World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 5 - Levi Bellfield - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-In February 2003, police were trying to track down a vicious attacker who was targeting young, blond women.
-He would run up behind them and hit them on the head, often with a hammer, repeatedly,
and then run back to his car and disappear into the darkness. -One woman, Marsha McDonnell,
had died from her injuries, [ Camera shutter clicks ] and, by August 2004, the assailant had claimed a second victim:
Amélie Delagrange. -He's a predator. He's stalking his prey. He's staking them out and he's very organized
and he's very planned and that makes him incredibly dangerous. -The killer was a man named Levi Bellfield.
Even after his incarceration in 2008, he was linked with the shocking murder of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.
-I hate it when people refer to him as an animal because animals don't behave like that.
They kill to survive, not for fun and pleasure. He was born evil. He is pure, pure evil.
-Levi Bellfield had cemented his place as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪
[ Suspenseful music climbs ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Suspenseful chord strikes ] [ Shutter clicks ]
-Levi Bellfield is one of<i> the</i> most notorious British killers in recent memory.
He was responsible for the brutal murders of two young women and the attempted murder of another,
across a 16-month period between 2003 and 2004. While serving time in prison, he was again found guilty, in 2011,
of one of the highest-profile cases of the 21st century: the murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler,
a crime that had gone unsolved for almost a decade. -They've waited nine years and been put through the trauma of this court case.
They linked arms as the jury foreman pronounced Levi Bellfield guilty of murder.
-But this killer's shocking story began over 40 years before. ♪♪ [ Shutter clicks ] Levi Bellfield was born
into a Romani Gypsy family in Isleworth, West London, on the 17th of May, 1968. He was one of five children.
Age 10, Bellfield lost his father to leukemia and, as a result, he formed a very close bond with his mother.
-Bellfield was very much a mother's boy, <i> much</i> beloved of his mother. It was a close-knit family, brought up in West London,
in what was effectively once a<i> huge</i> community of Travellers and was groomed to thinking, from very early days,
that he was very special, that there was something particular about him. His mother encouraged him in that view.
-I think, during his childhood, he was a bit of a tearaway. He was a young lad who wanted to do what<i> he</i> wanted to do
and not much stood in his way, so he was often kind of larking around and getting into a bit of trouble at school,
but nothing completely out of the ordinary. [ Melancholy tune plays ] -By the time Bellfield was 13,
he'd had his first brush with the law and was arrested for burglary in 1981. It would not be the last time he was in trouble with the police.
-I believe Bellfield occupied what you might describe as the halo of Levi Bellfield: "I am greater than anything."
He was above the law, above suspicion, operated entirely under his own steam, in his own way, at his own time.
-In 1989, 21-year-old Bellfield set up home with a girlfriend. They went on to have four children together.
-He could literally charm the birds off the trees. This is a 19.5-, 20-stone man with a huge neck,
almost occupying his entire shoulders. He wasn't an attractive man, but, my goodness, me, he had the gift of the gab
and he didn't half use it to his advantage, particularly when it came to girls. -Another woman who fell under Bellfield's spell
and would go on to have two children with him was his common-law wife Jo Collings.
-I first met him when I was about 17, 18, 'cause we all used to go to a place in Twickenham called Cellars,
but I kind of knew him a little bit before then because, where I used to keep my horses,
he used to drink at a pub just round the corner and his mum lived just down the road.
Everyone knew him. He was always, you know, everyone wanted to be around him. He was like the sort of the fun person to be with,
you know, always loud. -But Bellfield was not a man of morals and often had extramarital affairs.
His job as a nightclub doorman helped him meet girls. [ Suspenseful music plays ]
-That way, he had access to any number of young women, all of whom, how I can put it politely,
were not backward in coming forward. They were out for a good time and Bellfield was out to help them have one.
-He had the talk, you know, the cuteness, and, like I said, I mean, back in the day,
he was good-looking, you know. Always had the nice car, always had nice clothes,
and, you know, he could get the women. -But his charming persona soon disappeared,
once he'd got what he wanted. -In adulthood, Levi Bellfield became a man that women should be quite fearful of.
He's somebody who was really entitled. He had a real sense that women were there to serve his needs
and, when they didn't comply with his expectations, he would turn violent and very nasty.
-The abuse started five, six months after we got together, might not even have been that long,
just with the odd slap and dig, and then he'd be really sorry and it's 'cause he'd said he'd never felt this way about anyone.
I'd found out I was pregnant, as well, [ Melancholy tune plays ] so it was more he was trying to make out that, you know,
he really cared and everything else, but, I mean, he was still seeing the one he was with before me, at the time.
Some of the abuse, he'd punch you, bite you, kick you, burn you with cigarettes,
make you sleep naked on the floor, spit at you. You couldn't go to the toilet, unless he was sat
on the bath beside you. All sorts of things. ♪♪ -Despite Bellfield's violent behavior
towards the women in his life, they rarely reported him to the police, for fear of what he might do to them.
-Time after time, in Bellfield's career, the women in his life could've pursued cases against him for violent attack
and, yet, persistently chose not to and that pays some tribute to his extraordinary charisma.
-I was the only one that had an injunction put on him and, within half an hour of him being served,
it was torn up in an envelope through my front door and he'd written on the envelope,
"Now I'm gonna kill you". ♪♪ -By 2002, Bellfield had fathered 11 children with five different women.
He'd started a new job, clamping cars, and was living in the leafy, Surrey town of Walton-on-Thames.
On March 21, 2002, 13-year-old schoolgirl Amanda Dowler, known affectionately as Milly,
went missing from her home. Journalist Martin Brunt remembers that day very well.
-She was on her way home. She'd got off the train, was going to walk the half-mile or so back to her home.
She was in her school uniform, very identifiable. This was daylight, busy time of the afternoon,
lots of people around, but nobody saw anything. -Milly had phoned her father to say she was heading home,
but never arrived. -She seemed to have disappeared into thin air. There was CCTV footage of her getting off the train
at Walton Station, some very blurred images of cars and the odd person in the street where she was headed home,
but nothing more than that and it became clear, very early on, that police were really struggling
to find what had happened to her. -The last sighting of Milly Dowler was on Station Avenue in Walton,
just 50 yards from the home of Levi Bellfield. -The search has taken in stretches of water,
including the River Mole, but police have been concentrating on ground near the busy station, and interviewing commuters.
-We have nothing that gives us any positive indication that she's gone off of her own volition.
Equally, we have no positive information that she has been taken off the street and abducted.
At this time, all of our lines of inquiry are open. -On September 18, 2002, six months after her disappearance,
the body of Milly Dowler was found by a group of foragers [ Shutter clicks ] amongst the trees
of Yateley Heath Wood, in Hampshire. -So, Milly was identified through dental records.
She was known to be missing, dental records were obtained, and then they were compared to the remains that were present
and, sadly for her family, it confirmed that that's who it was. -It was clear to forensic ecologist Professor Patricia Wiltshire
that Milly's body had been in the woods ever since she'd disappeared. -I was able to tell the police
how long each bone had been there and how long ago it had been moved because the bones were moved around by animals, you see.
There was no doubt in my mind, really, that she had been there since the early spring.
[ Shutter clicks ] -How Milly was killed remained a mystery. The degree of change that the body goes through after death,
particularly in the sort of timescales we're talking about with Milly Dowler, really hinders
what the pathologist can see, what the pathologist can say. It doesn't mean that there's nothing we can see or say,
but, clearly, the less we have to work with, the more difficult it is. -One likes to be objective.
One likes not to think of the remains as a person. One likes to just look for the evidence
and, but, yet, you try to be objective and then, of course, they take you into a scenario
where you become fairly emotional. Well, you can't help it. It's an emotional sort of scenario.
And then it comes a bit of a shock, really. [ Suspenseful music climbs ] [ Shutter clicks ]
-The police have no suspects and no forensic evidence and, just five months after the discovery of Milly Dowler's body,
only a few miles from Walton-on-Thames, another young woman was murdered. At around midnight on the 3rd of February 2003,
[ Sinister music plays ] in Kingston, London, 19-year-old Marsha McDonnell caught the bus home
after a night out at the cinema with friends. It was the last time they would ever see her.
Walking home, Marsha was attacked from behind, less than 50 yards from her parents' front door.
Colin Sutton was one of the lead detectives with the Metropolitan Police, at the time.
-Marsha was found on the street where she lived, 10 or 15 doors down from her parents' house.
Local resident heard a noise, [ Melancholy tune plays ] heard her whimpering, if you like, and called police
and she was found there with this terrible head wound and she was taken to hospital
and died two or three days afterwards. Marsha was killed with a single blow to the back of the head with a heavy implement.
-Forensic evidence suggested the weapon used was most likely a hammer. [ Shutter clicks ]
-Hammers are effective striking tools, so it's no great surprise that you can cause
very severe damage to a human skull with relatively little effort, with an effective hammer.
You'll often see lacerations. They're often curved, to match the profile of the hammer,
and you'll often see skull fractures that are quite often depressed or pushed inwards toward the brain
because the hammer is exerting its force so focally. [ Suspenseful music plays ]
[ Shutter clicks ] -Nightfall, and detectives in Hampton still work on, but, though they've searched tirelessly all day,
they remain baffled as to who carried out this apparently random attack. -Often, these things happen
and are carried out by somebody the victim knows. In this case, I'm sure police looked
at boyfriends, family members, but very quickly ruled out any kind of suspect like that, so,
it soon became obvious that this was a stranger murder, and those are very rare.
So, very soon, very quickly after Marsha's murder, people in the area became very concerned
that there was a killer on the loose. [ Suspenseful chord strikes ] -Subsequent investigations led police
to a mentally unstable 16-year-old who wasn't competent enough to be charged, or even interrogated about the incident.
-And, as a result, he was sectioned and was put into some sort of institution compulsorily
and, although he hadn't been charged with the offense, everybody kind of thought, "Well, it was him
and so we can put that offense to bed and, you know, we've solved that," if you like.
-But then, investigators noticed a possible link to similar attacks that had happened in the area in the months before.
-There was another 16-year-old schoolgirl that, [sigh] she was thought, at first,
to have slipped over in the snow and banged her head and it was only then, when Marsha was murdered,
that police looked at this occurrence, some two months previously, and realized that that could've been an assault as well
and they went back to this girl, who had been treated in hospital, and were able to talk to hospital staff
and look at the description of her wounds and some photographs and conclude that
the likelihood was that she, too, had been attacked, but had survived. We found a couple of other offenses, as well.
Again, young ladies had been attacked in the street and hit over the back of the head
and, in both these cases, they'd survived. -However, none of these other victims
were able to identify the attacker. -They just, you know, said, "I was walking along
and, the next thing I knew, I woke up in hospital," some hours or some days later, so,
we didn't have any kind of clue or sighting that led us towards the suspect for it
because they just simply couldn't remember it. -All of the attacks seemed to be totally unprovoked.
Could they all have been committed by the same perpetrator, the man who murdered Marsha McDonnell?
-As everybody knows, most murders are committed by someone you know, whether it's a husband, wife, lover, jilted lover.
It's comparatively rare for random attackers to kill. -Then, on the 28th of May 2004,
13 months after the murder of Marsha McDonnell, 18-year-old student Kate Sheedy was heading home
after a night out in Twickenham, West London, to celebrate the end of her A-levels.
Just after midnight, she caught the bus to nearby Isleworth and began to walk the few hundred yards to her front door.
-She's walking along the road. She's aware, up ahead of her was a people-carrier
that was sitting, parked, with the engine running and she said it was white and "it was sinister,"
was the phrase that she used. She said it looked a bit sinister because it was --
it had blacked-out windows and she just thought it was up to no good. She didn't like it. Some sort of sixth sense
or whatever said to her, "No, don't walk past that." So she crossed the road, so that she would be walking on the other side of the road
when she walked past the people-carrier. She heard this people-carrier start up, accelerate,
and it literally came across the road and simply ran into her, just ran her over.
[ Ominous chord strikes ] She ended up on the road between the front wheels and the back wheels of the people-carrier.
It then reversed, so the front wheels went over her body again, and drove off. -Incredibly, Kate survived the frenzied and brutal attack.
-To overrun a human body with a large vehicle, like a people-carrier, can cause very severe injuries.
You've got all the weight of that vehicle going through the tires onto the body.
If that's across the limbs, you're going to get fractures. If it's across the head, head injuries.
Obviously, the chest and abdomen are very prone to injury from that pressure on it
and, for somebody to be overrun twice and survive is very close to miraculous and I suspect it's a compliment
to the skill of the people who attempted to save her life. -She had terrible injuries, you know.
She had every rib broken. She had her liver was in two and various sort of injuries
that she was so brave when she overcame and she ended up going to university and, you know, getting on with her life.
-Although the attack on Kate Sheedy seemed very different to the murder of Marsha McDonnell
and all the other reported incidents, detectives still believed they could all be linked.
-It's similar in its outcome. It's similar in the area where it took place and the age and the victim,
what she looks like and all this sort of thing. It's just the weapon. Substitute car for hammer, and it's the same.
They ranged in age between sort of 16 and 32. They were all blond or blondish and I guess all of them were well-dressed
and were quite kind of sophisticated, looked quite well-off rather than, perhaps, some of the other people in the street.
[ Ominous chord strikes ] [ Shutter clicks ] -Someone who fitted that description perfectly
was 22-year-old French exchange student Amélie Delagrange and, just three months after the attack on Kate Sheedy,
Amélie was found, [ Ominous chord strikes ] dead. [ Ominous chord strikes ] On the 19th of August 2004,
22-year-old French exchange student Amélie Delagrange caught the bus home to her rented flat in Twickenham,
[ Melancholy tune plays ] but she missed her stop. -It was a nice night in August and she thought,
"Oh, it's not very far. I'll walk," and, you know, that was her fateful decision.
Had she waited for the bus, she may well have been okay that night. At about quarter past 10:00,
there's a young man walking around Twickenham Green and there's a cricket pitch there
and he walked across the cricket pitch and found what he thought, at first, was just a bundle of rags or a bundle of clothes,
but turned out to be Amélie and she was lying there on the grass. Her shopping bag, with her shopping in, was next to her
and she had her single wound across the back of the head, was bleeding profusely.
He thought she was still alive, at that point, called for an ambulance. He ran to the shops on the north side of the Green
and alerted people to call police and ambulance and she was taken to a hospital and died an hour or so later of this single wound,
which caused a, you know, a catastrophic sort of fracture to her skull and brain injury.
♪♪ -It appeared that Amélie had been killed by a blow to the head with a hammer,
just like Marsha McDonnell. Police were now certain the killings were more than just a coincidence.
-We were conscious that there had been a number of similar attacks in the area over the preceding sort of 18 months or so.
One of those was the murder of Marsha McDonnell and the other was the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy
and, as our investigation progressed, looking at the Amélie murder, so we realized
that we had to look at these previous offenses as well. [ Shutter clicks ] -Like all the attacks reported,
there appeared no motive for the murder. -Absolutely no reason for it, none, simply a random killing,
the most difficult kind of killer to catch, incidentally, because there's no connection.
There was no connection between Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell. None. They didn't know each other. They weren't friends.
There was no connection between those two and Kate Sheedy. -A second senseless murder in the same area
meant the story was now front-page news. -Suddenly, we had, potentially, a serial killer on the loose,
not on some scuzzy council estate, but in leafy Twickenham and Hampton, and that<i> really</i> struck fear in the neighborhood
and police were struggling to find an answer for a motive. -Media were very keen to ask us,
"Is this a series? Are we dealing with a serial killer?" Because those words have a particular sort of connotation
and mean something and, because we couldn't link them formally, by DNA or fingerprints, we couldn't really say that,
so what we said was that we had a linked investigative series and what that meant was these offenses are so similar in MO
and in their location and the profile of the victim that it would be a nonsense to investigate them with different teams.
-Pressure to catch the killer was mounting. [ Shutter clicks ] -Truth was that, without being too sort of dramatic
or too sort of clichéd, we knew, while we were investigating it, that, if we didn't succeed,
that he was going to do another one, you know. There was a time element in this one.
-But there was very little evidence for Colin and his team to work with, particularly in Amélie's case.
[ Shutter clicks ] -Nobody had seen anything. There was no CCTV covering there. She had a boyfriend.
She had no other kind of contacts, really, you know, no family or friends or life history in England.
She'd not been here very long. And it had all the kind of characteristics of a completely random attack
and they're often the very hardest to investigate because, not only do you not have the links to help you,
but also, they're quite often those murders that are preplanned and, when people preplan murders,
they tend to think about things like CCTV and their mobile-phone data and all the other tricks
and DNA and fingerprints and things. All the things that we can use in most murder cases
can be absent in preplanned murders. -There was no DNA evidence at the scene of<i> any</i> of the attacks,
but Amélie's mobile phone was missing. Police checked data, to see when it was last located.
-They were able, from the phone company, to get the information that her phone had switched off from the network,
had been lost by the network, if you like, at Walton-on-Thames at a particular time.
This time was something like eight or nine minutes after she was found dying on Twickenham Green
and Walton-on-Thames is a considerable distance away and it pointed to the bag with her phone in it
having been taken away by somebody in a vehicle. -Detectives trolled through 2,000 hours of CCTV
and, eventually, identified a white van at the scene, parked close to where Amélie was murdered.
But there were over 25,000 similar vans registered in the UK, so the police weren't optimistic about finding the right one.
But luck was on their side. -We had this file that was -- The official name for it is the single-suggestion file,
I think, where people ring up and say, "I've got an idea who might have committed that crime.
It is..." and give a name. And we had 129 people in this file and every one of them had been suggested to us
from a former wife or former girlfriend, or even a current wife or a current girlfriend,
and I termed it the women-scorned file. So we thought, "Oh, we'll go and have a look through that
and see if anybody in there had access to a white van and we might be able to kind of shortcut the search that way."
-The name Jo Collings surfaced. [ Ominous chord strikes ] She'd come forward after the murders were reported
and suggested her ex-partner Levi Bellfield as a possible suspect. -I was technically with him in a relationship
three, four years, but he ruled my life for 11 years, every day. He would drive past my house five, six, 10 times a day,
constantly ring me. He would walk down the alleyway at the back of my house and he'd ring me and tell me what time I'd put the kettle on,
what I was wearing, who was round my house, everything. -Jo told detectives Bellfield had a white van for his wheel-clamping business
and that he had a violent nature, with a particular hatred of blond women. It was a pivotal moment in the case.
-I'd always, at the back of my mind, because of how twisted and warped he is, you always think, "He could go that one step further."
I mean, people say I'm as guilty as he is because I didn't come forward before, but there was never enough evidence
or enough people willing to say, "Yes, actually, he did do this. He did do that,"
because so many people were scared of him. -We get the report we've had, which says,
"My ex-partner Levi Bellfield is a very violent man. He has a hatred of women, particularly blondes.
I found a magazine where he'd stabbed through all the photographs of blond girls in it.
He's very weird and it's just the sort of thing he'd want to do and he now works as a wheel clamper
and uses a little, white van to do it." So, oh, you know, that's exactly what we're looking for,
somebody that's got a small, white van, so let's try and progress that. -It was the ownership of that van that, in the end,
led the police to Levi Bellfield's door. -By joining the dots, Colin and his team could link Bellfield to another vehicle:
the car that ran Kate Sheedy down. -One of the times that he was arrested was in May 2004,
when he was arrested for kidnap, which was kidnapping the landlord of a pub near where he lived, in West Drayton.
And nothing happened about it and the landlord, in the end, said, "Oh, no. It was just a prank that went wrong.
Don't worry about it," didn't want to press charges. No charges were brought, but the crucial thing was that that arrest took place
and that abduction took place, indeed, [ Shutter clicks ] in a vehicle, and that vehicle was a white Toyota Previa.
Kate Sheedy had been attacked in Isleworth, not by being hit across the head, but by being run over by a large vehicle,
and she said that this vehicle was something like a Ford Galaxy. Of course, that's exactly what a Toyota Previa is.
-The white people-carrier, that was actually on my drive about two weeks before he ran Kate Sheedy over with it,
only because he asked me if he could leave it there for a couple of nights, and I begrudgingly said yes.
-And I got somebody to go and do a check on the number plate of the Previa that Levi had been arrested in and I remember her saying to me,
"Governor, I think we might have hit the jackpot," and said it was white. We now had somebody, Levi Bellfield,
who had the right kind of white van that was used at the time Amélie Delagrange was murdered
and the right type of vehicle at the time that Kate Sheedy was run over. -Bellfield was now the prime suspect.
At dawn on the 22nd of November 2004, police raided his West Drayton home. In the attic is a naked Levi Bellfield.
He'd covered himself up, in the hope that no one would find him. Well, they did and, indeed, the sergeant got him down
and duly handcuffed him. -Of course, he said to us, "Oh, I was only hiding 'cause I thought it was a gang.
I thought it was somebody after me." Well, it was somebody after you, Levi, but it was the murder squad.
-At 8:30 this morning, police raided several homes in West Drayton. The one behind me,
that of 36-year-old Levi Bellfield and his common-law wife. The nightclub bouncer is currently being held
at a West London police station. Bellfield was interrogated by detectives in relation to a long string of offenses,
ranging from rape to grievous bodily harm. He refused to answer any questions and, at one point,
he even petulantly turned his back on investigators. [ Shutter clicks ] He was remanded in custody
for almost 18 months, until the 2nd of March 2006, when he was formally charged with the murder of Amélie Delagrange
and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. The murder of Marsha McDonnell was added to his list of charges
on May 25, 2006. Bellfield's trial began at the Old Bailey on October 12, 2007. He pleaded not guilty on all counts.
Levi Bellfield's trial, for the murders of Amélie and Marsha was very long, very drawn out.
He was an imposing figure in the dock, big, tall, but it was his manner throughout it
that I think drew most attention. He looked very bored. He did give evidence. There were glimpses of the charm,
in a way, when he<i> was</i> talking. There was a point where he was explaining how you can be a successful wheel-clamper.
I'm not suggesting he charmed the jury, but I think some of them might have found him captivating
while he was talking in those terms, but he also had a very squeaky voice, that, again, was at odds with this
rather physically imposing man in the dock. Denied any of the charges. And you got the impression that he felt
that he would be acquitted at the end of it. [ Shutter clicks ] -But the circumstantial evidence
weighed heavily against Bellfield. They found 20 or 30 sightings of this van, separate bits of CCTV,
and that's when we built up the picture of this van circling Twickenham Green, effectively,
and driving round for a period of something like 45 minutes before Amélie was murdered.
Hunting. No other word for it, you know. He was cruising a very small area, looking for people to approach.
[ Suspenseful music plays ] -On February 25, 2008, Bellfield was found guilty of the murders
of Amélie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, as well as the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy.
[ Shutter clicks ] Judge Mrs. Justice Rafferty sentenced Bellfield to a whole-life tariff.
He was immediately sent to Woodhill Prison. He will never be released. His modus operandi, according to the police,
was that he got very angry, if he approached a young woman that he was attracted to and felt rejected by them
and it is suggested that this is what happened, in the case of the two women he killed.
-So, so, these women, they were disposable objects to him. They were part of his killing game,
his sort of hobby, his leisure activity. -The day after Bellfield received his sentence,
he was named as the chief suspect in a case that had shocked the nation and remained unsolved for nine years...
[ Ominous chord strikes ] ...the murder of Milly Dowler. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence,
particularly the fact that he had been living close by, within a couple of hundred yards,
of the place where she disappeared. It was established that he had use of, and had used, on that day, his partner's red car,
which matched one that was found in CCTV of the scene, but then there was the evidence of his partner,
who said that Levi Bellfield had got up in the middle of the night, the night of Milly's disappearance,
and had made an excuse to go back to that flat and, when she later went to the flat,
she discovered that the bedding had disappeared off their bed and he said that the dog had fouled the bedspread
and he'd had to burn it. Now, that was quite compelling evidence for the jury and they were convinced that he was the killer.
-On the 4th of March 2008, an ex-colleague of Bellfield, Kelly Fry, told ITV News he confessed to murdering Milly back in 2002.
[ Shutter clicks ] -He pointed at a flat in Walton and said that he used to live there
and that he'd lost £900 in rent that he'd already paid because he had to move out
and he said, "Oh, yeah, I also set fire to Emma's car." And I said, "Why would set fire to your girlfriend's car?"
And he said, "'Cause I took the girl." That was his exact words. And, immediately, I just knew that he was on about Milly.
If I, for one minute, thought that it was true, then I would've come forward a long, long time ago.
[ Melancholy tune plays ] -There was no forensic evidence. There was no smoking gun anywhere.
They had to build a case with what people had been saying, with little facts, with phone evidence they had,
with what CCTV they had, which wasn't particularly much. The whole thing came back to us knowing
what Levi Bellfield had done on the night that Milly Dowler was abducted. [ Ominous chord strikes ] [ Shutter clicks ]
-Bellfield had been questioned about Milly Dowler during the time he was on remand for his other crimes
and had always replied, "No comment." But one person was certain he'd murdered Milly:
his ex-partner Jo Collings. -He said that he'd never been to Yateley and he had nothing, no knowledge of the area.
Well, out of all the photographs, and I don't know why. Everything I had I threw away and I found an envelope.
It had two photographs in it and it was two of me and him at Yateley, which is really bizarre.
And I'm a great believer of "Everything happens for a reason" and I wasn't meant to throw those pictures out
because they were needed and, of course, they showed him in Yateley, so he knew where Milly was found.
He knew exactly the lay of the land because we used to go there all the time. [ Ominous chord strikes ] [ Shutter clicks ]
-On the 10th of May 2011, Levi Bellfield, three years after his first trial, was once again in the dock at the Old Bailey,
this time, charged with the murder of Milly Dowler. Bellfield pleaded not guilty
and refused to give evidence in his defense. -With Levi Bellfield, it's a power-and-control thing for him
'cause only he has knowledge of the murders that he's committed. Only he knows exactly who his victims were,
the full extent of the women that he perpetrated these crimes against, and it gives him a sense of power.
He's in prison now, so, what he's got control over is very limited, but one thing that he still
can exercise power over is that knowledge and, as long as that's his, then he's in control.
-Geoffrey Wansell was in the courtroom [ Melancholy tune plays ] during the trial.
-What's striking about Bellfield is that he wanted to put every witness through a real ordeal
because he never once pleaded guilty. He wanted them all to suffer and he<i> particularly</i> wanted the Dowler family to suffer.
It was as though he was smirking to himself, "Look what I'm putting you through."
He sat there, absolutely silent, throughout this fierce cross-examination. Utterly justified. I'm not criticizing at all, in fact.
It was perfectly justified. Bellfield made it happen. He made it happen by not pleading guilty
and he made it happen by instructing his own defense silk, his own barrister, to pursue the Dowlers to the full extent he was possible of
and it's very difficult to forgive Bellfield for that and it underlines just what a malicious,
malign, evil man he is. [ Sinister music plays ] -On June 23, 2011, the jury found Levi Bellfield guilty.
Judge Mr. Justice Wilkie sentenced him to a further whole-life tariff, on top of the one he was already serving.
-The fact that he is, as far as I know, the only convicted killer who's been given two whole-life tariffs does make him unique.
A judge in each case, the two judges, both felt that his crimes were so awful that he should be<i> never</i> given the chance of parole,
that life will mean life for him. To be given two sentences like that is extraordinary.
I suppose, in practical terms, it doesn't make any difference. Again, I suppose, if he ever felt
that he might try and challenge that, he's got to do it twice and the chances of him ever being released are nil.
-I think Levi Bellfield will be enjoying the notoriety that comes along with being a double-life-sentenced prisoner
'cause I think there is a certain hierarchy in prison, in terms of the nature of the offenses
that you've committed, the type of sentence that you have, and he will very much see himself
as the upper echelons of the prison population. -In 2016, it was reported that Bellfield had confessed
to the murder of Milly Dowler, giving gruesome details of how he'd abused and killed her.
Then, shortly after, he retracted the admission, causing the Dowler family untold grief.
He loves to manipulate and he<i> loved</i> to manipulate the Dowler family and they were his victims, every bit as much as Milly was.
-Well, basically what's going on when offenders like Levi Bellfield admit to things
or don't admit to things or retract things is that they are eliciting quite a lot of attention.
They are keeping people interested in them. They are playing with people 'cause people like Levi Bellfield,
they are the puppet masters. They like pulling other peoples' strings. They like pushing their buttons and seeing what happens.
-Levi Bellfield is now serving time at Frankland Prison. He has converted to Islam and calls himself Yusuf Rahim.
-Nothing will ever surprise me with Levi Bellfield. I don't know what he's done.
Only he knows what he's done. He would do anything, if he thought there was an angle that made it the best thing
for Levi Bellfield to do for Levi Bellfield. And he was ruthless; he was violent.
He was sociopathic, I'm sure. So who knows what else he might've done? -He sees himself, and still sees himself, to this day,
as a powerful, charismatic, famous, now notorious, figure whose place is guaranteed in the record books.
It feeds his arrogance. It feeds his ego and there's nothing that Bellfield likes more than feeding his ego.
-In letters written by Bellfield from his cell to the makers of this program, he claims that he has never confessed to<i> any</i> of his crimes
and still maintains he is not guilty, saying, "I'm innocent of all my convictions...
I have witnessed and done things I truly regret, but I'm no killer. My lifestyle led to my wrongful convictions...
I blame no one but me. The real victims are the victims and families of these crimes.
I am sincerely sad for their loss but I am not a victim... My lifestyle put me here, my choice, my fault."
But some of the people who know him better than others refuse to believe Bellfield's protestations.
-Levi, evil, all blends into one. I've always said it before. I<i> hate</i> it when people refer to him as an animal
because animals don't behave like that. They kill to survive, not for fun and pleasure.
He was born evil. He is pure, pure evil. -Bellfield is a psychopath. He deserves utterly to be in jail for the rest of his life.
He's a preening, vain, manipulative, smart, deathly man and, if anyone deserves to be called evil,
it's certainly Levi Bellfield. -Despite Levi Bellfield's claims of innocence, he has been convicted of three murders
and one attempted murder. We may never know if there are other victims out there, or not,
but what we do know is that Bellfield bludgeoned two women to death with a hammer,
ran another over repeatedly in his car, and killed a 13-year-old girl who had her whole life in front of her.
Yet, Bellfield has never offered any reason or remorse for his actions. He is, without doubt,
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Suspenseful music climbs ] ♪♪ ♪♪

Levi Bellfield killed two young women by bludgeoning them to death with a hammer, and he also attempted to murder a third. While in prison, he was convicted of a third murder that was unsolved for years.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Levi Bellfield, a notorious killer, murdered Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange, and attempted to kill Kate Sheedy, showcasing his violent history and manipulative nature.

Key points

Levi Bellfield: The Notorious Killer. Levi Bellfield became infamous for the brutal murders of young women between 2003 and 2004.
The Disappearance of Milly Dowler. Milly Dowler vanished on her way home, leading to a tragic investigation.
Marsha McDonnell's Murder. 19-year-old Marsha McDonnell was brutally attacked and killed just yards from her home.
The Attack on Kate Sheedy. Kate Sheedy survived a horrific attack by a vehicle, raising concerns about a serial killer.
Amélie Delagrange's Tragic End. Amélie Delagrange was murdered in a similar fashion to Marsha McDonnell, confirming a pattern.
The Women-Scorned File. Detectives explored a file of 129 tips from ex-partners, leading to a key suspect.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He is pure, pure evil.

Summarizing the essence of Levi Bellfield.

1:08WatchJul 8, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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