True Crime With Caledonian Kitty

(Top left: Milly Dowler. Bottom left: Marsha McDonnell. Centre: Amelie Delagrange. Right: Levi Bellfield, now known as Yusuf Rahim. Picture credit: dailystar.co.uk) 

Continued from Part One

In part one I covered a little bit of Levi Bellfield's background to give you more of an idea about what kind of person he is. In this post I'm going to talk about his crimes, the victims and the aftermath.

As always, please be aware that disturbing details will be included in this post.

If you happened to live in the UK around March 2002, you'll no doubt have seen the news reports, the articles in the newspapers and the photographs of a pretty 13 year old schoolgirl by the name of Milly Dowler who had been reported missing.

The disappearance of Milly Dowler was a huge case here in the UK, nobody knew what had happened to this popular, beautiful and bubbly young girl. The police had no leads except for nuisance callers who would sickeningly provide false information which wasted investigators time.

Milly's real name was Amanda Jane Dowler and on the 21st of March 2002 she and her friends went to a cafe after school for a short period of time. Milly, who was just 13 years old was dressed in her usual school uniform and jacket with her schoolbag and hair tied up in a pony tail (her bag, purse and mobile phone have never been recovered). Shortly after 4pm, she was seen walking a friend across the road to a bus stop from the cafe.

Being the kindhearted girl that she was, she waited until her friend got safely on the bus before she began to walk away from the bus stop. As she waved to her friend who was now sat on the bus, it was the last time her friend was to see Milly alive.

Although CCTV cameras were able to track some of Milly's footsteps from school, there was a section towards the end when she was coming away from the bus stop that provided no sight of her whatsoever, like she had just vanished.

When hours passed by and she didn't return home or answer her calls or messages, Milly's family and friends knew that something was wrong. Milly would never ignore messages or calls.

Over the coming days, weeks and months, the area where Milly went missing in Walton-On-Thames in England was thoroughly searched and missing posters with Milly's photo were all over the place. Regular appeals were broadcast and a newspaper offered a financial reward to anyone who could provide correct information about Milly.

It would be 6 months before the devastating news came that Milly's body had been found dumped in a wooded area in Hampshire. The callous murderer just left her naked body there. It was sickening and heartbreaking.

It would be many years later before Levi Bellfield was found guilty of her murder, the police had suspected him for a long time.

On the night that Milly had disappeared, Levi (34) was house sitting with his 23 year old girlfriend. He'd been out all day and appeared back at the house around 11pm at night with cans of beer and a Chinese takeaway.

His girlfriend reported that he seemed normal that night, they ate the food and then went to bed. He woke up around 3am complaining that he couldn't sleep. He said that he wanted to go and check his girlfriend's apartment which was located in Walton On Thames. He took the dog with him and drove his girlfriend's car.

[We now know the circumstances of what went on from the moment that Milly disappeared to when she was found. Levi had waited in the bushes watching Milly before kidnapping her, he put the poor girl through hell for 14 hours, sexually assaulting her repeatedly and torturing her. He told the police that he took Milly to his mother's house originally before taking her to his girlfriend's apartment. It is believed that he strangled Milly around 6am the next day before dumping her body in the woods in Hampshire]

3 days later when his girlfriend returned to the apartment she noticed there was a strong smell of bleach and cleaning products. The place looked spotless which she found strange as Levi wasn't the domestic type. She also noticed that the bedding in one of the room's was missing as well as her car.

Levi explained that the dog had urinated on the bed so he had to throw away the bed sheets. He told her that he'd gone for a few drinks with a friend and was too drunk to drive her car home so he got a taxi. When they went to pick the car up, it was not there. Levi claiming that it must have been stolen. The truth was that he had suspected the car may have been caught on CCTV and got rid of it in case it ended up being traced back to him.

Despite alarm bells ringing and never really trusting a word he said, his girlfriend continued the relationship with him and they moved in together. The neighbours mentioned later that Levi seemed really polite and approachable when they first moved in but that soon changed. As I mentioned before, he didn't get on too well with some of the elderly neighbours and had allegedly spread weedkiller on an elderly neighbours garden. He also put barbed wire up around his home, kept two wild dogs in his back garden and had a habit of stealing gates etc from houses a few blocks down.

Levi was arrogant and walked around like he owned the place. Neighbours found him intimidating and felt sorry for his girlfriend, one neighbour told investigators that the couple would act as if they were the perfect couple but the reality was that Levi was in control of that relationship and did all the talking. His girlfriend often looked scared of him and there were many times that she would be seen crying.

As I mentioned in part one, Levi had a history of being abusive towards women despite the fact that he idolised his mother.

At the time of Milly's murder, Levi was still working as a doorman at a nightclub and on the side he would go around clamping people's vehicles.

In Feb 2003 the public and the police were still in the dark about what had happened to Milly Dowler and London was rocked again by another horrific murder of a young woman.

Further reading & sources:

- Levi Bellfield - Murderpedia

- Levi Bellfield: News Article: Manchester Evening Times

- Levi Bellfield - Wikipedia 

- Born To kill - Levi Bellfield