How I nailed the evil- eyed psychopath who killed Milly Dowler
As a TV drama tonight recreates the hunt for one of Britain’s most wicked murderers, a top detective tells the extraordinary story of. . .
SOMETIMES a single moment can define your life and career. Mine came on a sharp autumn night, in the early hours of Monday, November 22, 2004. It was 3am, and around 70 officers from the Metropolitan Police had assembled at the force’s training centre in Hendon.
It wasn’t difficult to motivate them, or make them appreciate the gravity of what we were about to do. This was a moment we had spent months preparing for in painstaking detail: the arrest of Levi Bellfield, a terrifyingly dangerous man suspected of murdering at least two young women in South-West London and attempting to murder more; a man who we would later learn had an appalling catalogue of domestic abuse, including multiple rapes.
But that’s not all. In the process of investigating Bellfield’s offences, we had uncovered crucial evidence that suggested he was also responsible for one of the most shocking crimes this country has ever seen – the abduction and murder of 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler, nearly three years previously.
Today was the day that all of our hard work, since the brutal killing of French waitress Amelie Delagrange three months earlier in August 2004, would become real and our quarry seized.
The plan was to simultaneously execute search warrants across a swathe of West London at the numerous addresses we’d learned were associated with Bellfield. Everyone was in position by 5.10am and, with my heart racing, I pressed the transmit button on the Airwave radio and uttered the classic words, ‘Go, go, go!’
It all came close to unravelling when it appeared Bellfield was not, as our surveillance teams had reported, at his housing association home in Little Benty, by the M4 motorway in West Drayton. But after a fraught couple of hours, Detective Sergeant Norman Griffiths discovered him naked in the loft, hiding under a section of fibreglass insulation blanket between the joists.
It was the first time I’d set eyes on Bellfield in the flesh. He was larger than I had imagined, both taller and fatter, with a huge neck. His hair was shaved at the sides and his eyes were black as coal and devoid of expression.
The overall impression was of a powerful, intimidating man, but this was softened instantly when he spoke in a high-pitched squeak. He was also scratching all over from the fibreglass.
I am so glad that, in those moments, the last few minutes of freedom he would enjoy in his entire life, he was not only very uncomfortable but also utterly devoid of dignity. It is still much better than he deserved. WHAT we did not know then was that it would take more than three years of exhaustive, near-heroic efforts by my incredible team of officers before we would be able to send Bellfield to prison for life; that it would be a further seven years until he was eventually convicted of abducting and murdering Milly Dowler.
Nor could I have anticipated the mistakes we uncovered on the way, notably in Surrey Police’s handling of Milly’s murder and their refusal, initially at least, to consider Bellfield as her killer. It began with an apparently unconnected case – the unprovoked murder of Amelie Delagrange on the night of August 19, 2004.
The sun was shining that week and life was perfect. I had the job I’d craved for so long, Senior Investigating Officer in charge of one of the Met Police murder teams, two children and a lovely wife.
Then 22-year-old Amelie, blonde and carefree and working as a wait- ress at the Le Maison Blanc cafe in Richmond, was found dying in the middle of Twickenham Green, a wealthy and fashionable suburb in South-West London. She had a huge wound on the back of her head, probably inflicted by a hammer.
Murderous assaults carried out by a stranger in the street are extremely rare. But here I realised we had three very similar attacks in similar circumstances on similar women, all in a small, very subur- ban and safe corner of London. Marsha McDonnell, aged 19, had died from head wounds in Hampton on February 4, 2003, yards from her home after getting off a bus. Jesse Wilson, 16, sustained massive head and facial injuries near her home in nearby Strawberry Hill, while Edel Harbison, an accountant in her early 30s, was attacked on Twickenham Green and suffered extensive wounds to her head and face which required reconstructive surgery. With Amelie, there was now a fourth. There was every reason to think they might be the work of one person.
But when the national press suggested the attacks could be linked to the Milly Dowler case in Waltonon-Thames, six miles away, it was quickly denied. After all, the murder was startlingly different in its nature, in the victim’s age and in the way she died. It never crossed our minds there would be a link.
Still, we knew what we were dealing with was different from the usual one-off murder. Amelie had been a beautiful young girl, perfect and healthy in every way until an animal had left her with a skull like a dropped Easter egg.
We had no clear picture of what happened until we found Amelie’s phone – taken by her killer – had last contacted the T-Mobile network in Walton-on-Thames. The implications were potentially huge.
As cameras on passing buses had captured Amelie’s walk to the Green, we knew the time between her attack and the phone transmitting to the Walton mast was, at most, 20 minutes. It could not have got there by foot or cycle – it had to have travelled in a vehicle.
Hundreds of hours were spent trawling CCTV because I knew the killer’s car would be on the recordings somewhere. Weeks later, cameras from buses had identified a small white van which had parked on the Green for a very short while within 70 yards of where Amelie was attacked at exactly the same time. It had distinctive features: a wheel trim missing, a broken headlight and back doors painted a different colour.
Further footage showed it cruising the area for some time. A predator prowling for a victim?
More importantly, it had driven to Walton-on-Thames afterwards.
The news electrified me – I would pursue this van with everything I could throw at it.
We worked every hour for weeks. The van was identified as a Ford Courier, manufactured between 1996 and 2000. There were 25,000 in the UK and I wanted to look at every single one.
Then came a further breakthrough. A woman named Johanna Collings had visited the mobile police station we placed on Twickenham Green following Amelie’s murder and suggested her ex-partner could have been the killer. His name was Levi Bellfield.
Johanna had told officers Levi hated women, and that in one of his old coats she had found a hidden pocket which contained a knife and a balaclava, along with an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine where all the blonde women inside had had their faces stabbed.
Bellfield, she said, knew the areas where the recent attacks had taken place. That was exciting enough – then, we found he had also once owned a white Ford Courier van.
Bellfield’s intelligence record revealed tales of violence, drugs, firearms and lawlessness, but I was struck by his charmed life, because there were few actual convictions.
Then something big hit us. In May 2004, 18-year-old Kate Sheedy, head girl at Gumley House, a convent school in Isleworth, had just got off a bus near her home when she had been run over deliberately and then reversed over.
She had been left for dead with horrific crush injuries, but had survived by crawling to her handbag and raising the alarm on her phone. She later described the vehicle as a white people carrier, possibly a Ford Galaxy, with blacked-out windows and a defect in the driver’s door mirror. Looking at Bellfield’s file, a month before Kate’s attack, he had been arrested driving a Toyota Previa, with blacked- out windows – very similar to a Galaxy. More tellingly, a check on the Police National Computer revealed Bellfield’s car was white.
When it was found, having been sold soon after Kate’s attack, it didn’t take an expert to notice the driver’s door mirror was smashed. We had hit the jackpot.
We put Bellfield under 24/7 surveillance and, while looking again through his intelligence file, something else struck a chord.
It showed that, in 2002, Bellfield was living at 24 Collingwood Place, Walton-on-Thames – where the van had headed after Amelie’s murder, and where her phone had last ‘pinged’. I got out an A-Z street map and saw it was virtually opposite Walton railway station. Instantly, I realised the implications.
Milly Dowler had been abducted from Station Avenue, Walton-onThames and, although I had never worked on the case, I knew that the last sighting of her was at a nearby bus stop.
Our protestations to the media that our cases were not connected to Milly’s had been sincere, but now I was looking at the very spot on my map where both she vanished and, at the same time our suspect, a violent sexual predator with (according to his file) strong tendencies towards paedophilia, had lived. I was transfixed, staring at the map as the enormity of what I had found sunk in. I immediately rang Brian Marjoram, the senior investigating officer for the Milly Dowler inquiry, and told him all I knew. Brian concluded with: ‘Christ, the hairs on my neck are standing up now.’
Our own investigation, too, was moving swiftly. On the third day of tailing Bellfield, he pulled over to talk to two girls at a bus stop. When they got on a bus, officers tailed them until they got off. What they reported was chilling confirmation that Bellfield was every bit as dangerous as we suspected.
Bellfield had asked how old they were, and when they told him they were 13 and 14 he’d replied: ‘Ooh, that’s good. I bet you’re both virgins, then? I like virgins.’
It meant Bellfield was active on the streets and the likelihood of further attacks was very real. The fact he viewed bus stops as a hunting ground potentially linked both Amelie’s murder and Kate’s attack, not to mention Milly’s.
It was time to arrest him. WHILE officers questioned Bellfield at Heathrow Police Station, we were also questioning his partner Emma Mills, the mother of three of his 11 children. This was her chance to break free from a terrifying relationship, and she poured out a horrifying catalogue
of rapes and abuse, and said she knew Bellfield’s previous partners had suffered the same treatment.
We knew, if we investigated, we could charge him with t hese offences. It could be the quickest way of taking Bellfield off the streets. Even better, the risk of reprisals to the women would almost certainly make bail out of the question.
Emma, Johanna and another former partner, Rebecca Wilkinson, recounted almost exactly similar tales of sexual abuse, psychological control and physical violence.
Emma also recalled something particularly significant. On the evening Milly Dowler went missing the couple were dog-sitting at a friend’s house. Bellfield had left early that morning and, unusually, did not call every couple of hours and had his phone turned off.
He had taken her red Daewoo Nexia car, which had the only set of keys to their Collingwood Place flat on the same keyring.
When he eventually came home at 11pm he had changed into a tracksuit which Emma knew had been hanging in the wardrobe at Collingwood Place. The following day, they’d driven there, and Emma found all the bedding had been removed from the bed.
Bellfield’s excuse was that the dog had used the bed as a toilet and the bedding had been binned. But when Emma found no bedding in their bins, she assumed Bellfield had somehow soiled it while entertaining another woman.
She had said nothing for fear of violent consequences.
Emma recalled that a few days later, the red Daewoo had disappeared and Bellfield claimed it had been stolen. It confirmed Bellfield was in the area where Milly Dowler went missing during the day of her disappearance.
I knew I had to tell Surrey Police but, for now, had to get on with my own investigation. We charged Bellfield with rape, buggery and assault against each of his three former partners – but we were a long way from proving he was a killer.
We got a slot on Crimewatch revealing CCTV footage of the Previa used to run over Kate, and the effect was immediate. Old acquaintances of Bellfield’s started to come forward and give statements, realising it would be unlikely he would be freed to take revenge.
We also successfully managed to place Bellfield in the white van on the night of Amelie’s killing – thanks to phone calls and Emma’s extraordinary memory. She remembered that night because it had been the first time she’d left the house since giving birth to their youngest child and had gone to Tesco.
Bellfield, driving a small white van, had taken her home then gone out. She had called his mobile to ask him to pick up milk, which she’d forgotten, but the call had gone to voicemail – a call which we knew had transmitted to a mast covering Twickenham Green, exactly where CCTV had shown the van to be at that time.
Wanting to make sure this potent i all y cli nching evidence was watertight, the team went to the Tesco and found Emma’s receipt in storage, which confirmed everything from the times to the brand of nappies and, crucially, no milk. In March 2006, we were able to charge Bellfield with the murder of Amelie and the attempted murder of Kate. But we could also add the murder of Marsha McDonnell in May 2006 after some of the most fantastic pieces of police work I have ever encountered.
I turned again to CCTV evidence, this time from the bus Marsha had t aken, which showed a silver Vauxhall Corsa travelling past as she got off.
We established that Bellfield owned a silver five-door Vauxhall Corsa at the time, but because CCTV did not clearly show the registration plate, we had to eliminate every other possible vehicle – which amounted initially to 610,000.
Detective Sergeant Clive Grace broke it down to just 178 by eliminating models made before 2003, those with three doors, all with a sunroof and other specifics.
It put us just 177 statements away from proving Bellfield’s car was there when Marsha was murdered – a Herculean task, but we did it. MEANWHILE, the silence from the Surrey Police investigation into Milly’s murder, six months after I’d given them Bellfield as a good suspect, was puzzling. I arranged a meeting to tell them of Emma’s suspicions and what Bellfield had been doing on the day that Milly went missing. When I finished there was a pregnant pause.
‘So what I was thinking, you know, do you have any CCTV pictures of Emma’s Daewoo that day?’ I asked.
They showed me a picture of a red Daewoo Nexia, taken about 20 minutes after Milly was known to have disappeared, but added they had ‘never identified’ who was in it. This was huge. Emma’s car was the only one of that colour and type registered in the area, and the only person with keys was Bellfield. But the superintendent, Steve Scott, admitted the force had no more CCTV footage.
‘We’ve just got about ten minutes either side of the last sighting of Milly, from that camera,’ he said.
For once, I was lost for words. Did they really only seize 20 minutes of footage from one camera at the start of what was to become the biggest, longest and most public investigation in the force’s history?
Steve then reiterated that they had a ‘good suspect of their own’ and added: ‘ Perhaps when we resolve that one way or the other, we could find some time to have a look at your man.’
I exploded. ‘We are giving you a suspect who is not only a paedophile but a killer and a rapist too, and who not only lived right on the plot but is provably there at the exact time she goes missing. Don’t you want to solve this?’
He did call that night apologising. ‘We need to make Bellfield our No 1 priority,’ he acknowledged. And that was it – Surrey were on board.
But then another staggering fact came to light.
An 11- year- old called Rachel Cowles was approached by a man in a red hatchback the day before Milly disappeared, just a mile away in Shepperton.
Described to police as fat with a squeaky voice, he failed to persuade her to get in the car.
Inexplicably, when Milly was reported missing the next day, Surrey Police did not find this information in their intelligence trawl. Nobody was prompted to ask the questions that might have led to Bellfield. It was only in 2005 when Rachel’s father saw Surrey media appeals about the red Daewoo that he wrote to the Chief Constable, which drew attention to yet another opportunity missed due to very basic investigative work not having been done. BELLFIELD was found guilty of Amelie and Marsha’s murders, and Kate’s attempted murder, in February 2008 at the Old Bailey and sentenced to life imprisonment. I wanted to see if there would at last be some reaction in those cold, unmoving eyes but, in the end, I couldn’t look.
I was thrilled when, in March 2010, he was finally charged with Milly’s murder.
We had done it.
Amelie had been a beautiful young girl, perfect in every way It conf irmed Bellfield was in the area Milly went missing
© Colin Sutton, 2019
Adapted extract from Manhunt: How I Brought Serial Killer Levi Bellfield To Justice, by Colin Sutton, published by John Blake on Thursday, priced £8.99. Offer price £7.19 (20 per cent discount) until January 13. Order at mailshop.co. uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Manhunt starts tonight on ITV at 9pm.