Life Means Life. Nick Appleyard
him as she cut across the local cricket pitch.
Following the guilty verdicts, judge Mrs Justice Rafferty deferred sentence until the following day but Bellfield refused to attend court, blaming adverse accounts about him in the newspapers. His barrister, William Boyce, QC, announced: ‘He has waived his right to be in court today. Overnight, there has been what some consider to be a quite extraordinary explosion of bad publicity. There has been a welter of accusations of other crimes by him.’
Every national tabloid on the news stands the next morning carried the Bellfield verdict on the front page, alongside various damning stories about him, varying from allegations of rape to murder. The Sun pulled no punches and splashed the words: ‘HE KILLED MILLY TOO’ alongside his smug, bloated police mugshot.
Sentencing Bellfield in his absence, Mrs Justice Rafferty said: ‘You have reduced three families to unimagined grief. What dreadful feelings went through your head as you attacked and in two cases, snuffed out a young life is beyond understanding. You will not be considered for parole and must serve your whole life in prison.’
Explaining the whole life tariff, the judge added: ‘Aggravating features are the chronicle of violence directed towards lone vulnerable young women during the hours of darkness and substantial premeditation and planning. There are no mitigating factors.’
DCI Colin Sutton, who led the investigation, said outside court: ‘Levi Bellfield is a predator, who preyed on women over a period of time. He targetted his victims at random, attacking those much smaller and weaker than him. Only he knows why he did what he did.’
Survivor Kate Sheedy and the families of the dead girls held hands with friends and supporters as the verdicts were delivered. They burst into tears of relief when the man who had wrecked their lives was found guilty.
Kate, by then a 21-year-old university student, faced reporters outside court, saying of Bellfield’s absence at the sentencing: ‘I am disappointed that he was not in court to hear the judge’s words, which were so strong. I think it shows the type of person he is – a complete coward.
‘It means so much to me that he got a full life term; it’s what I wanted. The fact that he will never see the light of day again is brilliant. Even if it had been 40 years’ time, I would not feel safe if he was let out again. I have waited for nearly four years for this day.’
Amelie’s mother, Dominique Delagrange, paid tribute to her daughter and said of Bellfield: ‘We would like to have heard from Bellfield a confession of sorts, some evidence of remorse. In this we were disappointed. This guilty person has showed an unbelievable level of arrogance.’
A female officer who worked on the case said: ‘Bellfield has deprived us of the pleasure of seeing his face when he was told he will never leave jail, but at least we can be satisfied that this is the last time he will be in control.’
Bellfield, who had 11 children by five women, was arrested in November 2004. The jury found him unanimously guilty of murdering Amelie Delagrange and convicted him by a 10–2 majority of Marsha McDonnell’s killing and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. After deliberating for six days, the jury was unable to reach verdicts on charges that Bellfield attempted to murder hairdresser Irma Dragoshi, 33, who received head injuries, and kidnapped Anna-Maria Rennie, 17. Those offences, which all occurred at bus stops, were ordered to lie on file.
The judge ruled that a great deal of the evidence gleaned while Bellfield was under suspicion was too prejudicial for the jury to hear. But once he was jailed, much of this evidence came to light. Several women who had earlier given statements to police about Bellfield have since told of the full shocking extent of his loathing and predatory attitude towards females. His former friends, work colleagues and prison acquaintances came out to speak of a psychopath who thought he was above the law.
Paul Jarvis met Bellfield while he was on remand at Belmarsh Prison, South-East London, in 2005. He said: ‘He was like a caveman. He treated women like dogs.’ Bellfield told him: ‘You feed them and keep them – you can do what you want.’ Jarvis also revealed that the thug confided in him that he murdered Amelie Delagrange after she refused his offer of cocaine. This evidence was not allowed at the killer’s trial.
Bellfield was renowned in his hometown of West Drayton, Middlesex, for trying to pick up teenage blondes, who he followed in his Toyota Previa people carrier. The car had blacked-out windows and he kept a mattress and blankets in the back – they came in handy when girls were drunk or naïve enough to fall for his propositions. Those who resisted his advances were sometimes drugged and raped.
As the years passed, fuelled by steroids, cocaine and mental instability, Bellfield’s violent obsession with young blondes worsened. His ex-girlfriend Johanna Collins, with whom he had a son and a daughter, described him as, ‘Six-feet-one of pure walking evil’. Johanna suffered three years of ‘hell’ with the killer, telling of how he ruled her with the fear of beatings and systematic rapes. She also admitted how he would return home from his work as a club bouncer and boast about the girls he had raped that night.
She said: ‘When he came in late at night after working on a club door, he would tell me how he had “another little slut” in the back. Levi took great pleasure in telling me how they fancied a kiss and a cuddle, but when he got them where he wanted them, he just took them.
‘I would be told to get out of bed and scrub the cars out so there was no trace left of whatever he had done. He would tell me straight out if he had raped a girl – or even two – on an evening. He’d laugh and say they deserved what they got.
‘When he finished he told the girls to ‘F**k off back into the nightclub’ or just to ‘F**k off’. He warned them what would happen if they went to police. I was just too scared to even think of saying anything.’
Johanna revealed how she had once found Bellfield’s ‘stalking kit’ in a bin bag when she was tidying the garage. She said: ‘I pulled out my dad’s old donkey jacket. There was also what looked like a bobble hat and a magazine, Cosmopolitan. The coat felt heavy and something was in the lining. The left-hand pocket had been cut out so your hand went right the way down to this hunting knife.
‘Then I realised the “bobble hat” was a full-face balaclava. I opened the magazine and all the pictures of pretty girls or models with blonde hair had been slashed or hacked-up.’ When she mentioned her shocking find to her husband, Bellfield flew into a rage. Johanna said: ‘He beat me and forced my face over the pictures of the blondes, shouting, “I f**king hate blondes, they should all f**king die!”’
Becky Wilkinson, mother to four of Bellfield’s children, said she felt safe for the first time in years after he was jailed. Becky, who was with the brute from 1989 to 1995, told: ‘For those years I went through a traumatic, violent relationship with Levi that I couldn’t escape. When I eventually did, he would stalk me.
‘For the time we were together he would hit me, rape me. I wasn’t allowed to speak to my family or see them – he wouldn’t let me do anything. It is a big relief to know he will die behind bars.’
Bellfield, overweight with a squeaky, effeminate voice, told a colleague at the wheel-clamping firm where he worked that girls who dyed their hair blonde were: ‘Impure sluts who deserved to be messed around with.’ He boasted that he regularly shaved his entire body to avoid leaving DNA evidence, saying he was ‘untouchable’.
A former bouncer friend recalled how Bellfield spiked a young blonde’s drink with date-rape drug Rohypnol at a club in Maidenhead, Berkshire. He raped the girl in the car park and stole her mobile phone. Later that night the girl’s mother called the phone and Bellfield taunted her with details of what he had done to her daughter.
Bellfield suffered wild mood swings and went from friendly and affable to murderous in a heartbeat. In 2004, he turned on his former friend Peter Rodriguez, hitting him three times in the head with a hammer and stabbing him with a screwdriver in the stomach and kneecaps.
The wheel-clamping business Bellfield ran was known for its bullying methods. He and fellow clampers demanded