Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Milly Dowler and Levi Bellfield
Milly Dowler, right, and Levi Bellfield, left, who an Old Bailey jury found guilty of her abduction and murder in 2002. Photograph: PA
Milly Dowler, right, and Levi Bellfield, left, who an Old Bailey jury found guilty of her abduction and murder in 2002. Photograph: PA

Milly Dowler murder: Levi Bellfield convicted

This article is more than 12 years old
Convicted double killer found guilty of abducting and murdering 13-year-old schoolgirl

Levi Bellfield, the convicted double killer, has been unanimously found guilty of abducting and murdering Milly Dowler.

An Old Bailey jury on Thursday found the 13-year-old was snatched by the former club doorman while she was walking home from school in Walton-on-Thames nine years ago. Bellfield was living just 50 yards from where Milly was last seen alive on 21 March 2002.

Her badly decomposed and unclothed body was found six months later by mushroom pickers at Yateley Heath Woods, near Fleet, Hampshire.

Bellfield, 43, is already serving life for the murders of Amelie Delagrange, 22, and Marsha McDonnell, 19, and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18, all of which took place within three years of the murder of Milly. Milly disappeared "in the blink of an eye" after stopping off for some chips with schoolfriends, then setting off alone on the one-mile walk home from Walton station shortly after 4pm.

Bellfield had denied her kidnap and murder. The jury is still deliberating the attempted abduction of another schoolgirl, Rachel Cowles.

The verdict came after seven hours deliberation by the jury of four women and seven men. As the foreman read out the guilty verdicts, Milly's mother Sally, 51, put her face to her hands and sobbed, while Milly's father, Robert, 59, brushed away tears.

Her sister Gemma, 25, broke into hysterical sobbing. Sally Dowler collapsed outside the courtroom, wailing and shouting as police and court officials sought to help her and the matron at the Old Bailey was called.

Bellfield showed no reaction.

The parents of Amelie Delagrange were in court to hear the verdict, as was Kate Sheedy, whom Bellfield attempted to murder in 2004.

His conviction follows the largest investigation undertaken by Surrey police.

Police knocked 10 times at the door of the rented flat Bellfield was living in with his then girlfriend, on the road where Milly vanished. Despite getting no response, they did not check with the landlord the identity of the occupants.

And a report by Rachel Cowles's mother to police about the incident involving her daughter was not followed up at the time. It was three years before detectives investigating Milly's murder were informed.

Bellfield moved out of the flat, in Collingwood Place, Walton, the day after Milly's disappearance. The red Daewoo car he was driving has never been found, despite a huge police search of underwater sites and visits to more than 200 scrap merchants. None of Milly's possessions have ever been found

Bellfield came to police attention as a suspect only after his arrest for the murder of Delagrange, a French student living in London. She was hit by a blunt instrument as she walked home at night across Twickenham Green after missing her bus stop in August 2004.

McDonnell, a gap-year student, was attacked, again with a blunt instrument, near her home in Hampton, south-west London, in February 2003.

Kate Sheedy, who had just celebrated school leavers' day, was seriously injured as Bellfield ran her over in his van as she walked home in Isleworth, also in south-west London.

The four-week trial saw Milly's father, Robert Dowler, 59, a former IT recruitment consultant, and mother Sally, 51, a maths teacher at her daughter's Weybridge school, subjected to cross-examination by Bellfield's defence.

Each broke down in the witness box as it was suggested Milly may have run away because she was unhappy at home.

Most viewed

Most viewed