Bellfield’s trial began at the Old Bailey on 12 October 2007. It was to last five months, a lengthy period of time, even for a case of such seriousness. Bellfield pleaded not guilty to all the charges he faced: murdering Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. There were also the more recent charges – the attempted murder of Irma Dragoshi, causing Mrs Dragoshi grievous bodily harm with intent and the attempted kidnap and false imprisonment of Anna-Maria Rennie.
It was the first time the world at large had heard of the exact nature of Bellfield’s dark deeds. The opening speech from prosecutor Brian Altman merits repeating in part, even though we have already touched upon some of the events the hushed courtroom heard him describe. We can then look at what the witnesses and victims said during the case.
Mr Altman began by telling the court: ‘Between October 2001 and August 2004, five women – four of them young women aged between 17 and 22 – were violently attacked. Two of these young women were brutally murdered by being battered about the head with a blunt instrument. One young woman survived a horrific attack on her when she was driven at and run over. Another woman suffered a nasty injury when she was struck on the head. Another woman survived attack without injury … The prosecution case is that Levi Bellfield was the attacker.’
Mr Altman said the attacks began in October 2001 when the defendant emerged from a car in which there was another man and approached Ms Rennie. She was walking in the street late at night after a row with her boyfriend, said Mr Altman. She was declining the defendant’s invitation to go with him when he physically picked her up from the ground and sought to drag her to the car from which he had emerged. ‘She was fortunate enough to escape injury.’
Marsha McDonnell was attacked in February 2003 when she left a bus near a stop close to her home in Hampton after an evening out with friends. ‘She was struck on the back of the head with a blunt instrument as she approached the house. She died later in hospital,’ said Mr Altman.
In December 2003, Irma Dragoshi was attacked at a bus stop in the village of Longford, near Heathrow airport. Mr Altman said, ‘The defendant got out of a vehicle and ran over. He attacked her by hitting her with a blunt instrument.’ Mrs Dragoshi had recovered but the injury left her with amnesia.
Kate Sheedy was attacked in May 2004 as she was making her way home after an evening out with friends. ‘She got off a bus in Isleworth. She became suspicious of a people carrier vehicle which was stationary in front of her. In order to avoid that car from which she felt threatened she crossed over the road. Suddenly but very deliberately, the waiting people carrier moved, turned at speed and drove towards her. It ran her over in the mouth of the side turning, causing her massive injuries from which she survived, albeit with that she remains scarred mentally and physically.’
Amelie Delagrange, living in the UK to improve her English, was attacked in August 2004 in Twickenham. She too had spent the evening with friends. Mr Altman said, ‘She took a bus home and missed her stop. She was walking up Hampton Road. As she was crossing Twickenham Green, she was attacked and hit over the head with a blunt instrument. She died from her injuries.’
Mr Altman told the jury, ‘There are such similarities between the offences that the chances of them having been committed by two or more men working independently can safely and sensibly be excluded, such that all the offences were the work of one man and that man was Levi Bellfield.’ He said there was direct evidence linking Bellfield to the attacks on Anna-Maria Rennie and Irma Dragoshi, and ‘compelling’ circumstantial evidence linking him to the other three crimes. Ms Rennie identified Bellfield as her attacker when police reinvestigated her case following his arrest in November 2004, Mr Altman said.
The attack on Mrs Dragoshi was witnessed by one of the other people in the car that Bellfield used. Sunil Gharu, a ‘friend and associate’ of Bellfield, said Altman. Mr Gharu had said he saw Bellfield run out of the car and attack a woman standing at a bus stop, the court was told, but did not see him hit her over the head. He said he thought Bellfield was going for the victim’s handbag but nothing was stolen from her, Mr Altman said. Mr Gharu said it appeared Bellfield ‘spun her round’ and she fell to the ground, banging her head. But nearer the time of the incident, Mrs Dragoshi said she had been struck over the head by her attacker and the injury to her head was not caused by a fall to the ground.
After his arrest, Bellfield attempted to turn the tables, claiming Mr Gharu had carried out the attack, but Mr Altman said the accounts provided by Mr Gharu and the victim provided ‘powerful direct evidence’ that Bellfield was responsible. It was open to jurors to use any findings in relation to one allegation to inform their verdicts upon the others, he added. ‘The prosecution say the chances that these offences were committed by anyone other than Bellfield are so fanciful that you may reject them,’ said Mr Altman.
He said the cases of Ms McDonnell, Ms Delagrange and Ms Sheedy were linked by the ‘non-coincidental presence’ at each of a vehicle associated with Bellfield: a silver Vauxhall Corsa, a white Toyota Previa and a white Ford Courier van. One of Bellfield’s former landlords, Jason Woods, also ran a car finance company, and in November 2002 arranged the funds for Bellfield to get the silver Vauxhall Corsa. Mr Altman noted that the office of the car finance company was in ‘the very same road in which Kate Sheedy was to be run over’ and injured in 2004. The Corsa provided another significant link, the jury was told. ‘It is of critical importance to the Marsha McDonnell murder in 2003. There is evidence that could conclude that it was the car that was driving down the road when Marsha McDonnell alone alighted from a bus after midnight.’ CCTV footage showed a car of this description behaving in a ‘curious manner’. Mr Altman said, ‘It slows down as it approaches the bus from which Marsha is alighting,’ and ‘the behaviour of that car is identical to the behaviour of the people mover’ which mowed down Kate Sheedy as she got off the bus.
Referring to the charges in total, Mr Altman said, ‘He denies that he is responsible for any or all of these offences. It is his case that, if they were committed by the same man, it is not him or, if they were committed by different men, he was not one of them.’ The jury were to visit the west London areas where the attacks took place. Bellfield ‘lived and worked in south-west London most of his life and knew the area extremely well’, Mr Altman said.
Anna-Maria Rennie, who was 23, had lived in Spain since July 2004 but came back to Britain in the year of the trial, said Mr Altman. She revisited the scene of her October 2001 attack, when she had gone for a walk at about 11.30pm to calm down after a row with her boyfriend. Mr Altman said she told police she remembered a car pulling up a few metres behind her. Looking back, she saw two men in a dark-blue Ford Mondeo. The one in the passenger seat got out and approached her.
She was visibly upset and crying and she believed she had told him about what happened with her boyfriend. Mr Altman said, ‘She told police three days later that the man offered her a lift in the car, which she declined. She said a man of his age should not be offering young girls lifts … She began to walk away. She had only gone a few metres when the man grabbed her. He placed her in a bear hug which pinned her arms to the side. With his strength, he lifted her off the ground and tried to get her to the car. At the time, Anna-Maria weighed about seven-and-a-half stone. The man took her to the car in a very tight hold. Naturally, she was extremely scared. As he tried to get her to the car, despite being absolutely petrified, she kicked and struggled violently. It paid off because she managed to break away about one and a half metres from the car.’ Then she ran home through a park and heard the man shouting after her something like ‘whore’, said Mr Altman. She told her boyfriend but did not report it to the police until later. She described the man as being about six foot and fat with tattoos on his arm. Jurors were shown pictures of Bellfield’s tattoos – a boxing devil with the word ‘Levi’ on his right shoulder and a bulldog with a ‘Tottenham FC’ banner on his right leg.
Mr Altman said that, although Ms Rennie’s recollection of events had ‘faded’, one of the things she could recall was that she had been sitting at a bus stop at the time. ‘In the context of buses and bus stops, this is an important feature when assessing the question whether these offences are all the work of one man.’ After the arrest, Ms Rennie positively identified Bellfield in a video identity parade as the man who attacked her, he added. Bellfield remained silent when interviewed about the incident in September. Mr Altman said that, if Ms Rennie’s identification was right, and there was ‘no reason to believe that it is anything other than accurate’, it proved that in October 2001 he was ‘prepared to attempt to abduct a lone young female at night’.
Jurors were entitled to rely upon the evidence in the other cases to support the allegation and also upon the evidence in her case to support the others. Incidents had ‘similar features’ and there was a ‘pattern emerging’, Mr Altman said. The attacks involved ‘the assailant using his vehicle in the hours of darkness to locate and target lone females who he then attacked’. Mr Altman said Bellfield prowled the streets in his car, peering into buses and checking out bus stops for lone women going home. ‘The illuminations allowed the attacker of these women to see into the bus from the outside. These were not the chance victims of a street attack. They were the targets of a predatory man who had stalked buses and bus routes, looking for young women.’
Mr Altman also told the jury, ‘Four of the victims were young women aged between 17 and 22 who were violently attacked. Two of these young women were brutally murdered by being battered about the head with a blunt instrument. One young woman survived a horrific attack on her when she was driven at and run over. One other woman suffered a nasty injury after being hit over the head. And another young woman escaped any harm by running off. The prosecution say that this defendant Levi Bellfield was the attacker in all these cases.’
When the trial resumed after a weekend break, Mr Altman said a pathologist thought ‘a lump hammer was the possible weapon’ in the attack on Marsha McDonnell. ‘The evidence suggests a rapid attack with Marsha unable to use her hands for defence.’ Mr Altman had told the jury that a silver Vauxhall Corsa car, which Bellfield owned at the time, was caught on CCTV footage from her number 111 bus. ‘At the time of Marsha’s killing, not only did the defendant own the Corsa but he was still driving it – not only up to and in the week before the murder, but shortly afterwards, when he sold it on,’ said Mr Altman.
Six days before the murder, police spoke to a man of Bellfield’s description in the car outside his sister’s home. The man had a tattoo of a boxing devil similar to the one Bellfield had, he added. Mr Altman said Bellfield had sold the car in exchange for a van a week after Ms McDonnell’s death. The prosecutor said the sale of the car was an ‘act of desperation’, as was Bellfield’s decision to take his family on holiday to Tenerife shortly after the attack. He had told his partner at the time that the reason he wanted to take their daughter out of school to go away was because he was doing well in his clamping business and wanted some ‘winter sun’. Bellfield made no comment when asked under arrest about Ms McDonnell’s murder in May 2005.
Mr Altman added that the attack on hairdresser Irma Dragoshi in December 2003 ‘proves the defendant’s capacity for violent behaviour towards women’. Mrs Dragoshi, of Albanian origin, was 33, worked at a salon in Slough and lived in Hounslow. She was dropped off by her boss at a bus stop near Heathrow after finishing work at around 7.20pm on 16 December. At that time in winter, it was dark and quiet with no one around.
Mrs Dragoshi remembered taking a telephone call from her husband and telling him that her bus was late. She had her hood up and was facing the direction of the nearby White Horse pub, the court heard. ‘This is the last memory she now has of the evening,’ said Mr Altman. Her next clear recollection was waking up the next day in hospital suffering from terrible dizziness. There was a lump on the back of her head and her face was ‘black and blue and swollen’.
Her husband Astrid Dragoshi recalled that he had been speaking to his wife on the phone when the call was interrupted. ‘Quite suddenly, during the course of their conversation, Mr Dragoshi heard his wife scream and the telephone went dead,’ said Mr Altman. Astrid called his wife back and the phone was answered by an English woman who passed it back to Mrs Dragoshi. She told him that she was in a great deal of pain and had been hit behind the head, the jury was told. Mr Dragoshi called the emergency services and headed to the scene in a taxi, where he found his wife sitting in an ambulance with her head in her hands.
Mr Altman said that since that night she had no recollection of what happened or conversations she had and she had been diagnosed with temporary amnesia. The landlord of the White Horse found her lying on the ground crying, speaking a foreign language. A police officer who arrived at the scene said Mrs Dragoshi had described waiting at the bus stop when a man approached her from behind and tried to take her mobile phone. When she struggled, he hit her on the back of the head.
Sunil Gharu, an associate of Bellfield who worked part-time for his clamping business, was in a car with him that night, the court heard. He recalled Bellfield parking the black VW Golf at the side of the road and turning off the engine and the lights. ‘Suddenly Bellfield said, “Watch this.” He got out of the car and, as he did so, told Gharu to jump in the driver’s seat and Gharu did so. He saw Bellfield jog over to a woman standing at the bus stop. As he did so, Bellfield pulled up his hood,’ said Mr Altman. Mr Gharu said Bellfield grabbed the woman’s shoulder bag, spinning her around and smashing her to the floor. Mr Gharu said Bellfield then returned to the car and took over in the driver’s seat. ‘Bellfield got back in the car, turned on the engine but not the lights and drove off laughing,’ Mr Altman said. ‘During the journey they didn’t speak about what Bellfield had done.’
Mr Altman added, ‘You may think that, when he left the car boasting, “Watch this”, there was an element of bravado, showing off to Gharu, demonstrating his capacity for unprovoked, wanton violence towards a woman.’ When police questioned Bellfield about the attack in April 2005, he issued a prepared statement denying any involvement, but then issued a new statement when confronted with the evidence of Mr Gharu. This was a mirror image of what Mr Gharu had said, with Sunil as the attacker rather than Levi. Bellfield said he saw the other man get out of the car and pull at the woman’s handbag. He noticed the woman falling to the ground and was ‘shocked’, did not want to be involved and drove off, he claimed.
Mr Altman told the jury of the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy after she left a bus near her home in Isleworth in May 2004. Mr Altman said she was not blonde like the first two victims but did have light-coloured hair. She had taken a short journey on the bus and was the only one to get off at her stop. ‘There was no one else around, although she saw a car driving past. She got her keys out ready to let herself in to her home and then she heard an engine.’ She looked up and saw a Toyota Previa people carrier parked in a side road. ‘The engine was running but there were no lights on. It was a white people carrier with blacked-out windows. Kate sensed that something was not right about this vehicle and, sensing that, she crossed over the road to the other side. She did not like it. Something told her something was not right. What Kate was not to then know was that the people carrier had been stalking her before she even got off the bus. What the occupant of the vehicle was now doing was that, having noticed her on the bus and stopped with the engine running and no lights on, was to engage her.
‘As it tragically turned out, Kate’s instincts about the vehicle were right. As she reached a traffic island in the middle of the road, the car switched its lights on, revved up its engine and drove off. But it came back without warning. It did a U-turn and drove directly at Kate. She attempted to make a dash to the pavement but the car got to her before she could avoid it. It struck her and drove over her but that did not suffice. It reversed back over her before making off in the direction in which it came. Local residents heard a bang followed by a scream but thought little of it, living as they did near a pub. Gravely injured and in pain, she tried to crawl home. When she could go no further, she managed to phone her mother from her mobile phone, which she recovered from the road surface, and she had the presence of mind to call an ambulance.’ After her life-saving operations, she had follow-up surgery and physiotherapy to help her walk again. She still suffered from lower back pain and spasms and had an uneven collarbone. Physical and psychological injuries remained. She had missed her A-levels because of what had happened to her but was granted her predicted results by the exams board. When she started university in October 2005, it was a year later than her friends, the court heard.
The jurors were shown Ms Sheedy taking part in a police reconstruction of the attack, filmed in snow in February 2005. She was seen to walk from the bus stop to the spot where she was run over. The young woman remembered the car that attacked her being white with blacked-out windows and that the driver’s mirror was ‘defective in some way’, Mr Altman added. She recalled ‘two shapes’ being in the vehicle, one with short hair and broad shoulders and the driver having his arms forward across the wheel.
Jurors were shown a CCTV picture of a driver identified as Bellfield driving another vehicle with his arms over the steering wheel. And Mr Altman said Bellfield’s former partner remembered that he would ‘hold on to the steering wheel and he would rock’. The jury was shown CCTV footage of a Toyota Previa driving towards and then away from the scene of the attack. An expert said the vehicle that Bellfield was driving at the time was the same make and model as the one in the CCTV footage and there were ‘no significant differences’ between the two. They both had blacked-out windows, which were not a standard feature on a Previa, the jury was told. There was also evidence that Bellfield had the car that was associated with him valeted in June 2004.
The jury was shown images, believed to be filmed by Bellfield’s then girlfriend, showing him saying ‘f*** off’ to the person recording and carrying a torch in his hand, just one-and-three-quarter hours after the attack. When shown the video by police, he said, ‘Oh please.’ Mr Altman said, ‘He said that what had happened to Kate Sheedy had been despicable and he added, somewhat curiously, “I am showing remorse.” He explained that by saying [it] he found it a sad thing to have happened. He said he wasn’t too bright with English vocabulary and what he meant was he was disgusted that he was being accused of this crime.’
Mr Altman said the driver of the Previa had adopted the same system of stalking a bus as the driver of the Corsa who allegedly attacked Marsha McDonnell. ‘It is the commonality of system that shows that this must have been the work of one man,’ Mr Altman said. ‘It is true that no blunt instrument was used to strike Kate over the head but, if the prosecution is right, he used a different blunt instrument to attack her – that was the blunt instrument of the car. This terrible crime was the work of none other than Levi Bellfield.’
Amelie’s parents Jean-Francois and Dominique sat in court as details were given of their daughter’s murder. Mr Altman said Amelie, blonde and 5ft 4in tall, was passionate about English and had arrived in Britain in April 2004 to further her studies. After drinking with friends in Twickenham on 19 August 2004, Amelie missed her bus stop and was killed as she walked home along Twickenham Green: ‘She had been battered about the head with such severity that it caused her a massive head injury and she died from it. She had been struck on the back of the head with a blunt instrument and, like others before her, had been left for dead. Like the others, the attack was motiveless.’
Mr Altman said she had drunk three or four glasses of white wine and told a friend she felt a little bit drunk because she was not used to drinking. He added, ‘It is not clear why Amelie missed her stop. It may be she was somewhat tipsy or it may be that the bus was travelling too quickly. She unexpectedly found herself getting off at the alighting stop.’ She was battered to death during the eight minutes when Levi Bellfield’s white van was parked by Twickenham Green. Bellfield had spotted her walking along and looking lost after getting off at the wrong bus stop. He followed her as she took a shortcut to her home along the Green and battered her over the head with a heavy object. He drove to Walton bridge and threw some of her possessions in the river. They were later recovered by police divers, said Mr Altman. Her bag contained a sim card, her purse, a CD player and two mobiles – one of which had registered with its network in the Walton area 22 minutes after she had last been seen. A CCTV camera spotted the van driving in nearby Sunbury in the direction of West Drayton where Bellfield was living at the time. The court was shown the images of Amelie walking to the Green in Hampton Road – and of the van said to be following her. At one point near a zebra crossing, the van was 42 seconds behind her and was later parked at the Green when she was last spotted just after 10.00pm.
A local resident told police he heard a female voice coming from the Green. ‘It was a ten-second shout which included a scream,’ said Mr Altman. The van moved off at 10.08pm and was seen in Sunbury 26 minutes later. ‘In the intervening minutes, the van with Bellfield at the wheel had taken a necessary detour. He stopped in Walton bridge where he disposed of some of the items he had stolen from Amelie before or after the attack. They were items which were fished out of the Thames under Walton bridge. Only Amelie’s killer could be responsible for disposing of the items in the river.’
Mr Altman said the van had been seen ‘cruising’ the area before the attack. It stopped suddenly at the Green. ‘He had spotted Amelie sometime along her route and had become determined to engage her. He stopped with time to wait for her to catch up. He followed her across the Green, attacked her and stole her possessions and drove off. Amelie was a young female having just got off a bus having missed her bus stop. She was looking lost and was a bit tipsy. She was walking along alone and she had made herself a vulnerable target to a predatory male looking for someone just like her.’
The court heard that, in the weeks following the murder, Bellfield suffered from panic attacks and said to a friend, ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’ Bellfield also got rid of the van which has never been found. When police arrested him at his home in November 2004, they found a newspaper cutting about Amelie’s death in a drawer.
On 19 October, the first woman to have been attacked by the bus-stop stalker and who survived to tell the story, Anna-Maria Rennie, gave evidence.
She told how she had been living with her then boyfriend Richard Lewison when, probably crying, she left after a row. After a while, she paused by a bus stop for about five minutes then continued walking along before turning around to come back. She spotted a man coming towards her and, feeling uneasy about him, she crossed the road. Her attention was attracted by the driver of a passing car: ‘Somehow, I can’t remember why but we had a conversation for about ten minutes.’ She remembered him asking her if she wanted a lift home which she declined. ‘After the conversation I started to go off and while he was still walking with me I must have turned around. He put his arm around me. I screamed, he had his hand over my mouth and picked me up off the floor. He had his left arm around me and his right hand across my mouth. He was very strong. He was walking me towards the car which was parked in a layby with the back passenger door open. I put up a big struggle. I was using everything trying to get my arms free, kicking, anything I could to get away. It was hard. I was being held very strongly towards him and the more force I was using to get away, the more pressure there was being put on me to keep there.
‘He shouted, “You’re a whore! You’re a slut!”’ Her attacker lifted her up and walked to the car. Anna-Maria said, ‘I’m kicking, moving, screaming as much as I can to get away. Just before he gets to the car he lets go.’ She said she had been shown various men on a video line-up, and that she had asked to see two of them again. She then chose Bellfield and said, ‘He was the man.’ She said the attack had ‘changed who I am. I have always been a very open, confident person and for a long time afterwards it destroyed that. I was very withdrawn and quiet, I’m not so confident, I’m a lot warier.
The jury also heard of the night that Marsha McDonnell was found dying in the street near her home. Father-of-two David Fuller was woken late at night in February 2003 by a ‘loud thud’ which sounded like a car door slamming in front of his house but saw nothing unusual as he looked out of his bedroom window in Priory Road, Hampton. He began drifting back to sleep about 15 to 20 minutes later but heard moaning and spotted a pool of blood by a pillar near his front garden. He woke his wife, Bernadette. She told the jury, ‘I could see a pool of liquid running down the pavement. When I looked again there was a hand stretched out from the pool so we knew there was somebody there, not just blood from the pillar.’
Mr Fuller called for an ambulance and kept the line open to hear advice from the operator as the couple rushed outside to help. Mrs Fuller told the court: ‘She was face down with her arm underneath her. Her arm was stretched out in front of her and she clawed her arm backwards. It was quite difficult to see. She was obviously bleeding quite a lot. It was quite matted through her hair.’ Towels were fetched on the advice of the ambulance operator and the couple tried to see where the blood was coming from. Mr Fuller recalled seeing the long-haired teenager lying face down ‘on the floor obviously bleeding’ when he first went outside. He told the court, ‘She was still moaning at that point and my wife was still trying to talk to her. Her hand was on the ground and I think there was some movement in her fingers, in her right hand.’ Mrs Fuller said, ‘Initially she made a low moaning sound but that stopped quite soon when I was first out there.’
Irma Dragoshi too had to relive her ordeal in front of the jury and she struggled to cope with her emotions as she told of the moment she was struck on the back of the head at a bus stop. She had come to Britain with her husband Astrid in 1999 but had now returned to Kosovo. On the night she was attacked, Mrs Dragoshi was given a lift to a bus stop on her way home from work in Slough. Giving evidence from behind a screen at the Old Bailey in order to avoid eye contact with Bellfield, she described how her husband had called her on her mobile phone while she waited. ‘He used to ring me every night asking me where I was and did I finish work. The next thing, I was in hospital.’ She said she came round between 11.30am and midday. ‘I had a very big lump in the back of my head. It didn’t fit in my hand. I was trying to touch it but it was really very, very painful. It was so big. It is still there, you can feel it,’ she said. The next day in hospital she was in ‘strong pain’ and could not open her eyes. Pain was coming ‘from the back of my head and forwards from inside’ and she later suffered headaches.
‘How long did those headaches go on for?’ asked Mr Altman.
‘I still have it even now, a long time,’ she replied.
Clifford Hare, landlord of the White Horse pub, near where the attack took place, told the jury how he discovered Mrs Dragoshi lying on the floor with a bump ‘as big as an egg’ on the back of her head. He described how he was walking home when he saw what ‘looked like a roll of carpet lying in the bus stop. It moved. That’s when I realised it was somebody lying there,’ he said. ‘She was in distress and was hurt. She was crying and confused. I helped her to her feet.’ He said she was talking in ‘broken English’ and he did not understand her. The court was played a recording of his 999 call, in which her wailing and crying could be heard in the background. Mr Hare was telling the operator she had been mugged and when a bus arrived at the stop she wanted to go and sit on it, where she could feel safe.
Detective Constable Nick Deakin, who was the first officer on the scene, said Mrs Dragoshi was sitting next to the driver when they arrived. ‘There was a lady who was complaining she had been struck on the head. She was in quite a hysterical state and was crying. It was difficult to establish what had happened. She pointed to an incredibly large bump on the back of her head. I had never seen anything like it.’ He told the court how Mrs Dragoshi passed out several times on the way to the ambulance and became progressively less coherent.
Astrid Dragoshi, speaking through an Albanian interpreter, told the court how he called his wife as he waited for her to return home. They were having a ‘normal conversation’ as he asked her how her day had been and whether she felt tired after work. Then, he said, ‘My wife started screaming. The phone was immediately off. There was no connection … Of course, I was very worried, because if you hear your wife scream somewhere far away and you have not been able to help her, of course, how will you feel?’
Asked by William Boyce QC, defending, if he felt scared when he heard the screams, he said, ‘My hair went up.’ He said he tried ringing back several times until eventually he got through and an English woman passed the phone over to Mrs Dragoshi. ‘She was screaming and she was also saying, “Someone has hit me on the back of my head,”’ Mr Dragoshi said. ‘She said, “I am in a lot of pain” and these were the words she was using: “I am in pain! I am in pain! I am in pain!”’ Mr Dragoshi phoned for the police and an ambulance and took a taxi to go and see his wife.
‘I told the driver to rush a bit because of what has happened,’ he said. When he arrived at the scene emergency services were already there and he went to speak to her. ‘She was repeating the words, “Someone has hit me at the back of the head and I am in pain.” It seems that she was shocked and lost,’ Mr Dragoshi said. ‘I saw a big bump at the back of her head.’ He accompanied his wife in an ambulance to hospital where a doctor spoke to her about what had happened.
Mr Altman asked Mr Dragoshi if his wife’s memory had suffered later. The husband replied, ‘The next night it was midnight and she asked me, “What are we doing here? Why are we here?”’
Sunil Gharu said Bellfield had told him, ‘Watch this,’ before throwing Mrs Dragoshi to the floor during the attack. ‘He pulled up out of the blue. He switched off the headlights but the engine was still running. He made a comment like, “Look at this” or “Watch this” or something and said to me to get into the driver’s seat. Then he got out of the car. He jogged up to where the bus stop is. I think he put his hood on, he had a hooded top on.’ Bellfield then approached a woman wearing a long jacket and a scarf who was on her mobile phone, he added. ‘It looked like he grabbed her. There was a bit of a struggle and he threw her to the ground then jogged off.’ He said that Bellfield had grabbed the woman by the upper body and ‘just sort of swung her’ and had also been pulling on her handbag. Mr Gharu said that as she lay on the ground he jogged back to the car, took his place in the driver’s seat and drove off. Mr Altman asked what Bellfield was doing as he drove away. ‘Just laughing about what he’d done.’ Afterwards the two men never spoke to each other about what had happened, he added.
More trauma awaited yet another of Bellfield’s victims, Kate Sheedy, who relived the moment she was run over by the bus-stop stalker. Ms Sheedy, wearing a purple T-shirt and black cardigan, broke down in tears as she was cross-examined by Mr Boyce.
She told the court how she had been making her way home after celebrating her leavers’ day at Gumley House Convent School. She organised a party for fellow sixth formers and had gone out later in Twickenham with friends, wearing a pink V-neck jumper, black knee-length skirt and pink shoes with a pink handbag. After taking the 22 bus home shortly after midnight and rummaging for her keys ahead of the two-minute walk home, she noticed the people carrier parked over the road. ‘What drew my attention to it was the noise initially. Its engine was running and its lights were off. I knew it wasn’t a vehicle that was normally there. It just made me feel nervous. I assumed it was a taxi dropping someone off or picking someone up, but there were no houses with lights on and I couldn’t see or hear anyone. I felt very, very uneasy. I don’t know what it was – a sixth sense, I don’t know.
‘I decided to cross the road so I wouldn’t be walking directly past the vehicle. I was walking quite quickly. I had been made anxious and still didn’t feel completely safe despite having crossed the road.’ She was about to cross a small junction with an industrial estate service road as she made her way along the pavement when the car lights flashed and engine revved. The car drove past but then did a U-turn back towards her, she said. ‘I thought the car was continuing, but instead of doing that it carried on into the entrance of the industrial estate. I was halfway between the little traffic island and the pavement and it drove straight towards me. It sounded and looked like it was trying to go as fast as it possibly could. I tried to run to the pavement. The car hit me. I was thrown to the ground lying on my front, so I was face down lying on the road. The car continued to move. It all happened very quickly. It drove straight over me. My head was under the car, but my legs were protruding out of the driver’s side. Once the whole front wheel had driven over me it continued and then braked suddenly and then reversed so the wheel went back over me again.’
The vehicle carried on over her and then drove off. ‘It was going incredibly quickly,’ she said. She gathered her phone, keys and handbag, which were scattered over the road. ‘I phoned my mother to tell her I had been run over and I was around the corner and could she come and help me.’ Ms Sheedy said she then called for an ambulance, which turned up ‘after what seemed like an eternity … I tried to stand up. I stood up and fell straight back down to the ground again. I did try and shout for help but it was barely a whisper. Very little noise actually came out. I was determined I was going to get home. I didn’t really realise I’d just been driven over twice. I continued to crawl a distance and then collapsed, at which point I realised I had very serious injuries.’
She told the court she suffered a collapsed lung, broken ribs and a broken collarbone in the attack. ‘My liver was the most life-threatening injury. It was both crushed and fractured so couldn’t actually function at that stage. I also had a very large laceration to my back. The whole lower bottom of my back had been ripped open.’ She was unfit ‘both mentally and physically’ to start university that year and went instead the following October. She described how she was in ‘an immense amount of pain’ and found what happened to her ‘hard to put into words’. ‘For the first week I was kept unconscious, the pain would be too much for my body to cope with. There was a police officer constantly by my bed for the first week in case I died.’
The jury was read a statement by Eileen Sheedy. She had been at home when she said she was woken by a ‘panicky’ phone call from her daughter. ‘Mummy, I’ve been run over, I’m in our road,’ she said. The anxious mother ran out into the street but could not find her. ‘I went back into the house as I felt I was having a bad dream. I checked the bedroom but it was empty. I tried to phone Kate on her mobile but it went straight to her answer phone.’
She went out to look for her daughter again but still could not find her and tried calling Ms Sheedy’s father, James, and the girl’s friend, Helen, before hearing the house phone ringing and running straight back inside. It was her daughter, saying, ‘Mummy, where are you? Why is it taking so long? Come out of the house, keep going left, and you’ll find me.’
Mrs Sheedy put the phone down and ran out. ‘I saw a little body lying on the pavement near a parked car. I went over. Kate said to me, “I am on the phone to the lady from the ambulance and she needs to speak to you.” The lady from the ambulance was telling me to calm down. I asked Kate how she was feeling. She said, “I am in a lot of pain, someone ran me over on purpose, it was definitely on purpose, he’s a bastard.” She said she’ll tell me about it later.’ Mrs Sheedy took off her jacket and put it over her daughter as she was cold. Then James Sheedy, who was separated from Mrs Sheedy, arrived.
Mrs Sheedy’s statement continued: ‘Kate told me she loved me. I said that I loved her and gave her a kiss. Kate was complaining of being in so much pain. Kate said, “If they don’t get here soon I’m going to die.” She was in so much pain. I was trying to comfort her.’ Mr Sheedy flagged down the ambulance as it arrived, Mrs Sheedy said. ‘Kate was asking for her dad and was extremely anxious and crying. She said, “I love you, Daddy, I love you, Mummy.”’ The parents got in the ambulance with her and went to hospital.
The court was also read part of the 999 call Kate made after being hit. She was asked ‘Where does it hurt?’ by the operator and replied, ‘Everywhere. He ran over me twice … The car stopped and checked me out … I thought he was going to take me in his car but, when he saw that I knew he was dodgy, he just ran over me.’
Detective Constable Michael Jones told the jury how he spoke to Kate at West Middlesex hospital, just over an hour after she was run down. ‘She was clearly in pain but surprisingly well enough to converse quite clearly,’ Mr Jones said. She was wearing an oxygen mask and with her father by her side explained to the policeman in a ‘clear voice’ what had happened to her. He said she described her evening out and how she had been suspicious of the stationary vehicle.
Mr Altman asked the officer, ‘What was her closing line to you?’
‘Her closing line to me was, “Please get the bastard,”’ Mr Jones replied.
The jury also heard of the initial error in the police hunt for Kate’s attacker. Detectives investigating the near-fatal attack looked through security camera footage taken from a nearby pub, the County Arms. Initially, they only looked at three out of six tapes from the camera, missing the film that showed a white vehicle following the bus Ms Sheedy was on. It was not spotted until a complete review of the case was carried out some time later. Detective Sergeant Philip Royan said, ‘The relevant part wasn’t examined … The relevant part had a white vehicle following the bus and then driving off after Kate got off the bus. As I understand it, a number of tapes were seized – I think six in all. The officer who held responsibility took out some of the tapes and viewed them and said that they had been viewed and there wasn’t anything of evidential value … I was none the wiser until a complete review of the case had taken place and it became apparent that the officer had only watched three of the tapes instead of the six.’
In relation to Kate Sheedy, the jury also heard from motorist Philip Lancaster, who saw a man he later identified as Bellfield in a white Toyota Previa with blacked-out windows the day before the attack. Mr Lancaster met him after having his own vehicle clamped in a pub car park in Bicester, Oxfordshire.
Then the full, heart-breaking details of Amelie Delagrange’s young life and tragic death were told to the court. Her mother Dominique described her upbringing in France and her love for England. ‘Amelie had a real passion for the English language which she would display from a very young age,’ she said. ‘She was a good student, sensible and never gave her parents any problems.’ Ms Delagrange passed her baccalaureate exams ‘with ease’, then spent six weeks in Manchester as part of a language course. It was difficult for her mother. ‘We were concerned at seeing her go abroad on her own. Parting was very difficult. But in due course Amelie returned, delighted with her training. ‘After her happy experience in Manchester, she got it into her head to return to England.’
Mrs Delagrange said her daughter also spent six weeks in Alicante studying Spanish, ‘but wasn’t as happy as she had been in Manchester’. Then she took a job as a secretary before quitting in March 2004 to go to England and ‘become truly bilingual’. She came to London and found a job as an assistant waitress at the Maison Blanc. ‘She was happy and had a circle of French and English friends and she made good progress as time went on in England.’
Others spoke of Amelie’s life in London. Boyfriend Olivier Lenfant said, ‘She was a very sensible girl. She would never walk in places that would attract danger and she told me she would never walk down a subway on her own.’ Her friend Lauren Pomares said, ‘I would describe her as very friendly, quiet, very pretty, with a lovely smile.’ Benjamin Batrix was one of the group who was with her on the night she died. He said, ‘The conversation was that Twickenham was a safe area. We talked about other areas that weren’t so safe.’
Gerald Renault was driving the 267 bus that Amelie took home. He described how she got off the bus at the end of the route at Fulwell bus garage. ‘The French girl said to me, “Have I missed Twickenham Green?” I told her, “You have – it was three or four stops back.”’
Mrs Delagrange wept in court and had to be comforted by her husband as a pathologist described her daughter’s fatal injuries. Dr Robert Chapman said, ‘The death resulted from the effects of a severe head injury. There was a single, major, blunt impact injury to the back of the head that resulted in skull fracture, laceration and bruising.’ The impact caused a ‘crazy paving-style’ fracture and he said there were ‘similarities between the size and shape’ of her wounds and those suffered by Marsha McDonnell. ‘There is no evidence of any defensive injuries. The locations of the injuries would suggest a blow being struck from behind.’ Dr Chapman said the three separate injuries to the front and back of the head and the number and severity of the wounds were inconsistent with a fall. He added, ‘A blunt object such as a lump hammer or something of that sort could have been used to cause the injuries.’
Emma Mills, mother of three of Bellfield’s children, was to play a great part in his trial four years later. But even in December 2007 her evidence, given from behind a curtain screen, was dramatic. She received a call in the middle of the night from Bellfield a few days after Amelie Delagrange was attacked in August 2004. ‘He was really, really low – crying. He said he was going to kill himself,’ she said. ‘Around that time, he said he was in trouble with the police. He didn’t pinpoint anything. He was quite vague, he was sobbing. He said he didn’t have any money. He said, “I am in trouble with the police. I am going to go to prison.” I was worried about him.’ She wept as she said Bellfield told her to look after the children. ‘He said to always tell the children that he loved them,’ she said. The line went dead and she could not get back in touch with him. ‘I think I spoke to him the next day but he brushed it under the carpet. He said, “Oh, it was the drink.”’
Ms Mills talked of how their GP said Bellfield should go to hospital because he had told him he had taken an overdose. ‘I phoned him. He was upset.’ A friend took Bellfield to hospital and then she rang him again. She said, ‘Levi said another couple of months and I would be arranging his funeral. Look after the children.’ After only one night in hospital, he left and returned to Ms Mills’ home in West Drayton. She said Bellfield then took her and the children, aged nine, five and six weeks, to visit a friend in Kent. Bellfield returned the white van he was driving to a pub car park and swapped it for another vehicle, she said.
Two friends of Bellfield told the Old Bailey how he broke down in front of them after one of the murders. Richard Hughes said the outburst occurred when he visited Bellfield and his partner Emma at their home. Bellfield was lying on the bed talking on his mobile and had obviously been crying. He said there were also beer bottles on the floor. Mr Hughes said, ‘I knew he was pretty upset. He told me he needed some help. I said, “Do you want to go to the hospital?” He didn’t want to go.’ Mr Hughes left the house but returned a few hours later and drove Bellfield to Hillingdon hospital. During the drive, Bellfield rocked backwards and forwards. ‘I said, “What’s up, bruv?” He said, “You don’t know what I’ve done.” I left it at that. I think he did tell me that he had taken some pills.’
In January 2008, the trial entered its fourth month. Levi Bellfield was at last to give his version of events in a dramatic and lengthy appearance in the witness box.