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

  On this particular damp March afternoon she has caught the 15.26 train from Weybridge, but decides to stop off at Walton-on-Thames station with a group of friends for chips in the station café. It will mean she’ll have to walk the 800 yards or so home, rather than staying on the train to her own station, but she doesn’t mind a bit. It’s not something she does very often, but it is perfectly normal, and Milly doesn’t give it a second thought.

  She’s wearing the familiar dark-blue blazer and grey skirt that make up her school uniform, though she’s taken her pullover off because the drizzly rain has made it feel a bit warmer than she expected when she set off for school that morning.

  Not long after 3.45 Milly borrows one of her friends’ mobile phones to call her father to tell him she’ll be home in about fifteen minutes. She then stays just a little longer than she plans to, but at about five minutes past four she sets off to walk home down Station Road. A few minutes later, at 4.08, she passes a bus stop, where one of her school friends is waiting. The girls acknowledge one another, and Milly continues her walk down Station Road, past the Bird’s Eye factory.

  Once again, it’s a perfectly ordinary day in a respectable suburb of south-west London. Mothers are bringing their children back from school; businessmen are coming home a little early after meetings in the City; the television in the pub opposite the station is showing a repeat of a football match; and the taxi firm which works out of the station building is busy, with cars parked outside waiting for work.

  But, as Milly’s friend turns to get on to a single-decker blue bus to take her home, the fresh-faced thirteen-year-old blonde schoolgirl walking away from her on the opposite side of the road disappears into thin air.

  In the days and weeks that follow Surrey police mount the biggest missing persons’ inquiry in their history – codenamed Operation Ruby – in a desperate attempt to find this home-loving schoolgirl with a winning smile, but they fail, conspicuously. The police find no sign of her Nokia mobile phone – she had run out of credit, which is why she had used a friend’s to call her father – no sign of her dark-blue Marks and Spencer blazer or her short grey skirt, no sign of her clumpy black shoes with their thick high heels, no sign of her blouse or her light blue jumper, no sign of her black-and-white Jansport rucksack or her purse with its Ace of Hearts design. No trace of her whatever.

  What remains of Milly Dowler will not be discovered for six whole months, and even then there is only a skeleton that has to be identified from dental records. There are no clothes, no rucksack, no purse, nothing whatever when she is finally discovered again – except her bones.

  The question that baffles the police, her distressed parents and the rest of the world is simply: why? Who on earth would want to harm a vivacious, well-liked schoolgirl innocently making her way home from school on an ordinary afternoon in suburban Surrey?

  The answer would shock the world.

  The scene changes for the final time, and brings us to the central character in this contemporary tragedy.

  Once again it is dark, but this time we are under the flashing neon lights of a brash nightclub called Royales on Uxbridge High Street, another upright suburb west of London at the end of the Piccadilly and Metropolitan Underground lines and about four miles north of Heathrow airport. Indeed, it’s not all that far from Twickenham and Hampton, providing you have a car.

  It’s a cold February night in 2001, and a crowd of young people are waiting in a line outside to get in to the club. Barring their entry is a vast man – more than 20 stone in weight, a little over 6 feet 1 inch tall, and sporting a gold ear-ring in each ear. His hair is cropped close, which makes it look as though his head is too small for the vast body beneath – as if it’s been added as an afterthought.

  His dark-brown eyes are as dead and cold as a landed trout’s, but there’s a glacial smirk on his face as he eyes the young women dressed in the shortest of skirts and skimpiest of tops shivering in front of him. For the bouncer knows full well that most of the girls waiting to get into the club just round the corner from the RAF base at Uxbridge are there to meet a man – if not for life then certainly for the night. This certainly isn’t Mahiki in London’s Mayfair, haunt of young royals and the offspring of the super-rich. This is a local nightclub which trades on being local, and non-judgemental. The boys are dressed in Ben Sherman shirts to match the girl’s Primark dresses. It may not be every parent’s dream, but it’s a place where girls go to dance, meet boys and let their hair down. Drugs may be available, and fights can break out from time to time, but it’s the prospect of sex that draws the crowd. ‘Any muppet can pull there,’ one regular told a local website not long ago. ‘It’s got sticky carpet, smells of cheesy feet, and you’re guaranteed to get three fights a night, especially if any of the boys in uniform are in.’ The truth is that there is always the scent of imminent sex in the air, and the doorman knows it. In fact he relishes it. To the muscular man on the door, Royales is paradise.

  ‘You’re all here to get laid,’ he tells the girls in the queue in front of him, his high-pitched voice with its London accent squeaking in the night air. ‘You should give me a try,’ he murmurs. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’

  The girls standing in front of him in their low-cut tops and scanty dresses giggle on cue. As they do so the doorman’s eyes gleam like an urban fox’s caught in the headlights of a car.

  The doorman’s name is Levi Bellfield, a thirty-three-year-old who has spent his life in west London and who is known to almost every girl in front of him as a ‘bit of a Jack the Lad’. Rumour has it in the queue in front of Royales that he’s also been known to provide drugs for anyone who might be interested, be it a tablet or two of ecstasy, cannabis – always known in the club as ‘puff’ – or even cocaine. Those are only rumours. What is not in doubt is Bellfield’s appetite for sex. ‘He used to hit on some girl every single night,’ one of his conquests from the queue explained later. ‘I used to watch him. They were young girls, some of them probably fifteen, sixteen. There used to be a room at the top of Royales, and he used to boast about it. There was a grotty sofa in this room, and he used to take them all up there.’

  Not that his reputation put her off. She became one of his many sexual partners after encountering him in the queue, just like the other girls she saw being ushered upstairs to the room with its grubby sofa.

  But the doorman with the easy line in chat and the lascivious grin doesn’t restrict his sexual appetite to young women he encounters outside the nightclub. Even though he’s living with his partner and their two children, Levi Bellfield uses a number of cars to trawl the neighbourhood at night, looking for possible targets for his sexual appetites: willing young women whom he would later describe as ‘slags that were begging for it’.

  One of his vehicles is a white Toyota Previa people-carrier that he calls his ‘shagging wagon’, equipped with blacked-out windows, purple neon lights, a mattress with an orange quilt and – perhaps most significantly of all – handcuffs. In this car Bellfield tours the streets of Hounslow and Hillingdon, West Drayton and Twickenham, Isleworth and Feltham, searching out young women alone at bus stops, or catching a glimpse of them alone on the bus on their way home, intent on stopping them to engage them in a suggestive conversation that might persuade them to join him in his shagging wagon.

  To this day no one can say for certain how many girls actually did so, for most of them can’t even remember the experience. The reason is clear enough, this giant, pasty-faced man would offer them a can of Red Bull or a Malibu, ‘just to get us started’, and before they knew it the effects of the date-rape drug GHB would render them defenceless. Some would allege later that he would then rape these poor, unknowing girls, many of them under fifteen, and then offer them as sexual favours to his friends, while others would tell stories that he would even dress his prey up as schoolgirls while they were under the influence of his drugs for the amusement of his mates. But no one ever proved it.

 
What is not in doubt is that Levi Bellfield was capable of horrific violence towards the young women he stalked at bus stops across west London. Indeed, the police became convinced that he had murdered both Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, and may even have abducted and killed the Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler. That is why in the early hours of a November morning in 2004 officers from a Metropolitan Police murder squad arrived at his front door to arrest him on suspicion of the murder of Amélie. It was then that the central character in the tragedy of the lives of these young women took centre stage.

  But to understand why we need to travel to a tiny brick built house on the edge of London: the home of Levi Bellfield.

  1. Arrest on the Attic Stage

  ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’

  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  Little Benty is a tiny, nondescript cul-de-sac of houses in the shadow of the M4 motorway as it passes London’s Heathrow airport, a row of brick-built semi-detacheds, with cramped gardens, and a set of garages hidden around the corner. If you are driving east into London, with the airport on your right and just before the spur that takes you to three of the main terminals, you simply wouldn’t spot it. It’s hidden behind a lush green wedge of trees and overgrown bushes. Negotiating your way there, if you don’t know the area, takes concentration and a good map. It seems to exist in the midst of a maze of identical roads on a housing estate that even the locals admit that they find confusing. Even when you find it, you notice that means of escape are everywhere. There’s a pedestrian bridge over the motorway right in front of the houses, and a set of lanes to each side that lead in every direction. If you were to choose a place to conceal yourself, Little Benty would be an excellent option. It’s a fox’s lair – concealed and yet still accessible to the world.

  Life in the small group of squat villas that make up Little Benty is all but drowned by the incessant roar of the motorway that sweeps past them twenty-four hours a day, leaving it a downtrodden, unhappy-looking street, a place of broken dreams and rusted cars, with back gardens submerged in old sinks, broken flower pots and cracked glass.

  It is here in the early morning hours of Monday, 22 November 2004 that we find Levi Bellfield, the by now thirty-six-year-old muscle-bound nightclub doorman, asleep in a small double bed alongside his current partner, Emma Jane Mills, in the upstairs front room of their cramped three-bedroom house at number 11. The couple’s three children, Lucy, who is almost seven, William, five, and baby Georgina, who is just four months, are asleep in the two other bedrooms.

  On the surface it is a commonplace scene – a man, his partner and their children, asleep in their home at 3.30 in the morning of a perfectly ordinary night not long before Christmas. But Levi Bellfield is no ordinary man, and this will not turn out to be an ordinary night.

  Three miles away in a grey, steel Portakabin in the yard of Hounslow police station more than eighty officers from a double-sized murder squad are being briefed by the senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, in the hunt for the murderer of Amélie Delagrange. They are about to launch a series of raids in search of the occupant of 11, Little Benty.

  The officers are being told by Sutton, a bluff, smart north Londoner, that the Metropolitan Police’s expert surveillance teams – who have been tracking Bellfield’s movements night and day for the past twelve days – have identified seven houses and flats across west London where he could be staying that night, but they are pretty convinced that he is actually at Little Benty. That was where the surveillance team had ‘put him to bed’ just a few hours before.

  The teams can’t be too careful, however, and so they are going to raid all seven addresses simultaneously, just in case Bellfield has slipped away from Little Benty in the early hours of the morning without the surveillance team noticing. There are, after all, as Sutton explains, ‘an awful lot of ways out of Little Benty’.

  A mild-looking man in his mid forties with thinning hair and a confident manner, Sutton explains that he wants his seven teams of twelve officers to go to all the addresses to be absolutely sure of getting their man. But he’s also decided that the arrest does not demand the presence of armed officers.

  ‘We don’t believe he is a danger to the arresting officers,’ he tells his squad, ‘but you should be careful.’

  Sutton became the SIO in charge of the double squad only in the wake of Amélie’s murder in August, but after hours of painstaking police work he is absolutely convinced that there is a good reason to believe that Bellfield is the killer.

  ‘It wasn’t forensic evidence,’ he explains later. ‘We didn’t have any DNA, or the stuff that makes television shows like CSI. We just had masses of CCTV images of Amélie walking up Hampton Road from the bus stop and pictures of this small white van that always seemed to be there.’

  It was that white Ford Courier van and the knowledge that it was almost certainly being driven along Hampton Road, and then parked beside Twickenham Green, on the evening of Amélie’s death, that persuaded Sutton to organize the surveillance of Bellfield. For it was Levi Bellfield who owned the van and drove it regularly around London as part of the wheel-clamping business that he had started as a sideline to his job as a nightclub bouncer.

  After months of detailed work, Sutton’s squad had tracked down more than 128,000 white Ford Courier vans, like the one that the CCTV images from the buses travelling past Amélie showed, until they had found that the one in question was almost certainly being driven by Bellfield on that warm August evening earlier that year.

  That white Ford Courier van, with the number plate of P610 XCN, was distinctive in many ways. There was its ‘sporty’ wheel trim, the fact that it appeared to have once had a ‘beacon’ light on its roof – suggesting it may have been used at an airport – and the fact that its distinctive blacked-out rear windows had a small gap at the top which meant someone inside could peer out without being seen. The assembled CCTV footage also revealed that it was being driven that evening by a large, round-faced man who sat forward over the steering wheel in an unusual posture, a man who bore a striking resemblance to their target in the early hours of that Monday morning in November.

  DCI Sutton didn’t believe Bellfield knew that he had been followed for the past twelve days. He had every faith in the expertise of his surveillance teams – which usually consisted of five cars containing two plain-clothed detectives and one officer on a motorcycle.

  The surveillance had given the officers on Sutton’s squad an insight into the character of the man they were targeting that morning. They had watched Bellfield driving around west London after dark, looking for very young girls. On one occasion he had stopped at a bus stop and talked to two schoolgirls waiting for the bus on the way home. On seeing this, the surveillance team had decided to split up – one group staying with Bellfield and another tracking the two girls – to discover what their target had been saying to them. When the girls got off their bus they were interviewed by members of the surveillance team. The two girls, aged twelve and thirteen, had explained to the team that Bellfield had made a string of sexually suggestive remarks to them.

  ‘I bet you’re both virgins,’ he had had told them with a grin. ‘You certainly look like virgins.’ He had then invited them both to get into his car, so they could ‘go and have a good time’. ‘I bet you’re nice and tight,’ he had added. ‘I like nice tight young girls.’ It was a conversation that had convinced the schoolgirls that the last thing they wanted to do was to get into Bellfield’s car. But when they had refused, he had called them ‘slags’ before driving away.

  The officers reported the conversations to the murder squad and took formal statements from the two teenagers. It only served to heighten the squad’s conviction that they were looking at a particularly unpleasant individual with an unhealthy interest in sex – but they had no idea just how significant that insight was to become.

  At that moment the squad were simply trying to arrest
a man they believed had attacked and killed a young woman without the slightest hint of provocation.

  It was just after 4.30 a.m. when the seven teams of detectives climbed into their cars and vans and left Hounslow police station for the addresses that Bellfield was known to use across west London. They had been carefully instructed to wait for a clear signal from Sutton to go into the houses – he wanted each team to burst in at exactly the same time, 5 o’clock that morning. The SIO himself went with the team to Little Benty.

  And so, in the dark hours before dawn, Sutton’s team of cars pulled up silently in front of Bellfield’s cramped little house. For a moment it seemed as though every officer was holding his breath, until, on the single command of ‘Go’, they leaped out and rushed at the frail front door with a ram that could break it down in a matter of seconds.

  Uniformed officers wearing stab-proof vests and blue helmets with their identification numbers painted in yellow swarmed into the house’s narrow hallway, shouting ‘Police’ at the top of their voices. One group pushed into the sitting room on the left, while another rushed up the stairs in search of the 20-stone nightclub bouncer with a high-pitched voice.

  Inevitably, the officers’ shouts woke the children, and baby Georgina started crying as they poured into the house. Her mother scooped her youngest up in her arms and appeared at the top of the stairs to ask, ‘What on earth is going on?’ She then rushed to look after her other two children, who had begun to shout in fear as the officers went from room to room in search of Bellfield, while Emma held her four-month-old in her arms.

  ‘Where is he?’ DCI Sutton asked Emma Mills.

  ‘Who?’ the twenty-seven-year-old brunette with a pale open face replied angrily.

  ‘You know who – Levi Bellfield.’