Milly Dowler Amanda Jane "Milly" Dowler was a 13-year-old girl who went missing on leaving
Walton-on-Thames railway station on 21 March 2002 and was found dead in Yateley Heath Woods,
Yateley, six months later. In August 2009,
Surrey Police submitted a dossier to the
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) containing evidence of Bellfield's involvement in the murder of Dowler. On 30 March 2010, Bellfield was charged with the
kidnapping and murder of Dowler, as well as the attempted kidnapping of the 12-year-old girl Rachel Cowles on 20 March 2002. Bellfield did not give evidence at his trial and denied any involvement in Dowler's death. On 23 June 2011 a jury convicted him of Dowler's murder. She died in hospital two days after being admitted. Bellfield sold his
Vauxhall Corsa car for £1,500 six days after the murder, having bought it for £6,000 just five months earlier.
Kate Sheedy Kate Sheedy, then aged 18, was deliberately run over as she crossed the road near an entrance to an industrial estate in Isleworth on 28 May 2004; her mother called an ambulance and she survived with multiple injuries and spent several weeks in hospital. Nearly four years later, Sheedy gave evidence against Bellfield when he was tried for her attempted murder. Sheedy had described the car after the attack as a white
people carrier with blacked-out windows and a broken wing mirror; Bellfield was found to have owned a
Toyota Previa matching that description at the time of the attack.
Amélie Delagrange Amélie Delagrange was a 22-year-old French student visiting England. She was found at
Twickenham Green on the evening of 19 August 2004, with serious head injuries, and died in hospital the same night. Within 24 hours, the police established that she might have been killed by the same person who had killed Marsha McDonnell 18 months earlier. Bellfield reportedly confessed to the murder while on remand. She disappeared on the day of her death, having been seen leaving her school during her lunch break. Two days later, on the evening of 18 June, Morris's body was found by a police dog handler on
Hounslow Heath. She was discovered face down, fully clothed, in a copse beside a path on the edge of the Heath, a quarter of a mile from her home in Cygnet Avenue. She had been strangled with a ligature and there were no signs of
sexual assault. Bellfield was alleged to have made the confession to a cellmate while on remand. Morris's family told the press that they had not known they had known each other, and her sister stated: "We did not know him. It was a shock when we found out they knew each other. Friends told us about it. It is horrendous." Bellfield would have been 12 at the time of Morris's murder, which occurred a year before he received his first conviction, for burglary, aged 13. As a pupil he was known to have repeatedly played
truant and was known to often frequent Hounslow Heath when he should have been at school. Described as an "attractive and vivacious" middle-class housewife, she had died yards from her home after being hit several times in the face by an unidentified weapon. The circumstances of Gold's murder were somewhat mysterious: police were unsure why she had dressed as if for a business meeting just before she left her home at around 5:30 a.m. on the day she was killed, 20 October 1990. In February 1991,
The Guardian had reported that the murder was believed to be linked to an "international financial swindle".
Scotland Yard detectives said at the time that they were investigating fraudulent loan schemes in which Gold may have been involved, and it was found that she was involved in an "international advanced-fee fraud".
Russell murders Regarding the 1996 murders of 45-year-old Lin Russell and her six-year-old daughter Megan Russell,
BBC Cymru Wales reported that Bellfield had allegedly confessed to the murders to a fellow prisoner, giving details that "would only be known by the killer". Bellfield denied the confession. A 2017
BBC Two programme,
The Chillenden Murders, in which a team of independent experts re-examined the evidence, supported the idea Bellfield should be investigated for the killings. The legal team of
Michael Stone, convicted of the crimes, maintains Bellfield is the true perpetrator of the attack. In December 2017,
The Sunday Times reported that Bellfield's ex-wife Johanna Collings had told investigators in the Delagrange case that he was with her on the day of her 25th birthday, the time of the Russell murders, and had spent all day in Twickenham and
Windsor, 100 miles away from the scene of the murders which occurred at around 4.30 p.m. It was an
alibi which detectives found credible. Collings had helped detectives convict Bellfield for his previous murders, such as in the
Milly Dowler murder, giving evidence that he knew well the rural area where her body was left. However, as well as his former wife previously saying it was not possible that he could have been in Kent on the day, a member of Stone's legal team also later admitted that there was nothing in Bellfield's statement which was not already in the public domain, suggesting he could have fabricated it using known evidence. The detective responsible for investigating Bellfield's known crimes, Colin Sutton, also stated to the press: "Knowing Bellfield as I do, this could be him playing mind games". In 2023, Bellfield's lawyer claimed that Bellfield had admitted to the murders during a conversation with a prison psychologist. Stone's lawyer declared that a signed confession by Bellfield had been handed over to the CCRC. In July 2023, the CCRC announced that the case would not be referred to the Court of Appeal. However, this decision was overturned three months later and the CCRC began a review of Stone's conviction based on the new evidence.
Elizabeth Chau In October 2022, police were made aware that Bellfield had confessed to the abduction, rape and murder of 19-year-old Elizabeth Chau, who disappeared in 1999, and to the attempted murders of five other women. Chau went missing in
West London on 16 April 1999, when she left her home in
West Ealing at noon to attend
Thames Valley University. She was last seen by a friend on
Ealing Broadway at 5.50 p.m. that day. The confession was not made public until April 2023, and Bellfield was not interviewed over the murder until the following month when he claimed in a recorded interview that he had abducted and killed Chau and pointed to the location of the body on a map. The family of Chau accused the Metropolitan Police of not taking the case seriously because of their race. After several months of investigation, the Metropolitan Police announced in November 2023 that they had concluded Bellfield was not responsible for Chau's disappearance. Bellfield had claimed to have lain in wait for her in his car near Ealing police station, but CCTV footage from the night of Chau's disappearance did not show him or his car. As a result, police decided not to dig up the site where Bellfield said he had buried Chau.
Sarah Spurrell In January 2004, 23-year-old Sarah Spurrell was struck three times with a hammer in a dark street in the
East Sussex town of
Hastings. Spurrell survived the attack due to the intervention of a bystander and later informed the police, but was allegedly told that they lacked the resources to investigate the assault. Spurrell later said that she felt police considered her case an "utter joke". In March 2023 Bellfield, who was named as a suspect in the case in 2008, The Metropolitan Police co-ordinated the subsequent investigations of ten
police forces. On 9 November 2016, they issued a statement which said: "All lines of inquiry have now been exhausted and the decision has been taken to close this investigation as there is no evidence to link the individual to any case for which he has not already been convicted." It was later revealed by police that Bellfield may have lied about other murders so he could inflict pain on the victims' families. ==Conviction and imprisonment==