The Bus Stop Killer: Milly Dowler, Her Murder and the Full Story of the Sadistic Serial Killer Levi Bellfield
Page 28
So why did Milly cross Station Avenue, as she clearly did, and fall into the hands of Bellfield just yards from the front door of his flat? Did she cross the road in the hope that she might get a lift with her mother and sister, who would be driving back home at about that time, as the prosecution suggested? Or was she lured across the road by a trick? No one can be sure. But I believe that Bellfield may have enticed her across with an excuse. He may have waved at her, silently, appearing to need her to help him do something – say by tending to a sick animal he happened to appear to have in his arms. A trick would be typical of him.
The words of Sally Dowler during the trial stick in my mind: Milly was a ‘polite’ girl, she said in her evidence, and she was clearly one who would not have seen the danger in going across the road to help an apparently rather unthreatening man. Walking back from the station on a sunny afternoon, after chatting with her friends in the Travellers’ café, her mind would certainly not have been set to red alert for danger. Milly was probably thinking about her school report, and the boys she was going to meet at the gig she was looking forward to the following evening.
Milly crossing Station Avenue at the very moment when the CCTV cameras couldn’t see her was pure ill luck. Had her fellow Heathside pupil Katherine Laynes been on the other side of the bus stop, who is to say that she might not have fallen victim to Bellfield’s subterfuge in place of Milly? Or what about April Kent, the Rydens’ schoolgirl who had walked down Station Avenue in search of her brother and then set off back up the road again away from the bus stop? Had she been there moments earlier, is there not a chance that she might have replaced Milly as Bellfield’s victim?
The tragic reality – in the words of Mr Justice Wilkie – is that Milly ‘was at the wrong place at the wrong time and became a target of the unreasoning hatred’ of a man whose loathing for women – and sexual abuse of them – had grown like an evil canker in his soul throughout the previous thirty-three years of his life.
I do not wish to speculate on the terrible fate that befell Milly once Bellfield had clapped his hand over her mouth and dragged her behind the hedges in Collingwood Place. Suffice to say she was bitterly unlucky that not a single soul saw the abduction.
Only one person can tell us how Milly came to meet her death – and that man is Levi Bellfield, and I am as certain as I can possibly be that he will never reveal the details, just as the Moors Murderer Ian Brady has never revealed the whereabouts of the body of Keith Bennett. Like Brady, Bellfield will take his secret to his grave.
If there is the slightest scrap of comfort in the story of Milly’s abduction and murder it is that she did not suffer for long. She was not kept prisoner in a rat-infested sewer drain for weeks, for example, as seventeen-year-old Lesley Whittle was in 1975 by Donald Neilson, the man later to be called the Black Panther. Thankfully, if one can be thankful about such a tragedy, Milly was almost certainly dead by the time the Bird’s Eye CCTV cameras spotted Bellfield’s red Daewoo Nexia pulling out of Copenhagen Way at 4.32 that afternoon, barely twenty-two minutes or so after she disappeared. What happened during those minutes does not bear thinking about. On the evidence of the pathologist, it seems certain that Bellfield either strangled or suffocated the poor, terrified girl in the most despicable circumstance.
What did Bellfield do next? He almost certainly drove over to see his mother Jean, for his mobile phone was certainly in her vicinity at 4.48, and where else could possibly represent a better ‘place of safety’ than the home of the woman who had indulged his every whim?
If the prosecution’s mobile phone expert was right, he then stayed at his mother’s house for at least fifty minutes – but we have never heard a word from either Bellfield or his mother about what they might have talked about. Perhaps the travellers’ code of ‘Omerta’ – preserving their secrets from outsiders – prevents it. This is, after all, man who signed himself ‘Fat Gypsy Boy’ in letters from Wakefield Prison and boasted that he hated the police, whom he called by the gypsy name of the ‘gavvers’ – though that didn’t prevent him from sometimes acting as a police informant when it suited him.
What is not in doubt is that, later that evening, Bellfield went back to stay with his partner, Emma Mills, and their two children, before getting up at ‘between three and four’ the following morning to go back to Collingwood Place. The only logical explanation for that decision is that he went there to dispose of Milly’s body – and he did so after disposing of her clothes and her possessions.
But even then his brazen, psychopathic brutality knew no bounds, for Bellfield left her naked body to rot in the open air in Yateley Heath Wood, 25 miles away from her home with nothing whatever to protect her from the elements, or the animals that roamed the woods. It was an act of unimaginable cruelty. Amidst all the brouhaha surrounding Levi Bellfield’s crimes, and his trial for the abduction and murder of Milly Dowler, no one should forget for one moment that she was the only one of his victims who was humiliated and degraded in this desperate, ugly way.
It is her memory that we should never forget – an innocent, cheerful schoolgirl whose life was destroyed without a moment’s hesitation and whose body was disposed of without a trace of humanity by a man who thoroughly deserves to be called a monster. As Mr Justice Wilkie put it: ‘Milly’s memory will survive and be cherished long after he is forgotten.’ Let us pray that is the case.
Afterword
No one embarks on the biography of a serial killer without a lump in their throat and a sinking feeling in their heart, and I certainly had both when I began this book. Perhaps I should have known better, having been the official biographer of Frederick West in 1996, but that was a long time ago, and I had forgotten how much pain a work like this involves. But I was determined to capture in print the true nature of a most unusual serial killer – a man who may be sexually depraved, but has never been convicted of a sexual offence, and yet is also a man who kills totally at random with no apparent sexual motive, beyond a generalized rage at women. It is a psychological complexity that makes Bellfield very rare indeed, as does his ability to conceal the evil in his soul by charming woman after woman to have sex with him and bear his children. Monster though he undoubtedly is, his charm is not to be ignored – how else can you explain his eleven children by five partners, three of whom stayed with him in spite of the most dreadful sexual humiliation? I hope I have managed to convey that very particular, and sinister, quality.
This book could not have been written without the help and encouragement of a very large number of people, many of whom I prefer to thank privately rather than in public, though I must say at once that it would have been all but impossible without the support of the now retired Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who led the hunt for the murderer of Amélie Delagrange, and other senior officers at the Metropolitan Police. I would also like to pay tribute to the Crown Prosecution Service and the officers of Surrey Police for their politeness. They left me alone to work, but I did not rely on their help.
I would particularly like to thank my editor, Daniel Bunyard of Michael Joseph, who believed in this project as much as I did and without whom I could not have finished it, as well as his team, including Tamsin English, the copy editor David Watson and the editorial manager Samantha Mackintosh. I should also pay tribute to the many men, and women, who shared the press benches with me during Bellfield’s trial, especially John McShane and Paddy Cooper. I also owe a great debt to my friends – including barrister William Clegg QC and Joshua Rozenberg – for their advice, although they should certainly not be held responsible for my conclusions, as those are mine alone.
Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Brian Altman QC and Jeffrey Samuels QC – and both their prosecution and defence teams – for their forbearance. I could not be more grateful. It is an unenviable task to prosecute or defend a murderer, but to criticize them for doing it to the best of their ability is grossly unfair. In our adversarial system of justice we are lucky to ha
ve such talented practitioners of their craft. Both men conducted themselves with immense restraint and dignity – in spite of what has been said about them in the press afterwards – during the most difficult days of the trial of Levi Bellfield, a man whose name is now destined, quite rightly, to live for ever in the annals of criminal infamy.
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First published 2011
Copyright © Geoffrey Wansell, 2011
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Levi Bellfield image courtesy of Press Association Images
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196819-3