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05

The Bus Stop Killer

15 July

Levi Bellfield.
Map of Milly Dowlers last movements.

In this episode, we discuss serial killer Levi Bellfield and his numerous crimes (such as the murders of Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange). Sandra talks about her personal struggle with the british plumbing system and Joe thanks Daniel Farke for enriching the Premier league press conferences. Sandra got her information from wikipedia and the documentary "Evil up close - His name is Evil". Joe got his information from:

Audio transcript

Midweek Murders contains graphic and explicit content, listener discretion is advised. I've been feeling a bit under the weather, and Niklas has been feeling ill since getting home from Sweden. And I wanted to write you my last will and testament and it would say to you i leave my most precious worldly possessions a gamble lighter a ball that you've had in your mouth and a children's book for your offspring and the sword don't forget the sward and off at the sword i won't forget the sword and also a skin graft of my my birthmark that i will draw and you know i have a birthmark on the lower end of my back i'm gonna draw in the london underground oh good lord system and leave that skin to you you're welcome i will treasure it forever would have been funny though wouldn't it it would have been funny but now you've spoiled the surprise i know but i'm not gonna die well have you written a will no because i want i want the sword [Laughter] i believe in the sword of gryffindor griffin sword that is not yours to bestow and therefore has been seized by the ministry and then you're just gonna you're gonna be in the bathtub and then it's gonna bubble and you're gonna feel like oh my god am i having an erection thank god i'm not broken and then it's gonna be the sword of gryffindor this is getting weird [Laughter] oh but we've just started but yeah oh yeah we've just started calm down bane i have plans for you and me and it involves the sword and your skin getting graft it's gonna be my skin cut away from you yeah so it's gonna involve a sward and your skin yeah your plans are fucked up mate oh you say that yeah but you don't want it especially that's a ball that's been in your mouth [Music]

Speaking of the very strange german accents, the chufa somehow decided to take on daniel farkas the manager of norwich football club unfortunately have been relegated from the premier league and so we will no longer be experiencing it's very fast and very camping by german media conferences which i'm a little bit sad about i was quite hoping that norwich would find a way to stay in the premier league as long as it wasn't at the expense of watford football club yeah i'm going to miss him we will have to bestow our uh oh thank you very much daniel farker for providing us with a stereotypical german man uh everyone [Laughter] i said thank you i wanted to thank him okay i've only seen this interview once because you sent me the link to it but i do i do feel like it enriched in my life oh have i told you about the time when a german guy on the course well he wasn't on my course but he was a mentor for us so he was working at the space when we were having our course he was like from the course before me and i felt like he was never as much german as he was when we were both in the toilets together not in the same way weird not in the same toilet the toilets next to each other and then exiting the toilets we opened our doors into each other like into each other's doors and he had this weird meltdown and i just felt like this is the most german i've ever seen him because he was like how have they built these toilets it's inexplicable i would never get away with this in germany yes and i understood him completely because it's true it was built so badly and i just felt like oh my god this is so true and it's true for sweden as well they would have never like released that into the public they would have been like no no the doors open into each other we can't have that no they don't care in england have you ever been to the toilet in america no well i feel like unless you've had that experience you can't comment about poor british toilet design the doors in american toilets uh the cubicles specifically have like a massive like almost a meter gap at the bottom of the door oh no it's like it's like a genuinely like 50 to 70 centimeter gap that a child can crawl under no oh no and then and then the side of the doors have got like a two or three centimeter gap so you can if you wanted to you could very easily see someone having a shit how is that like why cheaper in it why pay for a bigger door when you can have a bit of voyeurism. Ain't that the truth about america.

i had another funny story yeah i think that it was when i first moved here i felt like i had never known adversary like i have when i first moved here and realized that the british plumbing system is as old as the british empire itself if not older i feel like we should also stipulate at this point that i have not known anyone to use as much toilet paper as you do so where our plumbing system is sufficient to flush a small dog you somehow go above and beyond that by using like half a roll of toilet paper just for a pee it is so true i have never once blocked a uk toilet [Laughter] we need to know if you're gonna stay overnight in advance to work out if we need to go and buy more toilet roll i'm finally off [Laughter] sandra's coming round oh is she staying yeah is that going to be a problem no we've got enough food but we might not have enough toilet roll how much have we got six rolls how long she's staying at night i should probably get some more i eat as a small child and yet i poof like an elephant [Music] [Laughter] they're gravity fed you pull the handle or the chain and it releases the stock plug and the water falls through into the toilet bowl the fact that you have still have chains is inexplicable because when i got a a duplo like house when i was eight living in london i got a toilet for the house with the little chain on it when i went back to sweden people did not understand what that was that's how different it is for when the toilet water storage is above the toilet bowl yeah but we don't you don't get a chain on modern toilets and it's not our fault that thomas crapper was the man who invented the toilet and invented it that way and just so happened to be british wait was his name thomas crapper yeah that's the best thing i've ever heard in my life it can actually in some places still find crapper branded taps oh that's hilarious oh my god i mean if that's your name you have to go into plumbing oh that's true it's true just saying a poor workman blames his tools [Laughter] you should poop in sweden man it's so good you come and live in this country and say that our plumbing system shit at least you can wipe your crayola butt and still manage to put the toilet in the same place your shit goes.

Okay, are you ready to start the case? About 40 minutes ago. Well actually, I wasn't, there's no evidence in this case. Are you ready? Okay, I've only got two beers left, we have to go through this case pretty quickly. Okay. you're listening to midweek murders which means that it's time to talk about crime this is my friend joe hello and this is my friend sandra hey yeah this week we're gonna talk about levi bellfield levi oh no not already the first word levi bellfield who is a serial killer oh my god and also seems to be a very insecure person with a very small dick allegedly a very small dick but also very good at getting away with crime yeah which was surprising we can start at the disappearance of midly dowler no let's start with our references oh yeah let's start with with which with wit with our references i got my information from wikipedia and from a documentary series called evil up close but they do other cases as well i think that this was just one of the episodes i got mine also from wikipedia that's my go-to a website called crime and investigation uk chillingcrimes.com and a character witness on i think the bbc uh from his ex-girlfriend oh yeah what's that joe not you joe no i'm joe no his second wife i think no uh was i want to say emma but i didn't write down her name we can start at the disappearance of milly dowler at 3 07 p.m on the 21st first of march 2002 dowler left her school and walked to a radio station with her friend i think they went to eat at another railway station on the way to her house so yeah she stopped one station short of where she would usually get off the train and they went and had fish and chips and they got a portion of chips for 90 pence which just brings me back to the day of when you could afford to buy things for less than a pound what i know right that was the most shocking part of this whole research investigation was a portion of chips in 2002 cost 90 pence in london. That is amazing. She phoned her father quarter to four to say that she would be home in like 30 minutes give or take the girls left the cafe five minutes past four and then dowler or midly was last seen three minutes later by a friend of her sister who was waiting at the bus stop they had a conversation and then i think she was spotted by cctv a short distance from that bus stop where she was talking to her friend and then no more cctv footage was found of her and at first they hoped that she was a runaway but then like i think it was six months later or something like that yeah in september they found the body of millie dowler which was unfortunately decomposed so much that there was only bones left so they positively id'd her by her dental records they couldn't find out how she was murdered and stuff like that because there was no soft tissue left.

After that Marsha McDonald was beaten over the head with a blunt instrument near her home like very close to her own porch or front step in february 2003 the wound was afflicted to her very shortly after she got off the bus another victim was kate sheedy she was 18 years old and she was run over twice near an entrance to the industrial estate in eisworth on 28th of may 2004 she managed to call the yeah she called emergency services and was on a call with them saying that she had been run over twice after that in the evening of the 19th of august 2004 amelie de la ranch was attacked and then died in the hospital after missing her bus stop with one stop talking to the bus driver and the bus driver said the other bus going back to where you came from is like in 10 minutes so she walked across the street and waited there for the bus to come and she was attacked and later died because of those injuries and levy levi bellfield was charged of these murders but also an abduction and an attempted murder of anna marie rennie in 2001 she managed to escape him fortunately but he tried to abduct her on the 14th october 2001 and he was also charged with the attempted murder of irma dragoshi in longford on the 16th december of 2000 and 2000 2003 before that he had drugged and raped... What are you doing, are you scratching something? Sorry, I was playing with my cable, I didn't think you could hear that. I can hear everything, just like google. They are listening to us. Hello google! Nice to meet you, sorry for my browser history.

But also there was a lot of underaged girls who had reported being drugged and raped to the police which he was in charge for i think because he was already sentenced for the murders before they brought those charges up but this happened before the murderers that they know of and before that he was a domestic abuser and he also attempted to kill one of his friends by hitting him in the back of his head with a hammer that friend woke up in the hospital like six weeks later or something like that and levi managed to talk himself into visiting him and tried to shut off his life support machines and one of the murders happened or attacks happened just outside of that hospital which brings me to the question one how come they felt like there was insufficient evidence to at least look into these accusations about being drugged and then raped by all of these young teenagers and two that friend that he attacked with a hammer he said that the last thing he remembers is an argument between him and levi so he's basically told the police that he must have been the one to attack me in the documentary they all said like there was insufficient evidence but it kind of looks like they didn't even look into it so with the sexual abuse claims it's incredibly difficult to get a positive prosecution without the victim presenting to the police or paramedics doctors whatever almost immediately after it's happened and with particularly younger victims there's inherently a case of shame and self-blame behind sexual assaults in that they will feel like they've done something wrong they can't go to the police because the police will ask well why were you hanging around with this 30-plus year old man but they didn't the thing is he was a bouncer at a club i understand what you're saying like if they went to the police after waking up maybe if you had there's no physical evidence remaining so unless you report it before and a lot of the psychology behind sexual assaults is that you feel dirty and used and you just want to cleanse yourself so one of the first instincts for people that have experienced sexual assault is to either have a shower or a bath and that's the worst thing you can do for physical evidence in terms of a rape allegation so if you take away the physical evidence all you've got is that he said she said case which is not enough in a court of law to prove a case of sexual assault. Yeah, I understand that, but the problem here is that there were so many of these accusations being made, and these reports to the police being made, that they should have at least looked into it. like i understand that they did look into it but there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute so they're not saying that it didn't happen but in the back of a police officer's mind is always can we get a positive prosecution out of this so they could have sat down with the survivor they could have sat down with levi and gone through the story and all he needs to say is that didn't happen that plants the seed of doubt in a jury's mind so if you've if you haven't got the fallback of physical evidence there's not enough evidence to prove this is what happened and it's a flaw in our judicial system because that's why so many rape survivors don't go to the police or will go to the police after they've cleansed themselves and yeah it puts the police and the crown prosecution in a really difficult place because they want to help the survivor but they're very limited in what they can actually do because there's no corroborating evidence to support that from what i understand it they didn't formally accuse him like the police or the prosecution didn't formally accuse him until after he was already being accused of the murders but this happened before the murders or well it's the same with any historical case of sexual abuse you only have to look at the celebrities that have been in the light of media relatively recently and you look at epstein and rolf harris and as soon as you get that person in court it becomes much easier for previous victims to come forward and for police to add on this he said she said evidence as more of circumstantial evidence to the prosecutions they're putting forward at the time because there was no physical evidence yeah as soon as soon as harvey weinstein went to court with firm evidential allegations of sexual abuse and advantageousism and all of the other things he was charged for all of these other women that had been victimized by him also came forward and they used their witness statements as corroborating evidence but they couldn't use those statements in themselves as a prosecution because there wasn't enough evidence to corroborate the story. I understand that but i do feel like the police should have kind of put it in their system as like these allegations have been made these police reports have been made at that time i don't think they even looked into him or the club where he worked at or anything like that and they should have flagged him or something like even just put him in the system ass like this is these uh accusations against him yeah because i feel like i know this is easy for me to say as like an outsider i'm not a lawyer i'm not a policeman i'm not any of that but i do feel like if there's so many accusations being made you need to look into that person if you look into that person you might find physical evidence somewhere else like if the victims come forward and he could have skin cells under his nails if he scratched them during a struggle yeah yeah and that's that's very much a fault of the police department at the time and there's no arguing against that they they obviously didn't take these allegations seriously, and it very well could have been that... And this is an interesting point actually is that the officer that was in charge of looking at millie's case did say that if they had not focused in other areas they could have stopped marsha mcdonald and emily from being murdered they weren't focusing where they should have focused and that caused them to miss key factors in levi's personality that could have led them to his arrest sooner yeah this is what i don't understand i think when i first read about the case i was first curious about the cctv footage because even in 2002 there was cameras around in england which is like england is one of the most video recorded countries in the world like there's so much footage everywhere which makes it even harder for me to understand i think because i feel like well when i watched the i should explain to the listeners that when i watched the documentary they did point out the fact that he was calculating about these things like he would use vehicles that was not his he would buy and sell vehicles all the time so that he wouldn't be registered to the vehicles that he used in his crimes stuff like that he apparently turned his phone off during the murder of uh millie so that his phone records couldn't be tracked across like the areas where he was and where he buried her so he was calculating and stuff like that i understand that and he didn't leave much evidence in his attacks and in his rapes stuff like that but i just felt like there was so many warning flags that were brought to the police that they could have acted on like the friend that he attacked with a hammer he told the police that it was levi he couldn't be sure because he couldn't remember the actual like attack but it was straight after being in an altercation with levi it was walking down the stairs from the flat that they rented together that he was attacked so who else could it have been you have to take into consideration with this kind of thing that all of the evidence that is being presented is circumstantial and without hard evidence to prove anything most cases will not go full to prosecution and although you can look at and say yes okay the last person he spoke to was levi the last thing he remembers was having an argument with levi it was outside levi's house if levi then gets questioned by the police and says no actually the altercation wasn't that serious he left my flat and that's the last thing i knew and that gets corroborated with whoever he's living with yeah they were both here the guy left levi stayed it was their apartment okay there's nowhere for the police to take that but when you're actually the officer responding to that case you can't present to your senior and then the crown prosecution service with this all lends towards levi having assaulted this person you need more firm evidence than that and i think that's where a lot of these cases fell down against him was he was so good at covering his tracks he made it almost impossible for the police to link him with any of these crimes but i also feel like they didn't do enough investigation because if they had investigated all of these police reports even though there was not enough physical evidence and then gotten this police report from the guy in hospital being attacked he should have been in their system which he probably was already but not for those kind of offenses.

What happened then was that his second wife Jo, not you obviously, another Jo. I never married him, I'm almost positively sure. He's not my type. she called the police because they had taken a photo of a car from probably cctv posted it in the media and said if you have any information about this vehicle please contact us and she saw the vehicle and as she tells it in the documentary series she was like hmm this i'm almost positive that this is one of several of the vehicles that levi is operating so she called another friend to make sure that she wasn't mistaken and she was like oh he does drive one of these person wagons and i was like what kind of english is that the first car was the one that he uh used to attack millie oh i wrote it down somewhere where is it yeah that was a red car that was like a a daewoo nexia um but yeah he also operated as a wheel clamper so he had a white van so i think when they say person wagon they just mean a small van yeah he had several different vehicles and he was regularly buying and selling cars and he was also like he borrowed one of his other friends cars and then he said that was stolen but it wasn't he just sold it on because he probably committed a crime with that car.

He obviously was smart about it. People who knew him said that he was very manipulative, like in the in the way that he could present the persona that was extremely likable and caring and a lot of people fell for it so he had a lot of friends he had a lot of girlfriends he had like 11 children which is crazy so i understand that he was very two-faced which is very common for people who are psychopaths that's probably not the correct psychological term his second wife called the police and said that this vehicle that you need information about i think that she had left him at the time so she said i think that this might be the person you're looking for which was levi and they asked her what would be the motivation and she was like i don't know maybe because he hated blonde women or girls i feel like searching for a motivation in people like levi or other serial killers is a bit moot it doesn't actually matter because they're violent offenders and they don't generally make sense to people who aren't psychopaths in the documentary people would say like but what is the motivation maybe he was hurt as a child it doesn't actually matter i think Levi was just a violent sociopath and taking steroids steroids steroids yeah obviously makes you more aggressive searching for like a motivation like he was just fucked up he was just super violent he would attack people at random does that make sense yeah but i also think that motive is one of the things that is drilled into crime investigation because but if you don't know to start with that your perpetrator is a sociopath or a psychopath then you need probable cause yeah and if there is no probable cause then fine you you drop that issue and you'd look at the mental state of the person committing the crimes but i think to say that there's no point looking at motive when you know they're a sociopath it's sort of chicken and egg it's easy to say from like the aftermath probably in in hindsight knowing his mental condition and the fact that he was a serial offender rules out the fact that he probably had any motive but when you are first given the crime a motive can really help you rule out suspects so like millie's dad was a suspect throughout quite a lot of the trial but he had no motive so there was no real need to push and press with the prosecution of the dad because a lack of motive means that he's unlikely to be the suspect yeah for a normal person but at what stage do you stop looking at motive and start looking at psychology i think is easy to tell with hindsight but you have to keep motive in perspective when you're investigating a crime until it's safe enough to rule out joe his second wife she said that he had a deep hatred towards women in general and towards blondes especially there was a modus operandi on the wiki page the murder victims that he was charged for was blonde and i feel like yeah he had a weird obsession with hating women that is it's very common for a lot of male offenders i just feel like they're kind of grasping at straws being like oh but why some people don't have a why that's just what i'm thinking but you have to get to the stage to be able to rule out the why and until you get to that stage you have to always consider the why yeah if you if you go into your whole investigation without looking at anybody who would have probable cause to commit these crimes you could be ruling out a whole arm load of suspects yeah no i understand that i just felt like the fact that they wanted to like psychoanalyze him i guess by being like what kind of childhood drama did this that's that's also a very important part of the defense because if the defense wants to plead insanity then they would have to psychoanalyze him and if he was say previously abused by a blonde woman then it would be rational for him to have this hatred and they could use that in his defense well it wouldn't be irrational but that would be a case against the insanity plead the thing that bothers me about it i think is that when they zeroed in on him as a suspect he is not insane he is 100 calculative and pre-meditative in his crimes and looking for a.... Okay, I was gonna go into the whole bundy discussion but we can just not do that.

Do you have any like, what did you research during your forensic science research? It's a very good question because there is no physical evidence in this case at all and it's quite interesting that actually the prosecution for millie's murder was entirely circumstantial in that he was already on trial for the murders of the other two women i think he was already sentenced yes yeah so he got a life sentence for the deaths of those two women but the evidence that they put forward for prosecuting him for millie's death was entirely circumstantial and i actually found a quote from the judge that said addressing to the jury during his trial a lack of proof of the mechanism of abduction and the cause of death in milly's case is therefore no impediment to prosecution and conviction i was always trained that circumstantial evidence would never even go to court so from a forensics point of view i have no idea how they managed to get away with charging him on this i think it was probably because they recorded the vehicle on the cctv but it's circumstantial yes the vehicle that his girlfriend owned that he admitted to driving and she admitted to lending him and that he was regularly driving was spotted in the area at the time that millie disappeared yeah but that's circumstantial yeah and i mean he later admitted to all of the crimes yeah so i guess it's all of a moot point really but in terms of actual legal prosecution they the evidence that they gathered was enough of the picture to be able to say that he was the perpetrator but i think a decent defense lawyer would have been able to get him off yeah but also i think it was also that his girlfriend or wife at the time saw him discard of evidence even though she didn't know it was evidence she did i don't think she saw him discard it but he came back after millie's disappearance in different clothes than the ones he left in he also got rid of their bed sheets or something like that yeah so he he was covering his tracks and acting suspiciously but again without that physical evidence it's all just pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that the prosecution are putting together to create enough of a picture to be able to determine the whole story yeah definitely did you find any kind of physical evidence for the other murder victims the post-mortem said that they were both bludgeoned with a blunt instrument they both suffered incredibly similar trauma which is what the police used to link the two murders marsha and emily together but i don't think they ever found the murder weapon not that i could find in researching okay i think it was a hammer but not a hammer i think there was another word for it like a sledge a sledgehammer yeah that's a thing something like that i think the guy who ended up in the hospital was attacked with the same instrument the officer that ended up looking into the whole series of events uh was the only one that linked marsha and emily's murders together again they had no motive but because of the similarity and the traumas that they both suffered they were able to assume that it was the same person with the same type of weapon at least but that i don't think they ever matched the weapon in levi's possession to the one that caused the damage okay but again it's very that i found almost no details on marsha and emily's records and postmortems and the evidence that was used to charge him for those crimes but he got charged for them and he got given an entire life sentence i think he was given two life sentences he was given one life sentence for marsha and emily for their murders and the attempted murder of kate sheedy and the judge said there that this life sentence will be your life it's not 25 years which is a typical life sentence yeah he recommended him to never be let out that was in millie's case so when the second case of millie's murder got put forward he was given an additional life sentence on top of his life sentence and then the judge said you will spend the rest of your life in jail and he's the only person in the uk who has ever been sentenced to two full-term life sentences i didn't know that that's interesting because we like to give people life sentences and then only charge them 25 years and then they get out on 10 for good behavior yeah that's a bit weird we have the same in sweden but we probably have more lax ones there's been a lot of weird sentencing behavior going on but also we don't have that much cases of reoffending in the same way that the like america has like super strong sentences for some cases and then there's a higher risk of reoffending because they don't actually get any help stuff like that in sweden they get a lot of help which i think is good but for some offenses i kind of feel like they should be super incarcerated. But Levi, if you're listening, fuck off. You're a scumbag cunt. True that. but i kind of feel like it's good that i think they also realize that if you can't have you can't see any motive they're that much more dangerous to society.

I'm sorry for making you change to zoom. It's better for the audio but good lord it was a fucking pain man fucking pain yes yes it was oh and thank you frank and surely what's his name not frankie fucker fucker oh thank you you're being racist now [Laughter] oh my god you also sound more like an austrian than a german because you can tell the difference you're actually german your surname's growl yeah yeah well i am long away though it was a couple of hundred years ago mm-hmm that's what i want to stay that's what trump says blue eyes german surname suspicious trump and his dad used to tell people that they were swedish for a lot of years turns out they are german yeah i'll never switch yeah the uh windsors like to tell people that they're english but they're german yeah and the swedish queen german yeah and uh swedish king lunatic [Laughter] well it is not that unrelated to heritage just crazy [Laughter] but kind of true but also just like he's i don't feel bad for him because he's not someone that you would feel bad for but he's a dick i'm not gonna be welcome home to sweden anytime soon and also the that's treason you're gonna be put to death the prince of sweden he married a girl that looks exactly like his mother which is a bit weird prince of serbia sex pest well they're all allegedly sex perverts because they can do whatever they want and nobody cares because they're royalty yeah try telling that to prince andrew saw a documentary about ein epstein einstein i saw a documentary about einstein did you know he came up with the theory of general relativity uh he also domestically abused his wife yeah he's a scumbag yeah but he's about two meters away from being extradited to the us to give testimony against epstein because they were super bloody close yeah and on the documentary there's a lot of eyewitnesses that have actually seen that sexual abuse which is good because he thinks that he can get away with anything because he's royal that's how they do it same as trump though he was all buddy buddy with them unless he watched fox news and then they cropping out that was funny speaking of cropping someone out do you want to say bye to the listeners thank you so much for listening to midweek murders we're very happy that you're listening and please rate review and subscribe bye suckers see you next week see you

Topics
  • Levi Bellfield
  • Milly Dowler
  • Marsha McDonnell
  • Amélie Delagrange
  • serial killers
  • UK true crime
  • UK podcasts
  • Podcast about serial killers
  • Famous british crime cases
  • british serial killers
  • Psychopaths
  • forensic evidence explained
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