Levi Bellfield was born in Isleworth on May 17, 1968, and worked as a nightclub doorman and, latterly, running a wheel-clamping business in west London. He had a long history of violence towards the women he lived with, and a pattern of using vehicles that would eventually convict him.
On March 21, 2002, he abducted thirteen-year-old Amanda Dowler, known as Milly, from a street in Walton-on-Thames a few hundred yards from her home. Her body was found in Hampshire woodland six months later. On February 4, 2003, he beat nineteen-year-old Marsha McDonnell with a blunt instrument as she walked home from a bus stop in Hampton. On May 28, 2004, he ran over eighteen-year-old Kate Sheedy in Isleworth, reversed over her, and drove off; she survived with serious injuries. On August 19, 2004, he killed twenty-two-year-old Amelie Delagrange, a French student, on Twickenham Green.
The pattern was consistent: young women alone at night near bus stops, attacked from behind without warning, in areas he knew, and vehicles he had access to caught repeatedly on camera. He was arrested in November 2004. In February 2008 he was convicted of the murders of McDonnell and Delagrange and the attempted murder of Sheedy, and given a whole-life order.
The Dowler case was tried separately at the Old Bailey in 2011, on evidence including his tenancy of a flat overlooking the spot where she vanished, which he had abandoned that day. He was convicted on June 23, 2011, and given a second whole-life order. The trial was notable for the treatment of the Dowler family in the witness box, which prompted a change in how the courts handle relatives of victims, and the case produced a much larger consequence: it emerged that the News of the World had accessed Milly Dowler's voicemail while she was still missing, which closed the paper and led to the Leveson Inquiry.
He has since offered confessions to other unsolved murders, including that of Lin and Megan Russell in 1996, for which Michael Stone is serving life. That claim was investigated at length and rejected as unreliable, and Bellfield retracted it. He remains convicted of three murders and one attempted murder.