Ricky Brouillard, who worked for the thug, told police that Bellfield once offered to sell him sex with his ‘naïve’ 16-year-old girlfriend and her sister, 14. ‘I would describe Levi as an animal,’ Brouillard said. ‘I remember being disgusted. I met his girlfriend on one occasion and he said, “Do you want to buy her off me?”’
Bellfield boasted that he made more than £70,000 in cash every year from his various jobs and he regularly flashed thick wads of money. He thought he was above the law and he was arrogant and reckless. But that recklessness was to prove his undoing. Bellfield had been clever on his nights out hunting down and beating women, being careful to dispose of vehicles and clothing used in the attacks. But he did not consider the CCTV cameras that caught him on film or the evidence of mobile phone records placing him at the scenes of his crimes.
Cameras on buildings and on buses captured detailed footage of four of Bellfield’s vehicles and placed him at the scene of the murders of Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell, and at the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy. The day before his arrest, police were following his car when he pulled up and started chatting to two young girls who were waiting at a bus stop. Later, the girls told police how he had offered them a lift and asked how old they were. When they said they were 14, Bellfield said: ‘You must be virgins – I bet you are nice and tight.’ He then drove away, laughing to himself.
Emma Mills – mother of three of his children – was living with Bellfield when police arrived at their West London home to arrest him. She recalled: ‘It must have been four or five in the morning when they came. The house was lit up with torchlights and I thought he must be in trouble with the police – he’d been in trouble before, for fraud.
‘But this was different. There were about 30 policemen with guns; there were dogs, all surrounding the house. They were banging on the door and screaming his name. I thought, “What the hell have you done now?”We were in bed and he turned, and he just looked at me and he looked so scared. It was complete fear. I’ve never seen him look like that before.
‘He said, “I’m sorry,” and then he ran out onto the landing, pulled out a chest of drawers and used it to jump up into the loft – that’s the last time I ever saw him. I went downstairs just as the door flew open and a load of police officers pushed past me, calling his name.’ Police found Bellfield naked in the loft, crouched behind a roll of insulation. Ironically, officers noted that the prolific sexual predator was anxious to hide his private parts that had shrunk after years of steroid abuse.
Police believe the three hammer attacks for which Bellfield was jailed are just the tip of the iceberg. They suspect he may be responsible for many more, similar attacks on women. Officers are currently working through cases where victims have no recollection of being attacked because of their horrific injuries. In many cases, their injuries were put down to falling over drunk or fainting.
DCI Sutton said: ‘There is a group of 20 or so other offences that we will be looking at because we feel they may be offences which Bellfield had something to do with. They are not 20 murders, they are 20 attacks on women.’
After the trial, it emerged that Bellfield’s first girlfriend, Patsy Morris, was murdered in 1980. The 14-year-old was found strangled in undergrowth on Hounslow Heath, 48 hours after going missing from a playground. Bellfield, then just 12, was said to have been fascinated by the unsolved killing – it is just one of the many crimes that police have said they will be questioning him about.
‘One would have to say that anyone committing these crimes must be out of their minds.’
Defence counsel Ivan Lawrence, QC
Name: Dennis Nilsen
Crime: Multiple murder
Date of Conviction: 3 November 1983
Age of Conviction: 37
Respected civil servant Dennis Nilsen sat in the bath with his lover, a 16-year-old called Martyn Duffey. It was bizarre that a dog-loving, nerdy pen-pusher was soaking in the suds with a handsome, streetwise young man, and it was especially odd because Martyn was dead.
It was May 1980, and Martyn had made his way from his home in Merseyside to London, looking for work. There, he found a sex-crazed serial killer.
The pair met by chance in the capital’s West End. At that time the deal was simple: if you were a young man who asked for money, there were men who would give you money – so long as you did as they requested. Nilsen asked and Martyn said yes. For a roof over his head and a hot meal, he accepted Nilsen’s offer of a bed to sleep in at his house in Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood Hill, a suburb of North London.
It was the costliest deal of the young man’s life.
As Martyn slumbered, Nilsen strangled his guest, but as he withdrew his hands he realised he didn’t have a corpse in front of him, but an unconscious 16-year-old youth, who would scream down the neighbourhood if he woke up. So Nilsen dragged him to the kitchen, filled the sink with water and plunged his head underneath until he was sure no life remained. He then filled the bathtub, added a splash of bubble bath and placed Martyn’s cooling body in the water… Then he got in himself.
In a journal written in prison, and quoted in the Nilsen biography Killing for Company by Brian Masters, the killer recalled the macabre episode:
I remember sitting astride him (his arms must have been trapped by the quilt). I strangled him with great force in the almost pitch darkness with just one side light on underneath. As I sat on him, I could feel my bottom becoming wet. His urine had come through the bedding and my jeans. I pulled him over my shoulder and carried him down. He was unconscious, but still alive. I put him down, filled the kitchen sink up with water, draped him into it, and held him there, his head under the water. I must have held him there for about three or four minutes. I then lifted him into my arms and took him into the room. I laid him on the floor and took off his socks, jeans, shirt and underpants. I carried him into the bathroom. I got into the bath myself this time and he lay in the water on top of me. I washed his body. Both of us dripping wet, I somehow managed to hoist this slipping burden onto my shoulders and took him into the room. I sat him on the kitchen chair and dried us both. I put him on the bed, but left the bedclothes off. He was still very warm. I talked to him and mentioned that his body was the youngest-looking I had ever seen. I kissed him all over and held him close to me. I sat on his stomach and masturbated. I kept him temporarily in the cupboard. Two days later, I found him bloated in the cupboard. He went straight under the floorboards.
It was a new experience for Nilsen: he’d never bathed with a corpse before, but he’d killed before. And now, as the pale, prune-like body of Martyn Duffey lay between his legs, he knew he’d kill again.
Dennis Nilsen was born in November 1943 at Academy Road, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire to a Scots mother and a Norwegian father, Olav Magnus Moksheim, who had adopted the surname Nilsen to seem less German at a time when Britain was battling Hitler. His father was an alcoholic, as were many seafaring men at that time in the North-East of Scotland. Nilsen’s parents divorced when he was just four. Later in life, his mother remarried and the boy’s new family warned him of ‘impurities of the flesh’. This advice was to give him an unhealthy view of human relationships and a murderous conception of sex.
Between 1961 and 1972 Nilsen served in the British Army with the Royal Fusiliers. He loved drinking with his comrades and was a regular in the bar. Like many young soldiers of his time, he saw action in the conflict in Aden, which raged in what is now Yemen from 1963–67. Later serving in the Persian Gulf, where he became a cook, he was popular with colleagues because of the amount of meat he could cut from a bone. It was