‘I wish I could turn the clock back. I pray every night to die so I can be with him. His last words haunt me. He said: “Goodnight, Dad” when he went upstairs to bed on the Saturday night. He was always in bed early because of his paper round.’
On 4 November 1988 Miller was jailed for life at Birmingham Crown Court. Passing sentence, Mr Justice Otton told him: ‘The charges reflect sadistic sexual attacks on young men and boys. You deliberately chose in some instances newspaper boys because they were particularly vulnerable and without any hope of assistance or escape.
‘You have a previous record of offences, which has escalated from relatively minor indecent assaults on young boys to sadistic torture and killing. The opinion of the doctors is that your preoccupation with sex and violence, progressing from fantasy to actuality, is characteristic of a sadistic sexual psychopath.
‘You used and abused the body of that 14-year-old boy for your sexual gratification. You then considered deliberately whether to take him back to where you brought him, to let him live or take his life.’
The judge added: ‘You are described as a highly-motivated psychopath and you will remain dangerous for the rest of your life. In view of the compelling, overwhelming and unanimous medical opinion, and your own wish to remain in prison for the rest of your life, I anticipate that you will stay in prison for the rest of your life. The public deserves to be assured that you are unlikely ever to be released.’ Miller nodded in agreement and smiled from the dock.
The judge said that he would recommend to the-then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd that Miller should die in prison. Hurd agreed and the prisoner was handed a whole life tariff.
After his killer was jailed, Stuart’s shattered father Geoffrey said that he ‘dies a thousand deaths’ every day, imagining his son’s final moments at the hands of his killer. ‘My mind keeps going back to what Stuart was saying in his last few minutes – was he shouting to me to help him? I just can’t get it out of my mind, and I don’t think I ever will.’
Miller had a disturbed childhood. His white mother Joan was embarrassed about her son’s dark skin and she made no effort to hide her feelings, often making him walk a few feet in front of her in the street. His boyfriend Trevor Peacher revealed: ‘Vic felt he had been rejected by his family. Even as a small child his mother used to make him wait for her away from work so her work mates would not know she had a half-caste son.’
In fact, she disowned him when he was five and he spent most of his formative years in care. As a child Miller would lock himself in cupboards and wardrobes for hours, curled up in the foetal position.
Miller had his first homosexual affair at the Bodenham Manor School for maladjusted children in Hertfordshire, where he lived for eight years in the 1960s. When he was 15, Bodenham Manor closed and Miller was moved to Eastfield Special School in Wolverhampton. One of his teachers there from 1970–72 was Fran Oborski, who remembered: ‘He struck me as a very disturbed psychopath – intelligent and scary. I was aware he could be a very dangerous character, but I was not aware he was a latent homosexual rapist, or that one day he might kill.’
Miller was 21 when he was jailed for four years in February 1976 for indecently assaulting a 15-year-old boy at knifepoint in Wolverhampton. The boy and his 17-year-old friend were crossing a field when he struck. Miller grabbed the younger boy by the jumper and held a carving knife to his throat. When his friend ran for help, he dragged the boy to a ditch beside a railway and indecently assaulted him.
He did not complete his sentence and weeks after his early release in December 1978, Miller attacked two boys in another field in Wolverhampton. He stripped them and dragged them into a ditch and stabbed one of them in the chest. For this, and an indecent assault on a teenager in Brighton, he was jailed for seven years. It was while serving this sentence in Gloucester Prison that he met his lover Peacher, who was imprisoned for similar offences against boys.
The pair were freed within a few weeks of each other in spring 1983 and set up home in Penn Fields. The following year, Miller was employed at a community project in Wolverhampton, where he drove youngsters in a transit van which was used in attacks in Staffordshire to abduct a 13-year-old newspaper boy at Pattingham, and a 22-year-old man in Lichfield. He accosted another newspaper boy in the grounds of a school at Aldridge, West Midlands, but was frightened off by the caretaker. It was only after his photograph appeared in newspapers and on television that it became clear Miller was the man behind those three attacks.
DCI Mayo, who led the investigation into Stuart Gough’s murder, said Miller was the most prolific and dangerous sex offender that he or any of his colleagues had ever come across, adding: ‘Besides those crimes he admitted to in court, Miller has confessed to 20 more similar offences, which were never reported.’ His colleague, Detective Chief Superintendent David Cole, said: ‘In 30 years of police service, this is the most distressing case I have ever been associated with.’
‘He hated women. He hated blonde women.’
Prosecution barrister Brian Altman
Name: Levi Bellfield
Crime: Double murder
Date of Conviction: 25 February 2008
Age at Conviction: 38
Woman-hater Levi Bellfield was born in Isleworth, West London, on 15 May 1968. He was one of six children and when he was eight, his dad, Joe, died of a heart attack, aged 37. The young Levi went off the rails and by his early teens he was already displaying sadistic and deviant tendencies. When he was 13 he tortured and killed his sister’s pet rabbit. Former school friends recall a rumour that he had tried to have sex with the animal.
By August 2004, Bellfield – whose first name is an anagram of evil – had murdered at least two young women. Police believe he may have killed others, including schoolgirl Milly Dowler, who disappeared outside Walton-on-Thames railway station in Surrey, in March 2002 while on her way home from school. Six months later, the 13-year-old’s body was found in woodland in Hampshire. Despite a massive police investigation, detectives are yet to charge anyone with her murder, though Bellfield is the prime suspect.
On 25 February 2008, Bellfield – who throughout his trial at the Old Bailey pulled faces, yawned and mouthed obscenities from the dock – was found guilty of murdering students Amelie Delagrange, 22, and Marsha McDonnell, 19, and the attempted murder of schoolgirl Kate Sheedy, 18.
Bellfield trawled bus stops and followed buses late at night, looking for young blondes on their own. He would follow them, offering them lifts, drinks, drugs and sex, and, if they turned him down, he would react with rage. Brian Altman, QC, prosecuting, told the court: ‘He hated women. He hated blonde women.’ He added: ‘These women were targeted victims of a predatory man who stalked bus stops and bus routes in vehicles looking for young women to attack.’
In February 2003, Marsha McDonnell was just feet from her home in a quiet residential area of Hampton, West London, when she beaten over the head with a hammer and left to die on the pavement. Bellfield had followed her bus in his van.
The former nightclub bouncer stalked convent school head girl Kate Sheedy when she got off a bus near her house in Isleworth, in May 2004. When Kate crossed over to avoid the snarling brute, he aimed his vehicle at her and ran her over. He then reversed back over her to make sure she was dead and unable to identify him. His young victim said goodbye to her parents as she lay on the road, waiting to die, but the brave teenager survived to be the prosecution’s star witness.
Amelie Delagrange had been out with friends when she was battered over the head three times with a hammer in August 2004. After getting off at the