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

  The Bus Stop Killer

  Brought to you by KeVkRaY

  GEOFFREY WANSELL

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue: Death’s Shadow

  1 Arrest on the Attic Stage

  2 Innumerable Questions

  3 Twilight Citizens

  4 A Dark World of Abuse

  5 The Master and His Slaves

  6 The Alleyway Stalker

  7 Sex and Drugs

  8 Sultan of Sex

  9 Vanished into Darkness

  10 Keeping Up Appearances

  11 Mr Treacle

  12 Into the Abyss

  13 The Killing Ground

  14 The Noose Tightens

  15 Trial by Jury

  16 The Reckoning Begins

  17 The Dowlers on Trial

  18 Witness for the Prosecution

  19 End Game

  Epilogue: Milly’s Memory

  Afterword

  For Tom and Veronica, Leaf, Michael and Andrew who believed in me

  Illustrations

  Bus stop killer Levi Bellfield (Rex Features)

  Bellfield with two of his children (Rex Features)

  The road where Bellfield lived (Harry Page/Rex Features)

  Kate Sheedy, who suffered horrific injuries (Cate Gillon/Getty Images)

  The families of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange (Cate Gillon/Getty Images)

  The police handout of nineteen-year-old Marsha McDonnell (Getty Images)

  Marsha getting off the bus (Getty Images)

  The Vauxhall Corsa used in Bellfield’s attack on Marsha McDonnell (Photonews Service Ltd/Rex Features)

  A floral tribute at Marsha’s funeral (Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

  The photo of Amélie Delagrange used by the Metropolitan Police (Getty Images)

  A CCTV grab of Amélie boarding a bus (Getty Images)

  Police search for clues in Twickenham (Graeme Robertson/Getty Images)

  The intense search operation led police to the banks of the River Thames (Graeme Robertson/Getty Images)

  Amélie’s parents, Jean-François and Dominique Delagrange (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

  Amélie’s parents lay floral tributes (Alessandro Abbonizio/Getty Images)

  Milly Dowler had her whole life ahead of her

  Milly got off the train one stop early

  Leaving school the day she was kidnapped

  A nationwide search followed Milly’s disappearance (Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

  It was six months after Milly went missing that her body was found (Barry Phillips/Evening Standard/Rex Features)

  Milly’s father, sister and mother walk behind her coffin (Michael Dunlea/Rex Features)

  A court drawing of Levi Bellfield in the dock (Elizabeth Cook)

  Milly’s father Bob Dowler reads a statement outside the Old Bailey (Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images)

  Prologue: Death’s Shadow

  ‘The soul of a murderer is blind.’

  Albert Camus, The Outsider

  The scene is a warm Thursday evening in August 2004, and dusk is falling gently across the shops and bars of Twickenham’s London Road, just half a mile south of the famous rugby stadium. The bright lights from the pubs and clubs on both sides of the busy street are gradually beginning to illuminate the pavements outside the Waitrose supermarket and the railway station that lie at the heart of this comfortable, leafy west London suburb.

  On the patio outside Crystalz wine bar, just beside the police station, sits an attractive twenty-two-year-old French girl, just 5 feet 4 inches in height, 9 stone in weight, and with collar-length blonde hair, who is drinking a glass of white wine with three of her girlfriends. Her name is Amélie Delagrange, and she’s wearing white linen trousers, a low-cut red vest and a white cardigan. There is a broad smile on Amélie’s face, for she’s enjoying being back in London after some time in France and working in a café and patisserie in the eminently respectable middle-class suburb of nearby Richmond. The group of girls are laughing and telling each other how this part of west London is a ‘very safe’ place to live.

  What they do not know, however, is that it is to prove exactly the opposite for this vivacious, charming young French girl – for within an hour she will be killed by a complete stranger.

  Amélie was born on the outskirts of Paris in February 1982. Her parents, Jean-François and Dominique, named her after her grandmother. Amélie’s father was an architect who had built the family a house in the Picardy countryside in northern France when she was a girl, where she had been brought her up alongside her elder sister, Virginie. Balanced, enthusiastic and eminently sensible, she had decided to come back to England to improve her English still further and she had even recently found a new boyfriend, Olivier, who worked with her in the patisserie.

  Just after 9.30, with the light finally fading, and a chill starting to make the patio feel a little less welcoming, Amélie Delagrange starts to leave. She throws her handbag over her shoulder, collects the Next carrier bag that she’s brought with her, containing a new top she had bought that day, and gets up. She’s had three, perhaps four, glasses of white wine, she can’t quite remember, and is just a little unsteady on her feet, but that doesn’t worry her for a moment. With a grin she tells one of her French girlfriends, Floriane, that she’s ‘a little bit drunk’, and asks another of the group, Vanessa, if she would mind walking her across the road to the bus stop to wait for the R267 red double-decker that will take her the short distance home to the room that she’s been renting for the past few months in a street just north of Twickenham Green. Her bus duly arrives at 9.39, and from across the street her friends watch her get on and wave goodbye. It is the last time that they will see her alive.

  Amélie’s good mood, helped a little by the white wine, means that she overshoots the right bus stop for her home – perhaps she dozed off for a moment or two – but, undismayed, she gets to her feet to speak to the driver, to check if she has indeed missed it. He tells her she has, but then explains that if she waits for a moment she’ll be at the end of the bus’s route and she can walk the half mile or so back towards Twickenham Green and home.

  Hardly any time has passed – barely five minutes since she waved goodbye to her friends outside Crystalz – when the double-decker’s CCTV security cameras show her getting off outside the Fulwell Bus Garage on Hampton Road. For a moment, she isn’t quite sure which way to go and stops to look at the map on the bus stop to get her bearings. That only takes a moment, and within seconds Amélie starts to walk towards the Green.

  The walk takes Amélie just a quarter of an hour, and lots of people see the young French girl making her way northwards. She passes the Prince of Wales pub, where one drinker sitting alone at the bar notices her looking ‘a little unsteady on her feet’, while a lady parking outside her home sees her checking her route at another bus stop to make sure she’s still going the right way. She is even captured on the in-car video system of a police car that drives past her.

  Finally, just after 10 o’clock on that warm August evening, Amélie crosses Hampton Road and walks on to the south-western tip of the triangular Twickenham Green, which boasts a handsome white cricket pavilion and a cricket pitch, and slips into the dark shadows of the trees that shelter the Green on its edge. There are no cricketers at this time of night, no sounds of white-flannelled players congratulating one another after an evenin
g game as they prepare to walk across to the pub to celebrate or drown sorrows. There is just a cloying darkness – the street lights don’t reach far on to the Green itself. Unconcerned, Amélie walks quickly past the rope that protects the cricket square towards the lights of the shops and wine bars on the far side and home.

  It could hardly be a more English scene: a cricket pavilion surrounded by leafy suburban roads and comfortable middle-class villas on the western outskirts of London. Twickenham doesn’t boast the alleyways and runnels of Dickens’s east London, haunt of Jack the Ripper; nor the red lights of the backstreet terraces of Leeds, where the Ripper’s Yorkshire namesake took his victims. This is affluent, unthreatening, comfortable suburbia. That makes not a jot of difference. Amélie could just as well have been in Whitechapel on those terrible nights in the summer and autumn of 1888 when Jack eviscerated his five victims, because just moments after she starts to walk around the cricket pitch and across the Green a family in a nearby street hear a plaintive scream in the stillness of that evening – ‘a ten-second shout rather than a cry for help’, they remember later.

  Amélie was not alone on Twickenham Green that evening. Men were walking their dogs, stubbing out their cigarettes behind the white cricket sightscreens, hurrying towards the Indian restaurant and the wine bar on the north side to join friends, but no one stopped when that scream went up, no one turned a hair, or called a policeman. No one spotted a threatening man in the shadows, no one saw a hooded figure bent on violence, or a tramp begging for money for food, drink, or drugs. No one saw anything. It was simply an ordinary summer’s evening in west London – and yet into that utterly commonplace setting someone injected a brutal murder.

  Amélie Delagrange never reached the far side of the Green and home. She died, alone, in the shadow of the cricket pavilion, murdered for no apparent reason.

  Shortly after 10.15, with the shadows now deep and dark, student Tristram Beasley-Suffolk was walking across the Green, ‘taking a breath of air from his studies’, when he saw what he thought was some white plastic sheeting lying on the ground on the edge of the cricket square. But as he got closer he realized, to his horror, it was a person.

  Amélie was face-down on the grass with her right arm underneath her and her legs bent up towards her chest in what was almost the foetal position. She was breathing, but only just: she had been hit viciously on the head with a heavy blunt instrument – not once but several times. Tristram did what he could to make her comfortable and ran across the Green to ask the local wine bar to call an ambulance.

  The paramedics arrived at 10.31 and rushed the severely injured young woman to the local west London hospital, but Amélie’s life couldn’t be saved. She was pronounced dead at two minutes after midnight on that same August night, in the first hour of Friday, 20 August 2004.

  Amélie’s handbag and mobile phone weren’t there when she was found, which made it difficult for the first police officers on the scene to identify her – until in the end they did so by calling two mobile numbers they found on a piece of paper in her Next shopping bag, one of which was her boyfriend’s.

  For a moment the police considered that Amélie’s death might have been a mugging that had gone tragically wrong, but within a few hours they realized that this was no robbery. There was no motive for the attack. This pretty, unassuming French girl had no enemies. No scorned lover stalked her every move, no crazed maniac had targeted her, no threats had ever been made towards her. It was that rarest of all modern murders – a blitz attack on a complete stranger by someone who has no relationship whatever with the victim. She had been battered ruthlessly on the head from behind without the slightest warning. It was murder most foul – by someone who killed for pleasure.

  The scene changes, to a chill night in February 2003, just eighteen months earlier. And once again there is a young blonde woman – this time just nineteen years of age – getting off a bus in the leafy west London suburb of Hampton, not far from Twickenham Green.

  Marsha McDonnell is just over 5 feet 5 inches and a little over 9 stone, and she’s working during her gap year between school and university at a gift shop in the Bentall Centre in Kingston. One of four children, she lives with her parents, Philip and Ute, in a neat semi-detached house in Hampton, about five minutes walk from the local railway station.

  It is just after five o’clock on this particular Monday evening, 3 February 2003, and after work Marsha is going to meet two girlfriends in a local bar to discuss what they are going to do that evening. In the end they decide to go a late showing of Steven Spielberg’s new film, Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, which tells the story of con-man Frank Abagnale, Jr, who conned millions’ worth of cheques out of unsuspecting victims before he reached the age of nineteen by posing as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer.

  The movie ends at about 11.45, and Marsha and her friends walk to the bus stops in central Kingston to catch their buses home. Her friends are going in the opposite direction and say goodbye, while Marsha waits for the red double-decker number 111 to take her back to her parents’ house in Priory Road. She is wearing a pair of black trousers, black V-neck top and white trainers underneath a full-length black coat with a hood that has fur trimming, and her shoulder bag is slung over her left shoulder. The bus arrives at 12.07, and Marsha goes to sit at the back of the lower deck. What she doesn’t realize is that this makes her all too visible to anyone who might be passing the bus and surveying the passengers. It’s a dark night, and the bright lights on the double-decker make the eight passengers clear to anyone in the world outside. But Marsha isn’t thinking about that as the number 111 makes its way through the gentle suburbs of west London.

  It’s a short journey, and it’s just seventeen minutes after midnight on that February evening when Marsha gets off at the stop in Percy Road, just round the corner from her parents’ house. She’s made the journey hundreds of times, and she thinks nothing of it as she turns left as she gets off the bus and then right into Priory Road towards her home at number 88.

  But Marsha McDonnell never gets there. Shortly before 12.20 she is attacked without warning outside number 60 Priory Road, barely a hundred yards from her own front door. She is battered repeatedly on the head from behind by a blunt instrument and left for dead on the pavement of this leafy respectable little road, just yards from a local primary school.

  Number 60 is the home of David and Bernadette Fuller, and it was Mr Fuller who called the police at 12.23 that morning after he had been woken up by what he thought was a ‘loud thud’ and the sound of a car door closing. Originally he had got up and looked out of the window to see what had made the noise, but, as he couldn’t see anything, he had climbed back into bed. Moments later, however, Mr Fuller heard what sounded like a ‘long continuous moan’ from outside his house, and when he looked out again from his first-floor bedroom window he saw what he thought was blood on the pavement. Now very worried indeed, he woke up his wife, and they both went outside to investigate.

  The Fullers found Marsha McDonnell lying face-down close to the gate to their front garden in a pool of blood that was seeping from a deep wound in her head. Her right arm was slightly above her head, and her left arm was bent underneath her body, with her shoulder bag caught in the crease of her elbow. Her blue eyes were shut, and she was groaning quietly, but she wasn’t moving.

  David Fuller rushed inside to call an ambulance, and the paramedics arrived in minutes, just after 12.30 on what was now a distinctly cold Tuesday morning in February. But by now Marsha was demonstrating all the symptoms of a severe head injury – her breathing was growing noisier and noisier by the second. The paramedics didn’t delay. They rushed her to the Accident and Emergency department of the nearby Kingston hospital, but – in spite of the doctors’ efforts and intensive care over the next forty hours – Marsha McDonnell died at 4.41 p.m. the following day, Wednesday, 5 February 2003.

  The pathologist later reported that Marsha’s de
ath was the result of no fewer than three heavy impacts to the skull caused by a blunt weapon – possibly a ‘lump’ hammer. The blows almost certainly took her completely by surprise, for there were no defensive wounds on her hands. She had been killed by someone who had hit her over the head three times in quick succession, not allowing her any chance whatever to protect herself.

  Once again it was a blitz attack on an unsuspecting victim by a total stranger. Marsha had no enemies, no angry boyfriend or outraged stalker, no outstanding arguments about anything with anyone at all. She was a well-adjusted happy young woman, with a job she liked and a future she was looking forward to. Marsha wasn’t a drug addict living on the edge of society, prey to other addicts out of their minds on heroin or crack cocaine; she hadn’t even had a drink that evening – no alcohol or drugs were found in her bloodstream. And this was no robbery. She was still clinging to her handbag when David Fuller and his wife found her.

  Like Amélie Delagrange, Marsha was the victim of a brutal, violent motiveless crime, a murder committed by someone who was most definitely killing for pleasure.

  The scene changes for a third time, this time to a busy road outside the railway station in Walton-on-Thames, another leafy area of suburban south-west London, only a few miles from Hampton and Twickenham Green. It is just after 4 o’clock on the sunny afternoon of 21 March 2002, and thirteen-year-old Amanda Dowler, known to her friends as Milly, is walking back from the station to her parents’ home in Hersham about half a mile away. Milly is a bright, vivacious girl, with a cheeky smile, who likes pop concerts and playing the saxophone. Her mother, Sally, teaches at her school, while her father, Bob, is a computer consultant. Milly’s elder sister, Gemma, who is sixteen, goes to the same school as she does, Heathside, in Weybridge. In fact, Milly always goes to school in the morning with her sister and mother, but they like to stay on after the school day, while Milly prefers to get home.