Original subtitles

COLIN: I was at home on the day that I got the call,

it was 7:00 in the morning.

The on-call superintendent was trying to get a hold of me

because there was a new investigation

that I was gonna have to take.

It was a case of get yourself down to Twickenham with your team,

a girl has been murdered by being battered on the head.

It's a stranger attack and we don't know an awful lot else

at the moment.

Was this someone who could be a serial attacker

who could go on to strike again?

As it turned out, yes.

This is someone with a real propensity

of horrific violence to young women.

The more I've seen of horrible things that happen

in the world and some of these things

can happen to anyone.

This was a high-profile job

and he was under some serious pressure here,

when he made a decision, he stuck with his guns, you know.

It's always absolutely crucial, you think about

what you're doing

in the first stages of an investigation,

by 9:00 that morning I was down at Twickenham police station.

It was a crime of almost breathtaking...

The man who tried to kill her will never be free to harm again.

(INDISTINCT CROSSTALK)

...targeted young women unable to defend themselves.

SCOTT PEDEN (NARRATES): Colin Sutton

was a Detective Chief Inspector and senior investigating officer

in the metropolitan police.

He let the investigations into some of the most complex

and high profile cases ever,

bringing dangerous criminals to justice.

He showed his cowardliness...

(INDISTINCT CROSSTALK)

Another 146 victims...

In this series he will take you inside those cases

and show you how he caught these criminals

using nothing but pure detective work.

This is The Real Manhunter.

Now been found guilty on all 20...

(INDISTINCT CROSSTALK)

The officer in charge described it as a senseless tragedy.

The life sentence may provide some closure

for his victim's families.

Twickenham Green on a summer's day, like we've seen,

is normally a hive of activity, people enjoying themselves,

this oasis of green in suburban London.

But when I came here on a summer's day in 2004,

it was because there'd been a murder and when I arrived here,

the whole green was cordoned off,

taped off preventing people using it at all.

Twickenham Green's sort of a big triangular shape piece of land

with a path running through the middle of it

and roads on all three sides.

It's a cricket pitch with a cricket club and a pavilion

and it's where families take their children

and walk their dogs.

It's in a very safe, pleasant, quiet corner of London,

we were certainly not used

to conducting murder investigations there.

Arriving to take over that investigation,

the first thing that struck me was the scale of the open space,

the scale of the cordon.

There was a woman had been murdered,

there was scenes of crime tent over there protecting

where she'd been found but we didn't know who she was,

where she'd come from, how she got here

and that meant that this entire swathe of green

was potentially my crime scene.

And trying to make a forensic examination,

a fingertip search of that sort of area

takes a huge number of resources.

It's always absolutely crucial

what you're doing in the first stages

of an investigation because decisions

that are made then can have a profound effect

on how the investigation goes, and you need to make sure really

that you don't miss any chances to preserve evidence

that you might want to come across later,

you know, you might want to go back to later.

Colin very quickly identified

the fact that how important

this...this...this evidence

is going to be.

If you make mistakes in the beginning,

you're almost done.

The first thing that I did was to get the scene widened

so that we taped off the pavement as well so that passers-by

had to walk on the other side of the roads

which meant they weren't able to put debris into the crime scene.

It was really a question of getting officers from search team

to do a fine fingertip search around the immediate location

of where the body was found to see

if there was anything that would give us a clue

as to who'd done it and what had happened.

The body was discovered around about quarter past ten

in the evening when it was obviously dark here

by a man who lived locally...

he just went out for a quick walk round the green to get some air.

And he saw what he thought at first was a bin bag or a bag of rags,

it was only when he went over and looked more closely he realised

it was the body of a woman, dressed in white,

with a carrier bag nearby to her.

And he found that she was still alive,

she was still breathing, and he went away to get help,

to raise the alarm.

The police and ambulance service turned up very quickly afterwards

and she was taken to the Kingston Hospital

and what the medical staff told us at the hospital

was that the severity of her injury was such

that she couldn't have been lying there very long

and she survived minutes rather than hours.

What you need to do is to try and find out more about your victim

and find out the journey she had to get here, why she was here,

where she lived, where she was going.

That morning, we didn't know any of that

and it literally was a dead body in the middle of Twickenham Green,

let's go an investigate it.

It's only as that day unfolded that we started to know more

about the victim and more about what happened

that night in August 2004,

that we were able to prioritise our work

and really start making some progress in the investigation.

Nearby was her carrier bag

and it had some clothing, some shopping in it.

But also in that bag was a till receipt

and it had some phone numbers written on it, with some names.

And one of those names was "Olivier."

It turned out he was the boyfriend of the victim

and he was able to tell them,

"Yes her name is Amelie,

"Amelie Delagrange, she lives

"just near Twickenham Green"

and that she worked as a waitress

in a patisserie in Richmond.

I don't think I got home

until past 2:00 the following morning,

so it's been a long day as well, and it's a long day

where I'm thinking, double thinking everything

that I'm doing because it's so important

to get things right at the early stage.

By the Saturday morning we went back to Twickenham Police Station

and we had a, what we like to refer to as a "Scrum-down,"

basically a team meeting/briefing and it's...

you know, this is where the work's done.

So, I've got information coming in from my intelligence officers,

from my inquiry officers, some, in that case,

from the borough as well.

They were all feeding in and word was getting around

that this was a young girl that had been

just brutally murdered by a stranger.

There was a, kind of, palpable fear in the community

but there was also a sense that they wanted to do something to help.

I was part of the investigation into Amelie Delagrange's murder

from the beginning.

My role was known as "receiver."

The idea is you identify lines of inquiry,

the priorities, very quickly.

Lots of people would try to give information about

what they thought might help.

Our first crucial task that day was to try to plot the movements

that Amelie had made on the evening before she was murdered.

As is often the case, CCTV came to our assistance.

It's very important to get CCTV recovery rolling,

really straight away,

because if you lose the footage,

it's gone forever.

The scene, being in the middle of a green,

per se would not be covered by CCTV.

But you can't get there without almost certainly being caught

on CCTV and Colin very quickly identified the fact that,

how important this evidence is going to be.

Amelie had been at work at the French Patisserie in Richmond.

And after work she came here to Twickenham to meet some friends

in a wine bar called "Cristalz," over there.

She had three or four glasses of wine

and while she was there she phoned her boyfriend,

but he was busy and couldn't meet up with her.

So, it got to 9:30 and she thought, "Well, I'll call it a day"

and she came across the road here

and caught a bus back to Twickenham Green.

It was on that bus that she missed her stop

and that was her fateful mistake,

because if she had got off at the correct stop,

she would have had a short walk to home

and she would never have encountered her killer.

The bus she got on goes towards the bus garage

at Fullwell where it terminates.

And that means it takes the southern road,

the bottom road along Twickenham Green.

So, what she had to do was get off at the stop at Twickenham Green,

walk across the green and to her house

which was in Gould Road

which was a couple of streets north of the green.

She had not gotten off at Twickenham Green

and she was still on the bus

when it got to the terminus at Fullwell bus garage.

That's the bus stop that she should have got off,

it's a short walk across the green and up to where she lived.

For whatever reason, we don't know, she missed her stop and instead,

she's carried on for around a mile, down Hampton Road

until the bus garage at Fullwell.

And when she gets there, the bus terminates

and she asks the driver

when the next bus back up to the Green would be

and he said, "About ten minutes."

And it was a nice summer's evening, you can imagine,

Amelie thought, "Well, I've got a decision,

"do I wait ten minutes for the bus

"or shall I just walk the mile back."

Fatefully for her, she decided to walk.

And she's walked all the way back up Hampton Road,

she'd have to go across Twickenham Green to get to her home.

And all those buses at Fullwell bus garage at that time

had just been fitted with CCTV cameras,

and they had either six or eight cameras

that were facing inside and outside and it recorded onto a hard drive,

it was all timed with the atomic clock,

it was, you know, pretty much as good as you could get

for CCTV in those days.

We've got CCTV pictures of Amelie getting on the bus,

CCTV pictures of her talking to the bus driver

and getting off the bus down at Fullwell.

So, it then became a question of going back up her walk,

up Hampton road, and seeing what opportunities

for CCTV there might be there.

There were three or four

static CCTV cameras,

one at the Loch Fyne Restaurant...

there was an accountant's

that had CCTV as well

and, indeed, a police car,

a traffic police car

that had one of the video cameras

running at the time.

But also, of course, there were buses,

other buses, going up and down this road all the time

and they had the CCTV running, so by the time we were able

to get all the buses CCTV, we were able to get a dozen

or so points where we could fix

"This is where Amelie was at that time"

and we could plot her walk all the way back up

to Twickenham Green and it was only when she went

onto the green that there was no more CCTV

and she was found in the middle of the green.

So, we had everything apart from the last 70 or 80 yards

of her journey.

What it showed us was that about 10:05 that evening,

she came though this side of the pavilion,

she'd have to walk across here, around the Cricket wicket

and she would be over to where she lived.

But we also know she was intercepted.

We think that her attacker came onto the green from this side

of the Cricket Pavilion, followed her,

and it was when she was just beyond the Cricket wicket

that he attacked her, hitting her across the back of the head

with something quite heavy, and causing a fatal injury.

One of the first things that needs to be done in a murder investigation

is to make sure the next of kin are informed, it's more difficult

when the next of kin are abroad as they were in this case.

Amelie's parents lived in a little village called

Hanvoile in Picardy in France.

We had a couple of French speaking officers seconded

to the team.

They phoned our French colleagues and explained the situation to them.

And essentially, at first they said,

"Well, we'll get their phone number for you,

"you can phone them up," and we, sort of, said,

"No, that's not how we do it, we'll send someone round there,"

and they said, "Well, no, that's not how we do it."

When Colin found out that this was

how they were going to be informed,

he asked them not to phone

and arranged for somebody to go round in person

to speak to them because he felt that was a kinder,

more humane way of informing somebody

that their daughter had been killed, and in such an appalling way.

Eventually, I kind of...

it was almost a veiled threat really.

But I said, "Well, I'm not gonna have them phoned up

"and told about it, if we need to send somebody,

"then I'll get somebody from the British Embassy in Paris

"and see if they will go round there and do it."

And I think that the prospect of me involving the, sort of,

diplomats in it might have had some effect

and the French police said,

"Oh, OK then, we'll go round," sort of begrudgingly.

I later found out when speaking to Amelie's parents

that what indeed they'd done was they had gone round there,

there were two detectives in a car parked on the drive,

Amelie's father came home from work

and they got out of the car and said, "Are you Mr Delagrange?"

And he said, "Yes," and they said, "Oh, can you ring this number,

"your daughter has been murdered in England,"

and they got in the car and drove off.

They didn't even go in the house, they never even entered the house.

The first time the police officers went into the Delagrange's house

about Amelie's murder

was when I went over there to the funeral.

So, it's just, kind of, an example of how priorities are different

in different countries and things are done in different ways

I suppose.

Even at that point there was an awareness amongst

all of us that this might not be the only one of these,

that there had been other attacks where women had been hit

on the back of the head by a stranger.

There was I suppose the first feeling

that this was going to be one of those cases

where you had this element of pressure to succeed quickly,

to try and protect other people.

And I think we all realised that pretty early on,

and so that probably added

to the sombre atmosphere that there was.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

A little while into the investigation,

I was made aware of another case as of Kate Sheedy, in May 2004.

Kate had been walking home, just got off a bus in Isleworth,

but she had seen this vehicle

that she thought was laying in wait for her.

Kate was 18 years old, she had been to Twickenham town centre

with some school friends to celebrate the last day of lessons

because they were all dispersed and took their A levels.

She got the bus back from Twickenham to home,

getting off at that bus stop down there.

She then had a short, 200-yard walk, to her home.

The suspect's vehicle, a white people carrier

had followed the bus.

Kate was concerned about this particular vehicle,

concerned enough to cross the road, try and get out the way.

She started walking along the pavement

and she saw ahead of her, a white people carrier.

It had blacked out windows and she thought it was odd

because the engine was running but the lights were off.

And she was intelligent enough to sense something might be wrong

and she'd heard stories of girls being dragged into cars and abducted

and so forth.

So, to be on the safe side, she thought "I'll cross the road."

So, she crossed onto the pavement on this side

and walked on this side until she got to this point here.

When she was here, the people carrier

suddenly lurched forward at speed, turned right and knocked her down.

She fell to the ground,

the front wheel of the people carrier

when over her body and stopped, and then it went backwards,

reversed over her again, into the main road, and drove away.

His whole intent

was truly horrendous,

to do that to that young person,

probably because she's a person

way out of his reach.

Kate suffered terrible injuries,

every one of her ribs was broken,

her liver was split in two,

but she remained

conscious throughout.

And she managed to crawl a few yards,

recovering her mobile phone

which she'd dropped during the incident.

And she dialled her mother and told her mother,

"I'm here, I've been knocked over, I need help,"

and then dialled 9-9-9 to get the police

and the ambulance to come,

showing the courage that she showed throughout

this ordeal she suffered.

You can hear in her phone call,

how desperate that person is, at that point.

If you replace being hit on the head with being run over

by a people carrier, then actually the profile of the victim,

the location, the sort of blitz attack,

everything was sort of similar.

So, I kept a real, sort of, open and undecided mind on

whether that might be one of our cases as well.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

When I started on this investigation,

I was aware of the Marsha McDonnell murder,

I knew Marsha had been murdered in Hampton,

not too far away, more than a year, 18 months previously.

And I also knew that it was investigated

by another murder team, one from Hendon

and that they had, what they considered to be

a very good suspect who was arrested.

So, Marsha had been at the cinema in Kingston with her friends.

And she got the 1-1-1 bus home, here to Percy Road.

And it was about 20 past midnight

when she arrived here at this bus stop.

Marsha McDonnell got off the bus, walked down the road,

turned right towards her home address,

the suspect followed her,

drove around the bus and pulled into the road behind her.

We think he propositioned her, then he got out of the car

and struck her on the back of the head with a heavy object,

and she sadly died from that injury.

This was now the third case

we were investigating

which involved a victim

who had just been on a bus

and was accosted near a bus stop.

Marsha's murder was another big story for the media

and a very worrying story, I think, for the population.

There is no apparent explanation

for to why this would have happened

other than it possibly

being a serial attacker

or someone that is striking at random.

We know from other victims

that have been hit over the head

with a hammer from behind

that there was no interaction,

he just went up behind them

and hit them over the head with a hammer.

And Marsha's mother,

having seen a picture for Amelie

the day after her murder,

was very struck by the similarity

in their appearances

as well as the similarity

in the modus operandi,

the method of their deaths.

At that point, the investigation

started to merge, and the police

began to focus on the fact

that there was possibly here,

a serial attacker.

The Metropolitan Police said they were not linking it

to Marsha's murder, and the reason for that was that

they were looking at this other suspect,

who they felt murdered Marsha.

On the night that Marsha was murdered,

but before she was murdered, there was another young lady,

a 16-year-old girl who reported being followed

by a strange young man.

But when you, kind of, looked at all the detail,

the only thing he had actually been identified

for was for following this other girl,

there was no real connection between him and Marsha McDonnell.

At the moment, they're two separate offences

and we're going after Amelie, and we're concentrating on Amelie.

You have to go with the most recent job

because you have the best chances of getting the best evidence

and then look at the others.

But I was then told that there were other,

non-fatal attacks, nearby.

Because of the way that it works, whereby if you get attacked

and you survive, your case is investigated by a couple of DCs,

if you get attacked badly and you die,

it's investigated by a murder team of 30 odd.

So, the non-fatal attacks in the area

had been left with the borough to deal with

and we were completely unaware of them on the murder team.

One of the first cases we think

that was linked to this series

was that of Anna-Maria Rennie

who was attacked

in Hospital Bridge Road

in Whitton in October 2001,

this was an abduction or attempted abduction.

A vehicle pulls up after Anna-Maria is walking away

from a bus stop, and the suspect grabs hold of her,

tries to drag her towards the rear of the car,

Anna-Maria screams, struggles, gets away

and fortunately for her, effectively the end of that particular attack.

Edel Harbison had been walking

in April I think it was,

in 2004, walking from a restaurant

on the north side of Twickenham Green

to go home and been hit over the head,

dropping all of her shopping

and falling flat on her face, smashing her face,

needing reconstructive surgery.

We didn't know that a lady called Dawn Brunton

had been attacked in the same way

up towards Hatton Cross,

towards Heathrow Airport, on 5 November, 2003,

sustaining head injuries to the back of her head

where she was hit and facial injuries

where she fell over.

Irma Dragoshi who was attacked

in Longford Village on...

in December 2003.

Irma was an Albanian woman

who had lived in Hounslow

with her husband.

She was standing at a bus stop on her way home from work

at about 10:00 at night when she was attacked randomly

by a stranger who hit her over the head with a blunt instrument,

and then Irma woke up in hospital with a huge injury to her head.

She suffered, I think, very bad neck pain and back pain,

very bad headaches,

I know that she suffered a lot for quite a long time.

There was another where Jesse Wilson was found

with a wound on the back of her head

and facial injuries and it was thought

that she had fallen over in the snow,

it wasn't even dealt with as a crime.

The common thing of all these victims that survived

is that they recall nothing at all of the attack,

that's quite common, that you lose a portion of your recent memory.

And it was only when Marsha was murdered reasonably close by,

four weeks later, that Jesse's case was looked at again

and the pathologist who had done the post-mortem examination

on Marsha McDonnell looked at the photographs of the injuries

that Jesse Wilson had, and said, "I think this is...

"I think this is the same person that did this."

Because of the lack of detail

and CCTV recovery

and lack of potential evidence,

her case sat as a 'probable'

rather than a 'definite' because we were unable to prove it.

My strategy very much was,

let's stick with Amelie for the moment.

And the reason I said that was

because it was the most recent offence,

it hadn't ever been investigated by anybody else.

If and when we find a suspect,

then we can try and work backwards

and sort of retrofit him to those other offences in the past.

The next big piece of information that we had to consider

was the service provider for Amelie's mobile phone.

They had been able to tell us

that her phone was last on their network

at 23 minutes past 10

and that that was in the vicinity of Walton Bridge.

Walton Bridge is six, eight miles away,

we knew that she had been found by the passer by,

getting on for quarter past ten.

More interesting perhaps is the handshake, in simple terms

it's a phone saying, "I'm here, have you got any calls for me?"

And the network says, "No, it's alright, thank you,

"but we know where you are now."

What happened with Amelie's was that her phone was in the area

of Walton on Thames Bridge then it just suddenly disappeared.

And that means one of, sort of, three things.

It's either that the phone has been put into a place

where there is no signal and stayed there,

that the phone has been deliberately broken

or had the battery removed to stop it functioning straight away

or it could been that it was thrown into water, and, of course,

we're talking about Walton Bridge,

so there is a lot of water there actually,

it's the river Thames.

When we came down here, I wanted to try to find Amelie's phone

and her other belongings from her handbag.

So, I had the police divers come exactly to this spot,

doing a dive every 15 or 20 minutes,

then resting and then going back down again.

And it was remarkable, it was just the second dive that they made,

a diver surfaces and shows us a key ring and a Sony Discman.

And the Sony Discman is something that we knew Amelie had

in her handbag, but the keys were better

because the keys had a fob on them

which contained a photograph of Amelie

at a theme park on a log flume.

So, we instantly knew

that this set of keys must have been hers.

And that really then confirmed the information that we had

from the mobile phone company saying that whoever killed Amelie

had brought her handbag and her belongings to this spot.

The bridge here at Walton on Thames and this sort of public area aside

it is an important location for a number of reasons.

First, we had the cell sighting information

from Amelie's mobile phone company which told us

that the phone was last seen on the network,

it was switched off or thrown into water,

somewhere in this area.

That had the effect of dictating

to me the CCTV parameters,

every possible route

from Twickenham Green

to Walton Bridge that could be done

by car, that was the CCTV area.

The mobile phone were never found and, of course,

things are so variable with currents

and sort of different surfaces and boats going past,

it's not really surprising, we searched there for a good while

for I think over two or three days but couldn't find it in the stretch

of area but didn't really need to, we had her keys,

we had the mobile phone signal, we knew

that's where things had gone straight

after the murder.

Normally in an investigation,

in most murder investigations we did, we'd have one,

sometimes two officers looking at CCTV.

Such was the volume on this case that we had seven

and we'd gave them a dedicated room,

we got all the equipment that we could.

One morning I went past there and one of them said "Governor,

"you need to come and see this."

One of the most crucial parts of the CCTV was a bus camera

that picked up a white van parked alongside the green.

At almost exactly the time

that Amelie must have been being murdered,

there was a little white van parked just over there,

the other side of the cricket pavilion.

It was only there for less than eight minutes.

And by going back to other CCTV earlier in the evening

and slightly afterwards, they were able to reconstruct

what that van had been doing.

And it had been driving around and around Twickenham Green

for 40 minutes.

It looked like somebody was hunting.

This van had first appeared in the Twickenham Green area

just after 9:40.

I then plotted it and had seen it on,

I think it was 14 different occasions,

at various points around the green over the next

three quarters of an hour.

The CCTV team then spent hours trawling through the footage

identifying the white van

from different angles, side views,

back views, whatever they can get

from whatever footage they've got.

It did not include detail of the registration number,

but it did give quite specific detail

about the type.

And luck was on our side to a degree because the van had

a headlight that wasn't working,

it had a wheel trim missing

from the front nearside wheel

and it had some sort of defects at the back,

which made it easily identifiable on CCTV.

Looking at the movements of the van and Amelie's movements together,

we can be certain that at some point in Hampton Road,

the van had passed her.

And not only that, her pace slowed down there,

as if she may have been stopped for a while.

And that's why we think that what happened was that

the driver of the van had seen her walking,

had stopped and engaged her in conversation

and then presumably when the proposition was declined,

the van carried on in front of her, parked up there,

and the driver had lain in wait

and when he saw Amelie, very visible even in the dark green

because she had all white clothing on.

He came up behind her,

stalked her around the cricket wicket,

and then attacked her.

The thing about Colin Sutton, is he thinks outside the box.

And there was one window of opportunity

and that was around a camera on a bus,

that had picked up the Ford courier van around

Twickenham Green at that precise time.

A brilliant job by his team in terms of going through all the CCTV

from the area, a painstaking job.

We needed to find out who was in that van.

Because even if it wasn't the murderer,

and I had a good suspicion

that it probably was the murderer but even if it weren't the murderer,

it would be a potential witness, some people

above me thought I was...

I should be putting my time not on CCTV and vans,

but on rounding up local sex offenders

and the usual suspects.

There was kind of a difference between theoretical investigation

and what academia might say.

There was no obvious

physical sexual dimension to these attacks.

A sociopath or psychopath is someone who has no feelings

about anyone whatsoever.

He just went up behind them

and hit them over the head with a hammer.

To say that we should be looking at sex offenders,

to the exclusion of somebody who was there at the time

just didn't make any sense to me.

My immediate boss didn't agree with me,

some of my team may not have agreed with me.

But it was my decision, that's what I got paid to do,

is to make these decisions to strategise on the investigations.

I went to the Ford Motor Company and they were able to tell me

from looking at the pictures and various features of it,

that there were approximately 25,000 registered in the UK.

We needed to be able to find the white Ford Courier vans

that were being used in the Twickenham area.

Nowadays, that would be easy because there's really reliable

automatic number plate recognition cameras and software.

We didn't have that.

And so the only other way of doing it was by human observation.

The resources that were put in to trying finding

that included evenings, night times in Twickenham,

in and around Twickenham

and me personally, along with others,

stood on a footbridge across the A316 in

the, kind of, Twickenham-Whitton area

looking for incoming vehicles coming backwards and forwards

along the A316, had we seen any,

we would have made contact with local officers

and they would have stopped the vehicles there and then.

I'd read a book about

the Yorkshire Ripper, the investigation,

and the investigation there had 50,000 vehicles

tried to eliminate on tyre tracks.

And they started it and they had far worse,

kind of, facilities and equipment than we had,

because we had computers and things,

they had sheets of paper and people

literally ruling cars out on their hands

and knees on the floor with magic marker pens.

And they gave up, they found that they couldn't manage it

and they went on to pursue other lines of inquiry

about halfway through and if they'd have carried on,

Peter Sutcliffe's Ford Corsair was in that group.

We've got to have learned in the last 25 years that

if you embark upon this sort of exercise,

then you have to see it through.

I remember at the time thinking,

"This really is a needle in a haystack."

You make your own luck, and Colin once described himself

as being either a good detective or a lucky one

and you might argue, you make your own luck.

A number of us, myself included,

was spending a couple of hours

after work each day in Twickenham,

around Twickenham Green

and just driving around or sitting parked up,

hoping to spot this white van.

You know, I just had no illusions that that was going to be

extremely time consuming and I think if it failed,

somebody else would have taken this investigation off of me.

The point was made by Colin

that he would put resources,

whatever it took, to find that vehicle.

And as it happened, it was us in the incident room,

or me in the incident room that identified the right one.

Because of the nature of Amelie's death,

the fact that such a terrible crime is so rare in that area,

we'd had all sorts of help from the local community.

Jo Collins gave some information about

her ex-partner.

And said his name was Levi, she'd come across certain things,

blonde women being photographs that were stabbed out.

"He was violent towards me,

"he's a misogamist,

"he hates blonde women particularly..."

He also would work doors in nightclubs and things like that.

That made him this supposed character

who could endear himself to young girls

because he could encourage young girls to get into night clubs.

So, they would look at him...

but most of these girls were vulnerable and very often,

those young girls would soon be abused and damaged by him.

"He currently works as a wheel clamper

"and he uses a white van..."

This is an illegal car clamper who puts signs up after people

have parked and waits for vulnerable women to come back

to their vehicle before confronting them

with torrents of abuse saying how much this person

is gonna have to pay to get the clamp off.

And what that did was to trigger somebody else's memory,

who said, "Oh, hang on, when we were looking

"at the locally registered couriers,

"a garage said they'd sold one to a wheel clamper."

So, I'm wondering if that could be the same one.

My brother, Dave, had been in the police a little bit longer

than me and he had a number of connections through policing

and personal life in around sort of Kingston, Richmond, Twickenham,

where we grew up.

Predominantly,

my first role was in relation

to the tracing of the white van.

It didn't have a registration number,

just had a white van which was quite distinctive,

but not specifically distinctive

because it was quite a blurred image.

So, each officer had actions to go out and trace white vans.

Joanne Collins information came back into the incident room,

I reviewed that, in particular the information about

the wheel clamper then made me review this particular docket

about this particular vehicle.

The vehicle was the right type but more importantly,

it was sold by a dealer that both my brother,

Dave Leach, and I, knew.

Guy called John Wren who worked for Warren Motors.

It was a man that I knew well, I had a relationship with John

from way back.

And this was the relation that's just built on normal policing,

you know, when you drop in for a cup of tea

and you get a bit of knowledge, it was that kind of relationship.

As you can imagine, you're in the van business,

you're dealing with some quite serious characters,

and these particular characters that bought the van,

a guy named Aaron Smith, who was a traveller,

bought two vans from John and one of them,

this particular van was being driven by Levi Bellfield.

I knew that there was a car clamping business,

and I knew about a white van that had tickets against it,

speeding tickets, parking tickets,

that type of thing that had come in from the DVLC.

I stressed straight away to my brother, "I think we've got...

"we've got this guy called Levi."

The dealer had seen the vehicle recently

and what he had seen is the back of the vehicle

had changed.

He said, "There is something distinctive

"about this white van, Dave."

On the back of the van, low down on both doors

are welded, two metal plates.

Now, my memory of watching the CCTV was that there was something

on the back of the van that stood out,

you couldn't recognise it as metal plates initially,

unless you knew, you wouldn't actually say

it was metal plates.

But there was something distinctive about it that glared at the camera.

Then the other thing he'd noticed, he said, was that the glass panels

on the back had been painted white.

This made that vehicle in particular, unique.

And more importantly, it now matched exactly

what was on the CCTV.

So, to my mind at that stage then, I knew that we were dealing

with Levi Bellfield.

The van matched the description absolutely bang on.

The research that goes into that vehicle straight away

is enormous, everywhere it's been,

every camera it's done,

speeding offences on the M25, bus lanes in Twickenham.

We do an intelligence check on Levi Belfield then, to see

what was known about him.

He had relatively few previous convictions,

but quite a lot of intelligence

because he was always getting into scrapes

and always getting stopped by police and doing things,

one of those scrapes was that in May 2004,

he was arrested for abducting a pub landlord

and no charges reported,

he was never convicted of anything or indeed charged with it.

But the important thing was that it said that he was arrested

for abducting this man in a Toyota Previa.

I gave the registration number that was in this report to Tracy,

one of our researchers and said,

"Can you check on the computer to see what colour this van is?"

Because if it's white, I think it could be

something to do with Kate Sheedy.

And she came back two minutes later and said, "Governor, I think

"we've hit the jackpot."

What we've then got is Levi Bellfield involved

with a white Ford Courier van, of exactly the type

that we know was 70 yards away when Amelie Delagrange

has been murdered.

And we know that Levi Bellfield had a white Toyota Previa

at exactly the time that such a vehicle

run over Kate Sheedy.

From that moment onwards, we had our suspect.

(SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

It's 11 November, 2004.

I'm looking through Levi Bellfield's intelligence print-out

and I see that in March 2002,

he's shown on that as living

at Collingwood Place in Walton on Thames.

But I think if he's got connections in Walton on Thames,

that's probably why he fled there after he murdered Amelie.

Let's have a look at where this place he used to live is.

So, I'm expecting this place to be close to the river,

close to where the phone was switched off.

Instead, I find that it's the other side of town,

it's right by the railway station.

Of course, I knew...

"Hang on, that's exactly where Milly Dowler was abducted in 2002."

There was a certain amount of interest from both the media,

but also from local people in Walton,

as to whether or not there might be any connection

between what we was doing and Milly Dowler.

We had no reason to think that it was connected, because, you know,

abducting and murdering

a 13-year-old girl is a, kind of,

very different kind of crime to randomly attacking adult women

by hitting them on the back of the head.

Milly was on her way home from school on the train

and instead of getting off at Hersham,

she stayed on one extra stop to go

and get some chips here at Walton on Thames with her friends.

When she had had the chips,

she crossed over and was walking on this pavement.

A friend of hers was at the bus stop behind me,

and she saw Milly walk past the bus stop,

but Milly couldn't get on the bus, she didn't have any money,

so she was gonna have to walk home.

At that time there was a building across the road with CCTV cameras

on its corners and they would have captured Milly

if she had walked past the building, however they didn't.

So, what we know is that somewhere between that bus stop

and this spot here, Milly Dowler was abducted.

It wasn't until September 2002 that Millie's body was found

by two people going to pick mushrooms

in woods near Yateley, in Hampshire.

Surrey Police had been combing their county for six months almost

to the day, and not found Milly Dowler.

It was here in Yateley Heath Woods in Hampshire, some 25 miles from

where she was abducted that she was eventually found.

There wasn't much to be told from Milly's body

and the post-mortem examination,

she'd been in the open for six months

and there had been certain animal activity.

She was in the undergrowth, she hadn't been buried,

she had just been sort of lightly concealed.

This was an area with which Bellfield was very familiar,

just down the road there's an arena

where he accompanied his former partner,

Joanna Collins on many occasions when she bought her horses here

to show-jump.

We still don't know to this day how she met her death.

The only thing of which the pathologists could be

certain was that she hadn't suffered a severe blow to the head,

in the manner of his other victims.

Milly didn't die from being battered with a hammer,

the most likely explanation is, I think, that she was strangled,

but there was a difference between

a girl being murdered in that fashion

and young women who...

early 20s,

Amelie was 22, Marsha was 19.

At that point, really,

the investigation was no closer

to finding out who did it, than they were six months

previously the day after she went missing.

Any murder case, no matter who it is, no matter where,

and what their background,

you will work hard to get to the truth.

We just get on with it, do what we're meant to do

as thoroughly as we can.

And if we do that and we do that right,

99 times out of 100, we will solve it.

I realised that Levi Bellfield was far more complex

a character than just somebody

who hit women on the back of the head.

Bellfield was also a paedophile who sexually assaulted

and abused young girls.

And the more we got to know about Levi Bellfield

the more appalling his lifestyle appeared.

Bellfield had a 16-year-old girlfriend

in addition to his partner, Emma Mills.

He had a flat in Hanworth which was known as the raping room

where he and a group of vile individuals,

some of whom worked with him on his wheel-clamping business

would take young girls.

But he was also into supplying drugs and selling drugs,

he beats everybody he's ever lived with,

every relationship he's had.

People who he could easily intimidate,

pay a pittance and exploit.

One of these guys, Peter Rodriguez, that worked with him,

Bellfield exploits to such a degree,

he not only stores drugs

at the man's mothers flat while she was in hospital,

but he gets his 16-year-old girlfriend

to groom a 14-year-old, who he then takes to that flat,

gives drugs to her and she's raped by him

and his friends.

Rodriguez obviously put up an objection

one day to Bellfield's conduct,

Bellfield didn't like it and as Rodriguez left the flat,

Bellfield carried out a hammer attack.

And Rodriguez, I think died three times on the operating table,

he spent a long time in hospital,

recovering from his injuries.

When he finally came round, Rodriguez said,

"The last thing I remember before the lights went out,

"Levi Bellfield was coming towards me

"with a mallet in his hand."

Bellfield had been arrested for that attack

but bailed because there wasn't sufficient evidence.

This was six weeks

before Amelie died.

I was also mindful

that we now knew who he was

and if he murdered somebody else,

we needed to be in a position to say

that we've done what we could to keep

the public of South West London safe.

I genuinely believed he was such a danger to the public,

that the odds were that he was going to attack again,

and it was gonna be soon.

I really wanted to lock him up the day after we identified him,

I'd have been happy to arrest him then,

I was persuaded otherwise from

some very senior officers in the Met,

who thought that we could put surveillance behind him.

After, kind of, myself and my brother Dave joined the dots,

if you like, between vehicle and suspect.

We went into a surveillance stage where we were, you know,

looking for further evidence against him.

From my perspective, I don't think it changed anything,

it didn't lead to any extra evidence.

While we've got Bellfield under surveillance 24/7,

team behind him, watching his every move.

It's a Sunday afternoon, he's in Uxbridge,

in West London with a friend.

There were two girls, and they are waiting at a bus stop.

Bellfield drives past, sees them, gets out and engages in conversation

with them and the surveillance team were watching this

and they're so close to intervening on this

because they don't like what's happening

with these two young teenage girls.

And then a bus comes.

When the bus comes along, the girls get on it

and Bellfield waves them off with a cheery,

sort of abusive... calls them something.

And they go away on the bus and he drives off.

So, the surveillance team do absolutely the right thing,

they peel off one car, that follows the bus,

the rest of them stay with Bellfield.

And when these two girls got off the bus,

the police officers introduced themselves

and they said that he got out and asked them how old they were,

they told him they were 14.

And he said, "Oh, you're nice and young then, I like them young"

and that made suggestions to them of that nature.

So, we've got here a man who preys on women

who have just been on buses or at bus stops.

Amelie Delagrange, Kate Sheedy, Marsha McDonnell,

all just got off a bus and here he is, at a bus stop,

chatting up two 14-year-old girls

and not chatting them up nicely, but, you know,

they are 14-year-old-girls

and he is making suggestive sexual comments to them.

Apart from the bus stop incident with the girls,

was that somebody else came forward to us and said,

"My nanny was attacked near Twickenham Green a few years ago."

We were able to trace that incident

and verify it from the triage records

at the local hospital, which said,

"The woman called Sonia Salvatierra who was a Peruvian national

"had gone in there reporting discomfort

"and a bit of a sore head from being knocked over

"and having her phone stolen."

And we made contact in Peru with Sonia and she said,

"Yeah, I remember the man," she described this man

with a round face and fat man

and no neck and all the things

that sounded

very much like Bellfield.

So, to me, this was going to be our kind of holding charge,

I thought that would work, if we got...

we could get Sonia back over here from Peru,

put Bellfield on an ID parade,

she picks him out, we charge him with that serious assault,

he's remanded in custody and that takes the pressure off.

So, that was the plan we were going to arrest him,

we were gonna arrest him for Amelie's murder,

attempting to murder Kate

and for an assault

and robbery on Sonia Salvatierra.

That was when we had the bombshell

that the News of the World

had found out that we had a man on surveillance

and they were going to run with the story,

two days before we had this huge plan in place to arrest him.

And Bellfield would have wind of us.

The best we could do was to try to negotiate

with the News of the World and we negotiated

that they would be able to send a reporter

and a photographer along on the day of the arrest

with the proviso they never printed it

and never published the story until after the trial.

I've never actually found out who leaked the story

of the surveillance to them.

But the two things I've been assured of is one that it wasn't anybody

from my team and two, there was nothing to do

with any phone hacking.

And the steer that I've had is that I should be looking

at the higher floors at Scotland Yard.

Once the decision is made to arrest,

we would divide into two teams.

The arrest team that went to Bellfield's address

in West Drayton would have entered the house quickly

and effected a search of the property

and the surrounding sort of gardens etcetera.

Initially they couldn't find him, he was nowhere to be seen.

And then there was an identification via his partner Emma,

that he was in the loft.

It took them quite some time

to find him hiding in his loft,

as he was, stark naked and eventually brought him out.

Colin then rang me at home, I remember the phone call, he said,

"I want you to do the following

"interviews with him,

"over the next few days."

So, my reply to him was, "Boss,

"I'm not sure that's a great idea,

"with the greatest respect, I'm sure someone else could do it."

But he was quite adamant, as much as he was a nice guy

and very laid back, when he made a decision,

he meant it.

He was very firm about it and said, "No, I want you to do it,

"I want you to do the interview and don't worry about it."

At first he was talking to us and making denials,

but he was represented by a solicitor that he knew,

that he had asked for.

And the difficulty came that when we started investigating him

also for rape and abuse of his former partners,

this solicitor had represented

one of the partners

in domestic violence proceedings.

So, had a conflict of interest

and had to withdraw,

and the duty solicitor then took over

and the duty solicitor advised him to make no comment.

And so for most of the hours of interviews we did

with Levi Bellfield thereafter, he would say, "No comment."

To be honest, I'd seen that type of interview many, many times,

and in those days, we got a lot of "No comment" interviews.

We still have to cover a lot of questions.

If they don't say something during the interview

that they later rely on in court, then it becomes relevant,

or could become relevant for the jury.

If you've hit something he was really uncomfortable with

and he knew he was, then he couldn't face it,

he couldn't face you and he couldn't face

what was coming at him.

The only time where he would really engage with us, we noticed,

was if we showed him photographs or maps or some sort of document,

then we could kind of elicit a response from him.

I remember images being put in front of him in one session

and him looking away and turning around,

looking away from the interviewing team,

he turned the photographs over, but when, you know,

the second and third interviews were put in

and the images were put there again

and he tried the same tact, the interviewing officer

had put them on the back, so as he turns the image over,

the image is still there.

It's not about playing tricks, it's about

"Face up to what you've done,

"this is what you've done."

And he obviously...

he's not somebody who could do that.

But he had this rather curious way of doing it,

where he would talk to us just every now and then

and then realise he was meant to not be saying anything and say...

Sonia Salvatierra, the Peruvian nanny was flown over

from Lima and she was taken to do an ID procedure

and despite her confidently saying,

"Yes, I could recognise him again," she didn't pick him out.

And that was a major blow to me at the time,

because my confidence was high that she would pick him out

in the ID parade, we could charge him

with that assault, and that would, like,

be our holding charge to make sure he was in custody.

We had the very real prospect of having to release him on bail.

And such was the fear of him within the Metropolitan Police,

that there were arrangements in place, if he had been bailed,

he would have been followed by 24/7 surveillance...

Until there was some reason to take him back into custody again.

While Bellfield was at Heathrow police station,

I had two of my officers

who were trained family liaison officers

talking to his partner, Emma.

It was clear that she had endured

ten years of a desperately oppressive,

coercive and violent relationship with this man,

but she was so frightened of him

that she wouldn't do anything about it.

"He locks me in the house, he won't let me go out,

"so I can't have my own money, I can't have my own phone,

"other than with his number in it."

And then she talks about how often she had been assaulted

and sexually assaulted by him, and then told us,

"And I'm not the only one, because there were two other women

"who he's lived with in the past, and they will tell you

"that he did the same to them."

And if he was going to go to prison for a long time or forever,

then this was her chance to escape.

We had an awful lot of support

from his ex-partners,

in particular, Emma and Jo.

Jo gave us a really, really strong statement

about some of the abuse she'd suffered at his hands

and that gave us a real strength of evidence

to charge Bellfield with a variety of offences, but in particular,

serious offences that would keep him in custody.

And that provided us with nine charges, serious charges,

that eventually were the kind of holding charges

against Levi Bellfield.

Those nine offences on that indictment

have never been tried before a court, never will be now.

And it's the mark of the man and his kind of level of offending,

that something... an indictment that would be very serious

in any other circumstances has just been left on file,

because in the context of what else he's done,

it is kind of not as important.

There is no doubt that Levi Bellfield

was an intelligent man, not an educated man,

but he was street smart.

Where he made a mistake in the Amelie Delagrange case

was at Twickenham Green.

He didn't know that just weeks before he had attacked Amelie,

the bus garage at Fullwell had just fitted CCTV

to all of its buses, which recorded onto hard drives

rather than tape, the time stamp on the footage

was from the atomic clock, each bus had

either six or eight cameras facing inside and outside.

Both of the roads, either side of Twickenham Green

had bus routes on them.

And so, in plotting what he was doing,

cruising around hunting in his van and plotting how Amelie

had walked back up from the bus garage

towards Twickenham Green and putting the two together

and working out for certain that Bellfield had passed her

and probably stopped to speak to her,

all this CCTV was invaluable.

We were then able to spend real time and real resources

bringing together the other offences that we think he is involved in.

The first one was Kate Sheedy.

It doesn't look quite right,

because it's slightly out of the area

and the weapon is a car.

So, initially we were working out,

"Well, is it or isn't it potentially one of ours?"

I mean, Kate was able to explain that the vehicle

that had hit her was some kind of people carrier

and that it was white.

Levi Bellfield, who at the time, provably was driving

a white Toyota Previa people carrier with blacked out windows.

So, the vehicle that fitted exactly the description that Kate Sheedy

had given of the vehicle that ran her over.

We went and retrieved that so we could examine it forensically,

it had been professionally steam cleaned, valeted, top and bottom,

inside and out.

So, there was no forensic material on there at all

to associate it with Kate Sheedy.

However, what it did have was a defective drivers mirror

and that was something that she had noted

on the vehicle that ran her over.

So, it was, you know, pretty likely, we thought,

this was Bellfield's vehicle,

it fitted everything with Kate Sheedy.

So, I said, "Yes, OK, let's...

"we should take that on."

And that was when we realised that there was a bag of CCTV tape

from a nearby pub that had never been looked at.

And it was a simple error, human error made

by the original investigating team at Hounslow borough.

Although CCTV had been recovered by local police,

they hadn't got the resources to view it in as much detail as us.

Two lots of tapes had been seized, because the offence

was just near midnight and it was a bit confusing

what days' tapes they needed, and somebody had viewed one

but not realised there was a second bag.

And when we opened that bag and put it in the machine,

we could see the Toyota Previa, driving, stalking the bus on

which Kate Sheedy was riding.

As the bus pulled in to let her off,

the Previa overtakes it and parks in front of it.

What the CCTV does is tell him exactly what it is,

and it was a Toyota Previa.

A Toyota Previa that was white, had unique features about it.

We see the Previa going in the other direction,

back past the pub on the CCTV.

And we can't get a number plate, it's dark

and it's not particularly good quality footage,

but what we can see is that there is a mark,

an irregular shaped, sort of, stain by the petrol filler

as the Previa drives away after the attack.

And then I look at the photographs, the good quality photographs

we've taken of the Previa we've seized

and there's that stain visible.

And it kind of corresponded so much that we could

get expert video analysis done to say,

"Yes, that's the same vehicle."

I realised immediately that had that CCTV been viewed immediately

after Kate's assault, Levi Bellfield's name

would have come out of the initial inquiries.

Just a few days before Kate was run over, he was arrested

for a... what he described as a prank where he'd kidnapped

a pub landlord, it never went anywhere,

but the intelligence report was there.

So, as soon as somebody saw that CCTV,

somebody would've identified it as the previa,

very distinctive vehicle,

they'd go to the intelligence computer

and Levi Bellfield's name

would've popped out.

One of the lines of enquiry that we went down

involved a mobile phone that was in the possession

of Bellfield's 16-year-old girlfriend.

She and her 14-year-old sister were in the flat that Bellfield

had sort of illegally sub-rented from somebody else,

and they were taking lots and lots of clips of themselves

doing things while they were getting drunk,

dancing and this sort of thing.

About 1:00 in the morning, Bellfield comes into the flat

and the girls take video of him.

He's wearing an outdoor coat/jacket and what he does is he comes in

and he finds a torch and he picks it up

and switches it on and you see his face illuminate,

he's kind of checking to see if it works,

switches it off again and goes out.

But the significance of this is that just 40 minutes before,

Kate Sheedy had been run over by a Previa.

And what this looked very much like was somebody coming in,

getting a torch because they wanted to go back out

and check their vehicle over, to see if there was any damage.

It certainly showed that Bellfield couldn't claim he was in the flat

at the time it happened.

The problem we've got is we know that the time stamp on the video

is questionable, it depends on how the phone was set up

and there was some sound in the back ground

and it sounded like... it was music,

and somebody on the team said, "That's not a pop song,

"that's a theme song, it's 'Wheel of Fortune'."

And so, what we were then able to do was go back

to that broadcaster and say, "Can you help us at all?"

And they were able to look at their records

and give us a really accurate, you know, to the second time

when they thought that clip had been recorded.

Now, we can't say for certain that he would have been charged

with trying to murder Kate,

but obviously there is

a strong possibility

he wouldn't have been free to murder Amelie Delagrange.

I know that Colin became quite close

with Amelie Delagrange's parents.

He described them as being very humble

and they were very respectful of the police

and the investigation

and understood that everyone

was doing their best

in awful circumstances for them.

The only thing I thought I could do was to go and see

Amelie's parents, and apologise on behalf of my organisation, you know,

my colleagues that had let them down.

And it was obviously going to be a very personal and, kind of,

emotional conversation, but nevertheless,

one that I knew had to be done.

I explained all the situation about Kate, the situation with the CCTV.

I said, "Look, you do understand what this means?

"We should have had him in custody at some time

"before Amelie was murdered."

And they said, "Yes, of course, we understand, we know that,

"thank you for telling us, we thought that you had been honest

"with us all the way through this and this proves to us that you are,

"what has happened has happened, we cannot change the past.

"It's sad, we'd like to change it, but we know we can't,

"now will you three come back to dinner with us tonight here?"

And that was it, you know,

it was just the most unexpectedly generous

but dignified and honourable,

mature approach to what had happened.

The next case to look at really was that of Marsha McDonnell.

There was one line of inquiry which wasn't resolved

and, yes, again, it was CCTV

and the bus on which Marsha had gone home

and place she had got off of just a couple of minutes

before she was attacked.

We looked at that and from the outside camera

we could see that coming towards her was a car,

two seconds after Marsha had gone

through the doors to get off the bus.

And then by using the inside cameras

on the top deck but looking out

through the windows, we could see what that car did.

And what it did was it stopped, slowed down and then stopped

in the crossroads behind the bus.

And Marsha is walking in that direction too,

but the important thing about it was, was that from the front view

we could almost see a number plate,

it was tantalising, we could almost see a few characters

popping out a bit, but there was no doubt

that the car was a Vauxhall Corsa.

And one of his vehicles, one he actually bought

on finance, was a silver Vauxhall Corsa.

Trying to prove that that particular Corsa

was his Vauxhall Corsa was very, very difficult.

The combinations of numbers and letters on the number plate

of this vehicle that could be seen

and what the experts told us they might be,

initially gave us over 600,000 possible combinations,

a lot of those possible registrations

weren't on Corsa's,

they were on completely different vehicles,

so you could write all them off.

I said as soon as we get it down to 200 or lower,

then we can go through them and start eliminating.

And that's what we did, and it took us a little bit of time

but eventually, we got those all eliminated.

Look at the index of that silver Vauxhall Corsa,

apply that to the Marsha McDonnell case

and there he is.

So, you've now got three separate murderous attacks

on young women, three vehicles involved

and each of those vehicles at the time

is identical to one owned by Levi Bellfield.

There is an old, much used phrase,

that 'Detectives don't like coincidences',

and this certainly wasn't looking like coincidence.

I was in a position where I thought

we had a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to Levi Bellfield,

but that we could get more

from his friends and acquaintances.

If first they thought he wasn't going to come and beat them up,

in other words, if he was gonna go to prison and not be able to,

and secondly, if they understood

just how much evidence we really had.

And I came up with the idea of using the vehicle of BBC Crimewatch.

And I'd been on there with other cases a few times

and I knew the guy that was the editor,

and I was just honest with him.

I phoned him up and said, "Look, I want to come on

"for an appeal about the murders in South West London,

"asking for information about the two or three vehicles.

"What I need is the public to understand that we know

"who was driving it, you know, we've got these vehicles

"and we know these vehicles were involved,

"because that will make them realise that it's our man

"and come forward and give evidence.

"And so, we went on to Crimewatch and we showed these pictures

"of the Previa and the Corsa and the white Courier van

"and suddenly witnesses started coming forward as a result of that.

"There's a man called Richard Hughes,

"he was more a friend of Levi's partner than Levi himself.

"He told us about him modifying the white van,

"so that they couldn't be seen through

"and then cutting a little spy hole,

"and he could sit in the back and spy out.

"He talks about a blood-stained shirt

"that Bellfield had soon

"after the disappearance of Milly Dowler."

Bellfield said things shortly after Marsha's murder, for example,

"You don't know what I've done," and things like this.

So, he was kind of a really important witness

who had been close to Bellfield and was able to give us

lots of little bits of information.

There was Joe Ryan, who was another acquaintance of Bellfield's,

he'd helped him out with wheel clamping.

He told us about Bellfield hitting a kerb

with the front nearside wheel,

and because the van at that time

had alloy wheels on it,

it damaged it so much that

he had to put a steel black wheel on

and that was very visible in the CCTV.

He also told us about the headlights and how the headlight bulb had gone

out on the near side and that Bellfield had got

some old headlights from a Ford Escort

in his garden at the house.

When we searched Bellfield's house we found this Ford Escort headlight

with the bulb missing in the garden, so it, kind of,

corroborated Joe Ryan's story.

The other man that came forward that was really, really important

as a result of this, was a guy called Simon Redstone.

He remembers cycling home at about 10:00, 10:15,

the night Amelie was murdered, and his statement said,

"He was overtaken by a little white van

"being driven at crazy speed."

And he kind of tried to memorise the number,

although he hadn't got it completely correct,

he'd got enough digits accurately to show

that it must have been Bellfield's van

that he was talking about.

And, indeed, when we then went back to static CCTV

from the Loch Fyne restaurant in Hampton Road,

we saw Bellfield's van go past and then sort of two frames later,

there is Simon Redstone on his bike, so that corroborated that as well.

We were now able to overlay the path that we knew Amelie had taken back

from the bus garage back to Twickenham Green,

with the movements of Bellfield's white van.

And what that showed was that as Amelie was walking back up

Hampton Road towards Twickenham Green,

Bellfield at first was behind her.

He came out of this side road, I think it was Fourth Cross Road

and turned left into Hampton Road

and the footage from cameras on buses

show Amelie walking along, and then the van being behind her.

And then right up near the green,

the, sort of, virtually the last footage we get,

there is a change and the van is 62 seconds ahead of Amelie.

Amelie is on the pavement and the van has gone past,

62 seconds or a minute in front of her.

But then when we look at Amelie's pace,

she seems to have slowed down at that point

and that is exactly the time

when the van would have overtaken her.

So, what we deduced from that is that she didn't actually slow down

her walking, she was stationary for some while.

And she was stationary because Levi Bellfield was also stationary

at that point, propositioning her from the window of his van.

And that fits in what we think we know about why he committed

these blitz attacks, that he would proposition a woman,

she would decline, and he would then be triggered by that

and get out and assault them.

So, what we have not got is reliable evidence

that Bellfield had this white van, what we need then to do

is to be able to prove that it was him driving it

on the night Amelie was murdered.

One of the difficulties was that the scene itself

on Twickenham Green, we had not been managed

to get any forensic evidence, no weapons been found,

the vehicle hadn't been recovered.

Not for the only time in this investigation,

Bellfield's partner, Emma, came up trumps for us.

Emma Mills remembered the night that Amelie Delagrange

was murdered quite vividly.

The plan was that he was to pick her up

so she could go shopping in Tesco's,

but he was late, and he didn't turn up at home,

so she phoned for a minicab and came here in that.

When Bellfield got home and found that she wasn't there,

he phoned her and asked her where she was,

she explained, he said, "I'll come up and meet you."

An important thing is that he came up to meet her

in the white Ford Courier van.

He drives to Hayes, goes and meets her in Tesco,

he takes the two older children across the road to Toys 'R' Us.

And there is a few phone calls between Bellfield

and Emma at the time.

That's important because it gives us a time stamp and it gives us

the fact that we know the number, which of his mobile phones Bellfield

was using on that night.

Emma then told us they left here in the white Ford Courier van

and went home to Little Benty arriving there just after 9:00.

She said Bellfield had reversed on the drive, hadn't even gotten out

of the van, he left her to unload

all the shopping and the three children.

As soon as the shopping is out of the van, Bellfield drives off,

Emma tells us that it's about 9:10 now.

A short time after he had driven off,

she realised that she had forgotten some milk

and wanted to call him to see if he could bring some in.

Looking at Bellfield's mobile phone usage,

when he knows he is going to commit a crime,

he switches his phone off.

He made a mistake on this occasion, because that call from Emma to him

about the milk hit his phone.

And it only rang once and it went to voicemail.

But that one ring meant that the call had hit the mast

where his phone was, and that mast was the one

that served Twickenham Green.

So, that story from Emma gave us Bellfield in the white Courier van,

with his own mobile phone in his hand

and in the area of Twickenham Green,

it was to be a crucial piece of evidence.

And I can just imagine, he's sitting in a van,

he hears the phone ringing, and he thinks,

"I didn't turn it off," and grabs it and pulls

the battery or switches it off.

But that one ring was enough to leave a trace on the local mast,

we're kind of proving that he is the one

who's driving the white van.

The CPS asked us to just try and firm Emma's evidence up,

she'd paid cash for her shopping

but what my officers did,

and it was a fantastic and spontaneous

piece of investigative work by them,

they asked Emma to list what she bought.

And they came here to Tesco's, they asked the manager

if they had the copy till rolls, they found her receipt and,

of course, it had a date and time stamp on it

and it proved her story was correct.

So, that was a really crucial part of the evidence, in fact,

it was the clinching part of the evidence

as far as the crown prosecution service was concerned

and when we managed to prove

all that to their satisfaction,

that they authorised

the murder charge

in respect of Amelie.

It was back in November 2004 that...

when I first identified Levi Bellfield really,

that I saw how close he lived to where Milly Dowler was last seen

before she was abducted.

In my phone I still had the mobile number

for Brian Marjoram,

and he was the senior investigating officer

for the Milly Dowler investigation in Surrey.

I told him all that we knew about Levi Bellfield

and where he was living at the time.

And I'll never forget his reply, it was, "The hairs on my neck

"are standing up, Colin."

What I found surprising was that kind of...

there was a degree of inertia

within Surrey police in taking up

Levi Bellfield as their suspect,

they didn't feel

that they were in a position to drop everything they were doing

and look at this man instead.

And what they sort of said was, "We'll put him on the backburner

"and we'll carry on with what we're doing

"and if that comes nothing, we'll have a look at Bellfield."

Eventually what happened was that a new senior investigating officer

took over in Surrey.

I went down there with Jo Brunt.

We had a meeting at Surrey headquarters and we...

well, Colin put to them that we think Levi Bellfield

was a very good suspect in the case of Milly Dowler.

We'd already muted it and been

stone walled about it, basically.

They showed me a still from the CCTV, it's of a red car

that they thought was a Mark 2 Vauxhall Astra,

it was actually a Daewoo,

turning left out of the road that led to

where Bellfield's and Emma's flat was.

I kind of said, "Yeah, that's Emma's car,

"that's the car he was driving that day, it was a Daewoo,

"and it's the only...

"it's the only red one registered in the whole of Surrey.

"Not a very common car at all."

They just wouldn't want to listen,

they just didn't want to listen and eventually Colin said,

"Can I just ask, why don't you want to solve the case of Milly Dowler?"

At which point they erupted, Colin walked out of the room.

With hindsight, it was obviously gonna be

a red rag to a bull to any investigator.

I said, "Well, what I don't understand,

"is why you don't want to solve this?"

And the reaction I got was the reaction that comment deserved,

which was indignation.

And it was quite forceful indignation

by the superintendent.

We established that in March 2002, Emma Mills, Levi Bellfield's

long-term partner, was living in this ground floor flat here.

She'd moved here because of domestic violence at home,

she'd split up with him, but he'd persuaded her

to take him back.

She wasn't at the time staying at the flat,

she was house sitting for a friend

in West Drayton, but when Bellfield came

to that house on the evening that Milly was abducted,

Emma knew that he'd been to the flat in Walton,

because he was wearing clothes, he'd changed his clothes

and she knew the clothes he was wearing

were from the wardrobe of the Walton flat.

He also had the keys to this flat

because he was driving Emma's red Daewoo car

and the keys to the flat were on the same key ring.

When Bellfield drove that car from here,

drove away, was Milly inside it?

We don't know, we can't tell.

20 minutes after Milly Dowler was last seen, to when her remains

were found six months later, we have no idea of the timeline,

we don't know what happened and in what order.

All we can say is that Levi Bellfield

was exactly here on this spot at the time that she was abducted.

We don't know whether he abducted her

by force or whether he used his charm

or persuasion to get her to come with him.

What we do know is that while Emma was away,

house sitting for a friend, Bellfield was using her flat

as a base for his depraved activities.

It was quite sad that there is this friction between

police services, police forces, the Met versus...

I mean, we should all be in it together

and we should all be working for the same cause

and that sometimes I didn't find it was like

that with other forces that we dealt with.

It was tragic obviously

that they didn't find that clip

with the red Daewoo and it took them quite a while

to even acknowledge that.

I think the real mistake was made where they visited Emma Mills' flat

during that week when Milly went missing

and there was no response from the flat,

but it was a loose end that wasn't sewn up.

They were sending officers

to reported sightings all over the country

and yet didn't get the house to house inquiries completed nearby.

The results and the consequences of that were tragic

because from 2002, March 2002, the following year,

Bellfield killed Marsha.

He left Kate Sheedy within an inch of her death

and then finally murdered Amelie Delagrange.

Later that evening I'm at home and my wife then worked

for Surrey Police, she said, "Oh, the superintendent

"has asked for your phone number,"

my mobile ringed and he says, "Do you know, I've had a think

"about what you've said today and I think you're right,

"we are on board with it.

"He's our number one now."

18 months after Amelie Delagrange was murdered,

in March 2006 we were finally able to charge

Levi Bellfield with her murder.

I read the charges out to him, he was charged that he had murdered

Amelie Delagrange, that he had attempted to murder Kate Sheedy,

that he had abducted Anna-Maria Rennie

and that he had attempted

to murder Irma Dragoshi.

In May 2006, he was charged

with murdering Marsha McDonnell.

I was looking directly into his eyes,

they were just cold black, he had no emotion,

but I could tell he hated me at that moment

and I quite enjoyed being hated.

Because he knew if he got convicted of those,

he wouldn't see the light of day again.

But we knew at that point, there is still a long way to go.

You know, in major crime that charging and getting somebody

in custody is step... almost step one.

From that point on, proving it, we had a lot of work to do

to pull the offences together, join the cases up

and get enough of a case to make sure

that he would get found guilty.

The trial started on 1 October, but the first two weeks

virtually were spent up choosing a jury,

where you don't have forensic evidence,

where you haven't got a DNA profile or fingerprints

or things like that, there is always the chance that the jury will say,

"You haven't proved this."

I'm somebody who has spent quite a lot of my life

around courts and to be honest I quite enjoy the theatre

and the drama of a court trial, but this time, you know,

the stakes were really high.

This was something that I'd put a lot of time and effort into,

all my team had put an awful lot of time and effort into.

Amelie Delagrange's parents were there for the entire trial,

other families were here as and when it was relevant to them

and also we had the victims whose cases we couldn't charge

because there wasn't any evidence but nevertheless,

they came along, they wanted to see justice done.

I guess the victims and the victims' families,

the thing that I would say overall to describe them,

is just the dignified way in which they conducted

themselves throughout.

And that was in stark contrast to the sneering

and damn right offensive way

that Bellfield sometimes conducted himself

during that trial.

He came across as, sort of, arrogant man

who kind of swaggered his way into the dock,

Bellfield had little respect for anybody involved,

he was not a likeable character.

He called Amelie Delagrange parents "scum."

How dare somebody like him having done

what he has done, call these dignified,

wonderful people whose daughter he had slain...

how can he call them "scum?"

He really still genuinely believed at that point

that he would be able to talk his way out of this one,

like he had virtually everything throughout his life.

We knew that if this man

were allowed back out on the streets,

he would offend again.

The turning point came when Bellfield

was under cross examination and he got a little bit

kind of unsettled by this and eventually said,

"Look, you've got to understand,

"I'm fighting for my life here,"

and using those very words...

as soon as he used them I looked at the judge, I looked at the jury

and realised they were thinking the same as me, that

"You're saying you're fighting for your life, Bellfield,

"but you never gave that chance to Amelie Delagrange,

"you never gave that chance to Marsha McDonnell.

"Why should we care that you are fighting for your life,

"when you've taken some?"

Gradually, as he realised the strength of the evidence

and the relentlessness of the questioning

and the bringing up of these circumstances

which showed what he had done,

you could virtually see in his face

the realisation that it was going south,

that it wasn't going well for him.

And I have to say perhaps it's wrong of me

but I loved it, I loved

to watch him crumble like that.

The day of the verdict, the court room was absolutely packed

to the brim with press, police and everyone

who had anything to do with Bellfield

and it is so nerve wracking waiting for that sentence,

because you're thinking, "This could go either way,

"it can always go either way depending on the jury."

The first verdict that came was on the Marsha McDonnell case

and the foreman said that by a majority verdict

he was guilty, and I remember saying to Jo,

"That was actually our weakest case

"and if they've convicted him of that,

"he's going to be convicted of the next two."

And we sat there, and we heard from that foreman the words

we'd wanted for so many months,

that everything we had done was worthwhile

and Bellfield was guilty

and we knew at that point

that the only thing that would happen to him

was going to be a whole life tariff,

he was gonna be in prison forever.

And, you know, that's what he deserved

and what we had been working for.

This was it, this was game over for him.

His life was done.

When we got that conviction, I think most of us burst into tears

because it was absolutely overwhelming,

including Colin.

Just absolutely overwhelming feeling.

I don't believe that

justice being served gives closure.

I don't believe that families

who have lost a loved one

to murder ever have closure.

The beginning of this year

was the most difficult I was in,

going through all the motions

of pain...

backflashes...

details and, of course,

missing Marsha more than ever.

Over this period of time it's been hard to watch someone

who's killed your daughter, but he was arrogant in court

and he acted as if he was above the law.

All we've done for the families of the victims

that have been murdered is the very best we could.

And a very small part of helping them to go on

and adjust to live their life afterwards.

Of course, I will never be

able to forget what happened to me,

the scars on my body

and the memories I have

are something I will never be rid of,

but hopefully I can move on.

Attending court and facing my attacker was very difficult,

but something I felt was important.

The court process has been

a long and arduous one

that has stirred up many unwelcome memories

and a lot of evidence has been hard to listen

to, but it is finally over

and the fact that Bellfield

has been found guilty means

more to me than I can possibly say.

The life sentence may provide some closure

for his victims' families,

but the file on Levi Bellfield is still open.

The people we've really helped

in Bellfield's case,

by locking him away, are the people

who he would have assaulted

and who would have become

his victims in the future

and they don't know it,

but they are the ones

we've really helped.

Having been convicted of Amelie and Marsha's murders

and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy,

post-trial, the media were allowed

to run a background on Levi Bellfield.

There were huge appeals to try and find the red Daewoo

which he had undoubtedly used to transport Milly's body.

Another offence that was part of the series

was that of Rachel Cowles

who was subjected to a potential abduction

on 20 March, 2002, as it happens was the day

before Milly Dowler was abducted.

Rachel Cowles offence occurred in Shepperton, she was aged 11,

her mother reported it to the police,

not a great deal was done,

there was the registration of the crime,

but more importantly, three years later

when there is an appeal regarding

a red vehicle related to Levi Bellfield.

Rachel's mother made the connection and contacted police again

to flag up the fact that that vehicle almost certainly

was the same one used in the offence against her daughter.

That being the case, it made the incident

against Rachel become particularly relevant.

Because it showed that he was in that area.

He was living in that block of flats where Milly was literally walking

by when she vanished.

Eventually, it ended up with Bellfield standing trial

for Milly's murder.

We have some breaking news concerning Levi Bellfield,

he has been found guilty

of the abduction and murder

of Milly Dowler.

Levi Bellfield who is,

of course, already convicted

of two other murders,

is now convicted of the murder

of Milly Dowler, which for many years

was one of the most

notorious unsolved murders.

He now officially, because

he is convicted of a third murder,

now becomes officially

at least a serial killer.

It was the most difficult investigation I've ever done

because it was so wide ranging and so complicated.

And there's no doubt of all the people

I've met in 30 years, he is the most dangerous,

he is the most unpredictable

and the most violent.

He is the person I am proudest of being able to play a part

in taking out of circulation.

Because I seriously think that that's the most I could do

for the community of London, was to put him away,

more than any other criminals I've ever dealt with.

It wasn't an easy case, it was difficult to solve

and it had to be solved, as far as my career goes,

it was undoubtedly a standout point, yes.

Some people have described the Bellfield case,

the investigation, as an old-fashioned detective case,

we had no forensic evidence,

there were no fingerprints, there was no DNA.

That's why we had to piece together this circumstantial case

and although the bedrock of that was CCTV and phone data,

an awful lot of time spent by my very talented

and dedicated officers, pacing around the streets,

knocking on doors, taking statements,

getting small pieces of information

that we were able to assemble to make the case.

Colin handled the case brilliantly.

I mean, this was a high-profile job,

and he was under some serious pressure.

I don't think, to be honest with you, you know,

that anyone else could have done a better job to be fair.

Personally, I think there is other offending,

I think there is other things wrapped

around Levi Bellfield that could come to light,

given the right set of circumstances.

I don't think it's a done deal.

If there is the opportunity and the resources

and a set of circumstances exist,

I think there could be further investigation work to carry on.

The victims should be the most important people

involved in the case,

is my thought on it,

so it's important

that they are remembered.

They were the innocent people

who very unfortunately

and sadly for their families,

were hurt by him.

During that inquiry which lasted four years,

I met a lot of people of whom family members,

friends, some of them

I'm still friends with today,

standing there at the old Bailey

at that conviction

was the highlight of my career.

I've no doubt that at some point if I'm fortunate enough

to outlive him, that somebody will come to me and say,

"What are your comments?"

You know, I won't mourn Levi Bellfield

and I think very few people will.