Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  In the early hours of Friday 28 May 2004, Bellfield attacked again, although this time his victim survived, if only just. Kate Sheedy was exactly his type – a slim, eighteen-year-old schoolgirl with blonde hair, who was five feet four inches tall and weighed just over seven and a half stone.

  Kate and her friends had been out celebrating their last official day at school at two local pubs. She was a bright student and with just A level examinations left for her to complete before going up to University later that year, there was no doubt that she was going to do well. Kate left her friends at about midnight to catch the Number H22 bus home to Worton Road, Isleworth, where she lived with her mother and sister. At her stop Kate got off – she was the only passenger to do so – and walked towards her home, but as she did so she noticed a white people carrier with blacked-out windows parked about fifty yards ahead of her on her side of the road with its engine running but without its lights on. She was a streetwise girl, and so decided not to walk past what she later described as this ‘dodgy’ van and crossed to the other side of the road to avoid it. It was a decision that would change her life.

  As Kate crossed the road the people carrier suddenly switched its lights on and started revving its engine. She thought it was about to drive off when, without any warning, it did a U turn and drove straight towards her. She screamed and made an effort to reach the pavement opposite, but was hit before she could get there. It knocked her down and drove over her, then stopped and quite deliberately reversed back over her prostrate body. There was no reason for the attack, it was the work of someone with scant regard for human life.

  In spite of severe injuries, Kate was sensible enough to call an ambulance. Her first words to the control centre summed up the attack succinctly. ‘He ran over me twice,’ she said, her voice cracking under the pain. ‘The car stopped and checked me out … I thought he was dodgy … I thought he was going to take me in his car but … when he saw that I knew it was dodgy he just ran over me.’

  Kate was taken to the nearby West Middlesex Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a collapsed lung and a broken collarbone. More worryingly, however, she was also found to have serious internal damage to her abdomen and liver and was quickly transferred to the liver intensive care unit at King’s College Hospital in London. She was not well enough to be released altogether until 21 June – a full three weeks after the attack. In the months that followed she was to undergo still further treatment. Her injuries left her with a large scar on her lower back, which caused her constant pain, a right collarbone that was so out of alignment that it formed an unsightly lump on her chest, and what one consultant called ‘severe and lasting psychological effects’.

  One of Bellfield’s partners, Jo Collings, later described Bellfield’s attitude to the girls at Kate’s school. ‘Throughout the time I was seeing Levi,’ she said, ‘he would leer at the schoolgirls from Gumley Convent School. When he would see the girls walking along in their uniform he made comments like, “Dirty little whores, they’re begging for it.”’

  Just four months after the attack on Kate Sheedy, Bellfield struck yet again. Shortly after 10.05 pm on Thursday 19 August 2004, he stalked a twenty-two-year-old French woman named Amelie Delagrange as she got off an R267 double-decker bus from Twickenham, where she had been out with friends. After the bus stopped just outside the Fulwell Bus Garage on the Hampton Road, it was about fifteen minutes’ walk to the house she was lodging in. Once again, Amelie was Bellfield’s type – five feet four in height, nine stone in weight, with collar-length blonde hair.

  As Amelie walked along Hampton Road towards Twickenham Green, Bellfield silently followed her in his car. By the time Amelie reached the south-western tip of Twickenham Green, Bellfield had parked and was waiting for her.

  Shortly after 10.15 he followed her on to the dark Green – which she had to cross to reach her home – and hit her over the head several times with a blunt object, leaving her fighting for her life. When the paramedics reached her at 10.31 pm there was little they could do, and she was pronounced dead in hospital a little over an hour and a half later.

  It was to be another three months before Bellfield was finally arrested and charged with the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. He was only caught as the result of painstaking police work conducted by Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton and his Metropolitan Police double-sized murder squad. Crucially, the police had scrupulously examined video recordings from the buses used by all three young women on the nights of their attacks and had identified a particular car and van in each that they traced back to Bellfield.

  Those video recordings, together with the police’s tracking of his own and his victims’ mobile phones, eventually put Bellfield in the dock of the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey – but not for almost three years. After his original arrest in November 2004, he was bailed but not formally charged until March 2006, while the case against him was being prepared. His trial did not begin until 2 October 2007, and was to last almost four months, as Bellfield protested his innocence throughout. Indeed, giving evidence in his own defence, he told the jury, ‘No airs and graces. This is me. I’m not trying to fool anyone. I’m not an angel. I’m not claiming to be an angel. But I’m not a killer. No way.’

  The jury did not believe him. On 25 February 2008 he was found guilty by a majority verdict of the murder of Marsha McDonnell and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. Outside the court Kate told reporters that she could not bear even to speak his name. ‘Naming him is making him a person, giving him that luxury and somehow making him more human, which he doesn’t deserve. In my mind he has just been this thing, an unknown entity – not a person.’

  The following day Bellfield was also found guilty – this time by a unanimous verdict – of killing Amelie Delagrange. Sentencing him for the three offences, Mrs Justice Rafferty explained that he would serve a full life term of imprisonment.

  He was so disinterested that he refused to come into the court from his cells to hear her.

  On that same day Surrey police announced that they were ‘very interested’ in questioning Bellfield about the abduction and murder of thirteen-year-old Surrey schoolgirl Amanda Dowler, who was always known as Milly, and had disappeared on her way home from school on the damp, grey Thursday afternoon of 21 March 2002, almost a year before Bellfield’s attack on Marsha McDonnell.

  Shortly after 4.00 on that afternoon Milly had left her friends at Walton-on-Thames railway station to walk the half a mile or so back to her parents’ home in Hersham, not far from Twickenham and Hampton. She was wearing the dark-blue blazer and grey skirt of her school uniform, but had taken off her pullover because the drizzly rain had made it feel a little warm. At about 4.08 pm she passed a bus stop on Station Road, where one of her friends was waiting, but just a few moments later Milly disappeared into thin air. This bright, blonde girl, with a ready smile and who played the saxophone was never to be seen alive again.

  Though no one knew it at the time, behind that bus stop on Station Road, Bellfield had rented a flat that he had been staying in with his then partner, Emma Mills and their two children – though the family were actually ‘house-sitting’ for a friend nearby that week and were not in the flat. In the days and weeks that followed, Surrey Police mounted one of the biggest missing persons’ inquiries in their history, but to no avail. There was simply no trace of Milly anywhere – and what closed circuit television pictures there were of the area remain inconclusive, although there was a sighting of a red Daewoo Nexia car leaving the area about t
wenty minutes after the teenager vanished.

  It was not until Wednesday 18 September 2002 – almost six months after Milly’s disappearance – that a skull and some small bones were found not far from a little-used pathway in a wooded area on Yateley Heath near Fleet in Hampshire, some twenty-five miles from Walton-on-Thames. The following day the police discovered other bones, which were eventually identified as belonging to Milly Dowler. The missing persons’ inquiry turned into a murder hunt – but the Surrey police were still baffled.

  It was not until after Bellfield’s conviction for the two murders and an attempted murder in February 2008 that he began to emerge as the prime suspect. The fact that he had a flat very near where she disappeared, that he had ‘gone missing all day’ on the very day that she vanished, that he had climbed out of bed in the middle of the night to go back to the flat and had cleared out the entire bedroom when he and his partner went back there the following day, all pointed to the fact that Bellfield could have been Milly’s killer. In September 2009, Surrey Police presented their evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service, but it was not until 30 March 2010 that Bellfield was finally charged with the murder of Milly Dowler – at which point, of course, he was in Wakefield Prison, two years into his whole life term.

  Just before noon on Friday 6 May 2011, Levi Bellfield got to his feet in the armoured-glass-fronted dock of Court Eight of the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey to face the charge that he had murdered Milly Dowler nine years earlier. The judge was Mr Justice Wilkie, and I sat there in court as he replied to the formal question, ‘How do you plead?’ in the softest possible voice, ‘Not guilty’. He looked for all the world as though butter would not melt in his mouth, so respectful was his attitude, so gentle was his manner. But that concealed the very much more dangerous man beneath. Wearing a grey suit, white shirt and quiet striped tie he could hardly have looked less belligerent.

  Throughout the seven weeks of his trial for the murder, Bellfield took elaborate pains to present himself to the jury as a gentle man who could not possibly have committed such a depraved murder. But the moment the jury left the court he would revert to type, swearing loudly at his counsel for not obeying his orders, complaining about his poor treatment by the prison service, trying to intimidate the witnesses – particularly the young women who had lived with him – from giving their evidence against him without looking him in the eye.

  As DCI Colin Sutton of the Metropolitan Police said of him, ‘When we started dealing with him he came across as very jokey, like he’s your best mate. But he’s a cunning individual, violent. He can switch from being nice to being nasty, instantly.’ Bellfield also sensed how to take his personal revenge on his accusers. In the case of Milly Dowler that revenge was played out in the windowless courtroom eight at the Old Bailey.

  Bellfield’s defence counsel, Jeffrey Samuels QC, cross-examined Milly’s parents, Bob and Sally Dowler, in great detail about intimate family details – and even suggested that she may have committed suicide. It was a desperate ordeal to watch as the Dowlers suffered a humiliation in court that almost rivalled the terrible loss of their daughter – and one that had been orchestrated by the twenty-stone man sitting in the dock looking utterly unmoved across the court from them.

  The ploy failed, not least because Bellfield refused to give evidence in his own defence. He had done so at his earlier murder trial and had been savaged by the prosecuting counsel, Brian Altman QC, who was now prosecuting him for the second time. In his closing remarks to the jury in this second trial Altman drew the jury’s particular attention to Bellfield’s decision not to take to the witness stand and give evidence on oath.

  It took the jury less than two days to convict him. Yet not once had this devious, violent man expressed even one word of remorse for any of his appalling crimes: nor had he ever described what really happened in the small flat he owned at 24 Collingwood Place, just behind the bus stop on Station Road in Walton-on-Thames on that March afternoon in 2002.

  Outside the court, Sally Dowler said bitterly, ‘We have felt that our family who have already suffered so much has been on trial as much as Mr Bellfield. I hope while he is in prison, he is treated with the same brutality he dealt out to his victims and that his life is a living hell.’ There is no doubt that she was expressing the opinions felt by millions of people who had seen the details of the trial reported day after day in the media.

  Like the Moors Murderer Ian Brady, Bellfield now stands confirmed as one of the most ruthless serial killers in British legal history. He has become infamous, because of the terrible nature of his crimes. When I was writing my biography of him, which was published after the Dowler trial was completed, Bellfield asked me from the dock one day to ‘make sure it is a fair and accurate account’ – they were the words of a man who wanted to be remembered.

  What makes Levi Bellfield particularly significant for me is that he proves beyond most reasonable doubt that the possibility of a whole life term of imprisonment is of no deterrent when it comes to a psychopathic personality like his. Indeed I doubt strongly that it has any deterrent value to anyone intent on murder. Throughout his two trials, Bellfield (or Yusuf Rahim as he is now called, since his conversion to Islam three months after his return to Wakefield, following his second whole-life sentence) continually protested his innocence, no matter how convincing the evidence against him may have been, remaining trapped in a world in which he can portray himself on one hand as an eternal victim, wronged by society, while on the other he can bask in the notoriety that his disgusting crimes bring him. In either event, the idea of spending his life behind bars was no deterrent at all.

  16

  Killing for Profit and Pleasure

  John Childs, Paul Glen, Kenneth Regan and William Horncy

  There is another group of men serving whole life sentences who also clearly disregarded the deterrent effect of spending the rest of their life behind bars – killers who murder for money.

  These men may be psychopaths, or suffering from overwhelming personality disorders, but they are nonetheless cold-blooded killers who are prepared to take a life for a price, regardless of the consequences. Their personalities may mean they enjoy the killing, but their other motive is financial greed. Some of this group might be called ‘hit men’ – in that they offered themselves as killers for hire – while others are armed robbers who are prepared to use lethal force in pursuit of personal profit. What unites both groups, however, is their utter lack of conscience or remorse over what they do and its consequences.

  Let us begin by examining what I believe is the most ruthless group of all – men who kill to order.

  The most prolific contract killer in British police history is John Childs, also known as Bruce Childs, who is now aged seventy-six and has spent the past thirty-seven years behind bars for a series of six contract killings carried out between November 1974 and October 1979. One of Childs’ victims was a ten-year-old boy, and none of his victims’ bodies have ever been found; neither have the murder weapons.

  Yet this is a man whom friends and neighbours described as ‘very fond’ of his family and who seemed to many of them a ‘perfectly nice person’. Indeed, one visitor who went to see him after his imprisonment memorably described him as having a ‘ready smile and a warm handshake’.

  Spare in stature, with watery blue eyes and pale skin, Childs was born in the East End of London in 1939 and brought up in Bow during the war. As a teenager he joined one of the local gangs in the mid-1950s, before joining the Army as an engineer. He was discharged after nine months for
committing a burglary – but his brief military career gave him a lifelong interest in both weapons and books about war.

  On his return to civilian life, Childs sustained himself as a petty criminal during the 1960s, and was jailed at one point for stealing a series of motorcycles. But what set Childs apart from his fellow minor criminals was his utter lack of conscience. This made him an attractive accomplice to one of the East End hard men of the day, Harry Mackenney, always known as ‘Big H’ because of his six-foot-five inch stature, and his associate, Essex-based businessman Terry Pinfold.

  The three men embarked on a string of armed robberies in the 1970s, which eventually resulted in Childs’ arrest in September 1978 for his part in a £500,000 security van robbery in Hertfordshire. After his arrest, Childs confessed that they had not only been in the business of armed robbery, but also of murder – alleging that they had actually killed six people in the previous four years.

  Their victims, according to Childs, were haulage contractor George Brett and his ten-year-old son Terry, nursing-home owner Fred Sherwood, roofing contractor Ronald Andrews, ex-prisoner Robert Brown and teddy-bear manufacturer Terry Eve.

  Childs told the police that he had been hired to kill all six by Mackenney and Pinfold and that his price per ‘hit’ had usually been £2,000. He also insisted that the bodies would never be found, later suggesting that he had put them through a meat grinder in his living room before burning the remains in the fireplace of his flat in Bow.

  After his confession Childs was charged with all six murders, as all the victims he had named were registered as missing persons, and on 4 December 1979 he pleaded guilty to all six counts of murder. At the Central Criminal Court Mr Justice Lawson then sentenced him to six terms of life imprisonment – but the crimes were not revealed in detail. That would not happen until almost a year later when Childs would give evidence against his ‘employers’ Mackenney and Pinfold in their trial for murder. In the period between his first trial and the second, Childs was kept in solitary confinement for his own protection.