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Levi Bellfield Is Convicted of the Bus-Stop Murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange

An Old Bailey jury also found the former nightclub doorman guilty of trying to murder Kate Sheedy. The judge ruled he must never be released.

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Illustration of a lone figure on a wet, lamplit London suburban platform at dusk beside an empty shelter. Not an actual scene from the case.

Between 2003 and 2004, three young women were attacked near bus stops in south-west London. On February 25, 2008, an Old Bailey jury convicted Levi Bellfield of murdering two of them and trying to murder the third.

Bellfield, 39, a former nightclub doorman from West Drayton, was found guilty of murdering Marsha McDonnell, 19, who was attacked near her home in Hampton on February 4, 2003, and Amelie Delagrange, 22, a French student attacked on Twickenham Green on August 19, 2004. He was also convicted of the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, then 18, who was deliberately run over in Isleworth on May 28, 2004, after getting off a bus.

The next day, Mrs Justice Rafferty gave Bellfield whole life sentences, meaning he would never be considered for parole. Bellfield chose not to attend. "You have reduced three families to unimagined grief ... three young women, upon whom you preyed in the dark as they stood or walked near to or from buses," the judge said. She criticized him for contesting the charges and forcing Sheedy to go "through indignity after indignity in the witness box."

Police said after the verdict that they were examining Bellfield's possible role in 20 other attacks, but he had been convicted only of the three attacks near bus stops.

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