The police knocked at Levi Bellfield’s door just after midnight. Nine surveillance officers had been watching him for days, and the detail of his every move could have filled a book. He was about to learn that all of it was over. He was naked, covered in dust from a crawl space, when they found him.
His girlfriend Emma looked up and saw his face through the slats of the loft. That, more than anything else, was the moment the case broke. She would become the key witness. For years, he had believed he was untouchable.
And before he was caught, he had almost been right. Southwest London, 2002 to 2004. A string of young women attacked in blitz-style violence, some killed in the blink of an eye. The police had a suspect, but without DNA, without witnesses, without any forensic link, they couldn’t move.
They were dealing with one of Britain’s most dangerous killers, a man so cunning he knew to turn off his phone, to crush his cars, to change his bedsheets. His name was Levi Bellfield. He was born in 1968, and his father died when he was ten. His mother Joan became his world.
She doted on him, spoiled him, and in her eyes, he could do no wrong. He started getting into trouble as a teenager, convictions for motoring offenses and burglary by the time he was thirteen. But at school, he was the fat kid everyone picked on. His voice was high-pitched.
He wasn’t even five feet tall. A childhood friend remembered him being bullied hard, especially by girls. One of his ex-wives believed that was the root of his hatred for women. By his late teens, he’d shot up to over six feet, and he’d made a decision: he would never be the small boy again.
He built himself up with steroids until his arms were huge, his neck was thick. He was proud of that body. He wanted to be the man, the top dog, the one everyone wanted to be around. And for a while, women fell for him.
He married four times and fathered eleven children. But the charm had a violent edge. It showed up quickly, often after a few drinks, often fueled by steroids. A night out could end with him trying to beat someone up or driving recklessly.
His second wife, Jo Collings, remembered him splitting her head open with a tool because she didn’t answer him quickly enough. She knew he had a temper, but she hadn’t known the depth of his hatred. He wasn’t just aggressive, he had a particular loathing for blonde women. “I hate blondes,” he told her once.
“They’re all slags and they should die. ”
He worked as a nightclub bouncer, which gave him access to young school girls and drugs. He was proud of targeting girls under the legal age of consent. He kept a mattress in the back of a van, plied girls with ketamine and cocaine, and abused them while they were high.
Between 1995 and 2001, a string of complaints reached the Met about sexual attacks. But the victims’ memories were hazy, probably because they’d been drugged. No DNA, no witnesses, nothing to prove Bellfield was the attacker. Then he became a wheel-clamping contractor.
It was a perfect job for him. It used his size, it fed his aggression, and it kept him in cars and vans. Cars became central to his crimes. He changed cars constantly, buying, selling, scrapping them, so no one could ever track him.
He would drive around bus stops, watching women get off alone, and then attack them in sudden, ferocious bursts. On the 21st of March 2002, thirteen-year-old Millie Dowler left school and took the train home. She got off at Walton-on-Thames station, a four-minute walk from her house. She stopped to chat with a girl she knew about boys and a gig they planned to attend.
At some point between 4:04 and 4:10, she disappeared into thin air. Six months later, her body was found in Yateley Heath Woods, thirty miles away. There was no forensic evidence. She was just bones.
No DNA, no witnesses, no leads. But the day after she vanished, Emma came home to find her husband doing something he’d never done before: changing the bed linen. “What’s going on here? ” she asked.
“Oh, the dog had an accident on the bed. ”
She thought it strange because the dog was perfectly house-trained. What he was really doing was disposing of the mattress and clothing. A neighbor saw him stuffing things into bin liners.
He was moving her body. He knew exactly where to dump it because he used to walk his dogs through those same woods. The police at the time had nothing to link him to Millie. A year later, on the 5th of February 2003, eighteen-year-old Marsha McDonnell was attacked just ten doors from her home.
She’d been on a bus, got off, and was nearly home when she was hit over the head with something heavy. She died two days later. Blonde, young, struck from behind. Another blitz attack.
No trace left behind. Bellfield was nearly caught in 2004 when he attacked his own friend, Pete Rodriguez, hitting him over the head with a mallet and leaving him for dead. When Pete woke up six weeks later, confused and trying to piece everything together, Bellfield came to the hospital pretending to be his brother. He caused such a commotion that security escorted him out.
Pete knew then: the man had come to finish the job. “From that moment,” Pete said, “I had 24-hour police protection. ”
But the police still didn’t connect Bellfield to the murders. Marsha McDonnell and Millie Dowler were not yet linked to each other.
There was no DNA, no witnesses, nothing to tie him to anything. A blitz killer who strikes at random is nearly impossible to catch. On the 28th of May 2004, another young blonde woman, Kate Sheedy, got off a bus and walked up her road. She noticed a white people carrier parked on her side of the road, engine running, lights off.
Something felt wrong, a sixth sense, but she kept walking. The driver turned the car in a U-turn and ran straight over her. Then he reversed and ran over her again. She was left with every rib broken, a ruptured spleen, damage to her spine.
She somehow managed to crawl home and call her mother. “Mummy, I’ve been run over. I’m in our road. I love you.
”
Then she called 999. In the call, she tells the operator, “He ran over me twice. ” The cruelty of it was staggering. Pete Rodriguez later realized Kate had been attacked the same day Bellfield came to see him in the hospital.
Looking at a map, he saw the pattern: someone killed Millie in Walton-on-Thames. Someone murdered Marsha nearby. Kate had been targeted right by the hospital. On each occasion, Bellfield had been close by.
“I felt it was too many for coincidences,” Pete said. In June 2004, the police finally began making connections between the attacks in southwest London. But the net was not closing quickly enough. There was more violence to come.
In August 2004, Bellfield was becoming erratic. He’d seen a poster on holiday appealing for witnesses to a young girl’s murder, and he’d gotten up from the dinner table and left, shaking. He told his friend it was the heat. He sought treatment for depression, telling doctors he had been self-harming and had tried to kill himself.
But it was just a day or two after he’d struck again. On the night of the 19th of August 2004, a 22-year-old French student named Amélie Delagrange was walking home after a wine bar with friends. She’d had a few glasses of wine, missed her bus stop, and decided to walk. She was a few hundred yards from home when Bellfield drove his car alongside her.
He followed her, spoke to her, made approaches. She likely ignored him, tried to walk faster. And then he got out and hit her over the back of the head with a blunt object. A hammer, perhaps.
She was found by a student on Twickenham Green, lying there with a horrific wound. She died that evening. The fear in southwest London became palpable. There was a maniac on the loose killing blonde young women for pleasure.
Detectives studied CCTV seized from the area. A white van had been driving around Twickenham Green for three-quarters of an hour before Emily was murdered. It looked like hunting, looking for prey. Then a witness came forward: he had sold a white van to a man named Levi who wanted it for wheel clamping.
At the same time, Jo Collings, Bellfield’s second wife, was making her own connections. She called a friend and asked if Levi had a white people carrier. He did. She knew the pattern.
She went to the police and told them everything: his pure hatred of blondes, the fact that everyone killed or attacked was blonde. “Everyone who had been killed or missing or attacked were all blonde,” she said. One detail stood out to the investigators. “She said he now drives a little white van and does wheel clamping.
”
That was the key. They finally had their suspect. For ten days, a surveillance team watched Bellfield 24/7. They watched him go wheel clamping, watched him drive around.
One Sunday, he pulled up to a bus stop where two girls waited. He stopped and spoke to them for a long time. The officers thought they were about to watch another attack, one they might not be able to stop in time. Then they saw the girls swear at him, and he drove off.
They were cousins, aged 14 and 15. He had asked them if they were virgins, told them he bet they were “nice and fresh. ” They told him where to go. Bellfield was looking for his next victim, and the surveillance team could barely breathe.
On the 22nd of November 2004, police moved in. When they knocked, he wasn’t in the bedroom. After a two-hour search, they found him hiding in the loft, naked, buried under the insulation. His girlfriend looked up at the loft entrance and saw his face.
That moment made her the key witness. He was taken to Heathrow Police Station for questioning. It was almost theatrical, the way he answered every question with “No comment. ”
“Too many similarities, Levi,” the detective said.
“Blondes, buses, Levi’s, cars. ”
No comment. “Nothing can justify it, can it? ”
No comment.
In March 2006, he was charged with the murder of Amélie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. In May, he was charged with the murder of Marsha McDonnell. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. In February 2008, he was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to life in prison with a recommendation that he never be released.
But the mystery of Millie Dowler remained. Surrey police had never stopped investigating. In March 2010, they brought Bellfield out of Wakefield Prison to question him about Millie. They told him his wife had found him changing the sheets the day after she vanished, an explanation that made no sense.
“Do you honestly believe that your actions over the 21st and the 22nd of March 2002 are the actions of an innocent man? ”
No comment. “If you’re innocent, tell us. ”
No comment.
For years, he refused to admit anything. During the trial, Steve Bird, a journalist, watched Bellfield stare at a blonde female reporter in the courtroom and wink at her, a chilling bit of menace, even as he faced prison. In June 2011, Bellfield was found guilty of murdering thirteen-year-old Millie Dowler. He received a whole-life term, becoming the only prisoner in Britain with two full life sentences.
Then the story took a bizarre twist. Bellfield’s crime exposed Britain’s biggest newspaper scandal. An investigator for the News of the World had hacked into Millie’s voicemail while she was still missing, leading to the fall of one of the world’s most powerful news organizations. The irony was cruel: this man, who deserved no sympathy, had indirectly brought down a British institution.
For years, Bellfield refused to admit to killing Millie. Her parents were left in agony, not knowing what happened in her final hours. In January 2016, Surrey police announced that Bellfield had admitted responsibility for the abduction, rape, and murder of Millie Dowler. He had told officers he tortured and raped her over several hours before strangling her to death.
Her parents spoke of their torment at hearing the details of their daughter’s final fourteen hours. Then, weeks later, his lawyer wrote to police denying the confession entirely. He was playing games, even from his cell. His secrets were power, power over everyone, including the parents of his victims.
The questions remain. There are unsolved cases going back to the 1970s. A school friend, Patsy Morris, died under unusual circumstances when he was fourteen. He was ruled out, but one has to wonder how far back his pattern of violence goes.
Jo Collings has been asked what she thinks about him now. “Obviously, if we knew then what you know now, I wouldn’t have nothing to do with the man. But you don’t have a sign on your head saying murderer. ”
Pete Rodriguez, the man he left for dead, still can’t figure him out.
“Was it in his childhood, or did he just have a thing against women? ”
Bellfield preyed on the most vulnerable, women and girls who should have been safe walking home from school. He was violent, predatory, and his motivation remains something no one truly understands. No one came close to him, not in thirty years of police work.
The things he did, things he will never be prosecuted for, are shocking. Levi Bellfield. Levi Evil.
An anagram of his name, and far closer to the truth.
