Milly Dowler was not entirely the girl in the ironing video, but a much more complex one.

  Turning to Bob Dowler’s evidence, he defended his questions. ‘This not a court of morals,’ he explained. ‘No judgement should be made of a man’s sexual preferences. But this is a murder trial, part of which looks at the time and place of Milly’s disappearance. The subject cannot be avoided.’

  She may have been ‘uncomfortable’ to go home to her father alone, he suggested. There was only one witness that put her in Station Avenue, and it was possible that she had turned the other way and walked away from her home. There were no other eyewitnesses who had seen her. There was no CCTV of her. There was not even any forensic evidence to put her in the flat at Collingwood Place.

  ‘But for his convictions,’ Samuels went on, ‘you may think he [the defendant] would not be here,’ for the prosecution had ‘marshalled and tailored’ evidence against him to fit their ‘ludicrous theory’. Bellfield was now being ‘paraded’ in front of the jury as ‘the local serial killer’.

  ‘There has been an undue reliance on these convictions,’ he added. ‘There has been an artificial attempt to suggest similarities. The sad truth is that the police are no nearer to solving her disappearance now than in 2002.’

  The prosecution’s case, Samuels said quietly, ‘was pure fantasy’, and as he said it he looked directly across the court at each and every member of the jury.

  Then, bringing his speech to a close shortly before 3 in the afternoon of Monday, 20 June, he reminded them that the ‘burden of proof remains on the prosecution from first to last’ and quietly resumed his seat after addressing them for just three hours.

  It was the passionate speech of a man who believed in his argument, a speech for the common man, and his client should have thanked him profusely. But Bellfield remained impassive in the dock, though he did allow a smile to flicker across his face.

  Later that afternoon Mr Justice Wilkie began his summing up of the case to the jury, instructing them in his light Scots voice that they must reach their verdicts ‘coolly and dispassionately’. He was to spend the following day, and the morning of Wednesday, 22 June, reminding them in scrupulous detail of all the evidence they had heard. And at 12.41 that morning he sent them out to consider their verdict.

  As they filed out of Court 8 the remaining four women and seven men – one young woman having been lost to illness during the trial – looked a little overawed by the task ahead of them, but the judge had complimented them on their concentration, and there was a determination about them as they left the court. For his part Bellfield sat staring at their backs. His fate now lay firmly in their hands.

  The jury did not reach a verdict that Wednesday afternoon, and so the judge sent them home for the evening, so that they could reconvene the following morning to further consider their verdict. At that point it felt in court as though the trial was quietly coming to a close, without the drama that had been predicted by some. There had been no histrionics from the defendant, and the memory of the Dowlers’ interrogation had dimmed. No one could have expected the high drama that was to unfold suddenly when, shortly after lunch on Thursday, 23 June, the jury asked to be brought back into court.

  Amélie Delagrange’s parents and Kate Sheedy were in the packed courtroom as well as the Dowlers; no one knew if the jury had even reached a verdict – perhaps they were there to ask a question of the judge.

  The clerk to the court proceeded to ask them if they had reached a verdict on Count One – the attempted abduction of Rachel Cowles. The newly elected foreman simply replied: ‘No.’ The silence in Court 8 became almost suffocating. The clerk then asked whether they had reached a verdict on Counts Two and Three of the Indictment – the abduction and murder of Amanda Dowler. There was a slight pause, and at 2.32 on the afternoon of Thursday 23 June, the foreman announced in his soft voice that they found the defendant guilty on both counts.

  Asked to stand while the jury’s verdicts were read out, Bellfield remained studiously impassive. Then, as he was be
ing led out of the dock to the cells, he yawned casually. But in the court beside him Sally Dowler and her surviving daughter Gemma let out a series of piercing screams and both collapsed to the green-carpeted floor with tears flooding down both their cheeks in what one newspaper later described as ‘one of the most heart-rending scenes ever witnessed in the historic court building’. Bob Dowler and the Old Bailey’s matron went to the aid of both women, but it was to be several minutes before either were able to climb back to their feet, to be helped out of the court while clinging to one another for support.

  But the case against Levi Bellfield was not over. Mr Justice Wilkie instructed the jury to withdraw to continue its consideration of the case of Rachel Cowles. Indeed, later that afternoon, he was to send them home for a second night, as they had failed to reach a verdict – although he had by then instructed them that they could return with a majority verdict of ten to one.

  The case might still be alive for the judge and jury, but it was over as far the media and the defendant were concerned. Bellfield refused to return to the dock from his cells at the end of the day. The reality was clear enough as far as he was concerned – he would be taking no further part in the trial, not even when it came to sentencing.

  Outside the court it was also only too clear that the trial was over. No sooner had the guilty verdicts been announced in Milly Dowler’s case than a tsunami of publicity swept across the media, completely drowning the court’s scrupulously careful consideration of the case. Every television and radio news bulletin carried the details of the verdict within moments of the jury’s decision, and within an hour the networks were playing their carefully prepared background pieces on the worst aspects of Bellfield’s truly appalling character.

  Two witnesses from the case even went into graphic detail about their time with the man in the dock. Emma Mills told Sky News: ‘He had been raping me for a few years. There was this particular night it was so bad that I thought he was going to kill me.’ Johanna Collings, meanwhile, told ITV news: ‘Once I ironed his trousers wrong for work and he went absolutely off his head. He beat me. He was biting, kicking, punching – everything.’ Their statements went far further than anything they had been allowed to say in open court – had they done so there it would have unduly influenced the jury.